It's been nearly one year since NVIDIA's last update to Quake II RTX as their port of Quake II to using Vulkan ray-tracing extensions for RTX path-traced global illumination. Fortunately, that changed today as they are out with a big update in the form of Quake II RTX v1.6.

While the Linux 5.17 merge window is closing this weekend with the debut of 5.17-rc1, managing to come in at the last minute are a few more additions for Intel's next-generation Raptor Lake processors.

SiFive's HiFive Unmatched is the best, readily available RISC-V developer board at the moment with enough horsepower for modest development/porting work and continues seeing improvements with the mainline Linux kernel. But availability on HiFive Unmatched is beginning to dry up and SiFive isn't planning on any further production runs as it begins focusing on the board's successor.

Landing today for Mesa 22.0 was a fix for Vulkan ray-tracing with the RADV driver in the RDNA Wave32 shader mode and then switching to Wave32 by default for ray-tracing on RDNA/RDNA2 GPUs.

After recently carrying out the Core i5 12400 Linux benchmarks against other modern processors, for curiosity I ran some benchmarks on some older hardware going back to AMD Kaveri and Intel Sandy Bridge for a look at how the modern Ubuntu performance compares across all those systems.

For the past several years the X.Org Foundation has been part of Software in the Public Interest (SPI) but are now considering other possible arrangements moving forward.

On top of all the GPU driver feature changes to merge last week, yesterday marked the first batch of "fixes" sent in to Linux 5.17 for the Direct Rendering Manager drivers. Notable from this batch of fixes is getting GPU recovery enabled for Yellow Carp / Rembrandt APUs.

The RTC subsystem changes have been submitted for the in-development Linux 5.17 kernel ahead of its merge window winding down this weekend.

To date the Intel Linux graphics driver has supported Intel's DG2 "Alchemist" G10 and G11 sub-platforms/variants as the main designs to this point. However, at the end of last year we began seeing "G12" references surface in their compute stack and now the Intel open-source Linux kernel driver is formally preparing the DG2-G12 variant support.

In addition to the Fedora / Red Hat Anaconda installer working on a web-based implementation, openSUSE/SUSE is also exploring a web-based installation front-end built atop their existing YaST. They are developing this new web front-end as the "D-Installer" project.

Red Hat with the Fedora community have been working for years now to make Cockpit very capable for a web-based interface for administering Linux servers. In addition to this year working on shifting their Anaconda installer to a web-based interface that makes use of Cockpit, from this web management portal they are wanting to make it easier to setup file sharing with NFS and Samba.

When it comes to OpenGL extension support, the Zink generic OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation now has as robust coverage as core Mesa offers and what is implemented by the LLVMpipe software driver, RadeonSI Gallium3D, and the Intel i965 drivers.

A handful of new AMD Radeon open-source GPU sofware releases were made today for developers.

Way back in August Intel posted a set of Linux kernel patches for supporting "unaccepted memory" by the Linux kernel in preparation for next-generation Xeon processors and speeding up the boot time for guest virtual machines making use of Intel's Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) security feature. Unaccepted memory support hasn't yet made it to the mainline kernel but now a second iteration of the patches have been posted.

Over the years the Linux kernel has picked up many different sanitizers, memory leak detectors, and other features for helping to diagnose and address deficiencies in the kernel. However, all of these debugging-optimized features aren't centrally located that can make it difficult for system administrators and developers to spot these numerous features when configuring a kernel build manually. Now with Linux 5.17 that is changing.

Last week I noted about EDAC changes in Linux 5.17 for future AMD CPUs. The "Error Detection and Correction" work included AMD adding RDDR5 / LRDDR5 support to their driver and new CPU model IDs that appear to be for Zen 4. Also working on next-gen AMD processor support in Linux 5.17 are recent SMCA changes.

I've been writing about Genode OS for over a decade as one of the interesting original, open-source operating system frameworks that has taken novel approaches to many design elements and continues persevering with their efforts. For 2022 the project has yet more ambitious goals ahead.

F2FS as the Flash-Friendly File-System may not see too much use out of desktop Linux distributions at least as it concerns any easy/semi-endorsed root install option, but this file-system does continue maturing and seeing much use by enthusiasts and especially among the plethora of Android devices now supporting this flash-optimized file-system. With Linux 5.17, F2FS has some performance improvements and other fixes.

SUSE today formally announced SUSE Liberty Linux as its support offering for mixed Linux environments within enterprises.

The race is on for delivering XWayland 22.1 in time for the spring Linux distribution releases with at least Fedora Workstation 36 expected to carry this updated package for allowing X11 clients to work atop Wayland compositors.

