For consumer Radeon GPUs the "Radeon Software for Linux" packaged driver version has been on the 22.10 series since the end of March. For AMD Radeon PRO professional/workstation graphics the advertised "Radeon Pro Software for Enterprise on Linux" driver is still the 21.Q4 driver from last December. AMD appears to be finally prepping to release the "22.20" packaged driver as the next feature release to this packaged AMD Linux driver stack for those not relying just on the upstream kernel and Mesa.

The Microsoft Dozen "Dzn" code within Mesa that allows for the Vulkan API to be implemented atop Direct3D 12 for benefit on Windows now has a working pipeline cache implementation.

LLVM release manager Tom Stellard of Red Hat has laid out the planned LLVM/Clang 15.0 release schedule for this next major version of this open-source compiler stack.

Hector Martin who has been leading the Asahi Linux effort for bringing up Linux on Apple Silicon recently received his new 2022 MacBook Pro 13-inch to begin porting Linux to Apple's new M2 SoC. While only started this week, he's already making significant progress. Fortunately, much of the existing M1-written Linux code can work for the M2 but some new drivers will need to be written before the new M2 Macs are fully usable on Linux.

After what has felt like years of neglect and little progress in advancing this open-source mail/communications client, Thunderbird 102 is out today with some shiny new features and a lot of UI refinements.

AMD's GPUOpen team quietly setup a new GitHub repository for "gpurt", presumably a new ray-tracing related software effort.

Arm today announced their second-generation Armv9 CPU designs with the Cortex-X3 and Cortex-A715. Arm also refreshed the Cortex-A510 to allow for more cores and a power reduction.

Vim 9.0 is out as the first major update in two years for this popular text editor. With Vim 9.0 comes the Vim9 scripting language that offers significantly better performance.

In addition to announcing the GeForce GTX 1630 budget card today (expect our Linux review soon), NVIDIA published 515.57 as their newest stable NVIDIA Linux driver release.

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has approved a fresh batch of features for the next Fedora Linux distribution release.

For those not yet on the GCC 11 or GCC 12 stable series, GCC 10.4 is out today as the latest in that older stable series.

A "sched/fair" scheduler change queued this morning into TIP's sched/core for Linux 5.20 aims to enhance the efficiency when searching for an idle CPU under heavy system load. The change led by Intel should improve the kernel's efficiency when the system is overloaded but as with most low-level tuning does run the risk of regressions.

A decade after Luc Verhaegen started the Lima driver effort for reverse-engineering Arm Mali graphics, developers continue occasionally working on improvements to this Gallium3D driver for older generations of Mali hardware. The most recent feature work is finally enabling 4x MSAA support.

Last month for their Vision conference, Intel announced the Habana Labs Gaudi2 accelerator. Gaudi2 is the second-generation offering from Intel-owned Habana Labs for training and inference. The open-source Linux kernel driver support for Gaudi2 is now getting underway along with accompanying open-source user-space software stack support.

Git 2.37 is out today as the latest feature update to this widely-used, distributed revision control system.

The Rust-GCC front-end that allows Rust code to be compiled with the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) could possibly be upstreamed for next year's GCC 13 compiler release but not necessarily complete at that stage. In any case, it's good seeing progress on Rust-GCC as an alternative to Rust's official LLVM-based compiler.

Merged today to Mesa 22.2 was a four month old merge request for the open-source Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" that significantly improves the 16-bit FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) performance.

One of Intel's many wonderful open-source projects for creators is OSPRay Studio that is their interactive visualization and ray-tracing application built atop their OSPRay portable ray-tracing engine. OSPRay Studio has been making steady progress since its 2020 debut and out today is their newest update.

The Firefox 102.0 release is now available for download ahead of its stable release announcement tomorrow.

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.