For those that have been trying to find a desktop-friendly BSD operating system that works smoothly out of the box but haven't yet found the perfect match, NomadBSD 1.4-RC1 is now available for improving this desktop-minded FreeBSD-derived open-source operating system.

NomadBSD 1.4 is working towards a number of improvements for bettering the initial out-of-the-box desktop experience. Besides shifting to FreeBSD 12.2-p2 as its base, NomadBSD 1.

Wayland 1.18 released back in February 2020 while now nearly one year later it's been succeeded by Wayland 1.19.

Even with one year passing, Wayland 1.19 is a very minor update over Wayland 1.18. That's part of the reason why they moved off timed releases in the first place was the core Wayland code and protocol being quite stable at this point: there is very little change. Most of the work remaining to get Wayland ready

IO_uring continues to be one of the most exciting technical innovations in the Linux kernel in recent years not only for more performant I/O but also opening up other doors for new Linux innovations. IO_uring has continued adding features since being mainlined in 2019 and now the newest proposed feature is the ability to build new ioctls / kernel interfaces atop IO_uring.

The idea of supporting kernel ioctls over IO_uring has been brought up in the past and today lead IO_uring developer Jens

Finally with the upcoming Linux 5.12 cycle is support for Variable Rate Refresh (VRR) / Adaptive-Sync for Intel Tiger Lake "Gen12" Xe Graphics and newer.

The VRR/Adaptive-Sync support for the latest-generation Intel graphics with Tiger Lake and the likes of the forthcoming Rocket Lake, Alder Lake, and discrete DG1 graphics is now in order for the mainline kernel. The VRR enabling for Tiger Lake and newer was sent in this morning to DRM-Next ahead of the

Announced a few years ago was the notion of "extended" LTS kernel versions whereby the long term support cycle would span six years rather than the usual two years for LTS kernels in providing maintenance and bug/security fixes to the codebase. This means Linux 5.4 LTS is supported until the end of 2025, Linux 4.19 until the end of 2024, and even Linux 4.14 until the start of 2024. But with the recently minted Linux

A new Radeon power management feature with RDNA2 graphics processors being exposed by the open-source Linux driver is Duty Cycle Scaling in the name of power/thermal management with a focus on low-power hardware.

AMD graphics Duty Cycle Scaling is designed for "small power limit SKUs" and is designed to actually shut off the graphics core and power it back up based on current/power/temperature thresholds. Under heavy workloads, the AMD "DCS" functionality controlled by the graphics firmware will power down the GPU during

Feature development on LLVM 12.0 has ended along with associated sub-projects like Clang and libc++. Feature work now shifts to LLVM 13.0 while the LLVM 12 stable release should be out in just over one month's time.

LLVM release manager Tom Stellard announced on Tuesday night that the 12.x release branch has been created and the main development trunk open to LLVM 13.0 feature work.

LLVM 12.0-RC1 is expected to be tagged

Nearly a decade ago we were intrigued by Unvanquished as one of the most interesting open-source game/engine projects of the time. It was peculiar in going through dozens of alpha releases prior to drying up a few years ago. There hasn't been any major release yet past the prior alpha state but the project is in fact still moving along and issued their first new (point) release of the year as well as rolling out a new online updater.

In 2020 we were pleased to see