Last month was the proposal for Fedora to make DXVK their default back-end for Direct3D 9/10/11 usage with their packaged Wine build rather than WineD3D. That's now been approved for Fedora 33!

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has approved the proposal to use DXVK by default with their Wine package rather than WineD3D, which maps D3D 9/10/11 over OpenGL. With DXVK going from Direct3D to

Since leaving stealth last year and hiring some prominent Linux/open-source veterans to complement their ARM processor design experts, we have been quite eager to hear more about this latest start-up aiming to deliver compelling ARM server products. Today they shared some early details on their initial "Phoenix" processor that is coming within their "Orion" SoC.

The first-generation Phoenix CPU is said to have a "complete overhaul" of the CPU pipeline and is a custom core based on the ARM architecture. They believe

It is Intel's August 2020 disclosure day with 18 new advisories being issued for covering 52 vulnerabilities.

Intel engineers uncovered around half of those 52 vulnerabilities internally while the rest were found by external security researchers. Still digging through all of the Intel security advisories for the day but some of them include:

- Security vulnerabilities in select Intel Server Boards, Server Systems and Compute Modules that could allow privilege escalation or denial of service. Firmware updates are needed for mitigation to these 9.6 ranked

Mozilla today announced they are laying off around 250 of their employees with Mozilla Corporation and closing up their Taipei, Taiwan operations.

Due to falling revenues stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic, Mozilla is resorting to immediate cost-saving measures and acknowledging their pre-COVID plans are no longer feasible. This 250 reduction in headcount appears to be roughly a quarter of their paid staff.

Mozilla will continue focusing principally on their Firefox web browser, Pocket, and their new VPN offering.

More details on

There are a few changes worth mentioning out of the VirtIO updates submitted today for the Linux 5.9 kernel.

The latest Mellanox driver going mainline in the Linux kernel is a VDPA (Virtual Data Path Acceleration) for their ConnectX6 DX and newer devices.

The VDPA standard is an abstraction layer on top of SR-IOV and allows for a single VirtIO driver in the guest that isn't hardware specific while still allowing wire-speed performance on the data plane. VDPA is more versatile than the likes of VirtIO

For Intel NVDIMMs like DC Persistent Memory there is support on the way with Linux 5.9 to support firmware updates to the non-volatile memory device without the need for a system reboot.

The LIBNVDIMM changes for Linux 5.9 include "Runtime Firmware Activation" as the Intel-devised feature for accommodating device firmware updates to supported NVDIMM modules without needing a reboot. The intent is on being less disruptive than a reboot and allow loading the firmware still via the ndctl user-space utility and then the new ability to

The Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) changes have been sent in for the in-development Linux 5.9 kernel.

The prominent changes this cycle include a new garbage collection mode (GC_URGENT_LOW) and a "secure" TRIM option (F2FS_IOC_SEC_TRIM_FILE) in the name of security.

The F2FS_IOC_SEC_TRIM_FILE functionality is intended as secure erase functionality . For drives not supporting TRIM/DISCARD,

For those wanting to experiment with an actively-maintained BSD-powered, desktop-focused operating system, GhostBSD remains a great choice powered off FreeBSD.

GhostBSD 20.08.04 was released on Monday as the latest release for one of the few BSDs having a pleasant out-of-the-box desktop experience and is being actively maintained with frequent releases. Personally, GhostBSD has been one of my favorites in a time post-TrueOS/PC-BSD for a desktop-friendly BSD operating system

The Document Foundation that is behind the cross-platform LibreOffice open-source office suite has published their 2019 annual report.

Perhaps most interesting out of their 2019 report is their total income that came in at 906,470 EUR for their 2019 fiscal year. Or at least as far as today's currency exchange rates go, roughly 1.063 million USD. That is a measurable increase from their 2018 annual report where they