It's been a fairly smooth week and Linus Torvalds is expected this Sunday to formally release the Linux 5.18 stable kernel. Unless he has any last minute reservations and decides to stretch it out an extra week, Linux 5.18 will be out as stable and with it comes a great deal of new features -- especially for benefiting AMD and Intel products from CPUs to GPUs.

While Mesa's RADV open-source Radeon Vulkan driver continues seeing a lot of activity on a near daily basis by developers from Valve, Red Hat, Google, and other independent contributors, AMD continues with AMDVLK as their official open-source Vulkan driver derived from their internal, closed-source Vulkan driver for Windows and Linux. Out today is AMDVLK 2022.Q2.2 as the latest open-source snapshot of this Vulkan driver.

Fedora will keep around its legacy BIOS support that was decided earlier this month after a proposal to deprecate legacy BIOS support to focus resources on UEFI-only booting. However, Fedora will be relying more on the community to maintain that legacy boot support and as such the Fedora BIOS Boot SIG (Special Interest Group) is now established.

Since Ubuntu 20.10 there has been Active Directory integration in the Ubiquity installer while now it looks like the latest effort by Canonical on enhancing the Ubuntu desktop for the enterprise is around Microsoft Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) integration.

While the kernel-side Intel AMX support landed in Linux 5.16 and KVM support for AMX in Linux 5.17, other Linux patches around Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX) remain floating around. One important patch-set was updated this week for ensuring proper power management on AMX-enabled processors, coming with Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" this year.

Merged yesterday to the mainline X.Org Server for XWayland is the "-force-xrandr-emulation" option added for Valve's Gamescope / Steam Deck usage.

AMD has released a new version of AOMP, its LLVM/Clang compiler downstream where they stage their latest patches focused on OpenMP GPU offload support for their Radeon graphics cards / Instinct accelerators.

While the hostname on Linux systems is widely relied upon for different applications, setting the hostname is usually left up to user-space by the init system at boot. However, should any user-space processes try to read the system hostname prior to it being set, it could lead to unintended results. So now finally in 2022 there is a kernel parameter working its way upstream with "hostname=" should you want to ensure the hostname is set before user-space is started.

System76-Scheduler as the Linux PC vendor's effort to provide a Rust-written daemon to enhance Linux desktop responsiveness and shipping as part of their Pop!_OS distribution is out with a new feature release.

Hearing "open-source", "PSP", and "security" all together got me excited with my initial reaction thinking it was about AMD's Platform Security Processor (PSP) albeit that's not the case here. Google's PSP announced today is the "PSP Security Protocol" and is designed for dealing with cryptographic hardware offloading at data center scale and used by Google already in production.

The Framework Laptop is a modular laptop design that launched a year ago and is designed to be upgrade-friendly and allows users for switching out lots of components from different ports to the motherboard itself. And the laptop is Linux-friendly -- see my Framework Laptop review from last year. For new systems or those wishing to upgrade their laptop's motherboard, Intel Core 12th Gen "Alder Lake" is now available.

Intel today has lifted the embargo on SYCLomatic, their new open-source tool to help migrate code-bases targeting NVIDIA's CUDA so they can be re-purposed to target C++ and SYCL -- thereby being able to leverage Intel's graphics processors and jiving with their oneAPI goals.

The KDE development community today announced the release of the Plasma 5.25 beta.

Last week I wrote about how well known Mesa developer Samuel Pitoiset who is employed by Valve already started working on GFX11 (RDNA3) support for RADV, the open-source Radeon Vulkan driver in Mesa that isn't officially supported by AMD but remains more popular than their own "AMDVLK" driver. More GFX11/RDNA3 preparation work remains ongoing and it's looking like if trends continue this open-source driver could be ready for RDNA3 graphics cards in time for launch.

POCL as the "Portable Computing Language" that gets OpenCL running on CPUs as well as via LLVM allowing for targeting NVIDIA GPUs, AMD HSA environments, and other cases, is now preparing to roll-out OpenCL 3.0 support.

