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Intel's Habana Labs AI Driver With Linux 5.11 Begins Prepping For Future ASICs

Phoronix | Dec. 6, 2020, midnight | Original

Well before Intel bought out AI startup Habana Labs this company with their compelling AI training and inference accelerators has been maintaining an open-source kernel driver in the Linux kernel. That has fortunately continued under Intel's ownership to no surprise and coming up with the Linux 5.11 cycle are more improvements to this accelerator driver for both the Gaudi AI Training and Goya AI Inference products.

The Habana Labs driver updates have been queued as part of the "char-misc" area, which remains where it and similar

ZaReason Linux PC Vendor Closes After More Than A Decade Of Selling Linux Hardware

Phoronix | Dec. 5, 2020, 4:48 p.m. | Original

After a long run and being one of the early boutique Linux PC vendors, California-based laptop/desktop/server vendor ZaReason is the latest casualty of the COVID-19 pandemic.

ZaReason had been around since 2008 offering Linux across various laptops, desktops, and servers. In recent years we've heard less from the Berkeley based company as they battled increased competition from the likes of System76, Purism, Tuxedo Computers, and also more Linux pre-loaded devices coming directly from the

Debian 10.7 Released With Numerous Security Fixes

Phoronix | Dec. 5, 2020, 1:48 p.m. | Original

Debian 11 is starting its release dance next month with the initial transition and essentials freeze while the actual stable release should make it out later in the year. For now Debian 10 remains the current stable series and this weekend marks the debut of Debian GNU/Linux 10.7.

Debian 10.7 ships with a variety of fixes including a number of security fixes throughout. There are numerous CVE fixes as well as a number of memory leak fixes and some other basic additions like enigmail now adding a

Auxiliary Bus Support Coming To Linux 5.11

Phoronix | Dec. 5, 2020, 1:05 p.m. | Original

Coming to the Linux 5.11 is the Auxiliary Bus infrastructure that allows creating an auxiliary device and binding an auxiliary driver to it. This is for a new core driver feature around increasingly complex devices that rely upon several drivers for support/operation.

Auxiliary Bus is a new core driver feature set to be introduced in Linux 5.11 -- it was queued yesterday into driver-core-next. Intel engineers led development of this new bus with an initial use-case being for their Sound Open Firmware

A Quick Look At The Spectre Mitigation State For AMD Zen 3 On Windows 10

Phoronix | Dec. 5, 2020, 10:30 a.m. | Original

Earlier this week I looked at the Spectre mitigation performance impact on AMD Zen+ / Zen 2 / Zen 3 processors given the recent launch of the Ryzen 5000 series and those newest CPUs still requiring some mitigation handling. Questions were raised about the Spectre mitigation handling on Windows, so I ran some quick tests there as I happened to have a Windows 10 install on the Ryzen 9 5900X test box at the moment for some unrelated Windows vs. Linux gaming.

The prior article looking at

Initial AMD Zen 3 Support Successfully Lands In GCC 11

Phoronix | Dec. 5, 2020, 7:53 a.m. | Original

A few days ago AMD finally sent out the initial AMD Zen 3 "znver3" support to the GCC compiler with the LLVM Clang support to follow. That initial "-march=znver3" targeting support has now been merged for GCC 11.

While past the feature development stage of GCC 11 , the znver3 patch was permitted to land with new targets / hardware support allowed to land still as it doesn't risk regressing the existing compiler support.

As outlined in the prior article though, this

Wine-Staging 6.0-RC1 Stacks 740 Patches Atop Upstream Wine

Phoronix | Dec. 5, 2020, 6:33 a.m. | Original

Following yesterday's release of Wine 6.0-RC1 that is kicking off the release process for this annual release of Wine, the Wine-Staging experimental/testing blend of Wine is also updated.

Wine-Staging 6.0-RC1 is out today with some 740 patches atop the upstream code-base. This year the Wine-Staging code-base has been largely residing in the 600 to 800 patch range. With Wine-Staging 6.0-RC

Wasmer 1.0 Beta Released For Running WebAssembly Code Anywhere

Phoronix | Dec. 5, 2020, 2:36 a.m. | Original

Wasmer is one of the leading software solutions aiming to bring WebAssembly (WASM) to the desktop rather than largely isolated to the web browser as is the case now. Wasmer aims to allow WASM programs anywhere and on any client while quickly closing in on its 1.0 release.

Wasmer 1.0 Alpha debuted in September while as we approach the end of the year the beta is now available. Wasmer provides a universal run-time so that WebAssembly can run across platforms / operating systems in a trusted manner.

With

Loongson64 Finally Seeing KASLR With Mainline Linux 5.11 Kernel

Phoronix | Dec. 5, 2020, 12:02 a.m. | Original

While the Linux kernel has supported Kernel Address Space Layout Randomization (KASLR) for a decade and a half in varying forms, it hasn't been supported for all hardware targets. Only in 2021 is the mainline Linux kernel seeing KASLR working for the MIPS-based Loongson64 platform.

The Chinese-made Loongson MIPS64 processors have been popular in some circles for their Linux usage and the Loongson-powered Lemote hardware even popular with Richard Stallman for a time due to fully open-source firmware

Wine 6.0-RC1 Released Following Last Minute Changes

Phoronix | Dec. 4, 2020, 4:02 p.m. | Original

As expected , the first release candidate of Wine 6.0 is now available for testing for this annual update to Wine for running Windows programs and games on Linux and other platforms.

Wine 6.0-RC1 marks the start of the code/feature freeze ahead of Wine 6.0.0, which should be out in January. Until then the release candidates will continue.

But among the changes that made it in prior to this freeze with Wine 6.0-RC1 includes:

- Gecko engine

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