Manjaro 21.1 is on the way as the newest release of this Arch Linux based operating system that is popular for its desktop ease of use.

While solidly into the "fixes" stage of Linux 5.14 kernel development, the x86 platform driver pull request this week -- which has already been merged to mainline -- does have some new additions worth mentioning.

RenderDoc continues maturing gracefully as the leading frame-capture based graphics debugging system for OpenGL / Direct3D / Vulkan across all major operating systems as well as some consoles.

Last month I wrote about a possible global counter for block/disk changes on Linux being discussed by Microsoft and systemd developers to better track changes via a system-wide monotonically increasing number as an alternative to the existing per-disk tracking. That functionality is now queued up as part of the block subsystem changes ahead of the Linux 5.15 merge window in a few weeks.

The Mesa release train continues at full speed ahead for these open-source Linux graphics driver components.

Intel's open-source "Iris" Gallium3D driver for providing modern OpenGL driver support on their graphics hardware from Broadwell through all current Gen12 / Xe Graphics era hardware has been in great shape for some time and works wonderfully. But Intel's not done furthering this Linux OpenGL driver and today they now have threaded shader compilation merged.

OPNsense as the FreeBSD/HardenedBSD-based firewall and routing platform long ago forked from pfSense is out with its newest major release.

Less than one month since Open 3D Engine was announced based on Amazon's Lumberyard engine, the Linux support is nearly in a pleasant state.

The work going on for over a year to optionally flush the L1 data cache on context switching is going to try again for the next kernel cycle as an opt-in feature for select tasks. This was the feature rejected last year by Linus Torvalds that went on to "beyond stupid" and other concerns about it when it was trying to be mainlined originally.

FreeRDP as a leading open-source implementation of the Remote Desktop Protocol is up to version 2.4 and exciting about this release is multi-threaded decoding support.

A lot of new code landed yesterday in the Btrfs file-system's "for-next" Git branch ahead of the Linux 5.15 merge window opening up in about one month's time.

While PipeWire continues on a nice upward trajectory for fulfilling the roles of PulseAudio and JACK along with other audio/video stream management needs, PulseAudio isn't letting up yet and on Tuesday saw its big version 15.0 release.

GCC 11.2 is now available as the latest stable version of the GNU Compiler Collection.

The open-source Mesa RADV driver for independent Radeon Vulkan driver support on Linux has been working towards supporting ray-tracing for months. Progress is being made with the latest being more test cases passes and even the Quake II RTX game rendering correctly, but the performance is far short of being satisfactory yet.

Following the formation of the Open 3D Foundation and their open-source IBM-led work around watering farms from the cloud, the Linux Foundation's newest effort is around trying to enhance firefighter safety with open-source.

Apache Cassandra 4.0 is finally available as the latest major feature release to this widely-used NoSQL database management system.

The NVMe specification provides for an abrupt shutdown mode over the normal/safe shutdown command if needing to quickly get the NVMe solid-state storage ready for powering off as quickly as possible. Currently the Linux kernel isn't making use of the NVMe abrupt shutdown command but a proposal by Micron is looking to begin its usage.

There is the phenomenon on Linux where when double-buffered rendering and missing vblanks can lead to the GPU running at a lower frequency when instead the opposite should happen so it will try to not miss vblanks in the first place. In the past there's been talks of "boost" support in the GPU drivers or also workarounds from user-space like dynamic triple buffering, but sent out this week is a new proposal around DMA-Fence deadline awareness as another means of addressing this problem.

Going on for more than one year now is the effort for supporting KVM virtualization with the RISC-V architecture, which is very much important for RISC-V processors to be able to eventually take lift in the server space. The KVM RISC-V enablement work is now up to its nineteenth revision but not yet clear if it's ready for mainlining.

Google engineers and other parties are interested in being able to create swap spaces on Linux systems that would be reserved just for system suspend/hibernation purposes and not for generic swapping to disk.

For those making use of Radeon GPUs for H.264 encoding on Linux, the open-source Mesa driver stack for VCN hardware has just merged support for handling H.264 Scalable Video Coding (SVC) / temporal encoding.

Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger is back with another webcast following his update in March that focused on the new Intel Foundry Services, new US fabs, and more. Today's event is "Intel Accelerated" and offering an update on the company's IDM 2.0 process and packaging.

It turns out there is actually people running modern versions of the Linux kernel in 2021 that also are using floppy disks.

The Eclipse Foundation has released OpenJ9 as the latest version of their high performance virtual machine that continues advancing four years after IBM donated the original J9 code.

DXVK 1.9.1 is out as the newest version of this key component to Steam Play / Proton for running Windows games on Linux with DXVK being responsible for translating Direct3D 9/10/11 calls to Vulkan.

One year after Haiku R1 Beta 2, the third beta of this inaugural release of the open-source Haiku operating system is now available for testing. Haiku remains the open-source OS project going on two decades for advancing as the spiritual successor to BeOS.

The SDL2 library that is commonly used by many cross-platform games landed several patches this weekend to improve its Wayland support.

Following last week's big kernel in the form of Linux 5.14-rc2, rc3 is now available and it's much saner this week with fewer changes and those scattered changes being on the smaller side.

The BLAKE3 cryotpgraphic hash function that was announced last year and based on its predecessor BLAKE2 has now reached version 1.0 for its official/reference software implementation. BLAKE3 continues to be much faster than BLAKE2 while also being much faster than the likes of SHA-1/SHA--2/SHA-3 and even MD5 while being more secure.

When sticking to Wine recommendations of maintaining separate prefixes per-application, a lot of system files get duplicated for each game/application and in turn leading to significant bloat. With the current state of Wine it can mean hundreds of megabytes per prefix in duplicated files. But proposed reflink patches for Wine are aiming to cut down on this severe bloat.