The Linux kernel's frame-buffer device "FBDEV" subsystem has thankfully been on the decline over the past number of years thanks to the success of the more useful DRM/KMS drivers and having FBDEV compatibility emulation support. While not actively maintained, the FBDEV subsystem and some drivers remain within the Linux kernel and are used with some interest primarily in some legacy/embedded environments. The subsystem was orphaned while now a Linux kernel developer has stepped up to serve as its maintainer.

It's been over two years since Mumble 1.3 was released for this open-source VoIP / voice chat program that is popular with gamers and open-source enthusiasts while today it's been succeeded by Mumble 1.4.

Disclosed a few months back were "Trojan Source" attacks against compilers where specially crafted code could be rogue but not appear so due to exploiting Unicode issues. Unicode control characters could be used to reorder tokens in source code that could alter the behavior when compiled. With the upcoming GCC 12 compiler release there is a new warning to help point out possible Trojan Source attacks.

Sent in to the Linux kernel on Friday were the "char/misc" updates as the smorgasbord of kernel changes not fitting formally within other areas of the kernel. The char/misc changes range from AI accelerator driver updates to new Xilinx code to other random changes littered throughout.

Those wanting to enjoy some impressive Vulkan ray-traced visuals on Linux (and macOS or Windows) now have GravityMark to add to the list of Linux-native ray-traced software for testing.

Merged into Linux 5.17 this weekend is the Google-developed Page Table Check feature that can help combat some forms of memory corruption.

A new version of JACK2 is available this weekend, the latest version of this cross-platform, professional sound server.

Cemu as one of the leading Nintendo Wii U video game emulators is planning to go open-source this year and is also working on Linux support and related cross-platform advancements.

The Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) changes for Linux 5.17 bring several feature additions.

Intel ended out the week with a huge update to ISPC, the Intel Implicit SPMD Program Compiler. ISPC is Intel's LLVM-based compiler focused on its C variant with extensions for single program, multiple data (SPMD) programming. Interestingly with this release is the introduction of AMD Zen 1/2/3 targeting and even the PlayStation 5 while also adding support for forthcoming Intel Arc "Alchemist" (Xe HPG) hardware.

The sound subsystem updates have been merged into the Linux 5.17 kernel with a few notable hardware driver additions this cycle.

Libvirt 8.0 has been released for this open-source Virtualization API and associated daemon/tools for managing KVM, Xen, and other hypervisors.

The PCI subsystem updates for the in-development Linux 5.17 kernel have been submitted to Linus.

In addition to shipping Plasma 5.24 beta this week, KDE developers remained busy working on Plasma 5.24 as well as other KDE desktop components.

Wine 7.0 is inching towards release but for this week is the seventh weekly release candidate.

FFmpeg 5.0 is out today as a shiny feature update to this widely-used open-source audio/video handling suite.

Mesa's V3D and V3DV drivers providing open-source OpenGL and Vulkan driver support, respectively, for newer Broadcom VideoCore hardware now has a double buffer mode implemented. This is a win for numerous workloads for these drivers most notably used by modern Raspberry Pi single board computers.

The Qt Company just announced Qt 6.3 Alpha as the first formal test release for this next Qt6 toolkit update. The Qt Company also lifted the lid on their new Qt Quick Compiler where they are aiming for QML to run at "a speed close to native" for that interpreted language.

It turns out Ubuntu 22.04 LTS is planning to use the Linux 5.15 kernel as its default kernel. It makes sense in that Linux 5.15 is also a long-term support kernel, but unfortunate in that Ubuntu LTS releases haven't always used LTS kernel versions and v5.15 will be a half-year old already by the time the "Jammy Jellyfish" ships in April. This is a choice particularly unfortunate for those with recent hardware but at least there is the Ubuntu Mainline Kernel PPA and other non-default options available.

In addition to Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver developers being quite busy preparing for upcoming Intel Arc "Alchemist" (DG2) graphics cards on the consumer side, they have concurrently been preparing for Xe HP "Ponte Vecchio" hardware too. One of the big undertakings on that side from the driver perspective is bringing up multiple tiles.

