The Institute of Software Chinese Academy of Sciences (ISCAS) in cooperation with the Chinese openEuler Linux distribution have been working on their own project akin to Google Summer of Code and Outreachy for paying university-aged students to become involved in open-source software development...
Linux 5.10 as the latest Long Term Support release when announced was only going to be maintained until the end of 2022 but following enough companies stepping up to help with testing, Linux 5.10 LTS will now be maintained until the end of year 2026...
Oracle engineers have continued working on the "Maple Tree" data structure for the Linux kernel as an RCU-safe, range-based B-tree designed to make efficient use of modern processor caches...
In addition to work like Linux 5.13 addressing some network overhead caused by Retpolines, this next kernel's return trampoline implementation itself is seeing a simplification...
Outside of the i915 kernel graphics driver one of the areas Linux 5.13 is seeing more discrete graphics card bring-up work is within their PMT driver for enabling platform monitoring / telemetry support with this inaugural Intel PCIe graphics card...
Wine 6.8 was just released as the newest bi-weekly development snapshot providing the latest support for running the latest Windows games and applications under Linux, macOS, and BSD systems...
Last month when carrying out tests of Windows 10 vs. Linux on the Intel Core i9 11900K "Rocket Lake" processor we were very surprised to see Windows 10 frankly performing so well compared to Ubuntu and picking up more wins than usual. That unexpectedly strong showing for Windows 10 might be due to Intel's P-State behavior with Rocket Lake or other power management tuning or there the lack of on Linux at this time. But it led me to wondering if the latest Windows 10 updates spelled out anything different on the AMD Ryzen side... So here are some benchmarks of the latest Microsoft Windows 10 against Ubuntu 21.04 on the same AMD Ryzen 9 5900X system.
Intel's open-source graphics driver developers volleyed an initial set of nearly 100 experimental patches working on GuC submission support as they work towards integrating the DRM scheduler into their graphics driver...
The FreeBSD project published their Q1 status report yesterday that outlines the progress they made over the past quarter on advancing this leading open-source BSD operating system...
The VFIO changes for the Linux 5.13 kernel aren't particularly exciting this cycle but one of the changes does raise some eyebrows with the VFIO NVIDIA NVLink2 driver being removed. This driver is being removed as it shouldn't have been even added in the first place for lack of an open-source client/user exercising it...
Earlier this year with v21.02 Alpha, 7-Zip added initial Linux support upstream at long last. Out this week is now version 21.02 alpha that continues to refine the Linux support while also now punctually publishing the source code too...
Merged into LibreOffice yesterday is initial support for an EmScripten-based cross-build and compiling to WebAssembly (WASM) for in-browser execution or potentially running on the desktop in a portable manner with the likes of Wasmer...
Not only does Red Hat continue investing heavily in GCC and the GNU toolchain but it turns out they are ramping up their LLVM compiler talent as well...
From bringing up the PolarFire ICICLE SoC to adding support for KProbes, FORTIFY_SOURCE, and other new kernel features for the RISC-V architecture, the Linux 5.13 kernel changes are exciting for this open-source processor ISA...
Qt 6.1 is out today as the second major feature release to Qt6 following its stable introduction at the end of last year. Ahead of Qt 6.2 being the first planned Long-Term Support release later this year, Qt 6.1 brings more Qt5 modules over and other improvements in making Qt6 more viable...
Turnip is the open-source Mesa Vulkan driver aligned with the Freedreno effort for Qualcomm Adreno support. Turnip has been in fairly good shape but fixes and other improvements keep flowing in as new Vulkan games/apps continue to be tested on this open-source Adreno Vulkan driver...
With the in-development Linux 5.13 kernel there are some notable AMD Radeon driver additions. But with the 5.13 merge window set to close this weekend, an initial batch of post-feature-work fixes was sent in overnight...
Pyston 2.2 is out today as the latest version of this performant Python implementation. Separately, Facebook has introduced Cinder as a new incubator project providing a speedy Python JIT implementation...
Mesa 21.1 is available today as the latest quarterly feature release to this collection of open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers. There are many features to show with this new release and it even managed to release on-schedule...
For a project as large and complex as the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) one would reasonably have assumed that it would have setup continuous integration / continuous delivery support years ago for helping to ensure the reliability of this widely-used open-source compiler and the GNU Toolchain at large. But that's actually only happening now in 2021...
The LinuxBoot project that works to replace some portions of modern Linux server firmware with the Linux kernel and other open-source components has now integrated support for the convenient netboot.xyz project...
Linux 5.13 is introducing the "intel_tcc_cooling" driver for helping to cool newer Intel mobile/desktop CPUs by down-clocking the processor cores when crossing a lower threshold than is set by default...
As an additional security measure for the Linux kernel, Intel engineers are exploring making kernel page tables read-only and to then only allow writing on a per-CPU basis when they need to be modified. This would be handled using the PKS functionality found with future Intel processors...
While physical GPUs may be in short supply right now, VMware is preparing for "SVGA v3" as their next-gen virtual PCI graphics adapter for use within VMware virtual machines for graphics acceleration backed by the host...
The Turbostat utility that lives within the Linux kernel source tree for reporting on CPU topology and various power/frequency metrics has some useful additions pending for the Linux 5.13 kernel...
For those wondering how the recent releases of the GCC 11 and LLVM 12 (Clang 12) open-source compilers are competing on AMD Zen 3, here are some recently conducted benchmarks looking at that showdown on an AMD EPYC 7763 1P server.
Linux's perf tooling for dealing with hardware performance counters and associated monitoring has seen a number of nice updates for the Linux 5.13 kernel cycle...
If you are still relying on Apache OpenOffice in 2021 you might want to really make it a goal this year to transition to the much more featureful LibreOffice, but in any case you'll want to move at least to OpenOffice 4.1.10...
Over the years there have been a number of rounds of patches published for speculative page faulting. The goal has been to support user-space page-faults without holding the memory management semaphores and to ultimately allow for better performance especially with threaded workloads. A fresh take on the speculative page faulting (SPF) functionality was recently volleyed on the kernel mailing list...
Going on for a few years now has been some Mesa optimizations for AMD Ryzen CPUs and in particular L3 cache optimizations. There is now a fix to re-enable this support after it was mistakenly broken earlier this year...
The Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) updates for Linux 5.13 have been submitted in providing the latest features for this flash-optimized file-system...
Introduced last year was Taiwins as a compact Wayland compositor. While early on it began using Sway's WLROOTS library, it ended up writing its own Wayland compositor library (libtaiwins) and recently hit its version 0.3 milestone...
For those still having fond memories of the KDE 3.5 desktop, the Trinity Desktop Environment continues to be maintained in 2021 as a long-running fork from KDE 3.5 with security/maintenance fixes and other minor enhancements to the desktop environment...
Merged as part of the block subsystem changes for the Linux 5.13 were the usual assortment of enhancements to the exciting IO_uring. With this next kernel there is yet even better performance out of this morning Linux I/O interface...
Adding to the variety of places where the Linux kernel supports making use of Zstd compression, kernel modules moving forward can now enjoy size reductions with Zstd...
While Microsoft's Hyper-V virtualization hypervisor and their Azure cloud has largely been x86_64 focused, with the Linux 5.13 kernel they are moving further for supporting Linux as a ARM64 Hyper-V guest...
While last minute AMD Zen 3 "znver3" improvements managed to make it for GCC 11 that was recently released, the recent debut of LLVM 12.0 wasn't so lucky on the Zen 3 support front. There was the very basic enablement that landed in LLVM 12 but now the more complete support isn't expected until LLVM 13 this autumn...
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