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Zstd 1.4.9 Released With ~2x Faster Performance For Long Mode Zstd 1.4.9 is out today as the latest version of this implementation for the Facebook-led Zstandard lossless data compression algorithm. With Zstd 1.4.9 comes a very sizable speed-up when running in its long distance mode...
Intel Sends Out KVM SGX Virtualization Patches For Linux Intel SGX support finally landed in Linux 5.11 after going through 40+ rounds of review that took years for bringing up Software Guard Extensions in the mainline kernel. But that trek isn't yet over as Intel is now working on KVM SGX virtualization support to be upstreamed...
NomadBSD 1.4 Released With GUI For Easier Chrome / Brave / Vivaldi Browser Installation NomadBSD 1.4 is out today as the latest feature update to this operating system that is one of the BSD-based desktop initiatives...
AMD Announces The Radeon RX 6700 XT For $479 AMD today announced the Radeon RX 6700 XT as the newest RDNA 2 graphics card to begin shipping later this month...
openSUSE Leap 15.3 Beta Begins OpenSUSE Leap 15.3 Alpha started rolling out in December while today the beta builds have begun for this next openSUSE Leap installment...
Linux 5.12 Lands Fix For File-System Corruption Caused By Swapfile Issue For those wanting to help in testing out the Linux 5.12 kernel, at least it should no longer eat your data now if you rely on a swapfile...
Radeon R600 Gallium3D Flips On OpenGL 4.5 For NIR Backend The experimental NIR back-end for the R600 Gallium3D driver as an alternative to the default TGSI code-path has now enabled OpenGL 4.5 support for capable GPUs...
Gallium Nine Still Seeing Improvements In 2021 For Direct3D 9 Within Mesa While DXVK has been receiving much attention these days for implementing Direct3D 9/10/11 atop the Vulkan API that can be consumed in a driver agnostic manner, Gallium Nine as a D3D9 state tracker going back years for Mesa continues to receive new work too...
LVFS Serves Up 25 Million Firmware/BIOS Updates To Linux Users It was just this past September that LVFS served its 20 millionth firmware file to Linux users updating their system BIOS or device firmware using Fwupd while this week the Linux Vendor Firmware Service crossed the 25 million milestone!..
Steam On Linux In February Still Residing Below 1% Valve has released their updated Steam Survey figures for February 2021...
Multiple New Security Issues Hit GRUB Bootloader Around Secure Boot Last summer the GRUB bootloader was impacted by "BootHole" with security issues hitting its UEFI Secure Boot support while today a new round of vulnerabilities were made public...
That Linux 5.12 Severe Data Corruption Bug Hits Intel CI Systems - Issue Caused By Swap File Last week I issued a warning of possible data loss on the early Linux 5.12 kernel code that was reliably leaving my test systems severely corrupted. Intel's internal graphics test systems it turns out have now been bitten by this issue in encountering this significant file-system corruption and as such they've been quick to jump on the issue - there's now an idea what's causing the nasty issue and a workaround by reverting select patches...
Chrome 89 Released With Various New Web APIs Deemed Stable Chrome 89 is out today as the latest stable version of Google's web browser. With Chrome 89 various new APis are deemed stable including WebHID, WebNFC, and Web Serial...
Updated Portal 2 Vulkan Rendering Code Yielding Great Radeon Results Valve on Monday rolled out a new Portal 2 build that improves its new Vulkan renderer support. For those interested here are some fresh benchmarks of Portal 2 with OpenGL and Vulkan on the open-source AMD Radeon Linux drivers.
Qt 6.1 Beta Released With Porting More Modules To Qt6 The first beta is out today of the forthcoming Qt 6.1 toolkit...