Over the past month developers on Haiku as the open-source operating system inspired by BeOS have continued advancing the project.

Haiku's latest monthly progress report was issued outlining some of the advancements made. Over the course of February 2021 some of the work included:

- The HTTP code within the Haiku Network Kit has been seeing improvements. There should be "a big performance boost" to Haiku's HTTP code as well as being simpler and having various fixes -- including the ability to download files

University of Illinois researchers have discovered that Intel's CPU ring interconnects are vulnerable to exploit by side-channel attacks. This opens a whole new can of worms with the cross-core interconnect now being vulnerable to exploit but so far Intel doesn't appear to be overly concerned and there are some open questions on whether this interconnect exploit would still work with the latest Intel Xeon processors.

The university researchers believe their new side-channel attack vector could lead to encryption keys being leaked among other sensitive information. Existing side

It's been a while since last having anything to report on Waffle as the library abstracting OpenGL and windowing system selection to run-time while this weekend marked its v1.7 release.

The Waffle FreeDesktop.org project allows deferring OpenGL API and window system selection to run-time to easily switch between OpenGL vs. OpenGL ES as well as for Wayland vs. X.Org and other options. While the project site is rather stale at this point, those wanting to learn more can visit Waffle-GL

For a number of years it has been known that the Btrfs RAID5 and RAID6 code is potentially unsafe and not nearly as mature as the native RAID support found in this Linux file-system for other levels. Finally now we are seeing the Btrfs user-space programs warn the user when attempting to create such Btrfs native RAID 5/6 configurations.

There have been improvements to the Btrfs RAID 5/6 code in recent years but still it's not nearly as well off as the RAID 0/1

For those using Gallium3D Nine as a Direct3D 9 state tracker when running Windows games on Linux rather than the likes of DXVK for going through Vulkan, next quarter's Mesa 21.1 will better handle 32-bit games with the Nine state tracker.

As written about a few days ago, Gallium Nine has been seeing a fresh round of improvements for this D3D9 state tracker that has long been part of Gallium3D. Gallium Nine is still used particularly by those with

While Linux 5.12-rc2 released on Friday due to that prominent corruption bug, there still is some Sunday kernel fun with Greg Kroah-Hartman releasing a slew of stable kernel updates including Linux 5.11.4 and 5.10.21 LTS.

While I normally don't write about every kernel point release, I do when there are some prominent changes worth highlighting. With Linux 5.11.4 there are some notable back-ports from 5.12

With the exciting "HWCAPS" feature of Glibc 2.33+ allowing for optimized versions of libraries to be more easily deployed on Linux systems, diagnosing issues around it can be a bit more complicated but on the way for Glibc 2.34 is a welcome improvement to help in such issues.

Merging this week for the dynamic link (ld.so) in Glibc 2.34 is a --list-diagnostics option. This new option will provide a system dump of information around the glibc-

Over the years Google Summer of Code (GSoC) has resulted in some really great projects in the X.Org ecosystem from work in the early days on the open-source Radeon graphics driver stack to VKMS more recently to many other improvements especially as it pertains to open-source graphics drivers / Mesa. But for Google Summer of Code 2021 at least, the organization will not be participating.

With rare exceptions , the X.Org Foundation has been a regular fixture of GSoC for as long as Google

With plans of formally releasing FreeBSD 13.0 at month's end, FreeBSD 13.0-RC1 is available this weekend and on-schedule for helping to test and evaluate this forthcoming major BSD operating system update.

Over the prior betas, FreeBSD 13.0-RC1 has a TCP performance improvement when using TCP_NOOPT , SCTP fixes and improvements, and a variety of other low-level fixes and improvements. But at this stage most of the additions are mundane.

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