Microsoft's Extensible Storage Engine that has been in use for more than a quarter century and present since Windows NT 3.51 and Microsoft Exchange 4.0 is now open-source.

Microsoft has begun opening up the source code to the Extensible Storage Engine, a non-SQL database engine. The Extensible Storage Engine (ESE) is run in Windows client computers since XP through Windows 10, running on Office 365 Mailbox Storage Backend servers, used by Microsoft Exchange, and more. The ESE

OpenZFS 2.0.2 is out today as the latest version of this open-source ZFS file-system implementation currently supported on Linux and FreeBSD systems.

Since last year's release of the big OpenZFS 2.0 , it was followed up by a point release providing early fixes and Linux 5.10 support while now a second point release has arrived.

OpenZFS 2.0.2 is made up mostly of a random assortment of fixes - most of which are minor in nature. But there are

Canonical has been working on developing a new desktop installer built around Google's Flutter toolkit and they aim to introduce it later this year in Ubuntu 21.10.

The past few years there has been talk of overhauling Ubuntu's desktop installer as "Ubiquity-NG" and in particular leveraging Curtin and Subiquity efforts that went in to Ubuntu's new server installer that has been in use for the past three years. That Curtin-based installer is finally close to entering the spotlight with plans to make

The GNU C Library 2.33 release is out today as expected. Exciting with this libc update is HWCAPS in making it easier to load optimized libraries for modern CPUs .

See that linked article from last week for more details but Glibc 2.33 but basically it allows the dynamic linker to load optimized versions of libraries within a glibc-hwcaps directory on the library search path. The HWCAPS correspond to the new x86_64 microarchitecture feature levels and there is similar support for POWER and s3

While Qt 6.0 wasn't even released a full two months ago, the Qt 6.1 feature freeze went into effect this morning in trying to get out this next update sooner.

This year's Qt 6.1 and Qt 6.2 releases are expected to be released on a tighter timeline than the prior cadence. If all goes well this means Qt 6.1 will be out before the end of April, barring any delays.

This quicker release is useful in getting out more improvements atop

In the works over the past year for the GNOME desktop environment is dynamic triple buffering when the GPU is running behind in rendering the desktop. In doing so, the GPU utilization should increase and the GPU clock frequencies in turn should ramp up to meet the demand - thereby ideally getting the rendering back on track if prior frames were running late. That triple buffering support has been re-based to the GNOME 40 code-base but still is unlikely to land until the next cycle with GNOME 42.

Canonical developer

Two years ago patches were posted in working on Wine support for IBM POWER / OpenPOWER hardware . The aim with that enablement has been to run Windows programs on POWER 64-bit hardware via Wine with the related "Hangover" project for handling the cross-architecture difference. The Wine patches for PPC64 have now been revived with hopes of mainlining them now that Wine 6.0 has passed.

André Hentschel has taken over the work for cleaning up and re-basing the prior POWER 64-bit

From Linux 5.11 adventures to the AMD CES keynote to many open-source software advancements, there was a lot of activity during the month of January to take one's mind off the pandemic.

During the past month on Phoronix were another 250 original news articles and 18 featured reviews / benchmark articles written by your's truly, on top of all the benchmarking and Phoronix Test Suite / OpenBenchmarking.org development work. A lot of interesting activities in January while still a lot more to