The Linux kernel has just received its mitigation work for the newly-announced TSX Asynchronous Abort (TAA) variant of ZombieLoad plus revealing mitigations for another Intel CPU issue... So today in addition to the JCC Erratum and ZombieLoad TAA the latest is iITLB Multihit (NX) - No eXcuses.

Intel is today making public the Jump Conditional Code (JCC) erratum. This is a bug involving the CPU's Decoded ICache where on Skylake and derived CPUs where unpredictable behavior could happen when jump instructions cross cache lines. Unfortunately addressing this error in software comes with a performance penalty but ultimately Intel engineers are working to offset that through a toolchain update. Here are the exclusive benchmarks out today of the JCC erratum performance impact as well as when trying to recover that performance through the updated GNU Assembler.

GCC developers recently have been discussing a new proposal over an option for preserving the command-line flags/options used when building a binary as well as the associated compiler version.

Using Firefox 70 (including WebRender) and Google Chrome 78, here are our latest round of Linux web browser benchmarks tested on the Dell XPS Ice Lake laptop. Making this round of Linux browser benchmarking more interesting is also including power consumption and RAM usage metrics for the different browser benchmarks.

Debian 10.2 is out this morning as the latest point release to the "Buster" series.

With a change merged Friday night for the nearly over Linux 5.4 cycle, the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Extreme 2nd Gen laptop should see better touchpad input support.

Wine 4.20 came out last night while out today is Wine-Staging 4.20 as this experimental blend of Wine with more than eight-hundred extra patches on top.

While most Linux gamers don't appear to be into GPU overclocking, one of the limitations of the Radeon RX 5000 "Navi" series support with the AMD open-source driver to date has been no overclocking support. With the upcoming Linux 5.5 kernel that is set to change.

For the past four years going back to Linux 5.5 has been EXT4 native file-system encryption making use of the kernel's FSCRYPT framework that is shared between several file-systems. That support has continued to improve with time and with Linux 5.5 another limitation will be dropped.

Wine 4.20 is out today as the newest bi-weekly development snapshot for this open-source project allowing Windows games and applications to run on Linux and other non-Microsoft platforms.

Making waves this afternoon is word of the NUVIA server CPU start-up landing its series A funding round and thus making more information known on this new silicon start-up.

Librem 5 "Birch" batch was supposed to be shipping from 29 October to 26 November. They are now preparing to start shipping this second iteration of the Librem 5 Linux smartphone after early units in this batch were missing a resistor.

Drew DeVault of Sway/WL-ROOTS notoriety and longtime Wayland developer Simon Ser have started development on WXRC, a new Wayland compositor.

Purism has finally published their blog post outlining the software work they accomplished during October on bringing up the Librem 5 smartphone.

OnLogic (formerly known as Logic Supply until a recent rebranding) announced the Karbon 700 back in August as a durable Linux-friendly computer largely intended for industrial applications but nothing prevents the user from using it as a passively, well-built desktop PC either. OnLogic recently sent over the Karbon 700 and it's been working out very well even with passively cooling an Intel Xeon eight-core / sixteen-thread processor, 16GB of RAM, 512GB NVMe storage, and more.

While Android 10 is the latest release of Google's mobile operating system, the downstream Android-x86 has been on the Android 8 "Oreo" series for stable while now the first release candidate of Android-x86 9.0 is available for testing.

The crypto code within the Linux kernel for the upcoming 5.5 cycle finishes converting the drivers to making full use of the four-year-old SKCIPHER interface so that the old ABLKCIPHER code can be removed.

The Intel developers working on their open-source compute run-time this morning released a new version as they continue making improvements to their Gen11 Ice Lake support as well as further bringing up the Gen12/Xe Tiger Lake support.

The DXVK Direct3D 10/11 over Vulkan implementation to date has been built as a Windows library run under Wine along with the game/software being rendered for converting the calls to Vulkan for execution by the host drivers. There is now experimental work for building DXVK as a native Linux library for converting D3D10/D3D11 calls to Vulkan outside of Wine.

OpenWrt 19.07 is on the way as the next feature release to this router/network focused Linux distribution that remains quite popular with hobbyists.

Longtime X11 developer Keith Packard has spent a lot of time in recent months while being employed by SiFive working on Picolibc as a new C library for embedded systems.