Michael Larabel

While Ubuntu is not currently using Wayland by default with its GNOME Shell desktop and it doesn't look like they will try again until Ubuntu 20.10, the option is still available and they continue working in the direction of a Wayland Linux desktop future. One of their interesting "upstream" contributions in this area is with the Wayland Conformance Suite.

On top of all the changes queued for Linux 5.2 is an interesting last-minute performance improvement for the vmalloc code.

In addition to Dell releasing "budget-friendly" laptops with Ubuntu Linux on Wednesday, the company released new Thunderbolt and USB-C docks that should be working fine out-of-the-box on Linux.

It looks like the AMD posting of the open-source Radeon driver enablement code for next-gen "Navi" GPUs is imminent. In fact, the first bits of it quietly were pushed out today.

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.

Facebook has worked on various programming language innovations over the years from all their work on HHVM at a time when PHP was slow to working on a super fast C/C++ pre-processor to other open-source language work. Their latest work in this area is on supporting just-in-time compilation of C++ code to treat it like a scripting language.

Assuming Linux 5.1 manages to ship next weekend, the Linux 5.2 merge window will immediately kick off following that release. In our close monitoring of the different development branches in recent weeks, the Linux 5.2 kernel is shaping up to be an outright massive release.

As part of the first week of changes for the Linux 5.2 merge window, a patch series providing some x86 FPU optimizations were merged though there is some concern there could be regressions on older hardware.

The Linux 5.2 kernel will allow the EXT4 file-system on a per-directory basis to selectively support case-insensitive files/folders.

GNU Compiler Collection 9.1 was released today with a D language front-end joining the family while on the back-end is now the long-awaited Radeon GCN GPU target (although not too useful in its current form), Intel Cascadelake support, initial AMD Zen 2, C-SKY CPU support, OpenRISC CPU support, and many other features throughout this massive open-source compiler.

If you are waking up this morning to find all of your Mozilla Firefox add-ons have expired, you are certainly not alone. A major blunder has found users of Firefox finding most add-ons getting disabled.

To not a lot of surprise compared to the world of proprietary graphics drivers on Windows where once the support is retired the driver releases stop, old open-source Linux OpenGL drivers are found to be better maintained.

Microsoft announced from their Build 2019 conference this morning Windows Terminal as the newest Linux-inspired feature coming to Windows 10.

When drivers get dropped from the Linux kernel it's generally due to hardware being no one cares about anymore that hasn't been produced in many years and the code often falls into disrepair to the point that the only logical way forward is dropping the driver. That happened last year to the "FDOMAIN" driver but as does happen every so often (albeit rare) thanks to the code being still obtainable through Git and the nature of open-source, interested parties can step up and revive the code.

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.

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.

As was expected, Linus Torvalds just tagged the Linux 5.1 stable kernel.

Not only does Intel's Clear Linux distribution offer stellar out of the box performance, but they seem to be making it increasingly user/desktop friendly at this stage. There's been new GUI installer work as well as the launching of their own support forums.

Fedora 30 has managed to ship on time per its original release schedule and is packing globs of new features.

The Linux kernel's legacy IDE driver has been officially deprecated as of Linux 5.2 and is expected to be removed entirely in 2021.

In addition to the Windows Terminal app, Microsoft announced from their Build 2019 conference that Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 (WSL2) will be coming out this summer.

The change in Linux 5.0 that initially broke ZFS On Linux compatibility ends up being pretty nasty for the ZFS encryption performance... A NixOS developer reports that the functions no longer exported by Linux 5.0+ and previously used by ZoL for AVX/AES-NI support end up dropping the ZFS data-set encryption performance to 200MB/s where as pre-5.0 kernels ran around 1.2GB/s.

Intel just disclosed a new speculative execution side-channel vulnerability in its processors similar to the existing Spectre/L1TF vulnerabilities. This new disclosure is called the Microarchitectural Data Sampling (MDS).

In the run up to the Ubuntu 19.04 release I ran various gaming/graphics benchmarks looking at different desktops and X.Org vs. Wayland sessions. Check that article out if interested in the situation while this posting is just some complementary data I did from Fedora Workstation 30 when looking at the graphics performance under GNOME Shell's X.Org and Wayland sessions.

Developers at Mozilla, Facebook, Cloudflare, and elsewhere have been drafting "BinaryAST" as a new over-the-wire format for JavaScript.