Open-source News

It Turns Out CPU Speculative Execution Can Be Useful For Random Entropy / RNG

Phoronix - Sun, 09/29/2019 - 12:00
While CPU speculative execution has caused a lot of frustrations over the past two years due to the likes of the Spectre vulnerabilities, it turns out CPU speculative execution can be exploited to be a viable source of random entropy for random number generators...

Richard Stallman Reportedly Steps Down As Head Of The GNU Project

Phoronix - Sun, 09/29/2019 - 08:02
It was just two days ago that Richard Stallman said he would continue as head of the GNU project after last week having resigned as head of the Free Software Foundation (as well as his post at MIT), but this afternoon he reportedly has stepped down from his GNU leadership role...

Fresh Video Encode/Decode Benchmark Numbers For Xeon Platinum 8280 vs. EPYC 7742

Phoronix - Sun, 09/29/2019 - 06:39
Given recent updates to the Intel Scalable Video Technology (SVT) open-source video encoders as well as other open-source video encoders/decoders, here is a fresh look at the performance of the AMD EPYC 7742 2P server against the Intel competition with the dual Xeon Platinum 8280...

Linux 5.4 Pulls In LOCKDOWN Support For Opt-In Hardware/Kernel Security Restrictions

Phoronix - Sun, 09/29/2019 - 00:23
While yesterday Linus Torvalds was still undecided on whether to pull in the long-revised "LOCKDOWN" kernel patches and wanted to review them patch-by-patch, following that lengthy examination he has decided to indeed land this opt-in restricted functionality for Linux 5.4...

Java Applications On GNOME Under Wayland Will Now Behave Better

Phoronix - Sat, 09/28/2019 - 22:35
For those running the GNOME Wayland session and having issues with windows not grabbing keyboard input after a child window is closed with Java applications like IntelliJ, Mutter has landed a fix...

Wine-Staging 4.17 Brings Raw Input For Overwatch, StarCitizen & Other Games

Phoronix - Sat, 09/28/2019 - 19:27
Wine 4.17 was released yesterday that merged the DXTn support and other improvements from Wine-Staging. Meanwhile Wine-Staging 4.17 is out today to re-up their game with now more than 850 patches in total against upstream Wine...

IO_uring Is More Polished With Linux 5.4

Phoronix - Sat, 09/28/2019 - 19:08
Added back during the Linux 5.1 cycle was IO_uring for fast and efficient I/O. This new interface allows for queue rings to be shared between the application and kernel to avoid excess copies and other efficiency improvements over the existing Linux AIO code. With Linux 5.4, IO_uring is in even better shape...

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