While AMD has been crushing it when it comes to Linux performance and generally delivering good launch-day support, the one area many Linux/open-source advocates have been eager and hopeful to see change is around Coreboot support and ideally open-source firmware support such as by re-opening AGESA. Both inside and outside of AMD there continues being work in this direction.

Piotr Król and Michał Żygowski of consulting firm 3MDEB presented at this weekend's FOSDEM Online 2021 about the

The BeOS-inspired Haiku open-source operating system has continued pushing forward in 2021. The range of their work so far is quite diverse from finally landing SD/MMC driver support to at the same time being a bit more forward-looking and already working on 5-level paging support to handle terabytes of system RAM.

The Haiku crew has published their status report concerning their activities for the month of January 2021. Among the Haiku OS developments over the past month have included:

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With the incredible success of FWUPD and the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) where most major hardware vendors are supporting it in some capacity for distributing firmware updates to Linux customers, there are BSD developers working to it port it over to their camp to support firmware updates.

3MDEB under funding from NLNet is working to bring FWUPD to the BSDs. This is being done since firmware updates are commonly done in the name of security these days, among other factors. 3MDEB is working to see their port of FWUPD work

Dropping a conditional (if) statement from the RADV driver in Mesa is helping the performance of discrete Radeon graphics cards with the RADV Vulkan driver for some games.

Hitting Mesa 21.1-devel on Saturday and marked for back-porting to stable series of Mesa is a change to improve spilling on discrete GPUs. Up to now the preferred heap for buffers has only set GTT (RAM) for APUs given that all the memory ends up being system RAM on current platforms with the integrated graphics. But this simple

In addition to OpenMandriva Lx 4.2 nearing release , Mageia that shares a similar Mandrake/Mandriva lineage is nearing its next major release in the form of Mageia 8.

The first release candidate of Mageia 8 was issued on Saturday. Mageia 8 RC1 brings brand new artwork for its desktop, is powered by the Linux 5.10 LTS kernel, ships with KDE Plasma 5.20.4 / Xfce 4.16 / GNOME 3.38.3 desktop options, and a wealth of

FreeBSD 13.0-RELEASE is aiming to debut before the end of March and there is good chances of that with the FreeBSD 13.0 release process so far being on schedule. With that, this weekend marks the availability of FreeBSD 13.0-BETA1.

Weekly beta releases are expected before getting to the release candidates in a few weeks time. If all goes well, FreeBSD 13.0 will be officially out around 21 March.

FreeBSD 13.0 has a lot

Debian 10.8 as the Linux distribution's latest quarterly update is now available ahead of Debian 11 expected later in the year.

Debian 10.8 provides the latest stable release updates for "Buster" with dozens of package updates compared to 10.7. Debian 10.8 has a number of bug fixes, security updates to a wide range of different packages, offers the latest Steam package, an updated NVIDIA graphics driver package, updated timezone data, and an assortment of other fixes

LibreSOC remains the very ambitious project of creating a fully open-source hybrid CPU/GPU SoC but with a very uphill battle still in front of them.

LibreSOC has been after designing a hybrid CPU/GPU that is 100% open-source . The project originally stated off as aiming to be a RISC-V Vulkan accelerator back when the project was known as Libre RISC-V. But they ultimately dropped RISC-V for aiming to be an OpenPOWER ISA based design over not needing NDAs and other organizational

Security researchers out of the University of Birmingham have crafted another attack against Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX) when having physical motherboard access and using their "VoltPillager" hardware device they assembled for about $30 USD.

Two years ago Plundervolt was widely publicized for compromising Intel's SGX security by manipulating the CPU frequency/voltage as able to through software interfaces. By carefully undervolting the Intel CPUs when executing enclave computations they were able to ultimately compromise the integrity of SGX.