This past week Debian 11 "Bullseye" embarked on its hard freeze in gearing up for release later this year.

One month after beginning the Bullseye soft freeze , Debian 11 is now under a hard freeze. For the hard freeze, key packages and packaging lacking autopkgtest support are treated as if in a full freeze. Non-key packages with Autopkgtest support are treated as if in the soft freeze still. Autopkgtest is the Debian integrated solution for running automatic package acceptance/conformance testing.

Key packages and Debian packages

As we get ready for spring, KDE developers continue polishing up their Wayland support for the Plasma 5.22 cycle.

It's been another busy week in KDE land especially on the Wayland/XWayland front while other areas of the free desktop stack have also been enjoying improvements. Some of the noteworthy KDE improvements this past week include:

- KDE Connect now supports replying to text messages from within the Plasma notification itself.

- The audio volume applet with the applications tab will now show what audio output device a given

It's 2021 and proposed patches by upstream developers would finally remove Linux's legacy IDE driver code.

The proposed code is for removing the legacy IDE driver support from the mainline kernel tree, likely beginning with the 5.13 kernel assuming all goes as planned. It was two years ago that the legacy IDE driver code was deprecated and marked for removal in 2021... We are now well into 2021, so Christoph Hellwig is following through and looking to

For a long while now Linux kernel developers have discusses the prospects of optionally allowing the Rust language to be used for new device drivers within the Linux kernel areas and other areas within the kernel for this language that prides itself on safety and performance. As the first baby step towards that dream, initial Rust support appeared this week in the Linux-Next tree.

Announced yesterday on rust-for-linux was word of initial Rust support hitting Linux-Next. Miguel Ojeda who has been involved with this effort was quick to

Recently Ubuntu maker Canonical committed to using Google's Flutter user-interface toolkit as its "default choice" for their mobile and desktop applications moving forward. There is now an Ubuntu Blog post further detailing their interests in Flutter.

Canonical has been working with Google on the Flutter Linux port, the toolkit that aims to provide multi-platform support from a single code-base and built off the Dart platform. Canonical has been crafting Flutter to ensure it works well on Ubuntu systems, including with the use of Snap packaging

The release candidate of GNOME 40 is available today while the official GNOME 40.0 debut is still on track for next week.

The GNOME 40 release candidate, or "GNOME 40.rc" as it's referred to with the new convention, delivers on the last minute GNOME Shell and Mutter improvements including a better app folder appearance, multi-monitor enhancements, better overview performance, improved refresh rate calculation, the new headless native back-end, Wayland presentation time protocol support, running XWayland

Following yesterday's release of the Radeon RX 6700 XT graphics card and the updated Radeon Software for Linux 20.50 driver , AMD has now released AMDVLK 2021.Q1.6 as their updated open-source Vulkan driver with Navi 22 / RX 6700 XT support.

AMDVLK 2021.Q1.6 as the company's official open-source AMD Vulkan driver on Linux systems now carries RX 6700 XT / Navi

While Intel upstreamed their forthcoming "Ice Lake" Xeon processor support long ago and has been focused on next-gen Sapphire Rapids enablement now for the better part of the past year, there still are some Ice Lake Xeon tweaks taking place here and there. This week a new bleeding-edge patch is in testing for tweaking the power/performance behavior of Ice Lake Xeon with Intel's idle driver.

For hitting the C6 low-power state with Intel's Ice Lake Xeon there are higher costs involved than

It looks like the Linux 5.13 kernel will be supporting an interesting RISC-V feature this spring.

Queued up now in RISC-V's "for-next" branch as of this week is support for XIP, or eXecute In Place. RISC-V XIP allows for code to be executed directly from non-volatile storage that is directly addressable by the CPU. RISC-V XIP allows for executing code directly off CPU-addressable storage like QSPI NOR flash memory without first having to load it