The Fedora Project is the latest open-source software project working to migrate their Git repositories off using the existing default branch name of "master" and instead using "main" but for some repositories will be "rawhide" where it better aligns with the usage in Fedora Rawhide packages to their development development.

Approved at last week's Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee meeting was their path forward for getting Fedora off Git "master" branches. The proposal as they ended up voting on was:

Proposal: Approve Change proposal

Lavapipe (nee Vallium ) continues picking up more functionality for this software-based Vulkan implementation just as LLVMpipe is to OpenGL.

Lavapipe debuted in Mesa 20.3 and has continued progressing with its Vulkan capabilities for this CPU-based driver. The Lavapipe work continues to be primarily spearheaded by Red Hat's David Airlie who is quite prolific in the open-source graphics driver area.

The latest feature work of Lavapipe being merged into Mesa 21.0 is Vulkan Transform Feedback (VK_EXT_transform_

Arcan , the rather unique and innovative display server in development for about five years , is now matching or even surpassing the feature parity with the X.Org Server and have also issued a new release of their "Durden" desktop environment build atop Arcan.

The last major feature they recently addressed was network transparency support . The secondary area left for hitting X.Org/X11 feature parity was over a drawing API. Some of the other prominent features that Arcan has worked on include migration and recovery support, "

The main feature change for the XFS driver code in Linux 5.11 is adding a new "needs repair" feature flag. When the XFS code marks a file-system as needing repair, it will refuse to mount until the xfs_repair operation is run on it.

The XFS kernel code with Linux 5.11 and later will set the "needs repair" flag on a file-system when it's in a known state needing repair via the xfs_repair user-space utility.

Revealed earlier this year was the Arm Straight Line Speculation (SLS) vulnerability . SLS was a Google discovery for modern ARMv8 CPUs where speculative execution past unconditional changes in control flow could lead to information disclosure via side-channel analysis. Arm recommended compiler-based mitigations to insert speculation barriers after vulnerable instructions, which GCC and LLVM began adding opt-in protections right away. This weekend some additional SLS functionality was added for LLVM.

On top of the prior SLS mitigation options for LLVM (the initial hardening pass - AArch

Building off Friday's release of Wine 6.0-RC3 is now an updated Wine-Staging build for those that want a more experimental/testing blend of Wine.

Wine-Staging 6.0-RC3 is still bringing just under 800 patches compared to the current upstream state of Wine. Wine-Staging activity is light at the moment given upstream Wine's feature freeze ahead of Wine 6.0.0 in January. There were though updates to some of the staging patches around

The KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) changes were sent in today for the Linux 5.11 cycle.

Exciting of these KVM changes for what will be the first major Linux release of 2021 is supporting AMD SEV-ES on the host side. Linux has already seen bring-up work for AMD SEV-ES , the Secure Encrypted Virtualization Encrypted State functionality.

It looks like Mozilla Firefox very soon will be enabling support for AVIF as the image format based on AV1 video coding.

Google added support for AVIF to Chrome/Chromium earlier this year and shipped with Chrome 85 . There has been other industry adoption as well around AVIF images, even by the likes of Microsoft with Windows. Now in an upcoming Firefox release, AVIF image support will be present too.

There is this Mozilla bug ticket tracking the enablement of AVIF support by default. The patch enabling the support by

After undergoing review the past several months, Intel's Platform Monitoring Technology (PMT) is merged with the Linux 5.11 kernel.

Platform Monitoring Technology is hardware telemetry initially exposed with Tiger Lake hardware . This hardware telemetry is driven by customer demand and isn't about reporting hardware data back to Intel but rather collecting data on hardware internally within organizations and making it easier to manage. PMT currently supports Telemetry, Watcher (hardware sampling/tracing), and Crashlog components for various use-cases within organizations.