The mouse reporting functionality offered by the Linux VT console is rather basic and seemingly seldom used by text-based, mouse-aware programs. However, a series of patches was sent out this week for improving the implementation to provide for more xterm-like mouse reporting.

While upstream Wine developers continue working on VKD3D for providing a Direct3D 12 to Vulkan translation layer for Wine, a developer on Valve's Proton team has now forked it as Proton-VKD3D for focusing their efforts on getting the D3D12 support moved along for Proton that powers Steam Play.

Yes, it's true the LibreOffice builds in recent days -- including the new LibreOffice 7.0 RC1 -- have "Personal Edition" branding for the open-source builds. But given user concerns, The Document Foundation board has issued some clarifications to try to ease any immediate rumors, etc.

With just about one month to go until the official release, the first release candidate is out today of the LibreOffice 7.0 open-source, cross-platform office suite software.

The Versatile Video Coding (VVC) standard is now firmed up as H.266 as the successor to H.265/HEVC.

It was just a few days ago that the LLVMpipe OpenGL software rasterizer within Mesa finally achieved OpenGL 4.0 support while today it has crossed both OpenGL 4.1 and 4.2 milestones.

Building upon Intel working on GNU toolchain support for AMX, the newly-detailed Advanced Matrix Extensions being introduced next year with "Sapphire Rapids" Xeon CPUs, the GCC compiler support has been sent out in patch form.

The 64-bit ARM code building up for the Linux 5.9 cycle is set to mainline Memory Tagging Extension (MTE) support as another security improvement inbound.

While last Sunday Linus Torvalds was concerned over a big Linux 5.8-rc3 release, this Sunday he is reporting that Linux 5.8-rc4 is on the smaller side.

The Monado open-source OpenXR runtime has seen a lot of features added this year and the most recent is support for OpenXR's XR_EXTX_overlay extension to allow for multi-application / overlay rendering.

Edward Shishkin continues pursuing development of new file-system functionality for Reiser5, the next-generation evolutionary advancement over the controversial Reiser4 file-system.

Back in April I wrote about patches for enabling FBC on the Intel 865 chipset nearly two decades after that chipset first shipped. Those patches didn't yet hit the mainline Linux kernel but they were revived again this week.

Following the drm-misc-next pull request to DRM-Next last week that exposes VRR ranges via DebugFS and other improvements, another round of DRM-Misc-Next material has now been sent in for queuing ahead of the Linux 5.9 cycle.

While the Arm Cortex-A77 was announced last year and already has been succeeded by the Cortex-A78 announcement, support for the A77 has finally been upstreamed to the LLVM Clang compiler.

Binutils 2.35 was branched this weekend as this important component to the open-source Linux ecosystem.

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Prominent upstream Linux kernel developers are working on adding "inclusive terminology" guidelines to the Linux kernel coding style requirements.

Back in May we reported on work being done for a readfile() system call to read small files more efficiently. Greg Kroah-Hartman has now volleyed those patches for review on the kernel mailing list for this improvement for reading small to medium file sizes on Linux systems.

Wine-Staging at one point was traditionally 800+ testing/experimental patches on top of the upstream Wine code-base, even as recently as March when it was 850+ patches. Thanks to more work being upstreamed, last month it hit just over 700 patches and now with today's release of Wine-Staging 5.12 it represents a delta of just 665 patches.

KDE developers remain very active with improving this open-source desktop environment even amid the coronavirus pandemic.

The Khronos Group is celebrating the US Independence Day with the release of a new Vulkan spec.

Back in early 2017 "Mircade" was introduced as an arcade-style game launcher on Ubuntu powered by Mir. We hadn't heard much of Mircade since 2017 but the effort is still alive for this Mir-based launcher that can trigger various apps to run under Wayland/Mir.

While recent Firefox releases have seen VA-API video acceleration working when running natively under Wayland, the Firefox 80 release later this summer will bring VA-API support by default to those running on a conventional X.Org Server.

Wine 5.12 is out for the US Holiday weekend testing.

There may be some brief, intermittent downtime this weekend as all of the Phoronix Media web server infrastructure is being upgraded. This also marks the first time in Phoronix's 16+ year history that the servers are AMD powered, thanks to the incredible success of the EPYC 7002 "Rome" series.

XDC 20 was set to take place this September in Poland but is now moving to an online event as a result of the ongoing coronavirus / COVID-19 pandemic.

Intel's open-source Compute Runtime stack for providing OpenCL and oneAPI Level Zero support for their graphics hardware has now rolled out support for the DG1 Xe discrete graphics card.

You may recall that earlier this year X.Org/FreeDesktop.org may have to cut CI services for developers over the cloud expenses associated with that continuous integration service for the likes of Mesa, the X.Org Server, and other components. CI usage was leading to a lot of bandwidth consumption so much so that the X.Org Foundation is facing potential ~70k USD cloud costs this year largely from their continuous integration setup.

The "V3DV" Vulkan driver being developed by Igalia under contract with the Raspberry Pi Foundation has offered a status update on this official driver for the Raspberry Pi 4.

Approaching the two year anniversary next month of the L1TF / Foreshadow vulnerability, a Google engineer has proposed allowing the default mitigation state to be controlled via a Kconfig build-time option.

Following the discussions last month over restricting access to dmesg / kernel logs on Ubuntu in matching the behavior of other Linux distributions for better security practices, Ubuntu 20.10 indeed is moving forward with these plans where dmesg access would require root privileges.

Intel's open-source oneDNN library, which was formerly known as MKL-DNN and DNNL for this deep neural network library now living under the oneAPI umbrella, continues working on some big performance advancements for its 2.0 release.