Brief items
Kernel development
Kernel release status
The 5.11 kernel was released on February 14. In the announcement, Linus said: "I know it's Valentine's Day here in the US - maybe give this release a good testing before you go back and play with development kernels. All right? Because I'm sure your SO will understand."
Headline features in 5.11 include Intel SGX support, a new system-call interception mechanism, the seccomp() constant-action bitmap optimization, the internal kmap_local() API, the epoll_pwait2() system call, and much more. See the LWN merge-window articles (part 1, part 2) and the (under development) KernelNewbies 5.11 page for more information.
Stable updates: 5.10.16, 5.4.98, and 4.19.176 were released on February 13, followed by 5.10.17 and 5.4.99 on February 17.
5.12 Merge window delayed
Those of us who are watching the mainline kernel repository may have been wondering why it appears that no pull requests for the 5.12 merge window have yet been acted upon. The problem, it seems, is power outages caused by the severe winter weather in the US Pacific northwest. Until that gets resolved, which could take a few days, the 5.12 merge window is likely to remain on hold.
Distributions
Gentoo mourns the loss of Kent Fredric
A brief post on the Gentoo site is in memory of Kent "kent\n" Frederic. "Kent was an active member of the Gentoo community for many years. He tirelessly managed Gentoo’s Perl support, and was active in the Rust project as well as in many other corners. We all remember him as an enthusiastic, bright person, with lots of eye for detail and constant willingness to help out and improve things. On behalf of the world-wide Gentoo community, our heartfelt condolences go out to his family and friends."
Development
Go 1.16 released
Version 1.16 of the Go language is available. New features include an "embed" package, Apple Arm64 support, use of modules by default, and build-performance improvements; see the release notes for details.Rust 1.50.0 released
Version 1.50.0 of the Rust language has been released. "For this release, we have improved array indexing, expanded safe access to union fields, and added to the standard library."
Development quote of the week
When you put together the lessons from each of the research exercises we've done, the result is a picture of different user segments having somewhat different interests and requirements. On the one hand, we have the large number of people who have never used GNOME or an open source desktop, to whom a familiar design is one that is generally preferable. On the other hand, there are users who don't want a carbon copy of the proprietary desktops, and there are (probably more technical) users who are particularly interested in a more minimal, pared back experience which doesn't distract them from their work.
The best way for the GNOME project to navigate this landscape is a tricky question, and it involves a difficult balancing act. However, with the changes that are coming in GNOME 40, we hope that we are starting out on that path, with an approach that both adopts some familiar conventions from other platforms, while developing and refining GNOME's unique strengths.
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