The beta of GNOME 40 is out today, one month ahead of the stable release of this big open-source desktop environment update.

Last week I noted "GFX90A" appearing in the AMD LLVM back-end and now the AMDGPU Linux kernel driver patches have appeared for "Aldebaran" that appear to be the codename for the next-generation CDNA part making use of GFX90A.

Google is announcing today in cooperation with The Linux Foundation that they are providing funding for two full-time developers to focus solely on security issues.

Immediately following the publishing of the

Ampere Computing with their 80-core Ampere Altra processors and Mount Jade reference platform continue making progress on open-source firmware support for interested parties.

Linux 5.12 is bringing the initial infrastructure around ACPI Platform Profile support and with this kernel it's implemented for newer Lenovo ThinkPad and IdeaPad laptops. The support allow for altering the system's power/performance characteristics depending upon your desire for a speedy, quiet, or cool experience. With Linux 5.13 it looks like HP laptops with this capability will begin to see working Platform Profile support too.

Debian is the latest major Linux distribution deploying a Debuginfod web server so that ELF/DWARF/source-code information can be supplied via HTTP to clients on-demand when debugging.

An Oracle engineer has proposed introducing a new "-ftrivial-auto-var-init=" option for the GCC compiler that would allowing initializing automatic variables with either a pattern or zeroes in the name of security.

Pop open the champagne as the in-development Linux 5.12 kernel will be able to support link-time optimizations (LTO) in conjunction with the LLVM Clang compiler on not only AArch64 (64-bit ARM) but also x86_64.

After a two year hiatus on the patches, VMware's Nadav Amit has gotten back to working on current TLB flushing support for the Linux kernel in yielding a small but measurable performance improvement.

In yesterday's Linux distribution benchmark comparison on a Ryzen 9 5900X, you may have noticed some of the Ubuntu 21.04 development benchmarks coming in slower than Ubuntu 20.10 but overall a tight race. That is something I've seen now on other systems too -- such as these results to pass along today from an Intel notebook with the latest Ubuntu 20.10 vs. 21.04 development tests.

Thanks to Google engineers the Linux 5.12 kernel is providing punctual support for eMMC inline encryption that is being ratified with a forthcoming specification update and already being found within some mobile hardware.

Firefox 86.0 is out today as the latest monthly update to this open-source web browser that continues to work on ramping up its security offerings.

The open-source Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" has now enabled displayable DCC (Delta Color Compression) support that should yield some performance benefit while there still is more work to be completed.

The HID subsystem updates were sent in this morning for the ongoing Linux 5.12 merge window.

GNOME 40 beta is coming together with the GNOME Shell and Mutter components having seen new releases on Monday.

Libinput 1.17 is out as the newest version of this Wayland/X.Org input handling library for the Linux desktop.

Released yesterday was dav1d 0.8.2 as a fairly significant update to this AV1 CPU-based decoder. For those wondering what this update means for performance, here are some initial benchmarks.

The first release candidate of systemd 248 is now available with a number of improvements ranging from a new "system extensions images" concept to the out-of-memory daemon (OOMD) being declared stable.

One of many interesting and original open-source projects to be started in 2020 was ZLUDA, an open-spurce drop-in CUDA implementation for Intel graphics. ZLUDA - developed independent of Intel and NVIDIA - is built atop Intel's oneAPI Level Zero interface (hence the name, ZLUDA) and allows for unmodified CUDA applications to run on Intel UHD/Xe Graphics hardware with near-native performance. Well, that's the goal at least but with the initial ZLUDA release were a number of support limitations.

The changes within the remote direct memory access (RDMA) subsystem for Linux 5.12 are deemed "quite small" but there is one interesting addition courtesy of Intel.

Microsoft engineers continue increasing their contributions to the Linux kernel where it makes business sense for them, such as in the case of securing the Azure cloud given that around 50% or more of the instances run Linux. With Linux 5.12 there are integrity subsystem improvements coming from Microsoft.

Sent in last week were some AMDGPU "fixes" for Linux 5.12. While there are some fixes as part of the series, there are some new (minor) features enabled.

Dav1d is already the most performant and leading AV1 software decoder we have seen while out today is v0.8.2 that should speed-up the video decode process even more on modern x86/x86_64 and ARM hardware.

Greg Kroah-Hartman sent in the staging/IIO updates for the Linux 5.12 kernel and this time around are lighter than normal but still with a few interesting items worth mentioning.

Following the recent major rewrite to KDE's KWin compositor code there are more exciting improvements likely to come for KWin in improving its Wayland compositor support.

The block subsystem and related storage changes were merged today for the in-development Linux 5.12 kernel.

Earlier this month at the virtual FOSDEM 2021 conference was an interesting presentation on how European developers are preparing for AMD-powered supercomputers and beginning to figure out the best approaches for converting existing NVIDIA CUDA GPU code to run on Radeon GPUs as well as whether writing new GPU-focused code with OpenMP device offload is worthwhile.

Oracle continues maintaining Solaris 11.4 with monthly stable release updates but there still is no public sign of anything past 11.4 for this operating system that was once exciting during the Sun Microsystems days. But with this week's 11.4 SRU30 release, at least there are many package updates.

There is a lot of new hardware enablement with the ARM platforms and DeviceTree additions for the Linux 5.12 kernel merge window.

Mesa's on-disk shader cache, which is used for speeding up game load times by avoiding the redundant recompiling of shaders on successive loads and also helping performance for software that compiles shaders on-the-fly, is seeing a big improvement with Mesa 21.1. Mesa 21.1-devel merged this weekend the new single file cache implementation.

While the first week of a new merge window is often one of the busiest times for Linus Torvalds in overseeing the Linux kernel, until last night there was no actual Linux 5.12 code being pushed into the Linux Git repository. Linus was offline most of the week due to winter storms preventing him from pushing to the Git repository and interacting much with the mailing list.

XFS maintainer Darrick Wong characterized the file-system driver changes for Linux 5.12 as "a lot going on this time, which seems about right for this drama-filled year."

With Fedora 34 aiming to use PipeWire by default for audio use-cases currently handled by PulseAudio and JACK, the Red Hat developers working on PipeWire remain very busy in addressing bugs and wiring up new functionality for this audio and video framework/server.