Merged last week to Linux 5.9 were the main set of power management updates while hitting the kernel now are some last minute power-related changes.

Intel power management maintainer Rafael Wysocki for a while now has been working on allowing the P-State CPU frequency scaling driver to work in its passive mode when hardware p-states (HWP) is enabled for the system. That support is now deemed ready for mainline and will be available with Linux 5.9. Here's how he sums up that work

System76 has been on a spree of interesting hardware launches this year and their next one is a new Bonobo WS ultra high-end laptop.

System76 has begun teasing a new Bonobo WS laptop featuring an Intel Core i9 10900K desktop processor, up to 128GB of DDR4-3200 memory, up to a NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 SUPER GPU, four M.2 slots for plenty of storage options, a 97 Wh battery

Following the release yesterday of Wine 5.15 , Wine-Staging 5.15 is out this morning and is coming in slightly smaller as a result of the XACT Engine work being upstreamed.

Wine-Staging 5.15 is coming in at just 670 patches thanks to the XACTEngine3 DLL work hitting Wine 5.15 plus other patches being upstreamed around raw input, FSUTIL, and other bits.

Wine-Staging 5.15 does introduce a few new patches around providing basic systeminfo

KDE developers remain very busy tacking new features onto Plasma 5.20 and other improvements for polishing their desktop.

KDE developer Nate Graham has published his weekend report on the various KDE changes that landed over the past week. Some of this week's highlights include:

- Plasma 5.20's System Settings can now highlight any settings that have been changed from their default states.

- The System Settings area's autostart page has been rewritten. Also, the System Settings global shortcuts and standard shortcuts have

As reported a few days ago the NFS server with Linux 5.9 saw user xattr support finally merged for user-extended attributes as defined by RFC 8276 . The NFS client changes have now been sent in for this kernel and include the user xattr support along with other changes.

The NFS client pull request was sent in on Friday by Trond Myklebust. Most notably is the support for user extended attributes through the NFSv4.2 protocol as previously covered on Phoronix. Both the client and server support was

While RISC-V is flourishing when it comes to this open-source CPU architecture, the related OpenRISC architecture is still advancing but not seeing as much hardware efforts around it. In any case, the Linux kernel support continues improving for OpenRISC and with Linux 5.9 are more improvements.

OpenRISC still lacks any open-source ASIC with predominantly being used on FPGAs and a few commercial efforts based on the OpenRISC 1000 architecture. OpenRISC on the Linux software side has continued seeing improvements since its introduction back in

Wine 5.15 is out as the latest bi-weekly development snapshot for this program allowing Windows games/applications to generally run quite gracefully on Linux and other platforms.

There are a few new features worth talking about for Wine 5.15 with the official highlights being:

- Initial implementation of the XACT Engine libraries.
- Beginnings of a math library in MSVCRT based on Musl.
- Still more restructuration of the console support.
- Direct Input performance improvements.
- Exception handling fixes on x86-

Intel has published a whitepaper on their new TDX "Trust Domain Extensions" technology for better securing virtual machines.

Intel TDX is designed to isolate virtual machines from the VMM/hypervisor and other non-VMM system software on the platform. TDX is also able to protect the VMs from some forms of hardware attacks. Intel TDX will be coming with a future CPU generation but so far Intel has not detailed what generation or the timing of such support.

Intel TDX adds a secure-arbitration mode, makes use of memory encryption

Back in Linux 5.4 Xen 32-bit PV guest support was deprecated while now for Linux 5.9 it's set to be removed entirely. Last year's deprecation comes with the 32-bit usage dwindling in general but PVH being preferred to PV, Meltdown mitigations not being present, and the code not seeing much activity. Now for Linux 5.9 that support is being gutted.

Sent in today were more Xen patches for the Linux 5.9 merge window closing this weekend.