Linux 5.10.8 is out today as the latest stable release for the Linux 5.10 LTS series. Making this point release notable is that it finally addresses the 5.10 Btrfs performance regression.

The pandemic didn't adversely impact the Gentoo Linux project's operations with seeing the overall number of commits grow by nearly 42% last year within the Gentoo repository. Gentoo also saw commits from 333 unique authors in 2020, up from 333 the year prior. Plus they've made other improvements too for this technical-minded Linux distribution too during 2020.

Apple-focused security/virtualization startup Corellium has posted a very primitive build of Linux for Apple M1 Mac devices.

More improvements for Microsoft Surface laptops on Linux are set to land for Linux 5.12.

Given the talk in prior days around patches for PGO'ing the Linux kernel and some readers not being familiar with Profile Guided Optimizations by code compilers, here are some fresh benchmarks on a Ryzen 9 5950X looking at the benefits of applying PGO optimizations to various benchmarks.

For those making use of Linux's modern exFAT file-system, a significant optimization is on the way for when deleting files with the "dirsync" mount option set.

While Mesa's Panfrost Gallium3D driver has been working out well for modern ARM Mali open-source graphics support, for the old Mali 400/450 series hardware there still is the "Lima" driver within Mesa that doesn't receive too much attention these days (just around 70 commits over the past year) but as its first work of 2021 saw an initial shader cache implementation.

The FreeBSD project today published its Q4-2020 status report concerning all the interesting happenings for this open-source BSD operating system.

Prior to Mesa 21.0 being branched this week in preparations for the quarterly stable Mesa3D release, a number of open-source Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver optimizations were merged.

AMD processors along with older Intel processors will enjoy much faster AES-NI XTS crypto performance with the Linux 5.12 kernel this spring.

The high performance Fujitsu A64FX ARM processor now has the possibility of performing even better if relying upon the upstream open-source compilers from GCC and LLVM.

Li-Fi that uses LED lighting for wireless communication between devices is a step closer to reality on Linux systems with leading commercial start-up pureLiFi continuing to move closer to upstreaming the driver supporting their hardware that supports this technology.

KDE developers have remained very busy in the new year working to improve their open-source desktop stack.

While new feature code is normally not allowed in past the end of the merge window for a given Linux kernel release cycle, Linus Torvalds has decided to merge the newly-published open-source driver code for the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 "Ampere" graphics cards for the Linux 5.11 kernel that will debut as stable in February.

The CentOS board has approved the creation of a "Hyperscale" SIG spearheaded by engineers from the likes of Facebook and Twitter in aiming to make CentOS Stream more appealing to such large scale server/cloud organizations.

For those wanting to run a micro-kernel operating system for your low-cost, open-source friendly PinePhone, the Genode OS framework plans to port to the PinePhone this year. Genode OS and its Sculpt general purpose platform are also wanting to better embrace GPU support in 2021.

Sent in last week were many AMD graphics driver updates slated for Linux 5.12 including the likes of Radeon RX 6000 series OverDrive support. This week marks another batch of AMDGPU kernel driver changes being submitted to DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 5.12 cycle.

With this spring's release of Ubuntu 21.04 there is more widespread use of "phased updates" for gradually rolling out new stable release updates to help avoid any regressions en masse from coming to light. For years the Ubuntu desktop has employed this phased updates strategy while now with it being plumbed into APT, Ubuntu Server and other versions will by default make use of phased updates.

After experimental builds and the recent release candidates, Valve's Proton 5.13-5 is now available as the latest version of this Wine downstream for powering Steam Play for running Windows games on Linux.

Hitting the Mesa tree when Mesa 21.0 was being branched (but looks like it will still make it now part of "staging/21.0") is support for AMD's "rapid packed math" with the RADV driver's ACO compiler back-end.

One of the latest planned changes to the long list of improvements for Fedora 34 is enabling the HarfBuzz support within the FreeType library.

Patches were sent out today that provide the open-source Linux kernel "Nouveau" driver with support for NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 series "Ampere" graphics cards. But at the moment there is no 3D acceleration and the developers are blocked still by signed firmware requirements, so it's basically just a matter of having kernel mode-setting display support.