While the MIPS CPU architecture itself is at the end of the road, kernel developers still are busy with MIPS considering the Loongson hardware that is popular in China and lots of older MIPS hardware out there lacking mainline Linux kernel support. For Linux 5.17 several more older, consumer-grade network routers are seeing mainline support.

A draft merge request has been opened for landing "Copper" within Mesa.

Landing this week as part of the various subsystems overseen by Linux's second-in-command Greg Kroah-Hartman were the USB changes for Linux 5.17.

Back in 2019 the Linux kernel deprecated a.out support for that file format used several decades ago before ELF tookover. Now in 2022 it looks like that a.out code will be removed from the kernel.

Lead Fwupd/LVFS developer Richard Hughes of Red Hat today released v1.7.4 for this open-souce utility to allow firmware updating on Linux of system motherboards and peripherals.

While we are very eager for Godot 4.0 with everything that this open-source game engine is going to deliver on, Godot 3.5 beta is out today and is a rather nice interim step forward.

KDE has made available the beta of the upcoming Plasma 5.24 desktop update ahead of its planned stable release on 8 February.

Samsung in partnership with Tesla has posted a set of 23 patches for enabling Tesla's Full Self-Driving (FSD) SoC for the mainline Linux kernel.

Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver developers have now committed the DG2/Alchemist graphics card PCI IDs and device information data to Mesa 22.0 for their OpenGL and Vulkan driver support, but for now until the Linux kernel support is baked this is disabled.

Back in 2020 Microsoft announced the DXGKRNL driver as the kernel driver component for supporting GPU accelerated use-cases within Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2). That original DXGKRNL driver was quickly shot down by upstream kernel developers and various issues raised while now for the past year Microsoft has been reworking this kernel driver and on Wednesday published the new version.

Being worked on since early 2020 by Red Hat's David Howells has been a rewrite to Linux's FS-Cache and CacheFiles code focusing on making it smaller and simpler while also presenting possible memory/performance advantages. That major rewrite has been merged now for Linux 5.17.

Ubuntu developers have laid out their GNOME versioning plans for this spring's release of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.

While a lot of open-source OpenGL and Vulkan driver improvements have been landing in recent days in anticipation of the Mesa 22.0 code branching and feature freeze for Wednesday, that deadline has now been extended by three weeks.

The Linux 5.17 kernel is introducing support for the x86 straight-line speculation "SLS" mitigation with it becoming increasingly clear modern x86_64 CPUs are susceptible to speculatively executing linearly in memory past an unconditional change in control flow.

It's not an area of Linux hardware performance we normally look at, but thanks to a Red Hat engineer discovering very low serial console performance, there is an improvement queued up for introduction in Linux 5.17...

In addition to the prompt support for Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, another exciting milestone for the in-development Linux 5.17 kernel is introducing mainline support for the StarFive JH7100, which has been trying to make its debut as the first usable and low-cost RISC-V platform.

The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) that serves as the default system compiler on most Linux distributions is nearing its annual update with GCC 12. GCC 12 has been in a general bug fixing period since November while beginning next week will be onto its final phase of focusing just on regression and documentation fixes to the compiler.

Qualcomm only announced the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 and X65 platforms at the end of November but already they have managed to provide timely mainline support for these latest high-end SoCs. This is great to see compared to the days of slow to materialize mainline support for new Arm SoCs, which still persists among some vendors with either belated mainline support or only focusing on vendor downstream kernels. The big batch of Arm SoC/platform changes have landed for Linux 5.17.

A patch merged into Mesa 22.0 on Tuesday for Intel's "ANV" open-source Vulkan Linux driver is helping bump up the perforrmance in modern games.

Over the past two years work has been ramping up a lot on Compute Express Link (CXL) enablement for the Linux kernel and with the in-development Linux 5.17 there is more feature code landing.

The GNOME Shell and Mutter have checked in their new development releases for the imminent GNOME 42 Alpha milestone.