Google engineers are working on the notion of "memory modes" for the Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) with the intent on introducing a "low memory" mode for storage devices that would alter its behavior. Presumably Google is working on this new F2FS feature for low-end Android devices.

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 5.19-rc4 as the newest weekly test candidate. There are more patches this week than in the prior Linux 5.19-rc versions but nothing too scary as well as having some notable patches in tow.

Jens Axboe, Linux storage expert and IO_uring lead developer, released liburing 2.2 this weekend as the newest version of this helper library that makes it easier for user-space software to make use of the Linux kernel's IO_uring support.

NVIDIA has contributed support to the FFmpeg multimedia library for being able to take advantage of AV1 GPU-accelerated video decoding by way of the VDPAU API when using the latest-generation NVIDIA RTX 30 "Ampere" GPUs.

Last month Microsoft issued the first production release of CBL-Mariner 2.0, its in-house Linux distribution used for powering services from Microsoft Azure to WSL use-cases and more. CBL-Mariner 2.0 this weekend saw a rather large monthly update with a number of fixes, package updates, and new additions to this "Common Base Linux" platform.

Shotcut remains one of the leading open-source, cross-platform video editors built atop the MLT Multimedia Framework with FFmpeg. Out this week is Shotcut 22.06 as the newest feature update to this non-linear video editing solution.

For the Fedora 37 cycle Fedora CoreOS is hoping to be promoted to an official release "edition" alongside the likes of Fedora Workstation and Fedora Server.

2022 is certainly looking to be interesting on the open-source graphics driver front... You probably didn't have Imagination publishing an open-source PowerVR Vulkan driver on your 2022 bingo card nor NVIDIA working on an open-source GPU kernel driver. The latest 2022 surprise is the OpenChrome driver project is hoping to finally be mainlined in Linux 5.20 for open-source VIA graphics for those still running vintage VIA x86 hardware.

LLVM developers are eyeing Zstandard "Zstd" use within this compiler stack as a secondary compression method to Zlib. Zstd could be used for compressing ELF debug sections, AST data structures, and other purposes within this open-source compiler stack.

While Arch Linux itself is quite easy to get setup these days thanks to Archinstall for a quick installation process and sane defaults, for those looking for a nice and polished experience EndeavourOS remains one of the nice Arch-based desktop Linux distributions.

KDE released Plasma 5.25.1 this week with the first batch of bug fixes to the Plasma 5.25 desktop while yet more fixes are coming down the pipe to Plasma and other KDE software components.

This shouldn't be too surprising considering some of Linus Torvalds past commentary about compiler optimizations and bad experiences long ago with GCC, but Linus Torvalds is not interested in seeing a tunable Kconfig option for using the -O3 compiler optimization level for building the Linux kernel without substantial justification.

Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver developers remain very busy preparing the open-source driver stack for Arc Graphics DG2/Alchemist hardware. While much of the base enablement work is complete and now with Linux 5.19 the compute support is even exposed to user-space, one of the areas seeing more work in recent times has been around power management.

While many Red Hat open-source projects end up being relatively instant successes that then end up being widely adopted in the open-source community, Red Hat's Stratis Storage effort seems to be trending as one of the exceptions. Red Hat continues investing in Stratis but it doesn't seem to have the sizable adoption or widespread interest that tends to come with most of their projects. In any event, Fedora 37 later this year should ship with the newest Stratis tech.

Google's Stadia cloud gaming service since its 2019 launch has relied upon custom Vega-based GPUs in their Linux servers but now it looks like they may be quietly transitioning to using NVIDIA GPUs.

Following this week's Chrome 103 release, Google has now promoted Chrome 104 to beta.

With the recent release of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS it is shipping systemd-oomd by default on their desktop for trying to better handle low-memory / out-of-memory situations. However, in real-world use systemd-oomd is too easily killing user-space applications like Firefox and Chrome when approaching memory pressure. This is a poor Ubuntu 22.04 user experience but the developers now have an idea for their approach to addressing this solution.

Fedora developers are weighing adding an option to the default compilation flags for Fedora 37 that can enhance the performance profiling and debug-ability of generated packages but possible performance overhead implications -- possibly a few percent based on prior figures.

A set of patches have been posted for making the "-O3" compiler optimization level more easily accessible when building the Linux kernel but still it's not recommended and some kernel developers do not even want to see it as a Kconfig option.

This week's DRM-Misc-Next pull request was sent out of new DRM changes ready for queuing ahead of Linux 5.20. There isn't too much to get excited about for this week's code updates going to DRM-Next, but there is "fbcon: Improve scrolling performance" that did get my attention.

From 2011 to 2017 while Ubuntu had been using the LightDM display manager developed by Canonical, their engineers were actively supporting it and making new releases to coincide with new Ubuntu Linux updates. But with Ubuntu now using GDM as its default desktop display manager, there hasn't been a new LightDM release in three years and not much in the way of upstream activity. Today Canonical's lead LightDM maintainer issued a status update for the project.

The first beta of Krita 5.1 for this leading open-source digital painting program is now available for testing.

Adding to the list of features slowly building up that will be destined for the Linux 5.20 cycle, Jens Axboe has queued up the support for async buffered writes with XFS when using IO_uring can deliver some significant performance advantages.

OpenZFS 2.1.5 was released this afternoon as the newest maintenance release for this open-source ZFS file-system implementation that currently works on Linux and FreeBSD systems.

Back in March there were Linux kernel patches posted for review to boot Linux on the Nintendo Wii U game console after this Linux porting work has long been done out-of-tree. A new iteration of those Wii U enablement patches for the Linux kernel have now been posted.

Wine developers have released VKD3D 1.4, the newest version of their Direct3D 12 on Vulkan implementation that is useful with Wine for enjoying newer Windows games on Linux.

After AMD announced FidelityFX Super Resolution 2.0 back in March, as of today they have made good on their word to open-source it.

The open-source Mesa "R600" Gallium3D driver for supporting AMD graphics processors prior to the Radeon HD 7000 series, a rewritten NIR back-end has been published that enables better performance and proper FP64 usage.

With the AMD Radeon "HIP" acceleration in Blender 3.2 with the Cycles back-end, an unfortunate early limitation is that this is limited to just AMD RDNA2 (Radeon RX 6000 series) graphics processors while prior generation RDNA1 GPUs have issues with some textures like those used in the benchmarks. This week though AMD did post a new patch for Blender enabling HIP support on Windows and Linux for Vega/GFX9 graphics.

One of the multi-year efforts in the GNOME Wayland camp has been on deep color support and it's been of interest to Ubuntu developers among other parties. After not hearing about any progress on GNOME Wayland deep color support in a while, some progress is now being made.

Merged yesterday into Linux 5.19 as a post merge window change is making the kernel's signature verification code FIPS compliant.

AMD today released a new update to AMDVLK, their official open-source Radeon Vulkan driver for Linux systems that is derived from their internal Vulkan driver sources while plumbed to use the open-source LLVM AMDGPU shader compiler back-end. For Linux gamers this driver doesn't remain as popular as Mesa's RADV but the update today does deliver on some game performance optimizations.