Ampere Computing with their 80-core Ampere Altra processors and Mount Jade reference platform continue making progress on open-source firmware support for interested parties.

Ampere's Arjun Khare presented earlier this month at the 2021 FOSDEM virtual conference on the company's open-source firmware efforts. Ampere is "committed to supporting open-source in the firmware ecosystem" and have been engaging with the community and their customers from OpenBMC support to TianoCore/EDK2 and LinuxBoot through OCP/OSF efforts. Their relevant

Linux 5.12 is bringing the initial infrastructure around ACPI Platform Profile support and with this kernel it's implemented for newer Lenovo ThinkPad and IdeaPad laptops . The support allow for altering the system's power/performance characteristics depending upon your desire for a speedy, quiet, or cool experience. With Linux 5.13 it looks like HP laptops with this capability will begin to see working Platform Profile support too.

Lenovo is the initial Linux user/supporter of this Platform Profile support while Dell has also expressed

Debian is the latest major Linux distribution deploying a Debuginfod web server so that ELF/DWARF/source-code information can be supplied via HTTP to clients on-demand when debugging.

Introduced last year was Debuginfod with GNU Binutils 2.34 for distributing debugging information / source code on demand. Readelf and objdump utilities can query connected Debuginfod servers for source files / data based on a build ID. Debuginfod support was later integrated into the GNU Debugger too (GDB 10.1). The effort was led by

An Oracle engineer has proposed introducing a new "-ftrivial-auto-var-init=" option for the GCC compiler that would allowing initializing automatic variables with either a pattern or zeroes in the name of security.

In trying to fight security issues stemming from uninitialized memory disclosure, the suggested -ftrivial-auto-var-init==zero would initialize automatic variables with zeroes unless the new "uninitialized" variable attribute was used on a particular variable for overriding the behavior.

Or there is the -ftrivial-auto

Pop open the champagne as the in-development Linux 5.12 kernel will be able to support link-time optimizations (LTO) in conjunction with the LLVM Clang compiler on not only AArch64 (64-bit ARM) but also x86_64.

Last week I noted that Clang LTO support had been submitted but at the time was not clear if Linus Torvalds was willing to land it given his past comments around LTO'ing the kernel. With that pull request it was also

After a two year hiatus on the patches, VMware's Nadav Amit has gotten back to working on current TLB flushing support for the Linux kernel in yielding a small but measurable performance improvement.

Nadav has been working on Linux patches to allow for flushing of remote and local TLBs concurrently. Back in mid 2019 numbers shared by him pointed up to a 1~4% performance improvement on average under sysbench for these patches.

But the patches were not revised until recently when they were re-based against the

In yesterday's Linux distribution benchmark comparison on a Ryzen 9 5900X, you may have noticed some of the Ubuntu 21.04 development benchmarks coming in slower than Ubuntu 20.10 but overall a tight race. That is something I've seen now on other systems too -- such as these results to pass along today from an Intel notebook with the latest Ubuntu 20.10 vs. 21.04 development tests.

While still having my hands on

Thanks to Google engineers the Linux 5.12 kernel is providing punctual support for eMMC inline encryption that is being ratified with a forthcoming specification update and already being found within some mobile hardware.

Inline encryption for eMMC is able to enhance the storage encryption performance while also being more power efficient. This eMMC support builds off the existing Linux kernel FSCRYPT support around inline encryption . UFS support for inline encryption was upstreamed in Linux 5.9 as well while now the eMMC support is ready to make its premiere.

Along with the