Lenovo continues working on a number of contributions to the upstream kernel thanks to their work on preloading various Linux distributions on a number of different devices. In cooperation with Red Hat engineers over the past year we have seen a lot of Lenovo related improvements and the latest set to come with the Linux 5.12 cycle is ACPI platform profile support for their laptops.

Along with the previously noted ACPI platform profile infrastructure support , the Lenovo drivers are set to enable platform profile support in Linux 5.12.

As noted

Fedora 34 is planning to switch to using Intel's modern Sound Open Firmware audio driver as it should be in good shape now and superior to the existing sound driver. This is ahead of Intel likely switching to the Intel SOF driver code path by default in the upstream kernel once this change has first been vetted by Fedora users.

The past few years Intel has been developing Sound Open Firmware . As implied by the name, the sound firmware is now open-source for the audio DSP with this effort. This

Canonical today is shipping Ubuntu Core 20 as their minimal, containerized version of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS focused on IoT and embedded uses.

Ubuntu Core as the trimmed down version of Ubuntu is now re-based to Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and now supports full-disk encryption, secure device recovery, and other features particularly around increased security.

Ubuntu Core 20 is offered for x86_64 and ARM hardware and is backed by Canonical with ten years of support. According to

Mesa 21.1 has merged a common dispatch framework for use by Vulkan drivers to allow for better code sharing and the possibility of some Vulkan extensions to be more easily supported across all drivers.

Up to now all five Mesa Vulkan drivers (Intel ANV, Radeon RADV, Broadcom V3DV, Freedreno TURNIP, and Lavapipe) all of them have had their own slightly modified version of Intel's entrypoint generator script. Intel ANV lead developer Jason Ekstrand has taken now to avoiding this unnecessary code duplication between drivers and

Released last month was Phoronix Test Suite 10.2 while now it's been succeeded by Phoronix Test Suite 10.2.1 as a point release to this quarter's stable series.

Phoronix Test Suite 10.2.0 originally brought macOS Big Sur / Apple M1 support improvements, improved time tracking, a more responsive Phoromatic web user interface, BSD support updates, PHP 8.0 compatibility, and a variety of other improvements.

With Phoronix Test Suite 10.2.1

For the better part of a year now we've seen patches for Intel's kernel graphics driver working on fair low-latency scheduling that in part has been inspired by the design of BFS/MuQSS . While it's too late for seeing the work land with Linux 5.12, the latest batch of 57 patches were sent out this week.

Longtime Intel open-source driver developer Chris Wilson continues working on scheduling improvements for the Intel graphics driver. Among the work with the current set of

A combination of new year updates and updating benchmarks ahead of Ice Lake Xeon / Rocket Lake / Ryzen 5000 series mobile / EPYC 7003 Milan has led to a number of new and updated test profiles being available via the Phoronix Test Suite and OpenBenchmarking.org .

January was a very busy month not only with lots of new content on Phoronix, releasing Phoronix Test Suite 10.2 , and new OpenBenchmarking.org features , but also new/updated test profiles for use by Phoronix Test Suite

The user interface changes for GNOME 40 are quickly nearing the finish line with just two weeks to go until the UI freeze.

GNOME Shell recently merged its new horizontal workspaces , among other changes. The official GNOME Shell & Mutter development blog put out a new post on Monday highlighting their latest efforts. They are working to get the remaining big items in place over the next two weeks before the freeze and then an "intense period of polishing and bug fixing."

With a lot of new code already merged, the