The Debian 11 "Bullseye" build-essential freeze is now in effect with the release team no longer entertaining transition requests. Meanwhile, architecture support for Debian 12 is in early stages of discussion with a possible reduction in i386 support for that follow-on release.

Debian 11.0 "Bullseye" will see its soft freeze for new packages begin on 12 February, the hard freeze beginning a month later on 12 March, and then the full freeze of Debian 12 to

For those with TPM2 security chips in your system or various hardware security tokens like YubiKeys, the upcoming systemd 248 will make it much easier to use then for unlocking your encrypted LUKS2 volumes.

While systemd-cryptsetup has already supported unlocking LUKs2 volumes at boot via user-supplied passphrases and key files on a local or removable disk, with systemd 248 will be the ability to make use of TPM2 / FIDO2 / PKCS#11 security hardware for unlocking volumes if desired.

The

While normally the feature branching and first release candidate for new Mesa3D quarterly releases doesn't begin until around the end of the first month of a new quarter, this time around with Mesa 21.0 it has begun today -- half-way through the month of January. This should at least ensure Mesa 21.0 stable ships in February rather than March. Mesa 20.3.3 was also released today as the newest stable version for the time being.

Mesa 21.

While Bob Swan has been the interim and then permanent CEO for less than three years at Intel, following much speculation heating up in recent weeks, Bob Swan is out and returning to Intel is Pat Gelsinger who will now lead as CEO.

Beginning mid-February, Pat Gelsinger will serve as the CEO of Intel and join the board of directors. This follows a bumpy few years from Intel's manufacturing woes, security issues coming to light, and increased competition from AMD. Pat Gelsinger has been the CEO of VMware

NUVIA, the startup focused on making new high performance ARM CPUs for the data center that has talked up big performance capabilities and big performance-per-Watt advantages , is being acquired by Qualcomm.

While Qualcomm has tried with data center SoCs in the past with their Centriq processors, they announced this morning they are acquiring NUVIA. Qualcomm is paying out $1.4 billion USD to acquire NUVIA.

Qualcomm stated in today's announcement, " NUVIA CPUs are expected to be integrated across Qualcomm Technologies’ broad portfolio of

The Khronos Group and LunarG have announced an updated Vulkan SDK that includes now formally providing support for Apple platforms, including Apple Silicon systems via Universal Binaries.

With Apple still not officially backing Vulkan but preferring their own closed ecosystem of the Metal API, Vulkan on macOS/iOS platforms continue to rely on the MoltenVK portability layer that ultimately routes Vulkan over the Metal drivers.

With the Vulkan SDK now being formally available for Apple platforms, the hope is to ease Vulkan-on-macOS development by games / engine developers and other

At the start of the month Intel sent out their initial graphics driver changes targeting Linux 5.12 while now a secondary set of changes have been sent to DRM-Next.

That initial pull included restoring Tiger Lake Gen12 frame-buffer compression, HDR display support for select Intel Gen9 graphics hardware support, atomic mode-setting improvements for Big Joiner, and other changes.

The secondary pull request this week is mostly made up of minor changes and fixes with the open-source Intel developers still ramping up

Ubuntu 21.04 will do away with the existing practice on Ubuntu Linux systems of making new user home directories world-readable.

Creating new users on Ubuntu systems up to now have led to home directories being world-readable. Home directories were created with 755 permissions but will be dropped to 750 now to prevent new home directories from being readable by other users on the system.

Going back to at least 2006 have been complaints over home permissions being too open . The original