Now hitting about mid-way through the Linux 5.6 kernel with early fallout having been addressed, we've been ramping up our testing/benchmarking of this next major kernel release. Here is our initial experience with the AMDGPU driver on Linux 5.6.

OpenSUSE Leap 15.2 has rolled past its alpha phase and is now producing rolling-release beta builds for this version of openSUSE built off the SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 sources.

The Linux Mint crew continues maintaining Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) as a fall-back should anything ever happen to Ubuntu or their ability to deliver an Ubuntu-based Linux distribution. Available now in beta is Linux Mint Debian Edition 4.

Intel open-source developers have contributed support for VA-API acceleration of HEVC REXT "Range Extensions" content with the widely-used FFmpeg library.

Mir 1.7.1 was released on Monday and while a point release it's quite a big one.

At least not another hardware vulnerability, but CVE-2020-2732 appears to stem from unfinished code within the Intel VMX code for the Linux kernel's Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) support.

Pending GNOME Mutter changes in conjunction with the new PipeWire 0.3 will offer a big improvement in making use of GNOME's screencasting support from Wayland sessions.

While GIMP 3.0 remains elusive as the long overdue GTK3 port of this leading open-source image manipulation program, the GIMP 2.10 stable series continues seeing a lot of decent improvements in their subsequent point releases. GIMP 2.10.18 is out today following a botched GIMP 2.10.16 release.

Aaron Griffin is stepping down as the Arch Linux Project Leader, who has led the distribution since 2007 where under his tenure Arch Linux boomed in popularity. With him stepping away due to minimal time to invest in the project, a process for selecting a new leader has formed.

While the Linux 5.5 kernel landed Broadcom BCM2711 SoC and Raspberry Pi 4 enablement, one of the loose ends has been getting the open-source "VC4" DRM driver wired up for the display hardware on this latest Raspberry Pi. Patches are now pending for VC4 DRM to provide that display support and could potentially see it mainlined for Linux 5.7.

Besides Clear Linux delivering often leading x86_64 Linux performance at run-time, when it comes to boot performance it has also been at the forefront -- in some configurations, can boot in 300 ms. Intel has invested significantly in ensuring Clear Linux boots as fast as possible for when running in the cloud or on containers in order to respond to increased demand as quickly as possible as well as for use-cases like Clear Linux within automobiles where they need to get automobile cameras active within two seconds of power on. One of their many kernel patches could be on its way to the mainline kernel.

Intel today formally announced their "Cascade Lake Refresh" Xeon processors with higher clock speeds in some cases but also more aggressive pricing to go up against the AMD EPYC 7002 series.

Canonical's Daniel Van Vugt continues focusing on GNOME performance optimizations and this past week still managed to squeeze another optimization out of the near-final GNOME 3.36.

For four years we have been seeing Intel Secure Guard Extensions (SGX) bring-up for the Linux kernel and that work continues with the Intel SGX Enclaves support now having been sent out for review twenty-seven times as it tries to work its way towards the mainline Linux kernel.

There still is no sign of the long overdue X.Org Server 1.21 but the changes for it continue to build up particularly on the XWayland front.

Following the PCI Express 6.0 announcement from last summer that called for 64 GT/s transfer rates, version 0.5 of the PCIe 6.0 specification is now out for evaluation.

In addition to PipeWire 0.3 having shipped last week, also making it out a few days prior was a development snapshot in the road to PulseAudio 14.0.

Linus Torvalds is out today with the Linux 5.6-rc3 kernel as the latest weekly release candidate for Linux 5.6 that will be releasing as stable approximately in one month's time.

Netrunner 20.01 is out today as the 20th release for this Debian + KDE focused project over its ten year history.

While two weeks past the Linux 5.6 merge window some late changes for the C-SKY CPU architecture were accepted today.

For those that have been wanting to take the experimental Reiser5 for a test drive since being announced at the end of 2019, new versions of the Reiser4 and Reiser5 file-system kernel patches have been posted.

As part of clearing up the relationship between the FSF and GNU and seeking to add more clarity to the GNU Project, Richard Stallman has announced a document outlining the structure and administration of the project.

For some interesting Sunday debates in the forums, how important to you is having a completely open CPU design? Additionally, is POWER dead? This comes following interesting remarks by an industry leader this weekend.

This week in particular saw a lot of fixes in the KDE space for a wide variety of bugs.

FSCRYPT as the file-system encryption framework for the Linux kernel and is currently wired up for EXT4, F2FS, and UBIFS to offer native encryption capabilities is currently seeing improvements so the separate casefolding (case-insensitive) file/folder support can work on encrypted directories.

AMD's Radeon Pro Software for Enterprise 20.Q1.1 Linux driver release was made available this week as their newest quarterly driver installment intended for use with Radeon Pro graphics hardware.

PipeWire is the Red Hat engineered project aiming to offer better audio/video stream handling on Linux that integrates well with Flatpak and can optimally handle use-cases currently covered by the likes of PulseAudio and JACK. This week marked the release of PipeWire 0.3 as another big step forward for the effort.

Going back to the start of 2020 we've been seeing a few patches here and there around AMD Family 19h, almost certainly Zen 3. That patch work has continued with a few more bits out this week while hopefully more bring-up is on the horizon ahead of the Linux 5.7 merge window opening in just over one month's time.

Big "open-source" achievements aren't too common for NVIDIA or Microsoft much less together, but thanks to their open-source work on the DXC DirectXCompiler it's possible to easily convert HLSL DXR shaders to SPIR-V for Vulkan.

Google's Summer of Code initiative for getting students involved with open-source development during the summer months is now into its sixteenth year. This week Google announced the 200 open-source projects participating in GSoC 2020.

AMDVLK 2020.Q1.2 is out as the first official AMD open-source Vulkan Linux driver code drop in one month.

CodeWeavers working under contract for Valve on their Wine downstream Proton is out with a new update to their Proton 5.0 series.

To date the Mesa "RADV" Radeon Vulkan driver hasn't supported AMD's GPUOpen Radeon GPU Profiler but that is changing.

Version 20.07.15711 of the Intel Compute Runtime was released this morning.

Intel's ICE driver for the Ethernet E800 series is seeing a new member of the family come Linux 5.7.

The Linux EFI boot code is going through some "spring cleaning" ahead of the RISC-V EFI support landing that still could make it for the Linux 5.7 kernel cycle this spring.

The first batch of DRM-Misc changes following the recent Linux 5.6 merge window have been merged into DRM-Next in forming the early material that will ultimately come to the Linux 5.7 cycle in April.

Broadcom developers have been recently volleying open-source Linux driver patches for enabling their "VK Accelerators" on the platform.