When it comes to kernel address space isolation (ASI) and other yet-to-be-merged security features around fending off speculative execution attacks, there are multiple concurrent efforts by many of the public cloud providers and other hyperscalers. A Google engineer at this week's Linux Plumbers Conference has called for more collaboration in this area to ideally provide a unified solution.

Case in point to all the work going on in this area were talks by Google, Oracle, and DigitalOcean this week at Linux Plumbers Conference. DigitalOcean

After forgetting to release last week, Mesa 20.2 -RC3 is out as the newest test build of this quarterly Mesa3D feature release for the collection of open-source OpenGL/Vulkan drivers.

Mesa 20.2 is bringing many exciting features for these open-source graphics drivers. With Mesa 20.2-RC3 there are the latest fixes in getting ready for release. But as not all blocker bugs have been resolved, there will be at least a 20.2

An alpha prototype of openSUSE "Jump" is now available for testing of this new build of openSUSE.

OpenSUSE Jump is the prototype project that is built using the Open Build Service and working to synchronize SUSE Linux Enterprise with openSUSE Leap. OpenSUSE Jump brings SUSE Linux Enterprise and Leap closer to the same code-base.

For those wanting to test openSUSE Jump as this new blend, alpha images are available. Jump images can be found at download.opensuse.org .

At the same time, their rolling-release openSUSE

For those looking at enjoying some open-source Linux gaming this weekend, SuperTuxKart 1.2 is out as the Mario Kart inspired racing game that is cross-platform and features the Linux mascot Tux.

SuperTuxKart 1.2 brings better gamepad support thanks to SDL2, support for customizing the game's camera, a new theme, Haiku OS support for that open-source BeOS inspired platform, Android improvements, various kart improvements, support for IPv6 LAN servers, and other in-game features.

Download links

While a Microsoft engineer was at Linux Plumbers Conference this week talking up their LTO and PGO optimization work for the Linux kernel , Google engineers have now one upped that work by also shipping kernels with AutoFDO optimizations.

Google is not only leveraging link-time optimizations (LTO) and profile-guided optimizations (PGO) for maximizing compiler-based efficiencies of their kernel images but also auto feedback directed optimizations. AutoFDO relies upon CPU hardware counters with a sampling based profile for driving feedback to the compiler for better optimizing the binaries.

With last week's release of ROCm 3.7 for the Radeon Open Compute stack, it turns out there is a welcome change that wasn't published as part of the announcement.

Radeon Open Compute 3.7 has an open-source OpenCL Image implementation. With previous releases, a binary-only libhsa-ext-image64.so library was required for OpenCL Image support with the ROCm stack. But quietly with the new ROCm 3.7 release, they added the source code as part of

While Fedora 33 hasn't even been released yet, Fedora 34 is already seeing new feature proposals.

One of the planned changes so far for next spring's Fedora 34 release is to reduce the installation media size by means of greater compression.

The current plan is to ramp up the compression ratio of the SquashFS file-system on the install media. Red Hat's Bohdan Khomutskyi is looking at making use of XZ compression, a block size of 1MiB, and without the BCJ filter.

As mentioned back in July, upstream Linux developers have been working to figure out a path for adding Rust code to the Linux kernel . That topic is now being further explored at this week's virtual Linux Plumbers Conference and it's still looking like it will happen, it's just a matter of when the initial infrastructure will be in place and how slowly the rollout will be.

Back in July, Linus Torvalds shared his thoughts on Rust within the Linux kernel tree and didn't shoot down the idea