The Linux 5.12 stable kernel release is quickly approaching but may be challenged by an extra release candidate.

Following the PLATYPUS discovery last year that CPU energy information could be used for possible side channel attacks, the Intel RAPL counters were not only restricted to root but the "amd_energy" driver for exposing CPU energy information on supported Zen series CPUs was also dialed back to root-only in the name of security. Linux 5.13 is introducing a new mechanism so AMD CPUs will be able to still read the energy counters even if not operating as root.

Arguably the most interesting RISC-V board announced to date is SiFive's HiFive Unmatched with the FU740 RISC-V SoC that features four U74-MC cores and one S7 embedded core. The HiFive Unmatched also has 16GB of RAM, USB 3.2 Gen 1, one PCI Express x16 slot (operating at x8 speeds), an NVMe slot, and Gigabit Ethernet. The upstream kernel support for the HiFive Unmatched and the FU740 SoC continues.

While EXT4 supports both case-folding for optional case insensitive filenames and does support file-system encryption, at the moment those features are mutually exclusive. But it looks like the upcoming Linux 5.13 kernel will allow casefolding and encryption to be active at the same time.

The LuxCoreRender open-source physically based rendering (PBR) software is out with its latest major feature release that now offers NVIDIA OptiX/RTX acceleration support alongside the existing CPU, NVIDIA CUDA, and OpenCL rendering paths.

It's been another week of fixes and feature work for the KDE desktop as the march continues toward the Plasma 5.22 release this summer.

If your current Vulkan-based Radeon Linux gaming performance isn't cutting it and a new GPU is out of your budget or you have been unable to find a desired GPU upgrade in stock, the Mesa RADV driver has added an option likely of interest to you... Well, at least moving forward with this feature being limited to RDNA2 GPUs for now.

Wine 6.6 is out as the open-source project's first release of April for running Windows games and applications primarily on Linux and macOS platforms. With Wine 6.6 comes more feature work that will ultimately be incorporated into the Wine 7.0 release due out in early 2022.

The NVIDIA-led work to allow XWayland OpenGL and Vulkan acceleration with their proprietary driver has just been merged into X.Org Server Git.

The upcoming release of Fedora 34 will make it the first major Linux distribution to have sevctl available, an open-source utility for managing AMD EPYC systems with Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV).

The latest open-source compiler infrastructure effort seeking to target a wide spectrum of devices from CPUs through GPUs, FPGAs, and accelerators is HPVM. The HPVM project today celebrated its 1.0 milestone.

FFmpeg 4.4 is out today as a large update to this widely-used multimedia library and with it comes many new features including new demuxers, AV1 support improvements, and other enhancements.

The ability to randomize the kernel stack offset at each system call looks like it will land for the upcoming Linux 5.13 cycle. This optional feature makes it much more difficult to carry out stack-based attacks on the Linux kernel.

Toward the end of March was the AMD ROCm 4.1 release with a few new features. Released today is ROCm 4.1.1 with seemingly no real code changes but just to clarify two items around ROCm's HIP.

It was just a few days ago was the talking of the VirtIO-GPU Vulkan driver looking to be upstreamed into Mesa and now this Google "Venus" project has indeed landed.

While the independent effort to get the Apple M1 ARM-based SoC working under Linux has just been happening for a few months, with the upcoming Linux 5.13 cycle the very preliminary support for Apple's M1 and initial M1-powered devices looks to land.

Out today is version 4.15 of the open-source Xen hypervisor. The focus of Xen 4.15 is on "broader accessibility, performance and security" with a number of noteworthy additions.

Werner Koch announced the availability today of GnuPG 2.3 as the start of the (fairly stable, effectively production ready) test releases leading up to the GnuPG 2.4 stable update.

GCC 10.3 is out today as the latest stable release of the GNU Compiler Collection, weeks ahead of the GCC 11.1 feature release as the first stable version of GCC 11.

AMD engineers have a patch pending to improve the idle power consumption for Radeon RX 5000 "Navi 1x" GPUs on Linux.

Red Hat engineers spearheaded the work on Debuginfod for being able to fetch debuginfo/sources from centralized servers for a project to cut-down on manually having to install the relevant debug packages manually on a system as well as that occupying extra disk space and just being a hassle. The Fedora project is now getting their Debuginfod server off the ground and for Fedora Linux 35 are planning to make use of it by default.

XScreenSaver as the open-source screensaver solution for Linux as well as macOS systems this last week reached version 6.0. With XScreenSaver 6.0 comes increased security and other enhancements.

Normally we don't see the out-of-tree Reiser4 file-system ported to new Linux kernel releases until after the inaugural stable release, but this time around Reiser4 has seen an early port to the near-final Linux 5.12 kernel.

LLVM 12.0 was supposed to ship at the start of March but now more than one month later and some 6,660+ commits to LLVM 13.0 already, LLVM 12.0 has not yet shipped but on Wednesday 12.0.0-rc5 was issued.

At the end of March the release candidate phase began for the upcoming OpenZFS 2.1 open-source ZFS file-system on Linux and FreeBSD systems. The second release candidate is now available for this noteworthy OpenZFS update.

This quarter's Mesa 21.1 feature release will continue to offer more improvements for Lavapipe, the CPU-based software Vulkan implementation. The latest today is Vulkan 1.1 now being advertised.

Sway 1.6 is official today as the newest version of this i3-inspired Wayland compositor.

Mesa 21.0.2 is out today as the latest bi-weekly point release to the Mesa3D open-source Vulkan/OpenGL drivers.

Not only is the Linux kernel moving to allow Rust code to be optionally used within the kernel, but Google is now allowing Rust code to be used for system programming work on Android's low-level operating system components too.

The official open-source AMD Radeon Vulkan driver, AMDVLK, is out today with its first update of the new quarter.

In the open-source world there can even be much fragmentation and multiple implementations around something as central as parsing of EDID blobs for monitor (display) information and that's only been made worse by the growing number of Wayland compositors.

The latest area being worked on with VirtIO for para-virtualized drivers for Linux with a focus on KVM is Bluetooth support.