Michael Larabel

Mozilla developers are celebrating that they are now faster than Google Chrome with the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark, although that test has been superseded by the JetStream benchmark.

Alpine Linux remains one of the most popular lightweight Linux distributions built atop musl libc and Busybox. Alpine Linux has found significant use within containers and the embedded space while now sadly the most prolific maintainer of packages for the Linux distribution has decided to step down from her roles.

Linux creator Linus Torvalds is growing frustrated with AMD fTPM hardware random number generator bugs on recent Ryzen systems plaguing the kernel and has expressed a desire in disabling its use.

The Steam Survey results for July 2023 were just published and it points to a large and unexpected jump in the Linux gaming marketshare.

Along with detailing Advanced Performance Extensions (APX), Intel as effectively a footnote to that also disclosed another exciting addition to find with future Intel CPUs: AVX10. Most notably for consumer use is that AVX10 will enable AVX-512 capabilities across both Performance and Efficient core designs with hybrid processors.

The most popular topic among the emails I received this weekend weren't of direct technical nature but the number of people pointing out Twitter's new "X" logo and the similarities to the X.Org logo.

The long-in-development Bcachefs file-system driver was submitted for Linux 6.5 but never merged this cycle due to various technical issues and developer in-fighting. Linus Torvalds himself has now gotten around to reviewing the proposed code and chiming in on the situation.

While Linux 6.1 added the initial Rust infrastructure as an alternative programming language for writing new kernel modules, so far as of Linux 6.5 much of the upstreaming effort has been around adding new abstractions and supporting additional subsystems for making the Rust capabilities in the kernel more complete. The latest patch series is working on adding Rust abstractions for networking sockets and other fundamental networking bits.

As a follow-up to the first-on-Phoronix article last month that highlighted Linus Torvalds' frustrated views on the AMD fTPM random number generator continuing to cause problems for users even with updated firmware/BIOS, as of today the Linux kernel has gone ahead and blanket disabled RNG use for all current AMD fTPMs.

Debian 13 "Trixie" has been aiming for official RISC-V support and indeed it will happen: RISC-V has now been promoted to an official Debian CPU architecture.

Given all the interest this week in Firefox outperforming Google Chrome in SunSpider, I decided to run some fresh Linux desktop web browser benchmarks on my end. For today's comparison is a look at the newly-released Chrome 116 up against Firefox 117b8 that will be released as stable in just over one week.

The upcoming Linux 6.6 kernel will finish removing old remnants of Wireless USB support.

AMD has kicked off a busy Patch Tuesday by disclosing INCEPTION, a new speculative side channel attack affecting Zen 3 and Zen 4 processors that require new microcode while prior Zen CPUs require a kernel-based solution.

After six years as serving as the XFS file-system maintainer, Darrick Wong announced he'll be stepping down from this role and that really multiple developers need to step up to maintain XFS and help with testing and other responsibilities.

Google's open-source BBR TCP congestion control algorithm is widely used within Google and its v3 iteration is already proving a success within the company and they are working toward upstreaming BBRv3 into the mainline Linux kernel.

It looks like the updated Family 17h microcode this morning isin relation to a new Zen 2 CPU security vulnerability being disclosed. The Linux kernel has also just received a patch for this "Zenbleed" vulnerability for older AMD CPUs.

Those running Intel Arc Graphics on Linux can now enjoy the Hogwarts Legacy game under Valve's Steam Play. Intel engineers were able to get this open-world action RPG game running on their open-source Vulkan driver by hiding the fact that Intel graphics were rendering this game.

Two weeks ago a bug report was opened for Mesa that when using Radeon RX 7900 XT or Radeon Pro WX 9100 graphics, Blender's Eevee shader node trees are unusably slow. A fix has now been merged in reducing that shader compilation time from around 251 seconds to now getting done in just about 9 seconds.

Earlier this month Canonical asserted control over the LXD project. As another step in tightening up control over this container management extension for Linux Containers (LXC) is now apparently limiting LXD maintainership rights to only Canonical employees.

The NVK open-source NVIDIA Vulkan driver has finally been merged into mainline Mesa for easing development of this driver moving forward.

Building off last month's release of Debian 12.0, Debian 12.1 is out today to ship dozens of bug fixes.

Developers of the BeOS-inspired Haiku operating system have long been carrying patches for supporting the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) on their platform while this week the code was upstreamed for GCC 14.

Following Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX) and more recently Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX) for furthering the x86_64 CPU compute potential, Intel has now published initial details on APX: Advanced Performance Extensions.

Mozilla Firefox has merged Wayland fractional-scale-v1 protocol support for handling fractional scaling with the web browser on the Linux desktop.

The SUSE organization has changed hands many times over the years... From being its own independent company to the notable acquisition by Novell two decades ago. Over the past decade SUSE has changed hands between Attachmate, Micro Focus, EQT Partners, and then went public back in 2021 on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange. Now two years later it is being taken private.