Fedora 34 is shaping up to be another exciting Fedora Linux release on the feature front. Among the material to look forward to in this spring 2021 Linux distribution release is routing all audio through PipeWire by default , enabling systemd-oomd by default , an independent XWayland package , and more. The latest proposal involves making use of DNF/RPM copy-on-write support atop Btrfs with Fedora 34.

Fedora Workstation 33 initiated the move to the Btrfs file-system by default. With Fedora

Just in time for the upcoming AMD Ryzen 5000 series mobile processors, it's looking like the S2idle support is finally coming together on Linux for increased power savings.

As previously covered, Linux 5.11 picked up an AMD SoC PMC driver that is responsible for handling S2idle transactions driven by the platform firmware on the SMU. Sent in on Tuesday as part of a secondary set of ACPI changes for Linux 5.11 is more AMD S2idle enablement work.

This

Landing in Mesa 21.0 on Tuesday was support for OpenGL tessellation shaders (ARB_tessellation_shader) with the Zink Gallium3D code implementing generic OpenGL support atop Vulkan.

Tessellation support is one of the key requirements for OpenGL 4.0 and one of the remaining extensions for Zink in hitting GL 4.0 on mainline Mesa besides ARB_gpu_shader5 and ARB_texture_gather.

For months already there have been experimental patches taking Zink up to OpenGL 4.6 but that code has

Merged into the Linux kernel back in 2015 was the TraceFS file-system to better address Linux tracing use-cases that previously were handled atop DebugFS. Now LibTraceFS has reached version 1.0 as the user-space library around TraceFS after being spun out of Trace-CMD earlier this year.

TraceFS is a pseudo, stackable file-system for capturing file-system traces in a portable manner. TraceFS is designed explicitly for this use-case rather than the prior tracing tacked atop DebugFS. LibTraceFS was

Xfce 4.16 managed to ship in 2020 as one of the original goals for this release after the much delayed Xfce 4.14 series. Xfce 4.16 comes with many incremental improvements to this GTK3 desktop environment.

Xfce 4.16 features an update to its icons and overall visual identity, numerous improvements to the X11 window manager, a new plug-in for the Xfce4 panel to serve as both the status notifier and system tray items, support for

Microsoft continues pushing new code into Mesa 21.0 as its efforts around Mesa continue to ramp up principally around GPU acceleration within Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) as well as allowing the likes of OpenGL and OpenCL to function under Windows 10 in the absence of native GL/CL drivers by using Mesa to translate the APIs for consumption by Direct3D 12 drivers.

The newest code volleyed into Mesa 21.0 this evening is the "spirv_to_dxil" library for translating SPIR-

At the end of November systemd 247 released with the new Out-of-Memory Daemon (systemd-oomd) and for the Fedora 34 release next year that will likely be enabled by default for all spins.

Systemd-OOMD aims to improve the Linux low-memory / OoM experience and is based on code originally written by Facebook for their Linux servers and then adapted for Linux desktop memory pressure scenarios. Systemd-OOMD allows monitoring for resource contention and can kill opt-in processes when the memory/

Haiku as the open-source OS inspired by BeOS continues to be quite active in feature development as 2020 draws to a close.

The Haiku project has issued an activity report concerning their happenings for November/December 2020. Haiku over this time has seen code clean-ups, various user interface improvements, continued work on the ARM port, POSIX compatibility enhancements, networking updates, storage handling updates, and continued work on sound and other hardware drivers. The fixed up ACPI thermal driver is also

The Linux hardware monitoring "k10temp" driver is dropping support for reporting CPU voltage and current information for AMD Zen-based processors over lack of documentation for being able to properly support the functionality.

Earlier in 2020 this long-standing AMD hwmon temperature driver added support for core/SoC current and voltage reporting with Zen processors based on the work by the community and some best assumptions around the appropriate registers. But now that support is being dropped for lack of accuracy in some configurations and the possibility