For several generations now of Intel graphics there have been the GuC/HuC firmware binaries while beginning with Icelake "Gen 11" graphics those binary blobs will be loaded by default.

Later this month marks two years since the release of OpenGL 4.6 and just ahead of that date it looks like Mesa could finally land its complete GL 4.6 implementation, at least as far as the Intel open-source graphics driver support is concerned.

While it would have been nice seeing this next systemd release sooner due to the Zen 2 + RdRand issue with systemd yielding an unbootable system (that is now also being worked around with a BIOS upgrade), the systemd 243 release looks like it will take place in the near future.

The past few months openSUSE developers have been working on enabling LTO by default for its packages while now finally with the newest release of the rolling-release openSUSE Tumbleweed this goal has been accomplished.

OPNsense, the FreeBSD-based pfSense-forked firewall offering that has continued experiencing increased adoption following the closure of m0n0wall, is out with version 19.7 as its newest feature update.

Longtime X.Org developer Alan Coopersmith who also maintains the X.Org stack for Oracle's Solaris has been trying to get out some updated X.Org modules with different code-bases having collected enough changes over the years to warrant new versions.

Coming soon to a kernel near you could be the removal of 32-bit Xen PV guest support as better jiving with Xen's architectural improvements and more of the Linux/open-source community continuing to shift focus to 64-bit x86 with trying to finally sunset 32-bit x86.

While Clear Linux as part of its standard bare metal installations has long defaulted to having an AVX2-optimized GNU C Library installed by default, it turns out that it wasn't part of the default os-core bundle as used by containers. That though is changing and should yield even better out-of-the-box performance when running Clear Linux within containers.

With the VirtIO standard for cross-hypervisor compatibility of different virtualized components there is a virtual IOMMU device that is now backed by a working driver in the Linux 5.3 kernel.

While Mageia 7 released at the start of July for this Mandrake/Mandriva-derived Linux distribution, out today is already Mageia 7.1 as a rush release to fix AMD Zen 2 support.

The Linux Mint crew today released their 19.2 "Tina" beta releases of their Xfce, MATE, and Cinnamon desktop flavors.

Thanks to the upstream work achieved by Red Hat engineers working on Fedora the past few cycles, Ubuntu 19.10 should have a flicker-free boot experience.

Intel Software Guard Extensions "SGX" have been around since Skylake for allowing hardware-protected (via encryption) memory regions known as "enclaves" that prevent processes outside of the enclave from accessing these memory regions. While supported CPUs have been out for years, the Intel SGX support has yet to make it into the mainline kernel and this week marks the twenty-first revision to these patches.

Canonical's Balint Reczey has announced the addition of a new ubuntu-wsl package that will be installed by default when running Ubuntu on Microsoft's Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) in order to provide better integration.

Just over one week after the Radeon RX 5700/5700XT "Navi" graphics cards began shipping, the AMDVLK open-source AMD Radeon Vulkan Linux driver support is now available for these first RDNA offerings.

Drew DeVault of Sway/WLROOTS fame has been dabbling with his first Vulkan extension as part of work with other upstream Wayland developers on DRM lease support and better supporting VR headsets under Wayland.

David Sterba sent in the Btrfs file-system updates on Monday for the Linux 5.3 kernel.

The past few weeks while AMD open-source developers were busy getting their Navi enablement code public and aligned for the Linux 5.3 merge window, the display core "DC" frequent code drops ceased. Every so often AMD developers volley their DC patches from their internal development trees to the public mailing list for queuing ahead of the next cycle. Now that Navi is out there and getting stabilized, they've issued a new set of DC patches and it's coming in heavy.

The x86 platform driver updates were sent in and already merged for the ongoing Linux 5.3 kernel. It's the x86 platform driver updates that bring the recently mentioned Intel Speed Select Technology for Linux driver but there is also more.

Remember last September when that AMD Arcturus codename dropped in our forums for what at first appeared to be a successor to Navi but later clarified to be used as a Linux driver enablement codename? Well, the Linux kernel driver patches for this "Arcturus" GPU have just been posted.

It was just earlier this month that D9VK 0.13 was released with new features while now a "0.13f" Hypnofrog release is available in pre-release form.

