Going back to last year there has been work by AMD engineers on an experimental FreeSync video mode optimization to avoid screen blanking around full-screen video playback. Basically avoiding an entire mode-set when changing the timing mode during video playback to bypass any screen flickering/blanking. That work has now been updated to its sixth spin while it's being viewed as a temporary measure until a better solution can be devised.

That FreeSync video mode optimization has continued seeing new revisions following the public code review process. The sixth

Intel's Cloud-Hypervisor that is the Rust-based virtualization hypervisor focused for cloud environments is out with its newest open-source release.

Cloud-Hypervisor 0.13 released this week as the newest version of the Intel-led open-source hypervisor that has also the involvement of other key organizations. With this v0.13 update there is broader VFIO device support, which most significantly now means that NVIDIA graphics cards are supported in conjunction with their proprietary graphics driver. The VFIO device support improvement

There has been a lot of attention on helloSystem this week as a macOS-inspired operating system built atop FreeBSD with an emphasis on providing a polished desktop experience. Since we highlighting the FOSDEM presentation about it, there has been a lot of coverage on helloSystem and this weekend marks a new experimental ISO release.

The helloSystem motto is being a " desktop system for creators with focus on simplicity, elegance, and usability. Based on FreeBSD. Less, but better! " The desktop utilities are written with PyQt5.

The

IO_uring has been one of the greatest Linux kernel innovations in recent times. IO_uring for more efficient asynchronous I/O has continued getting faster and introducing new features over the past two years and for the upcoming Linux 5.12 cycle will be even faster.

Linux block maintainer and lead IO_uring developer Jens Axboe has teased that this I/O interface for Linux 5.12 is becoming even faster with a number pegging it at about 10% faster compared to the prior kernel.

Debian 11.0 "Bullseye" is now under its soft freeze, one month after starting its build-essentials freeze .

With the Debian soft freeze beginning, all uploads to the Debian archive are to be small, targeted fixes with no new source packages permitted for Bullseye. Existing source packages also cannot add or drop binary packages.

The Debian release team characterizes the current state of Bullseye as "pretty good". Debian developer Paul Gevers went on to add, " we're aiming for a record short freeze

Following last weekend's release of FreeBSD 13 BETA1 , the second beta is now available for testing this big BSD operating system update.

New to the FreeBSD codebase this week has been fixing of issues around their 32-bit builds, updated Ncurses, support for kernel TLS offload is now added and turned on by default, the Mellanox ConnectX-4 MLX5EN network driver is now included by default for the AMD64 generic kernel builds, a null pointer de-reference bug resolved, and other

Ahead of the Linux 5.12 merge window expected to open at end of day tomorrow, assuming Linux 5.11 is out on schedule, there is already a pending pull request with a big feature addition: IDMAPPED mounts.

Kernel developer Christian Brauner has sent in the pull request looking to land IDMAPPED mounts functionality as part of the imminent Linux 5.12 merge window. Here is his summary on this big ticket feature that will be part of the next Linux kernel, assuming Linus Torvalds is in agreement

Two weeks ago with Wine-Staging 6.1 it was at nearly 800 patches atop the upstream Wine code-base while for Wine-Staging 6.2 it has fallen to just a 669 patch difference.

Why did Wine-Staging lighten up so much? Fortunately, the ~100 patch loss is largely due to Wine 6.2 having upstreamed much of the work. Wine 6.2 picked up many patches around WinRT, NTDLL, and WIDL especially.

Thanks to Wine having

Plasma 5.21 is due for release on 16 February and as such developers have been busy working on bug fixing for the final stretch of development.

Many Plasma 5.21 fixes were taken care of this week in time for Tuesday's Plasma 5.21.0 debut. But it's not only been about bug fixing but Plasma 5.22 as well as KDE Applications have been seeing plenty of changes this week too. KDE developer Nate Graham continues providing his concise weekly round