While we are still waiting to see what AMD might do for returning to open-source AGESA or better supporting Coreboot and the like, they are making some inroads with open-source firmware support -- beyond the context of Chromebooks where they continue to engage due to Google's engineering requirements. AMD is working to " align with the industry direction of open-source firmware stacks " with their initial focus being on open-source OpenBMC firmware support for their server platforms.

AMD's Supreeth Venkatesh spoke at this week

Manjaro 20.2 is now available as the latest stable version of this Arch Linux derived distribution focused on providing a pleasant and easy-to-use desktop experience.

Manjaro 20.2 is powered by the Linux 5.9 kernel for offering the latest Linux hardware support, improvements were made to their Calamares-based installer, the Manjaro Application Utility has seen many improvements, improved keybindings, and more. Linux 5.4 LTS is also offered as an alternative kernel on Manjaro's minimal ISO.

The

The Khronos Group's glTF specification that is a transmission format for 3D scenes and models continues picking up more impressive capabilities as its adoption by a growing range of software packages continue.

With companies from Microsoft to Autodesk supporting glTF in various capacities for 3D models, the demands on this format continue to increase. Today the glTF working group at Khronos is introducing a set of new physically based rendering (PBR) extensions to offer new capabilities for glTF.

The new PBR rendering extensions are for clear coat, transmission,

It was just in September that the C++20 standards draft was approved as a major update to the programming language over C++17. While compilers like GCC and LLVM Clang are still completing all of the changes for C++20 support, Clang is already moving ahead and has added support for the " -std=c++2b " option as it begins the endeavor of staging changes likely for C++23.

Clang currently implements much of C++2

The BUS1 kernel code for providing an in-kernel, capability-based IPC mechanism hasn't seen much (or any?) activity in well over a year but at least the Dbus-Broker project continues ahead. Dbus-Broker continues ahead as this D-Bus compatible implementation focused on correctness while being optimized for performance.

This speedier user-space D-Bus implementation is out today with version 25. There aren't any exciting features for this D-Bus Message Broker update but rather just

In addition to OpenZFS 2.0 releasing and Bcachefs hitting up more performance optimizations , some further next-gen Linux storage news is Red Hat's Stratis Storage 2.3 being released.

Stratis is Red Hat's effort around improving Linux storage capabilities and features similar to ZFS and Btrfs but building atop Linux's LVM capabilities and XFS file-system while providing clean integration and interfaces around the advanced features exposed.

New with Stratis 2.3 is supporting Clevis encryption policies. Clevis is an automated encryption framework to

POCL as the "Portable Computing Language" that implements OpenCL and allows it to function atop CPUs as well as CUDA-enabled NVIDIA GPUs, HSA-supported AMD GPUs, and other possible back-ends, is preparing for a new feature release.

On Wednesday marked the release of POCL 1.6-RC1 as the test release for the next update to the Portable Computing Language.

POCL continues leveraging LLVM/Clang for doing much of the heavy lifting and supporting a diverse variety of back-ends for CPU execution

While we have been looking out for Radeon ROCm 4.0 that was announced back at SC20 as well as an updated ROCm for providing the RDNA2 compute support only found currently in their packaged RX 6800 series Linux driver, ROCm 3.10 arrived on Wednesday as an unexpected twist.

ROCm 4.0 has yet to debut via the usual channels. The ROCm 3.10 release also comes without any mentioned GFX10 RDNA/RDN2 support. We are waiting to hear

In working towards the March release of GNOME 40 , the Mutter compositor / window manager is out today with its 40 Alpha release.

The GNOME 40 Alpha release isn't scheduled until 9 January but coming out today is the Mutter 40 Alpha tagged. Among the changes include:

- Mutter's input work is now handled on a separate thread as a big win!

- Better handling of XWayland crashes so it should avoid tearing down the compositor and instead only removing the X11 application that was