The CentOS board has approved the creation of a "Hyperscale" SIG spearheaded by engineers from the likes of Facebook and Twitter in aiming to make CentOS Stream more appealing to such large scale server/cloud organizations.

As noted earlier this week, the CentOS Hyperscale(r) SIG is about shipping newer packages via a new repository and other possible modifications to package defaults in aiming to make CentOS Stream more suitable for large enterprises. Select packages might be back-ported to CentOS via a new opt-in repository, alternate policy

For those wanting to run a micro-kernel operating system for your low-cost, open-source friendly PinePhone, the Genode OS framework plans to port to the PinePhone this year. Genode OS and its Sculpt general purpose platform are also wanting to better embrace GPU support in 2021.

The Genode operating system framework that features an original, open-source micro-kernel abstraction layer and a set of user-space components in development since 2008, published their road-map for the year

Sent in last week were many AMD graphics driver updates slated for Linux 5.12 including the likes of Radeon RX 6000 series OverDrive support . This week marks another batch of AMDGPU kernel driver changes being submitted to DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 5.12 cycle.

Among the "new stuff" for AMDGPU in Linux 5.12 include more code warning fixes, enabling of GPU reset and recovery for Navy Flounder yet-to-be-released RDNA 2 SKUs, SMU workload profile

With this spring's release of Ubuntu 21.04 there is more widespread use of "phased updates" for gradually rolling out new stable release updates to help avoid any regressions en masse from coming to light. For years the Ubuntu desktop has employed this phased updates strategy while now with it being plumbed into APT, Ubuntu Server and other versions will by default make use of phased updates.

Going back a number of years in Ubuntu has been Phased Updates that wired into Update Manager has led to the gradual rollout

After experimental builds and the recent release candidates, Valve's Proton 5.13-5 is now available as the latest version of this Wine downstream for powering Steam Play for running Windows games on Linux.

Proton 5.13-5 is notable in that there is expanded OpenXR virtual reality API support to now allow Microsoft Flight Simulator to work on Linux in VR mode. At the moment that Flight Simulator VR mode requires AMD graphics hardware. Also notable are fixes for sound within the game Cyberpunk 207

Hitting the Mesa tree when Mesa 21.0 was being branched (but looks like it will still make it now part of "staging/21.0") is support for AMD's "rapid packed math" with the RADV driver's ACO compiler back-end.

Rapid Packed Math is the AMD terminology for allowing two FP16 operations within a single FP32 operation. ACO, which is the default shader compiler back-end since last year in Mesa's RADV driver,

One of the latest planned changes to the long list of improvements for Fedora 34 is enabling the HarfBuzz support within the FreeType library.

Fedora plans to flip on the HarfBuzz text shaping engine support with the FreeType font rasterization engine. In doing so, this should yield improved hinting of glyphs especially with languages that need more complicated text shaping. FreeType has supported HarfBuzz for more than a half-decade (after HarfBuzz was originally was born out of that project) while Fedora hasn't enabled its usage until the planned change

Patches were sent out today that provide the open-source Linux kernel "Nouveau" driver with support for NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 series "Ampere" graphics cards. But at the moment there is no 3D acceleration and the developers are blocked still by signed firmware requirements, so it's basically just a matter of having kernel mode-setting display support.

Red Hat's Ben Skeggs sent out the pull request today that provides kernel mode-setting support for the RTX 30 "Ampere" graphics cards with