It was just yesterday evening -- less than 24 hours ago -- that Linux 5.10 LTS was released but already the first point release has arrived due to bugs in the storage code.

Linux 5.10.1 as the first point release normally doesn't arrive for a few days or week after the initial kernel debut, but this time around it's coming one day later.

Linux 5.10.1 has just two fixes, both of which affect the storage code

The first set of major file-system material submitted for the newly opened Linux 5.11 merge window are the Btrfs updates.

The Btrfs file-system updates this time around are on the heavier side with a variety of enhancements throughout:

- The Btrfs rescue= mount option can now accept values of using the backup root (usebackuproot), ignoring bad roots (ignorebadroots), ignoring data checksums (ignoredatacums), and all (all).

- Exporting more Btrfs file-system information to user-space.

Back in October Intel announced Iris Xe MAX as discrete graphics for laptops . The overall Linux state for Xe MAX hasn't been too clear and we haven't had any hardware access to this Intel laptop discrete graphics hardware to report our own findings, but their developers have now cleared up the situation. The good news is the Xe MAX graphics can be used for a GPU-accelerated Linux virtual machine. The bad news is the Xe MAX support doesn't yet allow for dGPU usage by the host outside of

Earlier this year work began on preparing SD Express card/host support for Linux and now with the Linux 5.11 kernel that will debut in early 2021 is this preliminary support.

SD Express promises faster transfer speeds thanks to support for PCI Express 4.0 and the NVMe 1.4 protocol. SD Express is to come to SDHC/SDXC/SDUC memory cards while retaining backwards compatibility with the legacy SD card interface. The Linux kernel needed to be adapted obviously and first initialize with the legacy

Project Halium for the past several years has allowed various Linux distributions to build atop the likes of libhybris and other abstractions for running on hardware with Android pre-installed. This abstraction layer has been popular from KDE Plasma Mobile to UBports to Sailfish OS while now Plasma Mobile is discontinuing their support.

Due to the headaches involved in maintaining Halium-based device support and in recent years some smartphones seeing mainline Linux kernel support, KDE Plasma Mobile is dropping support for Halium devices.

Thanks to the likes of the Pine64 PinePhone

Following yesterday's release of the Linux 5.10 LTS kernel the GNU folks have released their "GNU Linux-libre 5.10-gnu" downstream that is the Linux kernel but without support for loading proprietary modules as well as preventing closed-source firmware binaries from being loaded on the system and related steps in the name of free software.

GNU Linux-libre 5.10-gnu remains popular in the FSF-endorsed distribution circles like Hyperbola, Trisequel, and GNU Guix, but for

Assuming Linus Torvalds has no last minute objections, the long-in-development Intel SGX support will be merged into the mainline Linux kernel.

The Software Guard Extensions (SGX) enclaves support has undergone more than 40 rounds of review over the past few years while finally this morning it was sent in as an "x86/sgx" pull request for mainline.

Borislav Petkov who staged the patches under the TIP area and sent in these patches of Intel's this morning noted in the pull request , "

Valve's VKD3D-Proton continues speeding along as their downstream of VKD3D for mapping Direct3D 12 over Vulkan. VKD3D-Proton 2.1 was just released and besides enhancing the GPU-bound performance there are more prominent DX12 games now working with this translation layer.

VKD3D-Proton 2.1 can see around 15% better GPU-bound uplift in games like Ghostrunner and other Unreal Engine 4 titles. There are also slight improvements in fully GPU

Linux's Cedrus media driver that provides video decoding on various Allwinner SoCs is finally seeing support added for VP8. But given this addition for Linux 5.11 won't be out as stable until well into 2021 and most of the world has moved onto VP9, it may not be too beneficial at this stage.

The Cedrus media driver has been working out well for various Allwinner SoCs and supporting the likes of H.264/H.265 decoding. But