A QtWayland module change has landed that should greatly improve the NVIDIA Wayland experience when running the KDE desktop on modern NVIDIA drivers offering GBM API support.

In recent years The Khronos Group has been expanding a lot and forming a number of new open industry standards around 3D commerce, analytics rendering, and more. The latest is Khronos now establishing a Camera API working group.

Last May there was some work on compiling LibreOffice to WebAssembly as another means of getting this open-source office suite executing within the web browser and other environments. It had been quiet since on the LibreOffice WASM front but a number of new commits were merged this morning.

KDE developer Nate Graham has sorted through plans for the 15-minute bug initiative for focusing on correcting many low-hanging bugs affecting the KDE desktop that should be able to be quickly discovered by users.

After ending out 2021 with an AMDVLK update to fix poor performance on Wayland, AMD today issued AMDVLK 2022.Q1.1 with their first set of changes for the new year.

The RISC-V architecture updates for the in-development Linux 5.17 kernel have been successfully submitted.

Intel's Media Driver 22.1.1 has been released as their firsr 22.x series open-source GPU video encode/decode software release. This quarterly update introduces new hardware support and a number of feature updates.

After starting off in development more than two decades ago as Kettle, Apache Hop in its current form has now made it to being an Apache Software Foundation top-level project.

VMware has been preparing support for OpenGL 4.3 to be exposed within their VMware virtualization software so that guest VMs can enjoy newer OpenGL support that is accelerated by the host.

Wine 7.0 is now officially available for enjoying Windows games and applications on Linux, macOS, and other platforms.

It turns out with enough maneuvering that Microsoft Windows 11 can run well with the open-source Coreboot even with keeping UEFI SecureBoot enabled and meeting Windows 11's TPM requirements and other security measures.

Thanks to Red Hat developer Martin Stránský, he has managed to get the Video Acceleration API (VA-API) working for AV1 content within the Firefox web browser.

Microsoft announced plans this morning to acquire Activision Blizzard in a nearly $69 billion (USD) deal.

The Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) that integrates with Fwupd for delivering firmware updates primarily to Linux users is surging with around three times the normal traffic volume. Unfortunately, this boost in traffic appears to be due to vendor(s) releasing new system firmware updates ahead of disclosing a presumptive security issue.

The Qt Company this morning announced Qt Digital Advertising 1.0 as its new ad platform that allows for developers to easily integrate advertising campaigns into Qt-based, cross-platform applications.

At the end of last year AMD introduced OpenGL sparse texture support into its RadeonSI Gallium3D driver. This functionality for Vega GPUs and newer flipped on ARB_sparse_texture support while now with the very latest Mesa 22.0-devel code ARB_sparse_texture2 is now flipped on too.

NVIDIA has released CUDA 11.6 as the latest version of their widely used but proprietary GPU compute stack. With CUDA 11.6 there are some good improvements and new features in store.

A change merged overnight with the libata subsystem updates for Linux 5.17 means that some older AMD hardware will be able to boot quicker by avoiding an otherwise mandated sleep period.

Back in November memory folios were merged into Linux 5.16 as a fundamental change to the memory management code. Now for Linux 5.17 there are improvements for folios merged and then out likely for Linux 5.18 is introducing the notion of large folios.

The alpha release of GNOME 42 is now available for testing.

GCC 12 as this year's annual GNU Compiler Collection feature release has moved on to "stage four" development with likely releasing GCC 12.1 in April.

Last September I was the first to call attention to Intel working on a new feature to allow updating some system firmware components without needing to reboot such as for mission critical servers that try to avoid downtime at all costs. That Intel "Seamless Update" feature also known as Platform Firmware Runtime Update and Telemetry (PFRUT) has now been sent in for mainlining with Linux 5.17.

FFmpeg 5.0 has now been formally christened as for what is aiming to be a Long-Term Support (LTS) release for this widely-used, cross-platform and open-source multimedia library.

Jason Ekstrand who was the lead developer of Intel's open-source "ANV" Vulkan Linux driver left Intel in December and has now revealed details about his new role.

A new tool added to the kernel source tree with Linux 5.17 is rtla to serve for real-time Linux performance and tracing analysis.

In addition to Linux 5.17 introducing Universal Stylus Initiative (USI) support for that new industry standard for styluses/pens that can work cross-device, the input subsystem updates for this kernel also add active pen support for a few more tablets.

Miguel Ojeda has published his third iteration of the patches implementing the basic infrastructure for supporting the Rust programming language within the Linux kernel.

For those wanting a desktop-friendly, easy-to-use BSD operating system to try out the GhostBSD project is one of the better bets in modern times. GhostBSD 22.01.12 is now available with a variety of fixes and improvements for this desktop-minded BSD.

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.