The fourth weekly release candidate to Linux 5.12 is now available for testing ahead of its anticipated stable release next month.

Linux 5.12 overall continues to be quite calm and much better off than early on when 5.12-rc1 was rocked by a nasty data corruption issue .

Linus Torvalds simply wrote of 5.12-rc4 , " Very much an average rc4, possibly just a tad on the smaller side of average. Nothing here particularly stands out. The diffstat

While Razer has talked up Linux support in the past, so far they have not officially offered Linux support for their range of wares popular with gamers. However, thanks to the open-source community there has been the likes of OpenRazer offering up support for the company's keyboards, mice, and other peripherals under Linux thanks to reverse engineering. Today marks the release of OpenRazer 3.0 for furthering this effort.

OpenRazer 3.0 is out as the fully open-source driver and user-space daemon for

In addition to the legacy IDE driver code ready to go from the mainline Linux kernel, receiving its final death sentence now is also the WiMAX support.

With Linux 5.11 the kernel demoted the WiMAX networking code down to the "staging" area of the kernel with a plan to remove it should no one step up to maintain the code. Well, no one cares enough about WiMAX support to maintain it, so the kernel support is set to be removed with Linux 5.13.

It's been three years that Retpolines (return trampolines) have been around as part of the Spectre defenses on Linux and kernel developers in particular are still working to better optimize different areas of their code to deal with the performance overhead incurred.

With the current Linux 5.12 cycle there is an important change to the AES-NI crypto code to overcome the overhead introduced by enabling Retpolines on older Intel systems and old through current AMD hardware where this is needed as part of Spectre V2 mitigations. Those AES

For users of the rolling-release openSUSE Tumbleweed distribution, it's been a very active past week.

First up was an entire rebuild of the distribution, which seldom occurs among distributions especially rolling-release distributions where it can then mean multi-gigabyte updates. This latest openSUSE Tumbleweed rebuild of all packages is as a result of picking up the latest GNU C Library (glibc) patches.

Some of the targeted updates recently in openSUSE Tumbleweed include moving to KDE Frameworks 5.80, Flatpak 1.10

Patches have been proposed for the GCC compiler to ultimately allow MinGW Windows executables to be debugged with Microsoft's debuggers.

The set of two dozen patches is for allowing the GNU Compiler Collection to emit debugging information in the PE-specific CodeView format used by Microsoft's debuggers. This PE-specific CodeView format is partially documented by Microsoft and understood via header files open-sourced by Microsoft as part of their PDB (Program Database) symbol file format.

Taking up this effort to allow MinGW EXEs to be handled under

This week marked the arrival of Qt 6.1 Beta 2 for providing the latest bug fixes for this cross-platform toolkit ahead of the planned release next month.

Qt 6.1 beta launched just at the start of March while now the second beta has arrived while at least three more betas are expected over the coming weeks.

The Qt Company continues to aim for releasing the Qt 6.1 toolkit around the end of April, which is part of their plan for shipping Qt 6.1/6.2

A third and final release candidate of FreeBSD 13.0 was warranted ahead of its formal 13.0-RELEASE later this month.

FreeBSD 13.0-RC3 is out this weekend as what was an "as-needed" milestone ahead of the FreeBSD 13.0 release set to take place around 30 March. Notable with this weeks FreeBSD 13.0-RC3 is the removal of the WireGuard kernel driver "if_wg" due to the change in WireGuard implementations

Ubuntu 21.04 is moving ahead with plans to enable compiler link-time optimizations (LTO) by default for package builds in the name of greater performance.

Back in January the plans were discussed for Ubuntu enabling LTO optimizations for packages with Ubuntu 21.04 to yield greater performance by allowing additional compiler optimizations at link-time on the entire binary. This follows the likes of Fedora and openSUSE already employing LTO by default as part of their package builds.

While into the Ubuntu 21.0