Debian developers are two months out from the transition and essentials freeze for Debian 11 "Bullseye" that in turn should debut as stable later in 2021.

Starting on 12 January 2021 is the transition and essentials freeze for the Debian 11 "Bullseye" release. After that Debian maintainers should avoid large/disruptive changes. The soft freeze should then begin on 12 February and the hard freeze on 12 March. The full freeze and actual release of Debian 11.0

Version 2.9 of OpenRazer is now available as the independently-developed solution for configuring and monitoring various Razer peripherals on Linux like not only their keyboards and mice but also headsets and other hardware.

With OpenRazer 2.9 there is a lot of newer Razer devices now supported:

Razer Atheris
Razer Basilisk X HyperSpeed
Razer Blade 15 Advanced (2020)
Razer Blade 15 Base (Early 2020)
Razer Blade Stealth (Early 2020)
Razer Cynosa Lite
Razer Cynosa V2

Currently when directly assigning I/O devices to virtual machines the guest memory needs to be statically pinned unless using a vIOMMU setup in which case it does not but there are performance implications there as well. Intel engineers though have been working on a virtual IOMMU implementation with DMA buffer tracking to overcome these limitations.

With Intel's proposed "coIOMMU" implementation there is fine-grained pinning and vendor agnostic support for emulated or para-virtualized vIOMMUs. Yu Zhang of Intel presented at KVM Forum 2020 on this

Intel didn't manage to get their Software Guard Extensions (SGX) support merged for the current Linux 5.10 LTS kernel cycle and it's still up in the air if it will be pulled in the near-term for providing the mainline kernel with SGX enclaves support.

SGX enclaves support is about providing protected regions of code/data from unauthorized access or modification. SGX support has been around since Skylake and continues to be built upon including with upcoming Ice Lake Xeon servers . But getting mainline support for

The first week of November brought numerous improvements to the KDE stack.

KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his weekly development highlights and among them for the past week are:

- The Kate text editor now supports the Zig language serer.

- Plasma's NetworkManager OpenVPN module now allows multiple types of compression for Plasma 5.21.

- Various Dolphin file manager and Konsole terminal emulator fixes.

- When running under the Plasma Wayland session, opening a laptop lid will now immediately wake up the system rather than requiring a

The recently proposed new TTM memory management page allocator that can yield 3~5x faster page allocation as tested with the AMDGPU kernel driver will be coming for Linux 5.11.

Christian König has been working on this new TTM allocator code and where it changes to it by default -- not just for AMDGPU but also the older Radeon DRM driver and for other drivers too like Nouveau and VMWGFX that also make use of the TTM memory management code.

The new TTM code was sent in this week as

A set of Linux kernel patches posted on friday allow peer-to-peer DMA (P2PDMA) transfers between NVMe drives using existing O_DIRECT operations or the NVMe pass-through interface from user-space.

These patches allow for user-space transfers between NVMe solid-state drives in a more efficient manner via P2PDMA . The patches though at the moment are marked "request for comments" and there are some technical issues to overcome around scatter-gather lists (SGLs) and one of the

For those sticking to stable releases of Mesa3D there is Mesa 20.2.2 now available as the latest point release.

Mesa 20.2.2 comes with a rather random assortment of fixes ranging from a few corrections in RADV as well as to the ACO compiler back-end, several Intel fixes , and other work in the different areas of the growing Mesa3D code-base.

There aren't any really standout fixes as part of Mesa 20.2.2 but

Following yesterday's Wine 5.21 release is now an adjoining Wine-Staging update that carries over 700 patches on top of it for testing purposes.

Wine-Staging 5.21 is a bit lighter thanks to a number of patches around Wine GStreamer and other areas having been upstreamed to Wine 5.21. But this release is still 737 patches on top of upstream even without any new patches added.

While no new patches introduced, Wine-Staging 5.21 does