GNOME Foundation and Linux Foundation Leftovers

• GNOME 40 Beta has been Released

  Anyone looking to test the beta for the upcoming GNOME 40 release can now do so. On the heels of the alpha release of GNOME 40, the developers have announced the availability of the beta, which includes a number of improvements and bug fixes. Of course, the biggest change to GNOME is the new horizontal Activities Overview, which makes for a much-improved workflow on the desktop. With the desktops residing at the top of the Overview, it is now easier to drag and drop an application to the specific desktop you want. It’s far more intuitive and efficient. This new layout also improves usage with touch screen navigation and faster overall performance. Another hotly anticipated change comes by way of how multi-monitor support will work with the new horizontal Activities Overview. GNOME 40 will default to only showing workspaces on the primary display, with the top bar and the Activities Overview on both displays.

• State of FinOps 2021 Report Shows Massive Growth in Cloud Financial Management

  Teams working with FinOps, the field of cloud financial management, are expected to grow 40% in 2021 according to a new report from the FinOps Foundation, a Linux Foundation non-profit trade association focused on codifying and promoting cloud financial management best practices and standards. The survey of over 800 FinOps practitioners – with a collective $30+ billion in annual cloud spend – underscores the need for more education around how to manage cloud finances.

• Here Is How To Create A Clean, Resilient Electrical Grid

• Linux Foundation, LF Networking, and LF Edge Announce Speaker Line-up for Open Networking & Edge Executive Forum, March 10-12

  The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, along with co-hosts LF Networking, the umbrella organization fostering collaboration and innovation across the entire open networking stack, and LF Edge, the umbrella organization building an open source framework for the edge, announced today the speaker line-up for Open Networking & Edge Executive Forum. The schedule can be viewed here and the speaker details can be viewed here. Open Networking & Edge Executive Forum (ONEEF) is a special edition of Open Networking & Edge Summit, the industry’s premier open networking & edge event, gathering senior technologists and executive leaders from enterprises, telecoms and cloud providers for timely discussions on the state of the industry, imminent priorities and insights into Service Provider, Cloud, Enterprise Networking, and Edge/IOT requirements.

• Linux Foundation, LF Networking, and LF Edge Announce Speaker Line-up for Open Networking & Edge Executive Forum, March 10-12

Istio 1.7.8 Released

This release contains bug fixes to improve robustness. This release note describes what’s different between Istio 1.7.7 and Istio 1.7.8 Also: Support for Istio 1.7 has ended

KDE: Krita Stuff and Slimbook Becoming a KDE Patron

• New Video by Ramon | Krita

  Ramon Miranda has just finished a new video, this time he’s doing impressionism in Krita! And with that, there’s also a new brush preset bundle for you to download! Click on the image to go to the video on Krita’s channel!

• Check Your Painting Values with One Krita Shortcut

  New video tutorial: how to set up one Keyboard shortcut to check your painting values in #krita while painting? Here is a short (2min) quick tip to answer this :-)

• Slimbook Becomes a KDE Patron

  “Since our early days in 2015, we at SLIMBOOK have been trying our best not only to sell GNU/Linux compatible quality hardware, but also to contribute and help those who make Free and Open Source Software. Our variety of contributions range from giving support to local groups of developers, the making of forums and tutorials to help the Linux community and sharing a common vision with KDE, to hit the market with a device able to provide the end user with the best out-of-the-box Linux experience available. [...] We take our duty of supporting the KDE Community full of pride, and we are honored to be KDE Patrons."

Kernel: Bootlin, Intel, and VFIO

• Videos and slides of Bootlin presentations at FOSDEM

  The videos from Bootlin’s presentations earlier this month at FOSDEM 2021 are now publicly available. Once again, FOSDEM was a busy event, even if it was online for once. As in most technical conferences, Bootlin engineers volunteered to share their experience and research by giving two talks.

• Intel's Simple Firmware Interface Being Killed Off With Linux 5.12 - Phoronix

  Intel's "Simple Firmware Interface" that dates back to the company's early Atom-powered mobile days is being eliminated with the in-development Linux 5.12 kernel. More than one decade ago with the Intel Moorestown platform, Simple Firmware Interface (SFI) was envisioned as a solution for lightweight devices in place of a complete ACPI implementation. Intel hasn't employed the Simple Firmware Interface as part of their platform design in years while ACPI is alive and well. Last year Intel engineers marked SFI as "obsolete" within the Linux kernel and confirmed Intel had no plans of resurrecting the Simple Firmware Interface.

• VFIO Gets Batched Page Pinning For An Easy Performance Improvement With Linux 5.12 - Phoronix

  The VFIO changes to the Linux 5.12 kernel include an optimization worth mentioning. The VFIO driver work for Linux 5.12 isn't too significant but the batched page pinning will be of interest to some. Up to now the VFIO kernel code has relied on pinning one 4K page at a time. That major efficiency bottleneck has been addressed with the batched page pinning to handle batches of 512 at a time.