Kicked off this past Thursday and running through 7 April is the Ubuntu 21.04 "Testing Week" for helping to test the new changes and catch any remaining issues with there being now just three weeks to go to the final release.

This coincides with this past week's Ubuntu 21.04 Beta release while ideally users will be running the very latest daily ISO at the time of testing or otherwise have carried out the latest package updates post-beta phase.

Those with extra time around the

FreeBSD 13.0 was supposed to be out by the end of March but a bumpy past few weeks has led to extra release candidates. Out this weekend is FreeBSD 13.0-RC5 for what might now be the final test release.

FreeBSD 13.0-RC4 came out last weekend and was expected to be the last but some pressing bugs led to lengthening the release cycle once more with today's RC5 debut.

FreeBSD 13.0-RC5 fixes a pressing

The past year there has been work led by Greg Kroah-Hartman on a "READFILE" system call for efficiently reading small files such as for data exposed via sysfs. While not yet mainlined, this week the patches for this new system call were re-based giving us hope that perhaps we'll see it with Linux 5.13.

The READFILE system call aims to make it very efficient to read small files straight into a buffer with a single system call rather than the traditional open/read/close

The pandemic is still not showing any signs of slowing down KDE development but with the new month brings more changes and improvements to this open-source desktop.

This week KDE saw the "KHamburgerMenu" work land as well as a number of other enhancements:

- The introduction of KHamburgerMenu as a component for QWidgets-based apps to show custom hamburger menus when the main menubar is hidden. This is similar to Dolphin's existing hamburger menu. This is helpful for those wanting to hide the main menubar for conserving vertical space

For those making use of OBS Studio for screen capturing or streaming from your desktop, the OBS Studio 27.0 release is on the way and it's a big one.

OBS Studio 27.0-rc1 is out this weekend as a great Easter surprise. One of the new features of interest to many of you will be the recently covered OBS Studio Wayland capture support . This Wayland support makes use of PipeWire and is tested to work on Ubuntu 20.10 or newer.

In

This week Intel's open-source developers released version 2.2 of oneDNN, their deep neural network library that is part of their oneAPI offering after previously being developed under the names MKL-DNN and the Deep Neural Network Library (DNNL).

The oneDNN library provides the "building blocks" for deep learning applications not only for Intel CPUs/GPUs/XPUs but also for AMD / AArch64 / POWER / s390x processors and initial support for NVIDIA GPUs. With oneDNN 2.2

AMD published a security whitepaper this week looking at their Predictive Store Forwarding (PSF) feature that is new to Zen 3 series processors. AMD is going to allow customers to disable this performance feature as they think it may be vulnerable to a Spectre-like attack.

Zen 3's Predictive Store Forwarding aims to enhance performance by trying to predict dependencies between loads and stores. PSF can speculatively execute instructions based on what it thinks the result of the load will be and while the predictions should be largely accurate, there is

Another round of AMDGPU kernel driver updates were sent out on Thursday to DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 5.13 merge window opening in a few weeks.

Given the timing, this might be the last feature pull of new AMD Radeon graphics driver material for the 5.13 cycle. There have already been earlier DRM-Next pulls for 5.13 on the AMD side that included Aldebaran GPU support, FreeSync HDMI, Display ASSR, and more .

With this week's batch of AMDGPU changes