Linspire, an early Linux distribution with its roots tracing back to "Lindows" that went dormant and then resurrected in 2018 and continuing an Ubuntu-based distribution, is out ahead of the holidays with its Linspire 10 beta release.

With Linspire 10 Beta the company claims, " Along with updated branding and design we have made significant advancements that once again proves - if there was ever any doubt - Linspire is the number one Linux distribution for new, intermediate and power users. " Rather ambitious claims

Unlike the KVM additions , the Xen hypervisor for the Linux 5.11 merge window doesn't bring any new features but just security fixes for some new vulnerabilities.

The Xen changes for the Linux 5.11 merge window include just a set of patches for addressing two vulnerabilities (XSA-349 and XSA-350).

XSA-349 was made public last week that Linux and some BSDs are processing Xen watch events using a single thread and that if events are received faster

For at least a second time, a patch sent out under "request for comments" would strip out the existing BZIP2 code within the Linux kernel.

Back when Zstd was added to the kernel there was a proposal as part of that to eliminate the BZIP2 usage given its inefficiencies compared to other modern compression algorithms. That change wasn't pulled at that time while now a developer has proposed a new patch stripping out BZIP2 from the possible kernel use-cases.

Alex Xu wrote in the RFC, "

Phoronix Test Suite 10.2 Milestone 3 is now available as the latest development release ahead of our Q1'2021 update to this leading cross-platform, open-source automated benchmarking system.

The prior milestone/development releases brought more ARM64 improvements including better detection/handling around Apple M1 and Ampere Altra as well as various automated testing enhancements .

Among the changes to find with the new Phoronix Test Suite 10.2 Milestone 3 release include:

- Various BSD updates, including

Intel engineers have posted the initial Linux kernel patches providing AVX-512 optimized versions of common crypto algorithms. The AVX-512 optimized versions do pan out and promise to offer huge speed-ups but are disabled by default at this stage over the negative CPU frequency/performance impact that running AVX-512 can have on CPU cores / shared threads.

Intel's Megha Dey posted the set of seven initial patches that make use of VPCLMULQDQ and VAES AVX512 instructions found on Ice

Back in September Arm began talking about their "2020 extensions" for the A-profile architecture. Initial support for these new additions as ARMv8.7-A is beginning to land in the LLVM compiler stack.

As part of Arm's annual updates to the A-profile architecture, the 2020 / ARMv8.7-A update is bringing improvements around device hot-unplug, atomic 64-byte loads and stores, updating the WFE and WFI instructions to support timeouts

For those running PostgreSQL database servers (and potentially similar workloads) on AMD EPYC servers, Linux 5.11 is bringing a very nice Christmas gift in the form of better performance for at least some 2P server configurations.

We are just half-way through the Linux 5.11 merge window with new code continuing to land, but already I've been running Linux 5.11 Git benchmarks on a number of systems in looking for any prominent performance improvements as a result of the new feature code

While the Linux 5.11 merge window is only half-way through with prominent pull requests like the DRM / graphics driver updates already have been merged some of the testing has already begun at Phoronix of this new kernel. With the Radeon RX 6800 XT "RDNA 2" graphics continuing to mature, we are seeing slight uplift in some benchmarks when moving from Linux 5.10 stable to Linux 5.11 Git.

When running some quick Linux 5.10 vs. 5.