The Valve-backed ACO shader compiler for Mesa's Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver has been an enormous success story where this year it's been the default as opposed to AMD's officially supported AMDGPU LLVM shader compiler back-end as pretty much for all major Linux gaming workloads is delivering superior performance . RADV+ACO performance has been so great that gamers have been eager to see the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver also adapted to see ACO as an option to the same AMDGPU LLVM back-end. Well

While for a while the Linux 5.10 development was trending concerningly high on changes late in the cycle, 5.10-rc7 is out today and Linus Torvalds appears comfortable in planning to release the 5.10 kernel next weekend.

Linux 5.10-rc7 is looking "pretty good" and "solidly in the average size department", much to Linus Torvalds delight. There are changes all over from the past week but seemingly nothing too bad.

Thus in the 5.

While the Debian 11 "Bullseye" freezes don't get started until January , the Debian Installer for Bullseye has been in alpha for just over a year . Today marks the third alpha release of the Debian Installer for Bullseye.

Notable with this alpha update is switching over to the Linux 5.9.0-4 kernel. Linux 5.9 is currently the latest stable kernel series. We'll see if Linux 5.10 ends up making it into Debian 11 "Bullseye" especially as

Given all the headaches and concerns from the early days of UEFI SecureBoot, for longtime Linux users hearing Microsoft is working on another firmware-level standard in the name of security may raise concerns... Microsoft in conjunction with Intel has been spearheading the Platform Runtime Mechanism (PRM) that is about moving more code out of the System Management Mode (SMM) and executing it within the OS/VMM context. PRM remains a work-in-progress but the Windows support is already ready within Windows Insiders builds while the

Following last month's Phoronix Test Suite 10.2 Milestone 1 development release that brought many improvements to our open-source, cross-platform automated benchmarking software a second development release is now available.

The prior Phoronix Test Suite 10.2 Milestone 1 release brought better support for Apple Silicon / M1 hardware, improved detection and Phodevi features around the Ampere Altra, Google Compute Engine detection improvements, and other changes.

Now with Phoronix Test Suite 10.2 Milestone 2 the latest work includes:

Transitioning

One of the surprises this year in the Linux kernel world was Paragon Software wanting to upstream their "NTFS3" kernel driver that supports read-write operations on Microsoft NTFS file-systems and is much more full-featured than the existing read-focused NTFS kernel driver or the user-space NTFS FUSE driver. The driver hasn't yet been mainlined but continues to be updated in preparing for that milestone.

This week saw the "NTFS3" kernel driver patches revved for a fourteenth time as it continues undergoing

Dell's Linux engineers continue working on improving the Linux kernel's handling around S0ix ACPI sub-states for greater energy savings.

In particular one area that has been problematic is the Intel e1000e network driver that previously disabled S0ix flows due to regressions on some systems with the i219-LM controller. Proper S0ix support though is now critical since Intel effectively ended S3 support with Tiger Lake mobile processors and thus forcing S0ix states for power

Better support for Microsoft Surface laptops on Linux is slowly coming to the mainline kernel.

After a lot of infrastructure work around the Surface platform support, in recent weeks patches have been under review for enabling the Microsoft Surface System Aggregator Module (SAM / SSAM) on Linux. The Microsoft Surface System Aggregator Module is found on later generation Surface devices and amounts to being an embedded controller. The SAM on some models is responsible not only for battery status handling and thermal reporting but also HID keyboard and touchpad input support.

While Microsoft

PureLiFi, one of the leaders when it comes to Li-Fi for high-speed, light-based wireless technology, has been spending the past few months bringing up their open-source Linux driver to the mainline kernel for their devices.

The pureLiFi devices like other Li-Fi designs use light rather than radio frequencies for data transmission with promises of multi-Gbps speeds, better reliability, low latency, and better security. It's surely interesting and will be fun to see how Li-Fi plays out