Last week we noted how a kernel driver for NZXT's Kraken AIO liquid cooling devices was under review for the mainline kernel. Shortly after that point the driver did get successfully picked up for hwmon-next and thus should be appearing in the upcoming Linux 5.13 cycle.

For those with an KZXT Kraken X42 / X52 / X62 / X72 all-in-one liquid cooling setup, Linux 5.13 should be mainlining this community-maintained driver. This

Two fixes were queued this week into the Linux kernel's power management "linux-next" branch that could help improve the power management behavior for some devices as up to now the Linux kernel was not properly following the ACPI specification.

An Intel discovered and fixed issue was Linux not turning off unused power resources during initialization. For select platforms there may appear to be power resources not associated with any devices physically present on the platform. The ACPI specification outlines that the OS should turn off such unused power resources, but

A small but measurable and seemingly widespread performance optimization is currently being buttoned up for Intel's open-source "ANV" Vulkan driver within Mesa to benefit latest-generation Gen12/Xe Graphics.

A pending merge request is providing 1~3% better performance on Intel Gen12 graphics hardware with the ANV Vulkan driver. Games like Dota 2, Rise of the Tomb Raider, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Fallout 4, and others have been tested and confirmed to benefit.

The driver change is to

For those running Linux MD RAID10 arrays you may have found the performance around discard requests such as when running MKFS and FSTRIM operations to be rather slow... Well, with Linux 5.13 it will be lightning fast.

For years there have been reports of slow DISCARD handling for RAID10 MD block devices under Linux... There have been bugs file as well over this slow DISCARD performance of MD RAID10 leading to abnormally long MKFS operations and more.

Thanks to Red Hat'

Google's open-source SwiftShader has been supporting a software-based Vulkan implementation for some time, building off its prior OpenGL / GLES and D3D9 support. While SwiftShader's Vulkan implementation has received heavy investment and attention from Google, it turns out Mesa's Lavapipe software implementation is beginning to pull ahead.

The CPU-based Mesa Lavapipe Vulkan implementation started by Red Hat's David Airlie and continued to work on part time by him and other Mesa developers is actually looking better now than Google

Intel's latest addition to Mesa 21.1 with their "ANV" Vulkan driver is... A null hardware layer.

This "nullhw" Vulkan layer is to disable all rendering and compute commands in the command parsing hardware. This null hardware Vulkan layer was written a year ago but only merged now.

This Vulkan layer for Intel's ANV driver is similar to Intel's "Blackhole" render extension for OpenGL . The function that this null hardware layer serves is for quickly finding CPU bottlenecks within

Besides Valheim, there hasn't been much in the way of native Linux game releases recently to really get excited about with much of the activity these days being through Valve's Steam Play for running Windows games on Linux. But in April there will be at least two high profile native Linux game releases.

First up, Metro Exodus will make its native Linux debut. Metro Exodus was released by 4A Games back in February 2019 as the newest Metro game under Windows. While users have been successful

This week marked the hard feature freeze for QEMU 6.0 along with the tagging of QEMU 6.0-rc0. The QEMU 6.0 release should happen around the end of April for this important piece of the open-source Linux virtualization stack.

QEMU 6.0 is a big feature update and will be seeing weekly release candidates until the stable release is ready to ship around the end of April. Among the changes coming with QEMU 6.0 are:

- QEMU can now be built with link