With the in-development Linux 5.3 kernel is now support for Intel Speed Select Technology (SST) that was introduced as part of Cascade Lake processors. Speed Select Technology allows optimizing the system with per-core performance configurations to prioritize certain workloads while lowering the performance envelope for other cores.

For those in the market for an AMD X570 high-end motherboard for use with the new Zen 2 processors, the ASUS ROG CROSSHAIR VIII HERO was one of the boards sent out as part of the reviewer's kit and it's been working out quite well.

At 479,818 lines of new code and just 36,145 lines of code removed while touching nearly two thousand files, the Direct Rendering Manger (DRM) driver updates for Linux 5.3 are huge. But a big portion of that line count is the addition of AMD Radeon RX 5000 "Navi" support and a good portion of that in turn being auto-generated header files. Navi support is ready for the mainline Linux kernel!

With more tier-one Linux distributions working on plans for doing away with 32-bit x86 support, if you are looking for a new distribution to play nicely with older hardware, Q4OS 3.8 may be it.

The char/misc changes with each succeeding kernel release seem to have less changes to the character device subsystem itself and more just a random collection of changes not fitting in other subsystems / pull requests. With Linux 5.3 comes another smothering of different changes.

While OpenMandriva Lx 4.0 was just released last month, we are already looking forward to OpenMandriva 4.1 for a number of improvements and some new features.

Various Chrome OS hardware platform support improvements have made it into the Linux 5.3 kernel for those after running other Linux distributions on Chromebooks and the like as well as reducing Google's maintenance burden with traditionally carrying so much material out-of-tree.

The UBIFS file-system for usage on un-managed flash memory devices now has support for Zstd compression.

Vulkan has been sticking to its weekly release regiment this summer. While recent weekly updates have introduced new Vulkan extensions, with today's Vulkan 1.1.115 release there are not any new extensions in tow.

For those that generally wait for the first point release before upgrading to a new kernel series, Greg Kroah-Hartman released Linux 5.2.1 this Sunday morning.

There is less than two months to go until KDE's annual Akademy conference, which this year is being hosted in Milan, Italy. But even with summer activities, KDE development remains quite busy. KDE developer Nate Graham has written another one of his weekly blog posts highlighting the interesting development work going into this open-source desktop environment.

Contributed by Mellanox to the Linux 5.3 kernel is an IPMB driver for the Intelligent Platform Management Bus.

The proposed change to no longer build i686 Linux kernel packages beginning with the Fedora 31 release later this year has been approved. Additionally, they might also begin removing some 32-bit repositories.

Epic Games released the first public preview this week of Unreal Engine 4.23.

The input and HID subsystem updates were sent in this week with various hardware support additions and improvements.

Philip Rebohle released version 1.3 of DXVK today, the widely-used Direct3D 10/11 to Vulkan translation layer for accelerating Windows gaming on Linux under Wine and most known with Steam Play.

For those using the NVIDIA proprietary graphics driver on an IBM POWER system, it could be a while before seeing Linux 5.3+ kernel support. Upstream has removed code depended upon by the NVIDIA binary driver for supporting the POWER architecture and as is the case they don't care that it will break NVIDIA driver support since it's binary/out-of-tree.

Nearly three years after OpenHMD 0.2, the OpenHMD 0.3 release is now available for the open-source SDK and support for various AR/VR headsets.

The networking subsystem updates were sent out on Wednesday for the Linux 5.3 kernel and include a bunch of improvements to many different drivers.

Today marks the immediate availability of KDE Frameworks 5.60.

Back in April I wrote about Coreboot seeing AMD Picasso APU enablement work as the first Zen/Ryzen processor target being handled by this open-source BIOS alternative. It now looks like that Picasso support is all squared away and ready for use by future AMD-powered Google Chromebooks.

While there is another nineteen years to go until the Year 2038 problem manifests, the GNU C Library "glibc" is one of the key software components still needing some fixes for this issue where this problem where storing the Unix time as a 32-bit signed integer will wrap around and become a negative number.

Simon Ser who has been serving as the Wayland/Weston release manager has laid out a schedule for getting out the next major release of Wayland's reference compositor.

While not too eventful on the end-user feature front, the XFS file-system has seen another round of clean-ups with the ongoing Linux 5.3 merge window.