While RHEL9 is just in beta form right now, due to CentOS Stream 9 now having launched and that effectively serving as the bleeding-edge of the RHEL9 upstream, EPEL 9 has already launched.

Genode OS as the interesting open-source operating system framework is out with its v21.11 release this week and delivers on many hardware improvements and other features.

Added to the in-development Linux 5.16 kernel was cluster-aware scheduling designed to enhance system performance where groups of CPU cores may share caches or similar and thus the scheduler could benefit from knowing that information for making more optimal task placement. But as I pointed out early on with Linux 5.16, this cluster scheduling is hurting the Intel Alder Lake performance on the new kernel. Intel is now working to correct this by making the cluster scheduling configurable and disabling this functionality by default for hybrid CPUs such as Alder Lake.

Ahead of Intel ARC graphics cards premiering next year, Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver developers remain very busy preparing for the next-generation graphics capabilities.

AMD on Friday published a new version of their Advanced Media Framework "AMF" software development kit that enhances the multimedia processing capabilities for Radeon hardware.

Taking place this week was the annual Open-Source Firmware Conference "OSFC" devoted to open-source firmware from Coreboot to open-source BMC solutions and other low-level booting/initialization efforts.

This week saw many fixes landing for the KDE desktop components along with some UI tweaking and other alterations.

The day has finally come that Mesa's classic OpenGL drivers (non-Gallium3D) have been cleared out of the code-base as part of their modernization effort for mainline.

Wine 6.23 is now available for running Windows applications and games on Linux, macOS, and the BSDs. Up next will be the Wine 7.0 release candidate that also marks the feature freeze for what will be the next annual Wine stable release.

EndeavourOS as the two year old Linux distribution project built atop Arch Linux is out with a shiny new release. Beyond package updates, the new release has several default changes like now making use of the wonderful PipeWire. Looking to 2022, EndeavourOS is also exploring the possibility of a gaming-optimized build of their OS.

Last month BattlEye-using games began running on Steam Play when using the latest Steam client beta paired with the experimental version of Proton. However, it still does require the intervention of the game studio to request the support be enabled for a particular game. Today in time for any weekend gaming is several more games using the BattlEye anti-cheat software working on Linux.

The Intel-led open-source Cloud-Hypervisor project that provides a VMM focused on cloud workloads and supports interfacing with Linux's KVM and Windows' MSHV is out with a big feature update. Cloud-Hypervisor is also the project that is known for its use of the Rust programming language and built in part off Rust-VMM.

A few days ago it marked two years since the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3960X / 3970X launched. While we are eager to see next-gen Threadripper, for now is a look at how the open-source Linux performance has evolved for these still-impressive HEDT processors by comparing the Linux performance at launch to where it is today with the very latest upstream Linux software.

TURNIP as the open-source Mesa Vulkan driver for Qualcomm Adreno graphics hit a new official milestone this week.

While there has been CentOS Stream 8, following last month's RHEL 9 Beta there is now official availability of CentOS Stream 9.

Blender 3.0 is officially releasing today as a huge update to this open-source 3D modeling software that in recent years has become backed by numerous large hardware/software companies and has rivaled proprietary software for its capabilities.

Kernel Address Space Layout Randomization has been common on Linux for a decade and a half now while more recently has been Function-Granular (or sometimes referred to as Finer-Grained) KASLR for further upping the security benefits by making it much harder to predict kernel address positions for attacks.

Going into 2022 the Linux kernel's floppy driver continues to see new code improvements and fixes.

Fedora 36 may support using the Linux kernel's fs-verity code for allowing some interesting integrity and authenticity use-cases around RPM packages.

Along with Intel this week sending out some of their initial graphics driver changes destined for the Linux 5.17 cycle early next year, AMD today also submitted their first batch of AMDGPU DRM driver changes intended for this next kernel version.