In addition to the LLVM SPIR-V back-end appearing ready for merging, also working through the final steps for being mainlined in the LLVM compiler stack is also Facebook's BOLT project for optimizing the performance of binaries.

Taking place in San Francisco from Monday through yesterday evening was the RISC-V Summit for discussions around this dominant open-source processor ISA. For those that were did not make it to the event, many of the slide decks are available.

It is not too often getting to talk about performance optimizations for Mesa's Virgl code that along with in conjunction with related "Virgil" components allows for hardware-accelerated 3D/OpenGL running within virtual machines. Hitting Mesa 22.0 this week though is some Virgl code improvements for allowing lower memory use within virtual machines.

Intel's oneDNN Deep Neural Network Library that is part of their oneAPI toolkit is out with version 2.5 and brings RISC-V CPU support among other updates.

Engineers from Intel and Arm in cooperation with The Khronos Group feel ready now to begin landing their SPIR-V back-end within the upstream LLVM source tree! This SPIR-V back-end for LLVM would ultimately allow LLVM front-ends for different languages to more easily target this industry-standard shader representation so that it could be ingested by Vulkan / OpenCL drivers.

While Ubuntu switched from LZ4 to Zstd for compressing its initramfs, they now are finding they were too aggressive in defaulting to Zstd with the highest compression level of 19. Due to speed and memory consumption concerns, they are looking at lowering their Zstd compression level.

AMD's Linux engineers continue preparing for next-gen EPYC server processors based on Zen 4 and supporting DDR5 memory.

The Cloud-Hypervisor open-source project started by Intel a few years ago as a Rust-written VMM focused on cloud workloads is now going to be hosted by the Linux Foundation.

Microsoft has introduced "Microsoft-Performance-Tools for Linux-Android" as a collection of open-source tools for analyzing system performance on Linux and Android.

When it comes to the state of packaged web browsers for Debian GNU/Linux, unfortunately it leaves a lot to be desired at the moment and for those wanting to be secure and up-to-date it can mean resorting to proprietary or un-packaged browser builds.

Mesa's Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" is implementing emulated support for ETC2 texture compression to use with newer AMD GPUs to improve compatibility with Google's Android operating system.

Google is looking to upstream their Linux kernel driver for Open Profile for DICE, a secret derivation protocol used currently by some Android devices.

One of many exciting features/changes with upcoming Intel Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" processors is the introduction of Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX). While initial AMX support is premiering with Linux 5.16 due out in stable form as the start of the new year, it currently doesn't allow for KVM virtualized guests to make use of the new capabilities.

While FreeBSD 13 is the current stable version of this leading open-source BSD operating system, FreeBSD 12.3 shipped today for their N-1 series.

While all of the software components are out there now for being able to run NVIDIA's proprietary driver stack with modern (GBM-based) Wayland compositors by default, including XWayland support, Fedora Workstation currently defaults to using an X.Org based session with the green binary blob. However, for Fedora 36 next spring they are planning on using the Wayland-based desktop here too.

Back in September Intel originally posted Linux patches for "Software Defined Silicon" for being able to activate extra CPU features present in the processor's silicon but not exposed by default unless the cryptographically secure process with this SDSi driver was performed. Intel appears to be moving toward allowing licensable processor features that can be activated after the fact and today a new version of that SDSi Linux driver appeared.

Along with XWayland touchpad gestures, another shiny feature was merged this week into X.Org Server Git for XWayland: DRM leasing support!

The Linux Foundation known for hosting numerous open-source projects and stewarding the Linux kernel, organizing countless events, and employing various LF Fellows such as Linux Torvalds and Greg Kroah-Hartman has published their 2021 report.

The LLVM compiler infrastructure supports not only a growing number of CPU architectures but continues to lead when it comes to its support for different accelerators. Back in 2019 NEC was working to upstream their SX-Aurora VE "Vector Engine" Accelerator and now as of this week that target is considered officially supported upstream.

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has signed off on more feature work for the current Fedora 36 cycle as well as Fedora 37 due out toward the end of next year.

The enablement work for supporting Apple's M1 SoC under Linux continues and with the v5.17 kernel next year will be yet more additions.

