Disclosed by Arm last summer was the Straight Line Speculation (SLS) vulnerability and they were quick to introduce new safeguards against SLS in the GCC and LLVM compilers. The compiler-based mitigations to straight-line speculation involves adding speculation barrier sequences around the vulnerable instructions to prevent speculatively executing instructions around changes in control flow. While compiler developers were quick to add the options, so far the Linux kernel developers are in disagreement still over its importance and the proposed patches that would flip on this option when compiling the ARM Linux kernel.

Exiv2, the widely-used C++ metadata library / tools for dealing with image metadata via EXIF / IPTC / XMP standards and ICC profiles is looking to join the KDE project.

Following the recent promotions of DataSketches and ECharts, the Apache Software Foundation has promoted Daffodil as their newest top-level project. Apache Daffodil is an open-source universal interchange implementation of the Data Format Description Language (DFDL).

While Linus Torvalds long has released his new kernel releases -- both release candidates and the inaugural stable releases -- every Sunday, there are the occasional exceptions like this week with Linux 5.12-rc2 being issued on Friday night. The Linux 5.12-rc2 release has come early due to that nasty file-system corruption issue stemming from botched swapfile handling.

PyTorch 1.8 was released on Thursday as the newest version of this widely-used machine learning library. Exciting many will be easier AMD Radeon ROCm support with Python wheels now provided for that Radeon Open eCosystem support.

Recently I wrapped up some tests looking at the Dell XPS Linux laptop with Core i7 1165G7 "Tiger Lake" processor when looking at the Linux kernel performance of 5.10 vs. 5.11 vs. 5.12 as well as the impact if upgrading to the Linux 5.12 kernel.

The next major NVIDIA driver series, the 470 release series, is slated to be "even more Wayland-friendly" but what all that encompasses remains to be seen.

Published last month was an updated but still experimental version of the native Wayland support for Wine after that code was originally published last year. One of the lingering questions has been around the prospects of mainlining this Wayland driver in Wine while last week the longtime Wine project leader, Alexandre Julliard, provided some clarity on the matter.

hipSYCL, the innovative implementation of Khronos' SYCL for targeting CPUs and GPUs by integrating with existing toolchains, is seeing work on supporting Intel oneAPI Level Zero for running directly off Intel graphics hardware.

While it's 2021 and many modern Linux gaming and other workloads are focusing on the Vulkan API, Intel isn't letting up in their aggressive optimizations to their open-source "Iris" OpenGL Gallium3D driver for Linux systems. With the latest Mesa 21.1 code today there is a set of patches providing up to 17% better performance in some games while other OpenGL software is generally a few percent faster at least. In some micro-benchmarks it can be more than 50% faster.

Hector Martin, who has been working on the crowd-funded effort to bring Linux up on the Apple M1 SoC and the modern Apple devices using that in-house silicon, has sent out the third iteration of his kernel patches.

Linus Torvalds has now warned developers over using Linux 5.12-rc1 as a basis for their future branches and is looking to release 5.12-rc2 ahead of schedule as a result of that problematic file-system corruption bug stemming from a swap file bug.

Google has been delivering new Chrome milestone releases on a six week cycle for more than one decade while moving ahead they are shifting to a four-week cycle.

Qt 5.15.3 is out today with nearly 250 fixes as the latest point release for this last Qt5 long-term support series. However, as reported previously, new Qt 5.15 LTS point releases are restricted to The Qt Company's commercial customers.

Recent kernel point releases have reported erroneous maximum frequencies on AMD Zen 2 / Zen 3 CPUs in the area of 6GHz+ while now with the latest stable releases that is being fixed.

While the 5.12 merge window hasn't even been closed for a full week yet, there is already the first DRM-Misc-Next pull request heading into DRM-Next with the first batch of feature material aiming for the Linux 5.13 kernel cycle.

A set of "fixes" to the AMDGPU kernel driver were mailed out today that include a few notable changes for some post merge window alterations.

With the forthcoming Linux 5.12 kernel there is a big Redmond victory with Linux being able to boot as the root partition on Microsoft's hypervisor while moving forward the company still has more in store for the ongoing years long effort of Linux on Hyper-V.

Given this week's launch of Chrome 89 and the recent Firefox 86 debut, here are some quick benchmarks for those curious about the current performance when using Ubuntu Linux with a AMD Ryzen 9 5900X and Radeon graphics.

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 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 is out today as the latest feature update to this operating system that is one of the BSD-based desktop initiatives.

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 Alpha started rolling out in December while today the beta builds have begun for this next openSUSE Leap installment.

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.

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.

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.

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!

Valve has released their updated Steam Survey figures for February 2021.

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.

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 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.

The first beta is out today of the forthcoming Qt 6.1 toolkit.

It's been talked about many times from various parties but so far has remained elusive from the mainline LLVM code-base: a SPIR-V back-end for LLVM that would go from LLVM into this Khronos intermediate representation most notably used by OpenCL and Vulkan drivers. Intel engineers are stepping up and hope to help get a proper SPIR-V back-end upstreamed into LLVM.

GCC compiler patches began appearing this morning for IBM Z "Arch14" as a future architecture extension for their Z mainframe processors. IBM Z Arch14 will likely correlate to IBM z16.

While Linux 5.12 has many great new features, what you won't find in the mainline kernel is the new "NTFS3" kernel driver developed by Paragon Software for NTFS file-systems. That driver is still coming for a future kernel and has now been sent out a twenty-second time for review.

The latest "Smart Access Memory" work by the open-source AMD Radeon graphics driver stack is an option for the RADV Vulkan driver to force the "SAM" behavior even if the system is not advertising all the video RAM as visible or even if using APU graphics.