AMD recently added a notice to the ROCm repository reinforcing their focus on headless, non-GUI workloads while now that statement is being sort of retracted and they have clarified their support intentions around this open-source Radeon Open eCosystem driver stack.

Towards the end of February, AMD ROCm support closed open bug reports pertaining to GUI applications like Blender and also posted this notice to the ROCm repository:

**Note:** The AMD ROCm™ open software platform is a compute stack for headless system deployments. GUI-based

Security researcher and Microsoft engineer Mickaël Salaün is proposing unprivileged chroot support for the Linux kernel.

With a patch sent out today he noted, " The chroot system call is currently limited to be used by processes with the CAP_SYS_CHROOT capability. This protects against malicious procesess willing to trick SUID-like binaries. The following patch allows unprivileged users to safely use chroot(2)...Being able to easily change root directories enable to ease some development workflow and can be used as a

With that nasty swapfile issue behind us , the Linux 5.12 kernel is looking to be in good shape and on my tests so far across a number of different Intel and AMD systems I am not seeing any major surprises.

Long story short, aside from areas of noted changes for Linux 5.12 , I am not seeing any benchmarks come out with unexpected results for better or worse. For one week now across continuous testing on many different systems, Linux 5.12 is looking to be in

Google has announced the 202 open-source projects that will be included as part of this year's Google Summer of Code (GSoC) initiative for getting students involved in free software development.

Even with this year's Google Summer of Code requiring half the time with half the stipend as prior years and that leading to some organizations not participating , there still are over two hundred open-source projects set to participate including 31 that will be part of GSoC for the first time.

Student applications for GSoC

Back in 2019 we reported on Intel bringing up a new SoC dubbed "Lighting Mountain" to be used as a network processor and for other use-cases. Intel brought up that initial Linux kernel code for Lightning Mountain in 2019 but since then the code has already begun to fall into disrepair while it looks like it was either punted off as part of MaxLinear's acquisition last year of the Intel Home Gateway Platform Division or otherwise as a result of that was cancelled.

There hasn'

Chinese MIPS64 vendor Loongson announced the 2K1000 back in 2017 and while it has already been succeeded by more advanced chips in the Loongson 3 series, the Linux driver support for the 2K1000 is still coming together.

The Loongson 2K1000 is their dual-core 40nm part from 2017 that has around a 1.0GHz clock frequency for the MIPS64r2 LoongISA 1.0 processor. While

The virtual sound driver for VirtIO has been queued up into the sound-next code ahead of the Linux 5.13 merge window this spring.

This virtual sound driver has been floated on the kernel mailing list while this week was queued up by sound maintainer Takashi Iwai of SUSE.

This driver implements the VirtIO sound device specification that has been incorporated into the VirtIO I/O virtualization standard, which was proposed last year for cases where having audio is needed but device pass-through or emulation is not suitable. VirtIO

We are already quite eager for NVIDIA's 470 series Linux driver due to Wayland / DMA-BUF improvements coming to this next major feature release for their proprietary driver stack. Making it all the more exciting is it looks like the NVIDIA 470 series driver will have OpenCL 3.0 support.

NVIDIA today released an updated WSL driver for use on Windows 10. What makes this notable though is the driver adding support for OpenCL 3.0.

Today's R470 beta (

OpenZFS 2.0.4 is out as the latest version of this open-source ZFS file-system implementation for Linux and FreeBSD systems.

OpenZFS 2.0.4 brings official support for the Linux 5.11 kernel along with early compatibility bits for the in-development Linux 5.12. BIO changes needed to be accounted for in the OpenZFS code for making it build happy against Linux 5.12 Git at this still early stage while we'll see in the weeks ahead if any