Multi-Gen LRU (MGLRU) remains a very promising effort for enhancing Linux system performance and particularly about providing a superior experience when the Linux kernel is dealing with system memory pressure. MGLRU v11 was posted this week while we await to see if it will be mainlined come the v5.19 merge window.

Back in 2017 for the Linux 4.11 kernel the statx system call was added for allowing enhanced file information reporting. Since then various file-systems began adding Statx support and worked its way up into Glibc and the like in user-space for Linux finally having file creation time reporting and other attributes. Two separate statx-related additions are now working their way to the kernel.

Mesa 22.1 is out today as the newest, quarterly feature update to the open-source OpenGL/Vulkan graphics driver stack that also supports video acceleration and other GPU features on the Linux desktop.

Last week Red Hat announced at the Red Hat Summit that RHEL9 would be reach GA in the coming weeks while today it officially crossed that threshold.

Intel today published their latest update (v2022.2) to the oneAPI Toolkits, their collection of open-source software components for empowering modern workloads across the growing world of CPUs/GPUs/XPUs.

With the upcoming Linux 5.19 cycle appearing to be the point at which Intel's DG2/Alchemist Linux graphics driver support is settling down and may end up being the base version requirement for their forthcoming discrete graphics cards, we are seeing other non-core feature work happen for these Arc Graphics products. A new feature we've only seen mentioned today for the first time by Intel is "vRAM SR", short for vRAM Self-Refresh.

AMD on Tuesday released the Kria KR260 Robotics Starter Kit featuring a Xilinx Kria K26 System-on-Module and tailoring it for robotics, machine vision, and industrial communication/control use-cases while running Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.

Security researcher Jason Donenfeld who is known for leading the development of the WireGuard open-source software has outlined a new security vulnerability affecting the Oracle VM VirtualBox software.

The Arch Linux installer "Archinstall" that makes it simple to quickly and easily get this popular distribution installed has prepared a new release candidate where they are introducing FIDO2 support.

Back in 2019 Realtek contributed the open-source "RTW88" WiFi driver to the Linux kernel for supporting their newer wireless chipsets on Linux. To date the mainline driver has just supported their PCI-based WiFi adapters while a patch series now out for review extends the driver to supporting their newer USB-specific chipsets.

It was just shy of one month ago that Intel and AOMedia released SVT-AV1 v1.0 and now Intel engineers have released SVT-AV1 v1.1 as the newest feature update to this CPU-based, open-source AV1 video encoder.

After 25 years being heavily involved in the Qt toolkit development, Lars Knoll announced today he is leaving The Qt Company where he currently serves as CTO and also largely departing from active work within the Qt community to "try out something else" moving forward.

Valve's Vulkan-powered Gamescope Wayland compositor has merged support for NVIDIA Image Scaling.

Qualcomm engineers are exploring bootloader-based hibernation in order to improve the user experience when restoring from a hibernated state.

Microsoft has made a lot of interesting developments and maneuvers over the past number of months for leveraging open-source Mesa for use by Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) and supporting various Khronos APIs atop Direct3D 12 for use when native drivers are lacking on Windows. This work so far has been focused on OpenGL, OpenCL, and Vulkan but Microsoft has now even implemented Direct3D 12 video API support within Mesa and leverages the VA-API state tracker support within Mesa.

Canonical continues investing a lot in ensuring a first-rate Ubuntu experience when using Microsoft's Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL/WSL2) with Windows 10 and newer. Rather than needing to wait longer to see the fruits of that work in the next Ubuntu releases, Canonical has now made "Ubuntu Preview" available from the Microsoft Store to have a daily-updated, bleeding-edge Ubuntu experience.

With the Linux 5.18 kernel reaching stable in the next week or two there is basic support for Tesla's FSD chip. That Samsung-based SoC for powering Tesla's full-self driving technology has the basic support pieces in place for this kernel while Samsung engineers are working on ironing out other portions of the SoC support for future kernel releases.

