The NFS code going into Linux 5.9 is finally presenting support for user extended attributes (user xattrs).

The NFS server updates for Linux 5.9 have support for user-extended attributes on NFS. This is the functionality outlined via IETF's RFC 8276 for handling of file-system extended attributes in NFSv4. " This feature allows extended attributes (hereinafter also referred to as xattrs) to be interrogated and manipulated using NFSv4 clients. Xattrs are provided by a file system to associate

The open-source Fwupd firmware updating utility paired with LVFS as the Linux Vendor Firmware Service has seen explosive growth for vastly improving the BIOS/firmware updating experience on Linux. Many major hardware vendors distribute their firmware updates on LVFS for consumption by Fwupd and more than 17 million firmware files have been served . Now though there is a new "large hardware vendor" willing to distribute their firmware updates this way but they want a end-user license agreement (EULA) added.

Fwupd/LVFS lead developer Richard Hughes of

Fedora developers continue embracing the work on making the Btrfs file-system the default for F33 desktop variants . Their latest progress report indicates new installation options being wired up for the Btrfs support.

A new Anaconda Kickstart install configuration knob is being added for setting the async discard behavior for solid-state drives. This configuration option will simply set the Btrfs DISCARD option to be enabled by default per the /etc/fstab options. They are still weighing whether to make it the default or more than likely that default transition

The HID changes for Linux 5.9 aren't too many but there are a few worth mentioning for improving input device support on Linux.

Among the HID items worth calling out for Linux 5.9 include:

- The USB HID code will no longer sleep when opening a device. This was done to allow queues to drain when starting out but can result in slowing down the device probing and decreasing the boot speed. Instead with Linux 5.9 it will simply start processing of input events later on but not

If you are still rocking a pre-GCN AMD Radeon graphics card on the R600g driver for the HD 2000 through HD 6000 series, you really ought to consider upgrading in 2020, but otherwise at least from the open-source community there continues to be improvements.

Gert Wollny continues to lead the work on adding NIR intermediate representation support to R600g as an alternative to the default TGSI code path. R600g NIR has

The XFS file-system has many improvements ready for the Linux 5.9 kernel.

The main XFS feature pull was sent in on Friday for Linux 5.9 and includes a wealth of improvements for this mature file-system:

- Inode flushing with XFS is now fully asynchronous. Additionally, memory reclamation is no longer blocked on inode flushing.

- A long-standing bug in the quota code was addressed where soft limit warnings and inode limits never ended up being tracked properly.

- An extensive refactoring to the xattr

The PCI subsystem updates have been sent in for the Linux 5.9 kernel. Peer-to-peer DMA support is now solid for all AMD CPUs of the Zen family or newer.

Support for peer-to-peer DMA (P2PDMA) on AMD Zen and newer CPUs is now set. This is for the whitelist being maintained around this feature . There previously was Zen bits in Linux 5.2 while now for Linux 5.9 appears ironed out.

This P2PDMA handling is now allowing

Not much is publicly known about Intel's Emmitsburg chipset. Prior to noticing some Linux patches recently referencing Intel Emmitsburg, the only other public mentions of it has been in the context of the Windows HWiNFO program mentioning it in their change-log. With Linux 5.9, Intel has begun adding Emmitsburg support.

Speculation on Windows sites earlier this year following the HWiNFO mention of "Emmitsburg" pegged it as for Xeon Ice Lake or Cooper Lake. However, that is quite unlikely and is more than likely some other