Cycles X as a modernizing of Blender's Cycles rendering engine has now landed in the latest development code for Blender 3.0. Cycles X brings big performance improvements but does eliminate OpenCL support in the process.

An Open Printing micro-conference took place today during the Linux Plumbers Conference 2021 week. While it's hard to get excited about printers in 2021, it is exciting the renewed effort around CUPS with it now being back to effectively led by the community and CUPS founder Michael Sweet who left Apple. CUPS 2.4 is coming as the first feature release in quite a while and then CUPS 2.5 followed by CUPS 3.0 are already being talked about with features being discussed.

French telecommunications giant Orange has published "BMC" as the (e)BPF Memory Cache providing a cache focused on memcached usage within the Linux kernel.

The Apache Software Foundation recently published their FY2021 report for their year-ended 30 April. Even with the ongoing pandemic, the Apache Software Foundation managed to raise more than $3M USD and enjoyed a host of software successes.

Released in August was the big OpenShot 2.6 video editor update while this weekend has been succeeded by its first point release.

Facebook last week formally announced CacheLib as their new open-source caching engine designed for web scale services and to make for effective non-volatile memory caching to offset the increasing costs of DRAM.

The Freedesktop SDK as a platform and SDK run-time for Flatpak apps/run-times is out with its first major stable update in one year.

OpenSSH 8.7 is out today as the newest feature release for this widely-used SSH server/client software.

Tesseract as the leading open-source optical character recognition (OCR) engine that employs neural networks for converting images/scans of text into actual recognized text is nearing its 5.0 release.

After being started by LinkedIn and open-source now for more than a half-decade while incubating at the Apache Software Foundation the past three years, Apache Pinot is the latest project graduating to become a top-level Apache project.

While solidly into the "fixes" stage of Linux 5.14 kernel development, the x86 platform driver pull request this week -- which has already been merged to mainline -- does have some new additions worth mentioning.

RenderDoc continues maturing gracefully as the leading frame-capture based graphics debugging system for OpenGL / Direct3D / Vulkan across all major operating systems as well as some consoles.

Following the formation of the Open 3D Foundation and their open-source IBM-led work around watering farms from the cloud, the Linux Foundation's newest effort is around trying to enhance firefighter safety with open-source.

Apache Cassandra 4.0 is finally available as the latest major feature release to this widely-used NoSQL database management system.

FreeType 2.11 is out as the newest version of this widely-used library for font rasterization.

Released on Friday was a new version of the Hashcat open-source password recovery tool that now adds an AMD HIP back-end.

DigiKam as the popular open-source image organizer is out with its version 7.3 feature release.

Back in May we wrote about China launching an alternative to Google Summer of Code and Outreachy. This global open-source program hosted by the Institute of Software Chinese Academy of Sciences is running "Summer 2021" for encouraging university-aged students regardless of gender or nationality to get involved in open-source development.

Darktable 3.6 is out as this summer's feature update to this open-source RAW photography software package and a great alternative to Adobe Photoshop Lightroom.

Ubuntu maker Canonical has partnered up with the Blender Foundation to offer paid enterprise support around the long-term support versions of Blender.

The OpenSSL project today shipped their OpenSSL 3.0 Beta, which is their equivalent to a release candidate ahead of the planned official 3.0.0 release next quarter.

The wildly successful Blender 3D open-source modeling software has been working hard towards its Blender 3.0 release but will likely now be proactively delayed to allow developers more time to relax with COVID-19 lockdowns/restrictions loosening, the possibility of developer meetups pre-3.0, and letting more changes flow into this big feature release.

There's a new, cross-platform, cross-API graphics benchmark out there that is free to download and focused on delivering maximum GPU acceleration support when rendering hundreds of thousands of objects.

Version 2.32 of the Git distributed revision control system is now available with a variety of improvements from performance optimizations to usability enhancements and a whole lot of bug fixes.

The GRUB bootloader saw some fresh feature work merged this week.

Dbus-Broker 29 was released on Wednesday as the latest version of this high-performance Linux message broker that retains compatibility with the original D-Bus implementation.

Blender has introduced the Blender 2.93 LTS 3D creation suite as their last major milestone of the Blender 2.x series before moving to the next-generation 3D creation pipeline with Blender 3.0.

Along with various open-source projects leaving the Freenode IRC network following infighting/managerial changes at Freenode, Fosshost that provides web hosting services for many open-source projects also shifted from Freenode to Libera.Chat. But now this week, Fosshost announced they have entered into a long-term partnership with Freenode.

OBS Studio 27.0 is out as the latest major feature release to this cross-platform, open-source software for desktop screen recording and livestreaming.

Over the past month on Phoronix there was a lot of excitement by readers around the in-development Linux 5.13 kernel, Mesa advancements, notable new software releases like dav1d and Zstd 1.5, new hardware benchmarking around Xeon Scalable Ice Lake and AMD's latest wares, and more.