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Updated 2025-07-15 00:00
Raspberry Pi Close To Seeing CPUFreq Support
Nicolas Saenz Julienne of SUSE has been working on CPUFreq support for the Raspberry Pi single board computers to allow for the Linux kernel to provide CPU frequency scaling controls...
Spectre/Meltdown/L1TF/MDS Mitigation Costs On An Intel Dual Core + HT Laptop
Following the recent desktop CPU benchmarks and server CPU benchmarks following the MDS/ZombieLoad mitigations coming to light and looking at the overall performance cost to mitigating these current CPU vulnerabilities, there was some speculation by some in the community that the older dual-core CPUs with Hyper Threading would be particularly hard hit. Here are some benchmarks of a Lenovo ThinkPad with Core i7 Broadwell CPU looking at those mitigation costs...
The Better Logitech Wireless Device Support In The Linux 5.2 Kernel
Of the many new features in Linux 5.2 there are various Logitech mouse and keyboard support improvements particularly for the wireless devices...
SiFive RISC-V SoCs Can Now Be Paired With A GPU... Imagination's PowerVR
If you want a SiFive SoC for the royalty-free, open-source RISC-V architecture it's now possible to pair it with graphics. Unfortunately, the graphics option is about as far from open-source as possible...
DragonFlyBSD 5.4.3 Released With Various Fixes
DragonFlyBSD 5.4.3 was released on Monday with just a hand full of changes over last month's 5.4.2 point release...
X.Org's XDC2019 Issues Call For Proposals On Wayland, Mesa, X.Org, Etc
X.Org's annual event, the X.Org Developers' Conference, is running like a well-oiled machined these days. While there are still months to go until XDC2019 in Montreal, a Call for Proposals has been issued for those wishing to speak at this annual gathering that pertains to Wayland, Mesa, libinput, Cairo, and related components as well, yes, the X.Org Server...
ESR Switches To Threadripper But His GCC SVN-To-Git Conversion Could Still Take Months
It looks like the saga of converting the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) source tree from SVN to Git isn't over yet and could still take months until completion...
Ubuntu Expands Its Kernel Uploader Team
As a sign of the times with the Linux kernel being affected by an increasing number of CVEs (and particularly high profile ones at that), there are now more Ubuntu developers with upload rights for sending down new kernel upgrades...
A Look At The MDS Cost On Xeon, EPYC & Xeon Total Impact Of Affected CPU Vulnerabilities
This weekend I posted a number of benchmarks looking at the performance impact of the new MDS/Zombieload vulnerabilities that also included a look at the overall cost of Spectre/Meltdown/L1TF/MDS on Intel desktop CPUs and AMD CPUs (Spectre). In this article are similar benchmarks but turning the attention now to Intel Xeon hardware and also comparing those total mitigation costs against AMD EPYC with its Spectre mitigations.
NetBSD 8.1 RC1 Released With MDS Mitigations, Option To Turn Off SMT/HT, Driver Updates
The first and only anticipated release candidate for NetBSD 8.1 is now available for testing...
RadeonSI Primitive Culling Lands In Mesa 19.2
The past few months AMD's Marek Olšák has been working on primitive culling support for the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver and last week that code was merged into the Mesa 19.2 development code...
Intel Graphics Compiler 1.0.4 Released With Fixes & Improvements
Less than one month after releasing the Intel Graphics Compiler 1.0.3, the Intel team maintaining "IGC" today released version 1.0.4...
Xen Developers Continue Work On CPU Core Scheduling Support
Sent out earlier this month is the second version of the Xen core scheduling patches that allow for CPU core and socket-level scheduling by this virtualization hypervisor...
Lenovo Hooks Up With Debian For DebConf 19
Not only does this appear to be the first time Lenovo has decided to sponsor Debian's annual conference, but they have done so at the flagship "platinum" sponsorship tier...
Qt Design Studio 1.2 Beta Offers Bridge With Sketch Vector Graphics Editor
The Qt Company today released a public beta of their upcoming Qt Design Studio 1.2, the software letting designers easily create QML-based user-interfaces and that can integrate with Photoshop and other design applications...
Xfce 4.14 Sees Its Long-Awaited Pre-Release
The GTK3-ported Xfce 4.14 might see its long-awaited official release in the near future. In preparing for a hopeful August debut, the Xfce 4.14 pre-release is now available...
Linux 5.2-rc1 Kernel Released With Case-Insensitive EXT4, New Intel HW & RTW88 WiFi
Back when Linux 5.1 was released, Linus Torvalds expressed some concern that the Linux 5.2 merge window may have to be extended by a few days as it would conflict with his daughter's graduation, but he has managed still to get 5.2-rc1 out on time...
Linux's vmalloc Seeing "Large Performance Benefits" With 5.2 Kernel Changes
On top of all the changes queued for Linux 5.2 is an interesting last-minute performance improvement for the vmalloc code...
