Newer wireless Logitech keyboard/mice supporting "unified battery" reporting will be supported beginning with Linux 5.12 as a newer interface compared to the existing battery reporting support.

While Logitech doesn't engage much with seeing good Linux support by their consumer devices (there has been only a handful of commits from Logitech developers over the past decade - in most cases providing just some basic bits), the open-source community through reverse engineering and widespread testing have filled in the voids. Wireless Logitech devices on Linux have

GCC 11 entered its final stage of development today as it works towards releasing around the end of Q1 / early Q2 if their past cadence holds up. Before GCC 11.1 can debut as the first stable version, there are some 60+ "P1" high priority regressions that need to be resolved or otherwise demoted to lesser priority regressions.

GCC 11 release manager Richard Biener this morning announced GCC 11 is now in stage four development meaning only regression fixes and documentation fixes are allowed

While in recent years there has been growing interest in enhancing Linux's Thunderbolt security with offering security levels and other functionality to authorize supported/known Thunderbolt devices, surprisingly it's taken until 2021 to see the ability for Linux's Thunderbolt software connection manage to handle de-authorizing devices.

If wanting to de-authorize a previously authorized Thunderbolt device for whatever reason or if wanting to establish policies like where on user log-out that devices would be automatically de-authorized, it's looking

While Intel formally discontinued the Itanium processors just under two years ago, the Linux software support for IA-64 continues. However, as a possible sign of the times, the Linux 5.11 kernel build for it has been broken the past month.

As what might set off Linus Torvalds on a Monday morning, it turns out since the Linux 5.11 merge window the Itanium "IA64" kernel code has been broken and unable to even successfully carry out a "defconfig" default configuration

While there is the prior "ESYNC" and "FSYNC" work pursued by Wine for the Linux kernel, it appears Wine developers are back to the drawing board in coming up with a Linux kernel implementation for Wine synchronization primitives that will address all their needs and match the Windows behavior well.

CodeWeavers developer Zebediah Figura sent out a lengthy mailing list post on Sunday night outlining the current state and objectives of coming up with kernel-based Wine synchronization primitives. While the ESYNC/FSYNC patches were successful in improving the performance of

Linux 5.11-rc4 was just released and it's looking like a fairly normal release at this stage of development aside from some notable additions that were merged this week.

Most prominent and representing around 20% of the work this week is the NVIDIA RTX 30 "Ampere" support that is currently limited to kernel mode-setting within the Nouveau DRM driver. It's a big addition in at least getting proper mode-setting for these very latest NVIDIA GPUs working on the mainline Linux

Linux 5.10.8 is out today as the latest stable release for the Linux 5.10 LTS series. Making this point release notable is that it finally addresses the 5.10 Btrfs performance regression.

As noted back on Christmas, Linux 5.10 was seeing significant slowdowns on Btrfs . For simply unpacking a Linux kernel source .tar.zst file it could easily take multiple times longer on this stable kernel version.

While patches for addressing this poor Btrfs behavior on Linux 5.1

The pandemic didn't adversely impact the Gentoo Linux project's operations with seeing the overall number of commits grow by nearly 42% last year within the Gentoo repository. Gentoo also saw commits from 333 unique authors in 2020, up from 333 the year prior. Plus they've made other improvements too for this technical-minded Linux distribution too during 2020.

The Gentoo project published their retrospective for 2020. Besides healthy growth on a commit basis