Two years after originally posting patches for working on Unified Shared Memory (USM) support for OpenMP with the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), there is finally an updated patch-set for implementing this shared memory functionality with both AMD and NVIDIA GPUs.

A new Ubuntu utility seeing an uptick in development recently is crypto-config as a means of system-wide cryptography configuration.

The GNU Hurd team has put out their Q2'2024 status update to outline recent activity around this micro-kernel platform.

The RADV Radeon Vulkan driver in Mesa 24.2-devel has received support for task shaders with the NVIDIA Device Generated Commands "DGC" extension.

A new preview release is available of Microsoft's Azure Linux 3.0 operating system.

In addition to proposed opt-in data metrics collection and the new web-based installer UI, some of the other early proposals for Fedora Linux 42 that isn't due out until April of 2025 is expanding the possibilities for unprivileged users.

The Intel kernel graphics driver code being queued for the Linux 6.11 kernel already has added the initial Intel Battlemage PCI IDs, Battlemage display support, eDP Panel Replay support, Hardware Replay to help with hang debugging, SR-IOV preparations, and more Lunar Lake / Xe2 enablement. Today another unexpected last minute pull request was submitted of a bit more Xe driver code.

Back in May there were Linux kernel patches posted as a workaround for Arm CPU errata around the Speculative Store Bypass (SSB) handling. Initially this workaround was just noted as the Cortex-X4 and Neoverse-V3 as being affected, but now it turns out many more exciting Arm processor cores are impacted.

Nearly every Linux kernel cycle has bought patches to bump the version of the Rust language targeted by the kernel as it worked toward having a suitable minimum version. With the latest Linux kernel patches, it looks like we may be finally approaching the point where a safe minimum version can be specified and for the Linux kernel to in turn allow supporting multiple different versions of the Rust compiler.

LLVM Clang 19 this morning landed initial support for the -std=c2y and -std=gnu2y options for targeting the next C programming language standard.

A change proposal has been filed by Red Hat engineer Miro Hrončok for retiring Python 2.7 within Fedora 41 and to drop packages still depending upon Python 2.

The Rust-written Redox OS open-source operating system is out with its monthly development summary that notes some interesting work taking place.

Canonical engineer Matthew Kosarek has released Miracle-WM v0.3 as the newest version of this Wayland tiling compositor built atop Mir. Miracle-WM is beginning to be useful and practical enough for daily driving by its lead developer.

The kernel powering Microsoft's Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 (WSL2) has long been using the Linux 5.15 LTS kernel while finally it's now upgraded past that aging long-term support kernel and onto the current Linux 6.6 LTS series.

Vulkan 1.3.289 was released at the end of last week with a handful of clarifications/corrections to the Vulkan API specification plus one new maintenance extension.

Intel engineers today released version 2.22 of libva, the driver-agnostic library for the Video Acceleration API (VA-API). Most notable with libva 2.22 is adding a new interface for Versatile Video Coding (VVC / H.266).

With the start of the new month comes the Steam Survey hardware/software details for the month prior. The June 2024 results show a decline to the Steam on Linux marketshare but staying above the magic 2% threshold.

Data collection around users tends to be a very touchy subject in the Linux/open-source world even when opt-in and Fedora Workstation 42 has just seen a proposal raised to do just that. If approved the Fedora Workstation 42 release would roll-out an opt-in metrics system of anonymous user information from system settings to hardware information and desktop usage patterns.

AMD's Radeon Developer Tool Suite from their GPUOpen group has now migrated to the Qt6 graphical toolkit.

Linux Mint has kicked off the start of July by releasing the beta of Linux Mint 22 "Wilma" as the next iteration of their desktop distribution built atop Ubuntu 24.04 LTS and with plans to support it until 2029.