Sent in last week for the Linux 5.9 kernel merge window were the initial batch of changes to the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) while today some additional interesting changes were sent out.

This latest material for KVM in Linux 5.9 includes:

- Support for the SERIALIZE instruction on KVM x86/x86_64. Intel's SERIALIZE ensures all flags/register/memory modifications are complete and all buffered writes drained before moving on to execute the next instruction. This can

Ubuntu developers are looking at using Intel IWD as the iNET wireless daemon to potentially replace WPA_Supplicant for offering a better WiFi experience.

Intel's open-source team has always been working on IWD as a potential replacement to WPA_Supplicant while recently the Ubuntu folks have found it has "mostly reached feature parity" now to WPA_Supplicant albeit is in need of more testing on the desktop side.

Among the IWD functionality they are interested in is faster network discovery, more reliable roaming, less system resource usage

AMD has released their Radeon Pro Software for Enterprise 20.Q3 driver as their quarterly update to this enterprise-rated driver for their professional/workstation graphics offerings. In step with the new Windows driver release is also the 20.Q3 packaged Linux driver for enterprise distributions including RHEL/CentOS 8.1, RHEL/CentOS 7.8, Ubuntu 18.04.4, and SUSE SLED/SLES 15.

The announcement of Radeon Pro Software for Enterprise 20.Q3

While Mesa 20.2 isn't even releasing for a few weeks, Mesa 20.3 is already seeing new feature work that will debut next quarter.

Intel's Jason Ekstrand has landed a set of patches for handling of kernels within Iris, Intel's modern Gallium3D driver. He commented , " This MR contains most of the patches required to handle kernels in iris. I've had them lying around in a branch in some form or another for a while. We should upstream

QEMU 5.1 is now available for this important piece of the open-source Linux virtualization stack.

There are plenty of changes across the board with QEMU 5.1 while some of the highlights standing out include:

- Support for live migration on AMD EPYC systems with nested virtualization.

- Persistent Memory Region (PMR) support from the NVMe 1.4 specification.

- Support for passing secrets to QEMU via the Linux keyring.

- Support for the ARMv8.5 memory tagging feature and ARMv8.2 TTS

It was just one week ago that LibreOffice 7.0 was released and it has already seen around a half-million downloads for this leading open-source, cross-platform office suite.

The Document Foundation crew shared this morning that from their official downloads area as of this morning they saw 422,938 downloads. Not bad for just one week and that number doesn't take into account those that procure LibreOffice 7.0 from their Linux distribution's package manager or other third-party

With the recently released Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.2, the Flatpak sandboxing and app distribution tech is ready to shine and there is also the new Red Hat Enterprise Linux Flatpak runtime.

The Flatpak runtime and SDK images are supported with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.2 with a focus on containerized desktop applications. The new RHEL Flatpak Runtime follows the traditional Red Hat Enterprise Linux lifecycle that is expected for a much longer duration than the likes of the FreeDesktop.org Flatpak Runtime. Red Hat intends to maintain their new Flatpak

For a while now Intel has been quietly been working on "mOS" as the "multi-OS" that is a modified version of the Linux kernel that in turn is running lightweight kernels for high-performance computing purposes.

Intel mOS has been seldom talked about (or incredibly rare, based on public searches) as it's still largely a research project but showing much potential in the area of high performance computing for delivering better scalability and reliability of HPC workloads. In fact, mOS can already be used on

If you are more of an artistic type than programmer, there still is plenty of valuable assistance that can be provided to free software projects... The latest call for help is that of the Debian project in looking for the Debian 11 "Bullseye" desktop artwork.

The formal call for the Debian 11 artwork proposals has been sent out in coming up with the desktop look-and-feel for this free software GNU/Linux platform come its release next year.

The deadline for submissions to be considered for