Michael Larabel

The Raspberry Pi 1 through Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ and even the Raspberry Pi Zero can now see Vulkan support via a new unofficial "RPi-VK-Driver" that is offering even better performance than the Broadcom OpenGL driver.

The Linux kernel is seeing some modern work done to its driver for supporting the Apple Desktop Bus on Macintosh II era systems.

Following today's disclosure by Intel of the CrossTalk/SRBDS vulnerability that is MDS-based and vulnerable across physical cores with affected instructions, Intel released new CPU microcode to mitigate the most prone/significant instructions. I've been benchmarking the impact of this new microcode on multiple systems and will have a full report tonight or tomorrow morning... But here is a look specifically at the look at the impact on the RdRand performance.

The Linux 5.9 kernel is slated to begin introducing new restrictions on allowing writes to CPU model specific registers (MSRs) from user-space.

Apple finally confirmed the log-running rumor that their future laptops and desktop computers will be using in-house silicon with their custom designed Arm-based chips.

Amazon's AWS has today introduced the smallest member of the "Snow" family for migrating data into/out-of the cloud.

Our recent benchmarks have shown WSL/WSL2 performance on the latest Windows 10 builds to generally be quite good compared to running bare metal Linux. But past the May 2020 Update and on the latest Insider Preview builds is the initial support for GPU acceleration in conjunction with updated Windows graphics drivers. The initial emphasis is on GPU compute with DirectML and for NVIDIA hardware CUDA support as well. Here are a couple CUDA benchmarks that ran gracefully under WSL2 albeit the performance leaves a lot to be desired.

There are some urgent fixes pending for the x86/x86_64 speculative execution handling for the Linux kernel following a Google security engineer discovering these issues, including one of the fixes address a situation that unfairly impacted AMD CPUs.

Last year Valve in cooperation with consulting firm Collabora published their work on extending the futex system call for more optimal thread pool synchronization with a means of waiting on any of several futexes. This kernel-level work paired with patched user-space for Wine/Proton allows better matching behavior on Windows. It's been months since hearing anything on Valve's futex effort while today a futex2 system call was published for discussion.

Linus Torvalds just released the Linux 5.8-rc1 test build as what he describes as one of the biggest releases of all time.

Fedora developers are once again discussing a proposal on switching to Nano as the default text editor on Fedora systems.

As part of our ongoing testing of the AMD Ryzen 5 4500U and Ryzen 7 4700U "Renoir" mobile processors, here is some Wayland vs. X.Org data with the GNOME desktop on Fedora Workstation 32.

Following a beta period since last year as the Firefox Private Network, Mozilla's virtual private network offering is now going official and under the Mozilla VPN branding.

Details are still coming in but INTEL-SA-00320, a.k.a. "CrossTalk", is the newest Intel side-channel CPU vulnerability.

Daniel van Vugt of Canonical who has been responsible for many GNOME performance optimizations in recent years has another tantalizing improvement under review.

Wine 5.10 is out as the latest bi-weekly development release of this open-source project for allowing Windows games and applications to run generally gracefully on Linux (and other) platforms.

Legendary processor engineer Jim Keller has resigned from Intel just over two years since he joined the company to much fanfare.

It turns out for the GNOME 3.34 and 3.36 series, Mutter's window rendering culling code was broken and that led to extra rendering of windows not even visible... A fix is in the works and can lead to the performance doubling or more.

FFmpeg 4.3 is out as the latest version of this key open-source multimedia library. FFmpeg 4.3 is quite a big release.

More than a decade ago Fedora was routinely trying to pursue the Btrfs file-system by default but those hopes were abandoned long ago. Heck, Red Hat Enterprise Linux no longer even supports Btrfs. While all Red Hat / Fedora interests in Btrfs seemed abandoned years ago especially with Red Hat developing their Stratis storage technology, there is a new (and serious) proposal about moving to Btrfs for Fedora 33 desktop variants.

After weeks of rumors, AMD today officially confirmed the existence of the Ryzen 3000XT series.

Back in April was the announcement that Lenovo would begin shipping some devices with Fedora Linux while now the story gets much juicier today.

A Google engineer has posted patches for review so that the mainline Linux kernel can be built with Link-Time Optimizations (LTO) by the LLVM Clang code compiler.

Ted Ts'o sent in the EXT4 file-system changes on Thursday for Linux 5.8 as the summer 2020 kernel release.

Some Fedora spins have already made use of swap on zRAM for serving as a compressed RAM drive while with Fedora Workstation 33 they are looking to make use of zRAM by default.