New feature material for Linux 5.12 continues getting ready ahead of the merge window opening in February to formally kick off the cycle.

In addition to Oracle's GraalVM 21.0 being released this week, the Eclipse Foundation has released OpenJ9 v0.24 as the newest feature release for their high performance JVM.

Now that Chrome 88 released, attention is turning to Chrome 89 of which an interesting technical change is the enabling of AV1 encode support within the web browser.

The Apache Software Foundation announced on Thursday that Apache Superset reached "top-level" status.

The oneAPI Level Zero repository consisting of the Level Zero API headers, Level Zero loader, and validation layer have reached version 1.1.

It was just earlier this month that mainline Mesa achieved OpenGL 4.1 for Zink, the Gallium3D driver allowing OpenGL to be implemented atop Vulkan. Now OpenGL 4.2 support is in place for this promising Mesa component.

KDE Plasma 5.21 is now in beta as what will be the first major KDE desktop update of the new year.

Red Hat hasn't been the only major enterprise Linux distribution shifting around their pieces with regards to how RHEL is formed with moving to CentOS Stream as its future upstream. Over the past year especially openSUSE Leap and SUSE Linux Enterprise having been moving closer together with the source trees now being more closely aligned between Leap and "SLE". SUSE has published an insightful blog post series detailing the prior way that openSUSE Tumbleweed and Leap tied in with SUSE Linux Enterprise and then the direction they have been shifting.

Netgate has announced pfSense as a rebranded and improved edition of this popular BSD-based firewall/network OS platform.

Even in 2021 longtime open-source AMD Mesa driver developer Marek Olšák isn't done optimizing OpenGL for delivering the best possible performance with the Radeon graphics driver. Marek's latest work includes more OpenGL threading enhancements and other work seemingly targeted at SPECViewPerf workloads.

While Ubuntu normally ships with the latest GNOME desktop as of release time, April's release of Ubuntu 21.04 will not be shipping with GNOME 40 but sticking to GNOME 3.38.

Raptor Engineering known for their work on open-source POWER9 systems has announced Kestrel, an open-source baseboard management controller (BMC) design that is open down to the HDL design and firmware.

Following November's launch of the Raspberry Pi 400 keyboard computer there is another new product from the UK foundation and it's not a new Raspberry Pi SBC.

With the in-development Linux 5.11 kernel there are many great features and improvements especially for AMD users with some new drivers and other pleasant enhancements. But as I outlined back on Christmas day: Linux 5.11 Is Regressing Hard For AMD Performance With Schedutil. Fortunately, a fix is now en route to the Linux 5.11 kernel for fixing that performance regression affecting AMD Zen 2/3 desktops and servers.

Lightworks, the professional-grade video editing system that works well on Linux but has remained elusive of its long past open-source promise, is out with its first major release of 2021.

One of the last pieces of the puzzle for supporting an entirely Vulkan-based Wayland compositor is coming together with a new extension that looks like it will be merged soon and there already being work pending against Sway/WLROOTS to make use of the Vulkan path.

If Red Hat's new no-cost offering for up to 16 production systems for RHEL doesn't fit your requirements and are evaluating alternatives to CentOS 8 that will be EOL'ed this year, Rocky Linux remains one of the leading contenders and is on track for its inaugural release in Q2 of this year.

Following a very active past couple of days, developers from security startup Corellium have followed through on their word so far of publishing the Apple Silicon patches to the Linux kernel mailing list for possible upstreaming in the future that allow the Linux kernel to boot with Apple M1 hardware.

Following the announcement at the end of last year that CentOS 8 will be ending and instead focusing on CentOS Stream as the future upstream to RHEL, there have been many concerned by the absence of CentOS 8 past this year. In trying to fill that void, Red Hat announced today they will be making Red Hat Enterprise Linux free for small production deployments.

For those still making use of pre-GCN AMD graphics cards supported by the R600 Gallium3D driver (namely the Radeon HD 5000/6000 series), the open-source "R600g" Gallium3D driver now has nearly feature complete NIR support.

LibreOffice 7.1 should be released at the start of February while now the second to last release candidate is available for testing of this leading cross-platform, open-source office suite.

Several readers have expressed concerned that Qt open-source downloads have disappeared but The Qt Company has now commented it's only a temporary issue due to a "severe hardware failure" in the cloud.

With the BUS1 in-kernel IPC not panning out and not seeing any major code work in nearly two years, the user-space based, D-Bus compatible DBus-Broker remains the performant and current option for those looking at something faster and more reliable than D-Bus itself.

Oracle on Tuesday released GraalVM 21.0 as the latest version of their Java VM/JDK that also supports other languages and modes of execution.

The domination of the open-source WireGuard secure VPN tunnel not only on Linux systems but BSDs too... WireGuard is now available on pfSense, the FreeBSD-based firewall/router focused software platform.

Google has released Chrome 88 as the latest stable version of their cross-platform web browser.

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee has unanimously approved several high profile features for the upcoming Fedora 34.

Back in 2019 support was added to GNOME 3.34 to allow starting XWayland on-demand. With this opt-in feature, XWayland support would only be started up when needed (on-demand) for running X11 clients. That support has now matured enough where for the upcoming GNOME 40 it will be enabled by default.

With Linux 5.11 came Pioneer DDJ-RR DJ controller support while for Linux 5.12 additional Pioneer DJ equipment will be supported.

The eBPF in-kernel virtual machine that allows for handling sandboxed "programs" within the Linux kernel continues on its stellar upward trajectory.

It's been nearly one year that AMDGPU patches have been around to better handle GPU hot unplugging on Linux. The use-case for that being either removal via sysfs such as if then assigning the GPU to a VM or for external GPUs such as connected via Thunderbolt. Those patches are still baking but the latest iteration of the work has now been published by AMD.

While 2021 may be the year that some desktop Linux distributions begin using PipeWire by default as the next-generation replacement to the likes of PulseAudio and JACK, for upstream PulseAudio this week it's finally seeing better/restored support for FreeBSD. PulseAudio has merged a set of patches long available via FreeBSD Ports and the like to improve the BSD audio experience.

Newer wireless Logitech keyboard/mice supporting "unified battery" reporting will be supported beginning with Linux 5.12 as a newer interface compared to the existing battery reporting support.

GCC 11 entered its final stage of development today as it works towards releasing around the end of Q1 / early Q2 if their past cadence holds up. Before GCC 11.1 can debut as the first stable version, there are some 60+ "P1" high priority regressions that need to be resolved or otherwise demoted to lesser priority regressions.

While in recent years there has been growing interest in enhancing Linux's Thunderbolt security with offering security levels and other functionality to authorize supported/known Thunderbolt devices, surprisingly it's taken until 2021 to see the ability for Linux's Thunderbolt software connection manage to handle de-authorizing devices.

While Intel formally discontinued the Itanium processors just under two years ago, the Linux software support for IA-64 continues. However, as a possible sign of the times, the Linux 5.11 kernel build for it has been broken the past month.