Zlib-ng 2.0 is out today as the first stable release of this zlib fork focused on "next generation" systems with speedier performance and a more modern API, among other changes.

Zlib-ng 2.0 sports a modern native API as well as a Zlib-compatible API. This fork has cleaned up the original code-base, supports making use of modern CPU intrinsics like AVX2 / NEON / VSX, pulling improvements from Zlib forks maintained by Intel and CloudFlare, and a variety of other

Red Hat is in the process of building out an "infotainment" team to work on low-level Linux infrastructure work around their growing automotive efforts.

Red Hat has begun listing jobs for this automotive team and I am told they will be listing more positions over the next two quarters. Of the positions so far range from Kdump for automotive , security engineer for the automotive team, a QA engineer for "our latest initiative in the automotive area", and more. Again, I am told this is just the start

Going back to last December System76 had been teasing a new Pangolin laptop that would be AMD powered . Finally their new laptop has launched with Ryzen 4000 series mobile processors and making use of the integrated Radeon graphics.

The new Pangolin "pang10" model features the choice of the Ryzen 5 4500U or Ryzen 7 4700U "Renoir" processors with integrated Radeon graphics. The Pangolin features a 1080p 15.6-inch display,

Java 16 is out today in the form of the OpenJDK 16 general availability release.

OpenJDK 16 now allows the use of C++14 language features within the JDK C++ source tree where as prior releases were bound to C++98/C++03 standards. This does up the build system requirements for OpenJDK but still rather lax by today's standards with only needing GCC 5.0+ or Clang 3.5+.

Another fundamental change with OpenJDK 1

Igalia has outlined some of the recent V3D compiler work they've been engaging in to help with the Vulkan driver performance on the Raspberry Pi 4 while the compiler back-end work also benefits the Mesa OpenGL driver too.

Back in November the V3DV driver became officially Vulkan conformant and since then the Igalia developers working with the Raspberry Pi Foundation have been working to support more Vulkan extensions, provide various bug fixes, and squeeze out more performance.

Igalia developers have been focusing on the V3D compiler

While recently Arch Linux developers and stakeholders were discussing the possibility of raising the x86-64 base requirements for this Linux distribution to the "x86-64-v2" micro-architecture feature level that roughly correlates to Intel Nehalem and newer, now the discussion has shifted to keeping the same x86-64 base level while potentially offering a "x86-64-v3" port for those with newer Intel/AMD CPUs.

Rather than raising the Arch

Siemens has recently been engaging directly with the upstream Linux kernel developers in aiming to mainline various drivers for benefiting their industrial PC platforms.

For Siemens industrial PCs like the SIMATIC IPC line-up, the German industrial giant is looking to begin upstreaming more of their drivers. The initial area includes watchdog and LED support for these x86-based industrial PCs while more platform drivers and expanded device support is expected to come with time. They do have more code internally left to be sanitized and published around hardware monitoring and other

GNOME developers remain very busy as they approach the finish line for GNOME 40 .

In preparing for the GNOME 40 release candidate this week, maintainers have begun tagging their new packages. Released yesterday were the GNOME 40 release candidates for GNOME Shell and Mutter with plenty of noteworthy changes in tow.

The GNOME Shell 40 release candidate is enjoying:

- Improving the app folder appearance.

- Improved workspace handling on secondary monitors.

- Improved interaction when dragging between app grid pages.

- Improved overview performance.

- Many