Raspberry Pi Vulkan Driver Making Progress But Long Road Remains
Consulting firm Igalia that has been working under contract with the Raspberry Pi Foundation on developing a Raspberry Pi Vulkan driver for the Raspberry Pi 4 and future SBCs has provided a status update on their development efforts...
KDE Plasma 5.19 Released After Lots Of Polishing, Better Wayland Support
The KDE community has released Plasma 5.19 on schedule this morning...
Google Engineer Uncovers Holes In Linux's Speculative Execution Mitigations
There are some urgent fixes pending for the x86/x86_64 speculative execution handling for the Linux kernel following a Google security engineer discovering these issues, including one of the fixes address a situation that unfairly impacted AMD CPUs...
Samsung Sends In Improvements To The exFAT File-System Driver For Linux 5.8
Merged back in Linux 5.7 was the new exFAT file-system driver backed by Samsung and replacing the prior "staging" exFAT driver that had been around for the prior few kernel releases. Samsung has now sent their queued up exFAT improvements for the Linux 5.8 kernel...
Char/Misc Additions For Linux 5.8 Headlined By Intel / Habana Labs Gaudi Support
The char/misc pull request for Linux 5.8 is big at nearly one hundred thousand lines of new code...
Ubuntu Is Working On Much Faster Hibernation/Resume Support
Canonical's Andrea Righi who is on the Ubuntu Kernel Team sent out a set of patches last week working on opportunistic memory reclaim support as a means of achieving much speedier system hibernation and resume performance...
Staging/IIO Changes For Linux 5.8 Are The Most Boring We Have Seen In A While
With the staging/IIO subsystem changes for Linux 5.8 arguably most notable is what didn't make the cut this round...
Radeon Navi 2 "Sienna Cichlid" Published For AMD's OpenGL Driver
Last week AMD's open-source Linux engineers published the initial Linux kernel driver patches for the "Sienna Cichild" GPU that appears to be almost definitely the big Navi 2. Now that those AMDGPU patches are public, the folks working on the user-space drivers have had the go-ahead to begin volleying their related patches for Sienna Cichild. Out today is the RadeonSI OpenGL driver support for this next-generation Navi GPU...
Firefox 77 / 78 Beta vs. Chrome 83 Linux Browser Benchmarks
Given the recent releases of Chrome 83 and Firefox 77 while Firefox 78 was promoted to beta, here are some current web browser benchmarks from the Linux desktop for these different browser releases.
USB Improvements Land In Linux 5.8 With Intel Additions, Non-x86 Thunderbolt
On Sunday Greg Kroah-Hartman began sending in his pull requests to the different areas of the kernel he oversees for the ongoing Linux 5.8 merge window...