The oneAPI Level Zero repository consisting of the Level Zero API headers, Level Zero loader, and validation layer have reached version 1.1.

Following last year's big oneAPI 1.0 "Gold" status, Intel's open-source oneAPI effort continues moving along with the Level Zero focus as their low-level, direct-to-metal interface for offload accelerators like GPUs and other "XPU" devices.

While now released as Level Zero 1.1.0, the changes aren't all

It was just earlier this month that mainline Mesa achieved OpenGL 4.1 for Zink , the Gallium3D driver allowing OpenGL to be implemented atop Vulkan. Now OpenGL 4.2 support is in place for this promising Mesa component.

Going back to last summer there have been patches experimentally taking Zink as far as OpenGL 4.6 albeit it's been a lengthy process getting all of the relevant patches upstreamed. Additionally, some patches have required reworking or proper adjustments after going through the conformance test suite to ensure they

KDE Plasma 5.21 is now in beta as what will be the first major KDE desktop update of the new year.

There is a lot to find with KDE Plasma 5.21 while the good Wayland support is certainly exciting and a lot of polishing throughout the KDE Plasma desktop. Some of the Plasma 5.21 highlights include:

- Extensive improvements to KWin's Wayland compositing code as well as support for mixed-refresh-rate display configurations, among other Wayland improvements.

- Firewall settings are

Red Hat hasn't been the only major enterprise Linux distribution shifting around their pieces with regards to how RHEL is formed with moving to CentOS Stream as its future upstream. Over the past year especially openSUSE Leap and SUSE Linux Enterprise having been moving closer together with the source trees now being more closely aligned between Leap and "SLE". SUSE has published an insightful blog post series detailing the prior way that openSUSE Tumbleweed and Leap tied in with SUSE Linux Enterprise and then the direction they have been shifting.

Up until openSUSE

Netgate has announced pfSense as a rebranded and improved edition of this popular BSD-based firewall/network OS platform.

The pfSense Plus offering is based on the existing pfSense Factory Edition and with that a greater divergence is forming between pfSense Community Edition and this commercial offering,

Moving ahead, pfSense Community Edition and pfSense Plus will diverge but with Netgate continuing to "donate features" to the community project. pfSense Plus will be made available to Netgate customers and will be installed on all Netgate appliances.

Even in 2021 longtime open-source AMD Mesa driver developer Marek Olšák isn't done optimizing OpenGL for delivering the best possible performance with the Radeon graphics driver. Marek's latest work includes more OpenGL threading enhancements and other work seemingly targeted at SPECViewPerf workloads.

Marek has spent the past several weeks working to remove the last OpenGL threading synchronization stalls that happen with SPECViewPerf 13. As part of this latest pull request he added support to glthread for executing display lists asynchronously. Plus there are

While Ubuntu normally ships with the latest GNOME desktop as of release time, April's release of Ubuntu 21.04 will not be shipping with GNOME 40 but sticking to GNOME 3.38.

While GNOME 40 should be out in March like usual and normally the latest GNOME updates are pulled timely into the Ubuntu desktop, given all the changes with GNOME 40 and GTK 4.0, they will be holding off one cycle. Thus Ubuntu 21.04 will remain on GNOME

Raptor Engineering known for their work on open-source POWER9 systems has announced Kestrel, an open-source baseboard management controller (BMC) design that is open down to the HDL design and firmware.

Raptor describes Kestrel as "the world's first open HDL / open firmware soft BMC, built on POWER and capable of IPLing existing OpenPOWER systems!" This isn't a physical BMC chip but a "soft" BMC that is currently designed and tested on Lattice ECP-5 FPGAs. It can currently handle