The first set of feature updates have been submitted to DRM-Next for staging until the Linux 5.18 kernel cycle begins around the end of March.

In addition to closing in on the Godot 4.0 release, another equally exciting effort in the open-source game engine space is the Open 3D Engine originally from the Amazon Lumberyard code and backed by the Linux Foundation and other organizations. Open 3D Engine 2111.2 is out today as the newest stable point release for this less than one year old open-source game engine effort.

As expected, Intel's open-source "ANV" driver is ready to go with Vulkan 1.3 for Mesa 22.0.

This will hopefully be the year that PipeWire becomes commonplace on the Linux desktop across all major distributions for audio/video stream management. But for as good as PipeWire is already, frequent point releases continue evolving the functionality and ironing out compatibility improvements for existing JACK and PulseAudio integration. PipeWire 0.3.44 is out today as another step in the right direction.

As of yesterday Intel's contributed Programmable Services Engine "PSE" support has been merged into mainline Coreboot for supporting this Arm-based dedicated offload engine found within select Intel processors.

One of Microsoft's Linux/open-source surprises for 2021 was publishing of CBL-Mariner as their internal Linux distribution used for a variety of purposes at the company. Microsoft has kept to updating CBL-Mariner publicly on a monthly basis and continuing to make it easier to test out and enhance its usefulness. Last night they published their January 2022 build of Microsoft's Linux operating system.

The DirectFB library had been a popular option for embedded systems in running off the Linux frame-buffer to avoid the full overhead of an X11 server. But a number of years ago DirectFB disappeared and ultimately stopped being maintained. Meanwhile Wayland has been making lots of inroads into mobile/embedded and areas once popular for DirectFB use. But now it turns out DirectFB2 is in development as a fork of the original DirectFB.

In addition to this week seeing Raptor Lake S support added for Mesa 22.0, the Alder Lake N additions have also been merged for this quarter's Mesa update.

Archinstall as the quick and easy-to-use installer for the Arch Linux distribution is out with a new point release delivering a few worthwhile enhancements to the text-based OS installer.

Intel's "i915" kernel graphics driver has been patched for a software issue that could lead to malicious user-space trigger DMAR read/write faults or worse is the possibility of user-space gaining access to random memory pages. Unfortunately, the security fix comes with performance implications.

After slipping from the original shipping target of Q4 due to component shortages, Valve is making good on their Q1'2022 shipping plans for the Steam Deck.

With today's SDL2 Git, Wayland is now preferred over X.Org/X11 by default without having to set the SDL video driver environment variable.

Yet another open-source Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver improvement being worked on by Valve's engineers is around better controlling variable rate shading "VRS" behavior with a focus on improving power savings for the Steam Deck.

AMDVLK as AMD's official open-source Vulkan Linux driver derived from their Radeon Software driver sources but using the LLVM shader compiler back-end is out with a new release. AMD is ready with day-after support for the newly-launched Vulkan 1.3 specification for AMDVLK.

As part of pushing it across the Vulkan 1.3 milestone, Intel's open-source graphics driver developers have merged their VK_KHR_dynamic_rendering support to mainline.

Microsoft's D3D12 Gallium3D code for Mesa 22.0 can now handle tessellations to expose GL_ARB_tessellation_shader in exposing OpenGL over Direct3D 12.

Rqlite 7.0 is now available as a lightweight, distributed relational database. This open-source database system for cluster setups is built atop SQLite while aiming to be easy-to-use and fault-tolerant.

In recent days Mozilla has begun activating Wayland support by default on Firefox Nightly for configurations capable of running Wayland.

GraalVM 22.0 has been released for this Java VM/JDK that also supports other programming languages and run-times / execution modes. GraalVM continues to be performant and showing promising results not just for Java with JIT'ing but also ahead-of-time Java compilation to Native Image as well as for its Python implementation, WebAssembly run-time, and other targets.

In addition to Mesa 22.0 landing Vulkan 1.3 support today with the Radeon RADV and Intel ANV Vulkan drivers, Mesa today also received initial support for next-gen Raptor Lake S processors.

For the just-announced Vulkan 1.3, the open-source Intel "ANV" and Radeon "RADV" Vulkan drivers within Mesa are prepared to land support for this updated specification.

According to a report this morning from Bloomberg, NVIDIA is communicating to their partners that they face the real possibility their deal to acquire Arm will not come to pass.

Now that Linux 5.17 has prepared DRM privacy screen support, the GNOME 42 is ready with its user-space side support for making use of this new standardized interface.

NXP engineers continue persevering for bringing up a mainline-suitable, open-source kernel driver for their Amphion video encoder/decoder hardware. Out today is their 15th revision to the Amphion driver patches.

Ahead of the Linux-based Steam Deck hopefully shipping around the end of February, Valve announced a new Steamworks feature called Dynamic Cloud Sync.

While just one part of the overall equation for a system with open-source firmware, the Framework Laptop has joined the ranks of the Linux-focused laptops these days being backed by open-source firmware for its embedded controller (EC).

Git 2.35 is out today as the newest update to this widely-used, open-source distributed version control system.

The first alpha release of the huge Godot 4.0 is now available! Godot 4.0 has been shaping up to be a massive update for this open-source game engine.

DXVK 1.9.4 is now available for this Direct3D 9/10/11 over Vulkan API implementation used by Valve's Steam Play (Proton) and other software.

Thanks to hiring more Linux developers and preparing to ramp up for next-generation hardware support, the in-development Linux 5.17 kernel is going to be another exciting step forward for AMD Linux customers.

Among the many new features in Linux 5.17 are several notable network optimizations. Optimizing network performance is a never-ending game and already for a future kernel are a new set of UDP/IPv6 optimizations being worked on.

It's just with the in-development Linux 5.17 kernel that the "asus_wmi_ec_sensors" is making its debut for greatly expanded sensor support for modern ASUS desktop motherboards. However, there is already a new driver that has been in development that ultimately aims to be superior to this still-new driver.

The Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) with Fwupd for firmware updating on Linux could soon be making it easier to transition older, end-of-life devices off official firmware packages and onto the likes of open-source Coreboot for capable aging PC hardware. This not only would make the system run on more free software but would extend the life of the hardware with firmware updates where the vendor has ceased their support.

Following GCC, the LLVM Clang C/C++ compiler front-end is now defaulting to using the DWARFv5 debugging data format.

For those interested in compilers, Mold as the "Modern Linker" is one of the interesting projects to watch in 2022.

Due to family travels Linus Torvalds has released Linux 5.17-rc1 a little bit early that marks the end of the Linux 5.17 merge window.

Cloud-Hypervisor 21.0 was released this past week as its first feature release since this open-source Intel project moved to the Linux Foundation with backing from Microsoft and Arm. Cloud-Hypervisor 21.0 brings new features and fixes to this Rust-written hypervisor.

After working its way through the release candidate process, Sway 1.7 is out this weekend as the newest feature release for this i3-inspired, lightweight Wayland compositor.

If you are in the rare group of folks still relying upon floppy disks and doing so while running up-to-date software stacks, Linux 5.17 will be of interest to you.

As good news not only to future Steam Deck users but all Linux gamers making use of the Mesa open-source graphics drivers, Valve is sponsoring additional continuous integration (CI) testing of Mesa commits.

It was a very busy and productive week for KDE developers with many new features and fixes landing.

In addition to Linux 5.17 bringing support for the low-cost StarFive RISC-V platform among other RISC-V updates, more changes for this royalty-free processor ISA were sent in on Friday.