Earlier this month Hector Martin and the Asahi Linux developers posted their initial Linux kernel patches for bringing up the Apple M1 ARM SoC platform for the mainline kernel with devices like the 2020 Mac Mini / MacBook Pro / MacBook Air devices. The second iteration of those Apple M1 Linux patches have now been posted.

Hector Martin continues working on the Apple M1 Linux support via crowdfunding with the ambitious goal of getting Linux running well on these modern ARM-powered Apple devices. Linux is already booting on Apple

Heading out of Valentine's weekend, there is a new Vulkan specification update with a notable new extension.

Vulkan 1.2.170 is available this morning and includes the VK_KHR_synchronization2 extension. VK_KHR_synchronization2 is an update over the original Vulkan synchronization APIs.

VK_KHR_synchronization2 simplifies the core synchronization APIs and aims to make them more usable. VK_KHR_synchronization2 also includes a new pipeline stage and adds new flags. There is also simplified

Due to an unfortunate misalignment of the Ryzen 5000 series launch and the Linux kernel cycles, CPU temperature monitoring for Ryzen 5000 (Zen 3) desktop CPUs isn't landing until now with the Linux 5.12 kernel cycle.

The hardware monitoring (HWMON) subsystem updates were sent in this morning for the just-opened Linux 5.12 merge window. There is now Zen 3 desktop CPU temperature monitoring support within the existing k10temp driver. The patch just needed

The Dark Mod that began as a total conversion mod for Doom 3 but evolved into a standalone game making use of the open-source id Tech 4 game engine is out with a big update. This is one of the few open-source games making use of the public id Tech 4 code-base and with today's v2.09 update is a large rewrite to its graphics back-end.

This open-source id Tech 4 game has a new OpenGL 3.3 renderer that replaces the

Made public last year was the Arm Straight Light Speculation (SLS) vulnerability . SLS with ARM hardware can result in speculative executing instructions following an unconditional change in control flow. The Linux kernel may soon have an option for enabling the mitigation of the Arm SLS vulnerability.

Mitigating the Arm Straight Line Speculation vulnerability involves using speculation barrier sequences following vulnerable instructions -- either the Speculation Barrier (SB) instruction or the DSB+ISB instruction sequence. The GCC compiler added its support along with the LLVM Clang compiler handling of this vulnerability

What better way for open-source enthusiasts to celebrate Valentine's Day than with the stable release of the Linux 5.11 kernel... Linus Torvalds even changed the kernel codename for the occasion to being the "Valentine's Day Edition" kernel.

While there were a fair number of changes merged this past week, Linus still went ahead today and released Linux 5.11 rather than going into overtime by releasing Linux 5.11-rc8. Included as part of this week'

Among Facebook employees while they are mostly using Windows and macOS on their laptops/desktops, for those using Linux the primary choice has shifted from Ubuntu to Fedora but they have begun ramping up CentOS Stream too.

Michel Salim of Facebook presented at last weekend's FOSDEM 2021 virtual conference on the company's internal desktop fleet. While Facebook is known for their usage of CentOS on servers, when it comes to Linux on their employee desktops Fedora is the primary target but with growing support for CentOS Stream.

The open-source Linux graphics driver support for the Ryzen 5000 series mobile hardware has been developed under the " Green Sardine " codename. With the soon-to-be-stable Linux 5.11 kernel offering the initial enablement for the new hardware and Ryzen 5000 series laptops expected this quarter, the Green Sardine firmware blobs have landed in linux-firmware.git .

On Thursday the necessary "Green Sardine" firmware binaries were merged into linux-firmware.git, the central repository

Linux 5.11 should be released today as stable but we'll see if 5.11-rc8 is decided instead given there has been an uptick in last minute changes for this kernel. This will mean either the Linux 5.12 merge window is kicking off at the end of today or could be pushed back by one week, but in whatever case there are many changes that have been queuing up for this next kernel version window.

Below is a look at various changes that have been