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.

ROCm 4.1.1 brings documentation updates around HIP for their environment variable handling and HIP installation instructions.

With ROCm 4.1 it stopped honoring the HIP_PLATFORM=hcc option with the Heterogeneous Compute Compiler (HCC) compiler having been deprecated for a while in favor of

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.

The VirtIO-GPU Vulkan driver is named "Venus" and is living within the Mesa 21.1-devel source tree now for allowing Vulkan acceleration support within guest virtual machines with the native host system's Vulkan driver doing the actual leg work.

While this VirtIO-GPU Vulkan work is promising for the future, at the

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.

Hector Martin sent in the pull request looking to have the initial Apple M1 support queued up as part of the ARM SoC/platform changes for the Linux 5.13 merge window that will in turn be opening up in

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.

Among the work in store for the Xen 4.15 hypervisor is Arm support for device models in Dom0 as a tech preview, support for exporting Intel Processor Trace Data into tools within Dom0, Viridian enlightnements for guests with more than 64 vCPUs, Xenstored/Oxenstored now supports the "LiveUpdate

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.

GnuPG 2.3 introduces a new experimental key database where the keys are stored in an SQLite database and allow for much faster key look-ups. This experimental key database can be enabled with the "use-keyboxd" option.

Also significant with GnuPG 2.3 is the new "tpm2d" daemon to allow

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 .

GCC 10.3 back-ports various fixes to the GCC 10 stable series, which was minted last year. The brief release announcement for the GCC 10.3 compiler notes 178 bug fixes over the GCC 10.2 release from a half-year ago.

GCC 10

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

While the Radeon RX 6000 "Navi 2x" hardware already can enjoy Active State Power Management (ASPM) on Linux, the AMDGPU kernel driver up to now hasn't enabled ASPM for Navi 1x graphics processors. That though looks to be changing with a pending patch that would allow these original Navi GPUs to enjoy this important PCIe power-savings feature

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.

Debuginfod was plumbed last year into GNU Binutils and has seen support by the likes of the GNU debugger

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.

Jamie Zawinski announced XScreenSaver 6.0 back on 1 April, which turned out not to be an April Fools' prank. The greater XScreenSaver security comes by a major refactoring to the XScreenSaver daemon, and splitting up the code into separate xscreensaver / xscreensaver-gfx / xscreensaver-auth components.

XScreenSaver 6.0 also removes support for