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Linux Finally Has A Tool For Encryption Setup With Older Logitech Wireless Keyboards

Phoronix | April 6, 2021, midnight | Original

For older Logitech keyboards that operate on a 27MHz radio frequency they may have a new lease on life as well as being more secure thanks to a new Linux utility.

Older Logitech keyboards relying upon 27 MHz RF communication have worked on Linux but have not supported the encrypted mode of transmission. Only when running in the default un-encrypted mode of operation have these keyboards worked on Linux but now thanks to Red Hat's Hans de Goede there is this capability for open-source users. Hans de Goede

VirtIO-GPU Vulkan Driver Looks To Go Upstream In Mesa

Phoronix | April 5, 2021, 1:46 p.m. | Original

The VirtIO-GPU Vulkan driver is looking to be upstreamed in Mesa in allowing Vulkan support for virtualized guests that in turn is handled by the host's Vulkan driver/hardware.

As part of the Virglrenderer project has been Vulkan rendering work and the VirtIO-GPU Vulkan driver component within Mesa for running on the guests.

The VirtIO-GPU Vulkan driver code has been in the works by Google and developer Chia-I Wu has outlined their plan to get it upstreamed in Mesa.

The performance of the VirtIO-GPU

AMD Instinct MI100 "Arcturus" Bits Added To Linux-Firmware.Git

Phoronix | April 5, 2021, 1 p.m. | Original

While AMD's open-source Linux graphics driver developers have been working publicly on the " Acturus " GPU support going back to 2019 that was then introduced last year in the form of the Instinct MI100 , finally today has the necessary binary firmware been upstreamed into linux-firmware.git for enabling the rest of the open-source AMD Linux driver stack.

For over one year the mainline Linux kernel has offered the AMD Arcturus GPU support and has continued improving with succeeding kernel releases. For

Two Decade Old RTS Game Rolls Out v4.0 Update With Vulkan Renderer

Phoronix | April 5, 2021, 12:18 p.m. | Original

Warzone 2100, the real-time strategy/tactics game that was originally released in 1999 as a proprietary commercial game only to then be made open-source several years later, is out this week with its version 4.0 milestone.

Most notable with Warzone 2100 v4.0 is the introduction of a Vulkan renderer to complement its existing OpenGL rendering support. Along with a Vulkan renderer there is also now support for OpenGL ES 2.0/3.0 as

CentOS Hyperscale SIG Backported Newer Systemd, Preps For Experimental Repo

Phoronix | April 5, 2021, 10:50 a.m. | Original

Approved at the start of the year was the CentOS Hyperscaler special interest group that is working to cater CentOS Stream so it's more suitable by the likes of Facebook and Twitter along with other modern enterprises. The SIG just issued their Q1'2021 report about what they accomplished in this first quarter of being an approved effort and what work remains on the table.

The SIG is maintaining the "Hyperscale" repository where their package back-ports and other work is landing. During Q1 they provided

Mesa 21.1 RADV Adds Another Performance Knob For RDNA2 Testing

Phoronix | April 5, 2021, 7:24 a.m. | Original

For those that managed to get their hands on Radeon RX 6000 series hardware and are habitual Mesa Git users, the newest Mesa 21.1-devel code for RADV has a new knob for performance testing.

The newest RADV feature to land for Mesa 21.1 is delta color compression (DCC) support for storage images. This functionality was already in place for GFX10 (see this 2019 article when the Navi DCC for storage images code was first added) while now

The Current State Of The Intel "Crocus" Gallium3D Driver

Phoronix | April 5, 2021, 5:35 a.m. | Original

The Intel "Crocus" Gallium3D driver in development for supporting old Intel i965 IGPs through Haswell continues making progress by the upstream, open-source Mesa3D community for hopefully one day replacing Intel's classic "i965" Mesa driver.

Particularly with Mesa likely to drop the classic drivers from mainline , Crocus has added importance for those with Haswell and older Intel graphics wanting to continue to use the latest mainline Mesa driver code. Being a Gallium3D driver, Crocus has the

Linux 5.12-rc6 Released - A "Positively Tiny" Easter Kernel

Phoronix | April 4, 2021, 6:16 p.m. | Original

Linus Torvalds put out Linux 5.12-rc6 on schedule even with the Easter holiday and it's a delightfully small update.

While last week Linus Torvalds was becoming concerned over the size of the kernel at this stage of development, over the past week it's trended down lower. In fact, Torvalds referred to it as a "positively tiny" update in his Easter day message .

If this trend holds, Linux 5.12 stable should be out in two weeks and won't

Benchmarking AMD Zen 3 With Predictive Store Forwarding Disabled

Phoronix | April 4, 2021, 12:19 p.m. | Original

This past week AMD published a security analysis of AMD Zen 3's new Predictive Store Forwarding (PSF) functionality. In there they did acknowledge there is the possibility where bad PSF functionality could lead to a side-channel attack albeit the real-world exposure would be quite low. In any case they are allowing interested users to disable the Predictive Store Forwarding functionality, but what they didn't comment on in that paper was what performance overhead to expect if disabling PSF. So my Easter weekend turned into AMD Zen

Arch Linux's Install Media Adds "Archinstall" For Quick/Easy Installations

Phoronix | April 4, 2021, 7:09 a.m. | Original

This month's Arch Linux install media update now provides "archinstall" as the guided installer for Arch Linux for those preferring a quick and easy route for deploying Arch Linux.

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