More improvements for Microsoft Surface laptops on Linux are set to land for Linux 5.12.

The previously discussed work around Microsoft Surface System Aggregator Module handling that was developed through reverse engineering is now queued for introduction in Linux 5.12 once its merge window opens in February.

The Microsoft "SAM" module is basically an embedded controller found on various Surface devices used for handling like battery status and thermal reporting as well as in some cases for the HID keyboard and touchpad input handling. With the System Aggregator Module

Given the talk in prior days around patches for PGO'ing the Linux kernel and some readers not being familiar with Profile Guided Optimizations by code compilers, here are some fresh benchmarks on a Ryzen 9 5950X looking at the benefits of applying PGO optimizations to various benchmarks.

We have benchmarked GCC and Clang PGO performance many times over the years with this just being some fresh data using a Ryzen 9 5950X and the latest software stack on Ubuntu 20.10. The testing was

For those making use of Linux's modern exFAT file-system, a significant optimization is on the way for when deleting files with the "dirsync" mount option set.

The exFAT file-system driver for Linux 5.12 should be able to delete (large) files much faster when running with the "dirsync" mount option set where the directory updates are done synchronously.

In exFAT's dirsync mode it was found with a SD card to delete a 4GB file taking about 39 seconds on

While Mesa's Panfrost Gallium3D driver has been working out well for modern ARM Mali open-source graphics support, for the old Mali 400/450 series hardware there still is the "Lima" driver within Mesa that doesn't receive too much attention these days (just around 70 commits over the past year) but as its first work of 2021 saw an initial shader cache implementation.

The Lima Gallium3D driver now supports on-disk shader cache functionality for

The FreeBSD project today published its Q4-2020 status report concerning all the interesting happenings for this open-source BSD operating system.

Even with the pandemic, the FreeBSD developers have been as busy as ever advancing their software. Among the highlights for the past quarter in the FreeBSD world include:

- Continued work on removing GPL software from FreeBSD base in order to "migrate to modern, copyfree or more permissively licensed components." Some of the latest GPL-licensed items removed in favor of more permissive

Prior to Mesa 21.0 being branched this week in preparations for the quarterly stable Mesa3D release, a number of open-source Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver optimizations were merged.

Besides the already covered ACO "rapid packed math" support , some of the other RADV code that landed this week includes:

- DCC for MSAA on GFX10+ . Or rather, delta color compression for multi-sample anti-aliasing with Navi and newer. This is yielding 1~2% improvements for 2

AMD processors along with older Intel processors will enjoy much faster AES-NI XTS crypto performance with the Linux 5.12 kernel this spring.

Processors supporting AES-NI instructions and that also are subject to Retpolines as part of their Spectre V2 mitigations will enjoy a big speed-up with AES-NI XTS for that next version of the Linux kernel. This includes past and current AMD processors as well as older Intel CPUs, but recent Intel processors do not need the return trampolines and thus not subject to this

The high performance Fujitsu A64FX ARM processor now has the possibility of performing even better if relying upon the upstream open-source compilers from GCC and LLVM.

The Fujitsu A64FX, which powers the "Fugaku" supercomputer among other accomplishments, has seen open-source compiler work going back a year while now the latest upstream GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) and LLVM Clang are seeing more complete support.

While GCC 11 and Clang 11 support -mcpu=a64fx for targeting the

Li-Fi that uses LED lighting for wireless communication between devices is a step closer to reality on Linux systems with leading commercial start-up pureLiFi continuing to move closer to upstreaming the driver supporting their hardware that supports this technology.

Li-Fi remains elusive outside of niche markets but we'll see what 2021 holds. PureLiFi for months has been working on a network driver for supporting their light-based networking hardware including the LiFi-X, LiFi-XC, and LiFi-XL USB adapters.