SVT-AV1 0.5 Released As Intel's Speedy AV1 Video Encoder
While we have been reporting on and benchmarking the Intel SVT video encoders since February, they were only officially announced last month and this Sunday marks their first tagged release for the AV1 encoder in the form of SVT-AV1 0.5.0...
DXVK 1.2.1 Released With Game Fixes, Some Performance Improvements
A new release of DXVK is available for translating Direct3D 10/11 calls to Vulkan for speeding up the Windows on Linux gaming experience...
The Many Changes & Additions To Find With The Linux 5.2 Kernel
The Linux 5.2 kernel merge window has been open for two weeks now and is expected to close today or in the next few days (there is some uncertainty due to Linus Torvalds traveling this week due to his daughter's graduation). But anyhow all of the major pull requests have already been sent in so here is a look at the new features to find with the Linux 5.2 kernel and the many other changes.
LibreOffice 6.3 Alpha Was Tagged This Week, Stable Expected In August
Tagged at the start of the week was LibreOffice 6.3 Alpha 1 as the first step towards the next major release of this cross-platform, open-source office suite...
Raptor's Blackbird micro-ATX POWER9 System Is Ready To Take Flight This Week
The much anticipated Raptor Blackbird is set to begin shipping over the days ahead. Blackbird is the lower-cost (compared to the Talos II Secure Workstation) micro-ATX motherboard for IBM POWER9 systems and offers open-source firmware as currently one of the most open, high-performance systems available...
Linux Kernel's Perf Now Supports Zstd-Compressed Trace Recording
Late updates to the Linux kernel's perf subsystem introduces support for compressed recording of traces, which can yield a three to five time reduction in file-size...
KDE Plasma 5.16 To Allow Fully Configuring Touchpads With Libinput On X11
It was another busy week in KDE space with a lot of bug fixing and last minute work around KDE Plasma 5.16. In case you missed it, this week Plasma 5.16 reached beta...
AMD Zen-Derived Hygon Dhyana Appears To Be Working On Coreboot Support
Chengdu Haiguang IC Design Co with its Hygon Dhyana processor that is based on AMD Zen IP appears to be pursuing Coreboot support...
The Performance Impact Of MDS / Zombieload Plus The Overall Cost Now Of Spectre/Meltdown/L1TF/MDS
The past few days I've begun exploring the performance implications of the new Microarchitectural Data Sampling "MDS" vulnerabilities now known more commonly as Zombieload. As I shared in some initial results, there is a real performance hit to these mitigations. In this article are more MDS/Zombieload mitigation benchmarks on multiple systems as well as comparing the overall performance impact of the Meltdown/Spectre/Foreshadow/Zombieload mitigations on various Intel CPUs and also AMD CPUs where relevant.
The Open-Source / Linux Highlights From OSTS 2019
We've had a number of articles covering the interesting news out of Intel's 2019 Open-Source Technology Summit (OSTS) held at Skamania Lodge in Stevenson, Washington. Here's a look back at the news out of the open-source event as well as some other smaller bits of information shared during the event...
PRIME GPU Offloading Improvement For GLXVND Merged For X.Org Server 1.21
Work by NVIDIA to provide separate per-client vendor mappings for GLXVND were merged to X.Org Server 1.21 Git as another step towards improving the PRIME GPU offloading support when multiple GPU drivers are at play...
Xfdesktop 4.13.4 Released On The Road To Xfce 4.14 Possibly This August
Xfce's Xfdesktop 4.13.4 was released on Friday as the newest stepping stone on the long and winding journey towards Xfce 4.14...
Linux 5.2 To Allow P2P DMA Between Any Devices On AMD Zen Systems
With the Linux 5.2 kernel an AMD-supplied change by AMDGPU developer Christian König allows for supporting peer-to-peer DMA between any devices on AMD Zen systems...
KVM Changes Make It Into Linux 5.2 With Improvements For x86, POWER, ARM
The Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) changes were sent out on Friday of the new feature updates for the Linux 5.2 kernel that is nearing the end of its merge window...
ModernFW Was An Exciting Announcement This Week That Went Largely Unnoticed
Of Intel's keynote announcements this week kicking off their first public Open-Source Technology Summit, surprisingly not attracting too much attention this week was news of their ModernFW initiative to create a new modular and open-source firmware solution to replace aging legacy code on motherboards...
Gaming Performance Only Faintly Touched By MDS / Zombie Load Mitigations
Yesterday I published some initial MDS/Zombieload mitigation impact benchmarks while coming out still later today is much more data looking at the CPU/system performance impact... But is the gaming performance impaired by this latest set of CPU side-channel vulnerabilities?..
Mozilla, Cloudflare & Others Propose BinaryAST For Faster JavaScript Load Times
Developers at Mozilla, Facebook, Cloudflare, and elsewhere have been drafting "BinaryAST" as a new over-the-wire format for JavaScript...
