Google today is announcing the open-sourcing of Atheris, a Python fuzzer they developed internally for automatically finding bugs within Python code and native extensions.

Atheris is focused on differential fuzzing for cases where multiple libraries are available to provide the same functionality but in many cases could present subtle differences.

Atheris supports fuzzing native Python extensions by using LLVM Clang's libFuzzer code. Atheris supports fuzzing both Python 2.7 and Python 3 code. Google is also adding Atheris to their OSS-Fuzz service.

More details on Atheris for

For the "Video Core Next 2" hardware like Navi as well as Renoir APUs , HEVC "sample adaptive offset" support has landed in Mesa 21.0.

VCN 2.0 initially came with Navi 1x and a feature now being exposed in the Mesa 21.0 Radeon video encode code is support for HEVC/H.265 sample adaptive offset, or SAO for short. As explained at IEEE.org , Sample Adaptive Offset for HEVC is a in-loop filtering technique to reduce

Pacman, the excellent package manager on Arch Linux, is working on becoming even more compelling with the in-development Pacman 6.0.

Pacman 6.0 has reached alpha today in marking the point the Arch Linux developers are seeking more widespread testing.

The main feature of Pacman 6.0 as it concerns end-users is support for parallel downloads for being able to download packages in parallel as well as the package database metadata. This should shorten up the overall installation process, assuming your Internet is fast enough to

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) approved a fresh batch of changes this week for Fedora 34 that is due out next spring.

Among the changes approved this week for Fedora 34 include:

- To little surprise, FESCo approved using GCC 11 and Glibc 2.33 as the bleeding-edge compiler toolchain components come next spring. Fedora will continue to ship with the very latest GNU Compiler Collection as its default code compiler.

- MariaDB 10.5 has been approved as this alternative to

In addition to AMD Zen 1/2/3 PowerCap RAPL support coming for the Linux 5.11 kernel, the hwmon-next Git branch has also queued initial support for Zen 3 processors within the AMD_Energy driver.

The AMD_Energy driver was introduced earlier this year and merged for Linux 5.8 for easily exposing AMD CPU energy metrics -- albeit the list of supported CPU models was later restricted to EPYC CPUs.

The AMD_Energy driver to now has not supported any Zen 3 processors but

The Linux kernel's input subsystem is gaining a new "inhibited" property feature as a policy to temporarily block input from given devices, including not using any event from them as a possible wake-up source.

This input inhibited property is being led by Google ChromeOS engineers in conjunction with Collabora and the initial use-case for inhibiting input from select devices is a 2-in-1/laptop use-case where the keyboard may be folded under the screen for creating a tablet-like experience. This new

Ever since AMD has been on a stellar trajectory with their hardware, users have been begging System76 to release an AMD Linux laptop... That's now finally coming with their upcoming Pangolin launch.

System76 today disclosed Pangolin as their first AMD-powered laptop with Ryzen (Zen 2) CPU cores and Radeon graphics. In particular, the Pangolin comes with the option of the Ryzen 5 4500U or Ryzen 7 4700U and making use of the integrated Vega graphics

Mesa 20.3 has been released as the Q4'2020 open-source graphics driver update, primarily around providing OpenGL and Vulkan support on the likes of Intel and AMD Radeon graphics along with the reverse-engineered Nouveau support, many smaller drivers especially in the embedded space, and the growing list of CPU-based implementations and other translation efforts.

Mesa 20.3 as usual sees much of the exciting work for the Intel and AMD Radeon graphics driver work -- including new hardware support