GNU Bash 5.1 was released on Monday as the newest feature release to this popular POSIX shell implementation with many extra features.

Beyond the usual bug fixing, Readline updates, and other mostly mundane changes, one interesting addition to note with Bash 5.1 is the new SRANDOM variable. The SRANDOM variable provides random data from the system's entropy engine and cannot be reseeded. In particular, the SRANDOM variable provides a 32-bit random number that relies upon getrandom/getentropy -- with fall-backs

HP today announced a new Ubuntu Linux offering for select mobile workstations and notebooks in the form of the "Z by HP Data Science Software" package. This isn't just pre-loading the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS OEM version on the notebook but calling it a day, rather it's been pre-loaded as well with a variety of data science software packages.

Z by HP Data Science Software pre-installs a variety of data science libraries, developer tools, Docker container support, and other

Proton 5.13-3 is out today as the latest version of this Wine downstream that powers Valve's Steam Play for running Windows games rather well on Linux.

Most notable with the Proton update is pulling in DXVK 1.7.3 that released last week with many different game fixes and other improvements.

Proton 5.13-3 also updates to FAudio 20.12, restores game controller hot-plugging support, and has several fixes affecting the likes of Serious Sam 4, Call

One of the NVMe specification additions that was ratified this year is the "simple copy" command that allows for copying multiple contiguous ranges to a single destination. That simple copy operation is offloaded to the SSD controller. The Linux kernel support for NVMe simple copy is now being prepared.

Simple copy allows offloading the copy operations from multiple source LBAs to a single destination LBA. This copy offloading operation is akin to SCSI Extended Copy "XCOPY" but much simpler. Data movement is handled solely by the SSD controller and this extension

Vulkan 1.2.164 is out today with the usual assortment of documentation fixes/clarifications plus two new extensions.

The two new extensions of Vulkan 1.2.164 include:

VK_VALVE_mutable_descriptor - This is the Valve-developed Vulkan extension we were first to report on last month as another stride for helping to improve Direct3D implementations atop Vulkan like VKD3D-Proton as used by Valve with their Steam Play (Proton) layer. VK_VALVE_

While most hardware vendors don't support Linux to the extent that any products with configurable RGB lighting controls will officially be supported, OpenRGB has been one of the successful community projects for allowing many different devices to enjoy configurable, cross-vendor. and open-source RGB lighting controls.

OpenRGB 0.5 was released overnight for this open-source RGB lighting control solution that works not only on Linux but Windows too. OpenRGB supports a wide range of devices from the likes of ASUS, ASRock, Gigabyte, Corsair,

For those that may find their hands on an Intel Tiger Lake laptop this holiday season with the "Gen12" Xe Graphics, here are some Linux OpenGL/Vulkan benchmarks in varying driver configurations if you are left wondering whether it makes sense upgrading your kernel or Mesa for better performance.

From the Dell XPS 13 9310 with the Core i7 1165G7 Tiger Lake processor, I ran some benchmarks atop Ubuntu 20.10 looking at various possible driver combinations. The

The Webboot project has been in development now for more than one year as an easy means of booting Linux ISO images from the web. From this minimal boot environment users can configure their network connection and download a new ISO or use a pre-existing ISO. From there Webboot allows kexec'ing into that ISO for booting it up.

Webboot was announced at the Open-Source Firmware Conference 2019 while at last week's OSFC 2020 the developers were providing an update on its many improvements

Back in October there were engineers from Tencent proposing DMEMFS as the "Direct Memory File-System" for Linux. DMEMFS is about reserving some RAM that is not managed by the kernel to avoid that overhead and in turn expose it directly to virtual machines in the cloud. Those initial DMEMFS kernel patches have now been updated by Tencent as they continue working to get this functionality into the Linux kernel.

The focus of Tencent's DMEMFS is all about avoiding the bits of memory saved by removing the struct page that is traditionally