Last Friday Mesa classic drivers were removed from the mainline code-base and punted off to an "Amber" code branch where they will receive whatever attention moving forward. With that classic Mesa code removed, more code cleaning is now happening on top of the tens of thousands of lines of code already removed. Intel's OpenSWR driver has also now been removed from mainline.

The Panfrost Gallium3D OpenGL driver and PanVK open-source drivers in Mesa have come a long way via reverse-engineering for Arm Mali graphics support. However, to this point the focus has been on Arm's "Midgard" and "Bifrost" architectures while the newer "Valhall" architecture has been around the past two years. The Panfrost effort for bringing up Valhall is now getting underway.

With Imagination Technologies having sold off what was MIPS Technologies several years ago and that CPU architecture having been abandoned now, Imagination today announced "Catapult" as their new family of RISC-V processor IP.

While the performance of LLVM/Clang has improved a lot over the years and for x86_64 and AArch64 can be neck-and-neck with the GCC compiler, the fierce performance battle is not over. With LLVM/Clang 14.0 due out in the early months of 2022 will be more performance work with one recent commit in particular showing a lot of promise.

In 2022 we will very likely see the experimental Rust programming language support within the Linux kernel mainlined. Sent out this morning were the updated patches introducing the initial support and infrastructure around handling of Rust within the kernel.

Mozilla Firefox 95.0 is now available for download ahead of its official release tomorrow. Making this new version interesting is the RLBox integration.

AMD is preparing updates to their SMCA (Scalable Machine Check Architecture) driver code for future CPUs and points to processors having different bank layouts between CPU cores on the package.

Landing in Mesa 22.0 on Sunday night was the Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" support for the recently introduced VK_KHR_dynamic_rendering extension.

It's been a number of months since GRVK 0.4 as the open-source project re-implementing AMD's defunct Mantle API over the modern Vulkan API that was originally based on the former. With Sunday's release of GRVK 0.5, this Mantle-on-Vulkan translation layer is now capable of correctly rendering Battlefield 4.

OpenIndiana as the open-source operating system forked from what was Sun's OpenSolaris and now based on Illumos is out with its latest half-year update.

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 5.16-rc4 as the latest weekly release candidate for Linux 5.16 that will debut as stable in early 2022.

Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver developers continue making their driver preparations for being able to accommodate Vulkan ray-tracing with upcoming Xe HPG graphics having ray-tracing hardware capabilities.

This week's set of "x86/urgent" changes for the Linux 5.16-rc4 kernel due out later today has some Spectre V1 fixes after kernel commits last year ended up partially messing things up around its SWAPGS handling. These fixes in turn will also likely be back-ported to relevant stable kernel series.

A year after Arm processors began mitigating straight-line speculation, Linux developers have been working on similar straight-line speculation mitigations for x86/x86_64 processors.

XWayland is increasingly great shape especially when it comes to fulfilling the needs of gamers with simply running games lacking native Wayland support with great speed. But when it comes to other use-cases there are occasionally gaps and areas not yet fulfilled by XWayland versus the conventional X.Org Server. One of the latest examples of a feature now correctly wired up is touchpad gesture handling.

While RHEL9 is just in beta form right now, due to CentOS Stream 9 now having launched and that effectively serving as the bleeding-edge of the RHEL9 upstream, EPEL 9 has already launched.

Genode OS as the interesting open-source operating system framework is out with its v21.11 release this week and delivers on many hardware improvements and other features.

Added to the in-development Linux 5.16 kernel was cluster-aware scheduling designed to enhance system performance where groups of CPU cores may share caches or similar and thus the scheduler could benefit from knowing that information for making more optimal task placement. But as I pointed out early on with Linux 5.16, this cluster scheduling is hurting the Intel Alder Lake performance on the new kernel. Intel is now working to correct this by making the cluster scheduling configurable and disabling this functionality by default for hybrid CPUs such as Alder Lake.

Ahead of Intel ARC graphics cards premiering next year, Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver developers remain very busy preparing for the next-generation graphics capabilities.

AMD on Friday published a new version of their Advanced Media Framework "AMF" software development kit that enhances the multimedia processing capabilities for Radeon hardware.

Taking place this week was the annual Open-Source Firmware Conference "OSFC" devoted to open-source firmware from Coreboot to open-source BMC solutions and other low-level booting/initialization efforts.

This week saw many fixes landing for the KDE desktop components along with some UI tweaking and other alterations.