Developers Start Debating Whether To Block Password-Based Root SSH Logins For Fedora 31
While upstream SSH has disabled password logins for the root user as their default configuration the past number of years and that has carried over into being the out-of-the-box behavior for many operating systems, Fedora continues allowing password-based SSH root log-ins by default. But with the next Fedora release they are thinking about changing that default behavior...
GCC 10 Lands Support For Emulating MMX With SSE Instructions
The GCC 10 code compiler merged support to begin emulating MMX intrinsics using SSE...
Intel Agilex Now Supported By Linux 5.2 Kernel; ARM Boards Like Jetson Nano Also Added
Olof Johansson sent in the SoC updates on Thursday for the Linux 5.2 kernel merge window that is nearing the end. There is new SoC support for this new kernel and a number of new boards also being supported...
A Push Towards Firmware-less Video Decoding By Linux Kernel Media Drivers
Veteran Linux multimedia developer Paul Kocialkowski summed up the current situation this week of many hardware platforms having a general purpose micro-controller running a non-free firmware blob for coordinating the video decoding work. It makes it easier to program with this firmware-based approach but makes the driver less free and now with recent Linux infrastructure improvements could better support dealing with the video hardware itself...
DRM Fixes Head Into Linux 5.2 While Letting Nouveau Turing TU117 Support Slip In
Following last week's big feature update to the DRM graphics drivers, an initial batch of "fixes" has now been merged to the early Linux 5.2 development code for these Direct Rendering Manager drivers...
DragonFlyBSD Flips On Compiler-Based Retpoline Support For Its Kernel, Also Adds SMAP/SMEP
In addition to DragonFlyBSD seeing MDS "Zombie Load" mitigations this week, the DragonFlyBSD kernel now has better Spectre Variant Two coverage with making use of the GCC compiler support...
Intel Has Been Recently Ramping Up Their FreeBSD Support
While Intel's open-source Linux support is largely stellar and was a big focus of this week's Open-Source Technology Summit in Washington, their FreeBSD support isn't nearly as polished but over the past roughly year and a half they've been establishing a FreeBSD team and working towards feature parity and supporting critical functionality for their customers...
The FSF Has Certified A USB To Parallel Printer Cable For Respecting Your Freedom
The Free Software Foundation has certified a new batch of hardware for being libre and meeting their "Respect Your Freedom" requirements. This newly-approved hardware for free software enthusiasts includes certifying an USB-to-parallel printer cable in 2019...
KDE Plasma 5.16 Beta Released With Many Features
The KDE community today rolled out the beta of the Plasma 5.16 desktop upgrade and it's huge...
MDS / Zombieload Mitigations Come At A Real Cost, Even If Keeping Hyper Threading On
The default Linux mitigations for the new Microarchitectural Data Sampling (MDS) vulnerabilities (also known as "Zombieload") do incur measurable performance cost out-of-the-box in various workloads. That's even with the default behavior where SMT / Hyper Threading remains on while it becomes increasingly apparent if wanting to fully protect your system HT must be off...
Clear Linux Is Beginning To Make Strides In The Industry From Alibaba To MontaVista
Of Intel's many open-source projects, taking a central role at this year's Intel Open-Source Technology Summit was Clear Linux. Most Intel open-source efforts mentioned during the event point back to Clear Linux in some capacity and at OSTS2019 we finally heard some of the companies that are beginning to make use of Clear Linux...
Intel's Coffeelake OpenCL Performance Between Beignet & Their Modern NEO Driver
A few days back I posted a number of Intel OpenCL benchmarks between their former Beignet and new "NEO" Linux compute stacks that was done using a Skylake NUC for the Iris Pro 580 graphics. For those wondering how these two open-source Intel OpenCL implementations compare for the more common UHD Graphics 630, here are some benchmarks using an Intel Core i9 8700K "Coffeelake" processor...
Over 100 Linux Gaming/Graphics Tests Looking At The Radeon RX 570 vs. GTX 1650
Complementing the recent comparison of Radeon RX 560/570/580 vs. GeForce GTX 1060/1650/1660 Linux Gaming Performance benchmarks, in this article are 102 Linux graphics tests (mostly games) looking more closely at the performance of the sub-$150 GeForce GTX 1650 and Radeon RX 570 graphics cards...
Librem 5 Developer Kit's Mainline Kernel Support Hits 12th Patch Revision
While it's just the DeviceTree additions needed to the kernel for enabling the Librem 5 Developer Kit to boot with the mainline kernel, the DT files are up to their twelfth patch revision...
Hands On With The Atomic Pi As A $35 Intel Atom Alternative To The Raspberry Pi
After a successful Kickstarter campaign and honoring those obligations, the Atomic Pi recently hit retail channels (albeit sold out currently) as a $35 Intel Atom powered single board computer to compete with the likes of the Raspberry Pi...
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