The Linux 5.12 kernel will allow optional, run-time disabling of Intel graphics driver security mitigations, which so far is just in regards to last year's iGPU Leak vulnerability. This i915.mitigations= module parameter control is being added as part of finally fixing the Haswell GT1 graphics support that was fallout from this mitigaion.

Alpine Linux, the distribution popular for container environments due to its lightweight nature with employing Musl libc and Busybox while being designed for simplicity, security, and efficiency, is out with version 3.13. With Alpine Linux 3.13 the distribution is ramping up its cloud ambitions.

Wine 6.0 stable is now officially available as the annual stable release for this open-source project allowing Windows games and applications to run on Linux, macOS, and other Unix-like platforms.

Following the surprise announcement last month that CentOS 8 will be discontinued at EOY2021 with CentOS Stream to be the new upstream for RHEL, several different organizations and developers have announced their intentions to create new community-oriented, open-source rebuilds of Red Hat Enterprise Linux that will be free. One of the promising announcements so far has been from CloudLinux and today they have announced it as AlmaLinux.

With GTK4 out and stabilizing well, more GNOME components are working to migrate to this updated toolkit as part of the GNOME 40 development cycle.

Clang LTO for the Linux kernel to provide link-time optimizations for yielding more performant kernel binaries (plus Clang CFI support) looks like it will land for Linux 5.12. With that compiler optimization feature appearing squared away, Google engineers are also working on Clang PGO support for the Linux kernel to exploit profile guided optimizations for further enhancing the kernel performance.

GCC 11 is slated to enter "Stage 4" development at the end of this weekend after which only regression and documentation fixes will be permitted. The first GCC 11 stable release should be out in 2~3 months, but at the moment there is an increasing number of P1 regressions that are of the highest priority.

Flatpak 1.10 is out this morning as the stable release following the Flatpak 1.9 development series for this Linux app sandboxing / distribution technology.

Rav1e 0.4 was released on Wednesday as the latest version of this Rust-written AV1 video encoder. The rav1e 0.4 release represents a speed-up for the encoder but depending upon the preset level can still be at fractions of a frame per second.

A new compute code path has been merged into Intel's open-source "ANV" Vulkan and "iris" Gallium3D drivers for the forthcoming Xe HP graphics hardware.

Following the very active discussions the past several days over the Linux kernel potentially dropping a number of old CPU targets/architectures, an updated list of planned ARM platforms for removal has been published now that some have been saved thanks to expressed interest.

The Debian 11 "Bullseye" build-essential freeze is now in effect with the release team no longer entertaining transition requests. Meanwhile, architecture support for Debian 12 is in early stages of discussion with a possible reduction in i386 support for that follow-on release.

For those with TPM2 security chips in your system or various hardware security tokens like YubiKeys, the upcoming systemd 248 will make it much easier to use then for unlocking your encrypted LUKS2 volumes.

While normally the feature branching and first release candidate for new Mesa3D quarterly releases doesn't begin until around the end of the first month of a new quarter, this time around with Mesa 21.0 it has begun today -- half-way through the month of January. This should at least ensure Mesa 21.0 stable ships in February rather than March. Mesa 20.3.3 was also released today as the newest stable version for the time being.

While Bob Swan has been the interim and then permanent CEO for less than three years at Intel, following much speculation heating up in recent weeks, Bob Swan is out and returning to Intel is Pat Gelsinger who will now lead as CEO.

NUVIA, the startup focused on making new high performance ARM CPUs for the data center that has talked up big performance capabilities and big performance-per-Watt advantages, is being acquired by Qualcomm.

The Khronos Group and LunarG have announced an updated Vulkan SDK that includes now formally providing support for Apple platforms, including Apple Silicon systems via Universal Binaries.

At the start of the month Intel sent out their initial graphics driver changes targeting Linux 5.12 while now a secondary set of changes have been sent to DRM-Next.

Ubuntu 21.04 will do away with the existing practice on Ubuntu Linux systems of making new user home directories world-readable.

The AMD Radeon "AMDGPU" open-source Linux kernel driver is tacking on another new feature: Secure Display TA.

While the i3 window manager has been around for more than a decade, it's taken until now for an i3 window manager spin of Fedora to be solicited and approved.