Just one week after Vulkan 1.3.213 released with its four new extensions, which included an update to the ray-tracing support, Vulkan 1.3.214 is out today with various fixes while introducing just one new extension.

AMD's Radeon open-source Linux graphics driver developers remain very busy preparing for next-generation RDNA3 GPU support.

For over the past year we've seen various patches posted by AMD engineers with a state effort around preparations for the Frontier supercomputer. Most of these patches have involved memory handling under Linux and the special purpose memory handling between the CPU/GPUs. Published on Monday was their latest work on coherent device memory mappings for the Linux kernel.

Microsoft has another open-source driver they are working to get upstreamed into the Linux kernel.

OpenSUSE Leap 15.4 betas began rolling out in March and now this distribution with shared sources to SUSE Linux Enterprise has advanced to the release candidate period.

Last week AMD quietly released a new Radeon Software for Linux driver package focused on providing their fully open-source "Open" and "PRO" (featuring some proprietary components, OpenGL / Vulkan) for enterprise Linux distributions.

It's been nearly one year since the release of Inkscape 1.1 while today it has been succeeded by Inkscape 1.2 as a major feature update.

After taking a few extra weeks to bake, FreeBSD 13.1 is out today as the newest stable release of this leading BSD operating system.

While not as exciting as last week's NVIDIA 515 series Linux driver that kicks off their open-source Linux kernel driver effort, but today they issued a minor point release for the current stable 510 series as well as updating their prior legacy driver branches.

Last week marked the first update to the jemalloc memory allocation library since August of 2019. This malloc() implementation focused concurrency and memory fragmentation avoidance has seen more speed optimizations and other improvements in this new jemalloc 5.3 release.

In addition to Linux 5.19 set to add NVMe support for the Apple M1 systems, the Apple eFuse driver also from the open-source community is geared up for landing in this next version of the Linux kernel.

Consulting firm Igalia that has been working on the Mesa V3DV open-source Vulkan driver for the Raspberry Pi 4 and newer has published a summary of recent accomplishments for this Mesa solution.

Mesa's Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" continues working on maturing its ray-tracing implementation after the initial code was merged last year. RADV ray-tracing is still treated as experimental and not as reliable as the proprietary NVIDIA Vulkan driver's ray-tracing support that has been around much longer, but it's getting there and at least is open-source -- unlike AMD's official AMDVLK driver that continues to not support Vulkan RT unlike their proprietary driver alternative.

Google engineer Sami Tolvanen has posted the second "request for comments" patch series on KCFI as a Control-Flow Integrity implementation better geared for Linux kernel usage than the existing CFI support.

Mesa developer Timothy Arceri of Valve's Linux graphics driver team has added a NIR varying linker for GLSL.

Linus Torvalds has released what is likely the last release candidate before officially declaring Linux 5.18 next weekend if all goes according to plan.

PAPPL as the free software project started by CUPS founder Michael Sweet after departing Apple more than two years ago, this C-based framework/library for creating CUPS Printer Applications is out with a major feature release.

An interesting Linux kernel patch series was posted this week to address inconsistent NUMA imbalancing behavior for at least some workloads. In such cases these patches address performance differences seen over the past number of Linux kernel releases going on for a while.

In addition to Linux 5.19 being the kernel set to have DG2/Alchemist graphics support in better shape with the IDs now (finally) being added and compute support being ready, this next kernel should boast improved power management handling for these "Alchemist" Arc Graphics GPUs.

The Solarflare "SFC" network driver within the Linux kernel for their high performance network adapters, owned by Xilinx and now owned by AMD, is seeing some restructuring with the next version of the Linux kernel. The intention is on shifting older network hardware to a separate kernel module/driver so improvements and new hardware support can be the focus with this main Solarflare Linux network driver.

MSM DRM driver and Freedreno creator Rob Clark continues leading the charge on open-source Qualcomm Adreno graphics/display support for Linux in this effort that started out as a reverse-engineering project years ago. This past week Rob sent in the last batch of MSM Direct Rendering Manager driver updates intended for the Linux 5.19 kernel.