While Slackware carries the badge of being the oldest still maintained Linux distribution, it doesn't see new releases too often and doesn't carry the popularity it once did. In any case, Slackware 15.0 is being prepared as the next release.

Slackware 14.0 debuted all the way back in 2012 while the current point release as Slackware 14.2 came out in mid-2016. Thus it's long overdue for seeing a new major release,

On Monday the crypto subsystem updates were sent in to the Linux 5.12 kernel by crypto maintainer Herbert Xu.

This time around there are a few notable crypto updates with this kernel. For systems relying on return trampolines "Retpolines" as part of their Spectre Variant 2 mitigations, Linux 5.12 will offer much faster AES-NI XTS crypto performance . Since Retpolines were added back in 2018, the Retpolines behavior ended up heavily regressing the AES-NI XTS performance that went unnoticed until recently

Mike Blumenkrantz continues to be on a mad roll when it comes to getting all of the Zink patches upstreamed into mainline Mesa... This Gallium3D-based OpenGL over Vulkan translation layer now has OpenGL 4.6 turned on for Mesa 21.1 !

It was just last week Mesa 21.1 saw OpenGL 4.3 for Zink and then just days later OpenGL 4.5 was reached . Now as of Monday night in Mesa Git is OpenGL 4.6 being advertised for the Zink OpenGL

OProfile as a system profiler for Linux systems was started twenty years ago during the Linux 2.4 kernel days. While the user-space components are still going strong, the kernel-side support is redundant in an era of the perf subsystem and thus slated for removal with Linux 5.12 .

The OProfile user-space tools remain used and are still maintained (OProfile 1.4 came out last summer), but the kernel-side OProfile code is no longer needed since the user-space code has

The "platform-drivers-x86" area of the kernel that is primarily made up of driver support around Intel/AMD laptops and other platform drivers is seeing a number of noteworthy additions for the newly-opened Linux 5.12 merge window.

The highlights of these x86 platform driver changes for Linux 5.12 include:

- The community-made, reverse-engineered support for the Microsoft Surface System Aggregator Module (SAM) is now in place. This is part of the effort

Monado , the leading open-source project implementing The Khronos Group's OpenXR specification for AR/VR devices, is now officially considered a conformant implementation and is marked by its v21.0 release.

Monado 21.0 is approved by The Khronos Group in officially passing the OpenXR 1.0 conformance requirements set forth by the OpenXR test suite with a simulated device.

Monado 21.0 is the first conformant release in moving to a hybrid of semantic and date-based versioning. Included with Monado

Even before the Linux 5.11 kernel was released on Sunday, Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) maintainer Paolo Bonzini already had submitted early the initial batch of virtualization changes for Linux 5.12. There are some interesting changes on the KVM front for Linux 5.12 .

Perhaps most interesting with the KVM work for Linux 5.12 is support on x86/x86_64 to allow user-space to emulate Xen hypercalls. This ability stems from work published

It's approaching one year since the proposal of FUTEX2 for addressing shortcomings of the existing FUTEX system call and allowing the semantics to better match that of the Windows behavior, which is of use when running Windows games on Linux via Steam Play's Wine/Proton. In the end the FUTEX2 system call can lead to lower CPU utilization and in turn allowing for greater Linux gaming performance.

André Almeida of Collabora today posted the latest patches introducing the FUTEX2 system call though with these patches are still marked

Building off yesterday's release of the Linux 5.11 kernel , the GNU folks have put out their "GNU Linux-libre 5.11-gnu" kernel that removes support for loading closed-source kernel modules, stripping out drivers/functionality that are dependent upon closed-source microcode/firmware, and other sanitization work in the name of maintaining a fully free software system.

There are many notable improvements with upstream Linux 5.11 while the GNU alterations continue to be in the name of