Each kernel cycle the networking subsystem sees a lot of churn given the importance of network interconnect performance and reliability especially in high performance computing environments where Linux dominates.

With Linux 5.9 the networking churn is active as usual with a wide assortment of changes:

- The Qualcomm Atheros Ath11k driver now supports the 6GHz WiFi .

- Xilinx EF100 NIC support .

- Support for 5GBASE-T i40e NICs.

- Intel is making it easier to flash Ethernet device firmware for the

Getting KDE's Wayland session into shape remains a priority for developers this year and it's looking like the support should be quite slick come Plasma 5.20.

Among the Wayland fixes/improvements tackled just over the past week for KDE on Wayland include:

- Task manager window thumbnails now work on Wayland with Plasma 5.20.

- A crash fix for KWin when logging out of a Wayland session.

- When running Plasma Wayland and XWayland crashes it will no longer crash the entire session but rather

The "char/misc" area of the kernel continues to be quite busy for Linux 5.9 included as a sort of "catch-all" for the Linux kernel drivers not properly jiving within other areas. While there previously was talk of formally making a hardware accelerator subsystem for the Linux kernel for fitting some of the drivers currently living under char/misc, as of Linux 5.9 that still has not materialized.

With more AI driver work for mainline and new accelerator devices coming to market, the "

The first beta of the forthcoming Mageia 8 is now available, the Linux distribution that traces its roots back to Mandriva/Mandrake.

Following Mageia 8 Alpha 1 just over one month ago, Mageia 8 Beta 1 is now available for testing this weekend. The theme for Mageia 8 has been working to improve the ARM support, nearly completed their transition off Python 2, RPM package metadata being compressed by Zstd rather than XZ, and other changes. Mageia 8 successfully is building all packages for ARMv7 and AArch64.

There are a number of notable power management changes to find with the Linux 5.9 kernel.

Sent out earlier this week was the main power management pull request. Included with that were some interesting bits:

- The Energy Model (EM) framework has been extended to support devices besides just CPUs.

- Ice Lake Xeon server idle states were added to the intel_idle driver along with other changes. This includes Ice Lake Xeons ramping up their frequencies slower and thus a new workaround introduced.

- Support for Intel Sapphire

Following the recent Intel Comet Lake Celeron and Pentium CPU benchmarking against other x86_64 Intel/AMD CPUs, here was a bit of fun... Seeing how these budget Intel CPUs compare to a Raspberry Pi 4 in various processor benchmarks, all tested on Debian Linux.

The Celeron part tested was the G5900 as a $42 processor as a dual-core 3.4GHz processor with 2MB cache and UHD Graphics 610.

The Comet Lake Pentium was the

For those using Wine in a production environment for running Windows software on Linux, Wine 5.0.2 is out as the latest stable update.

While Wine continues chugging along with a lot of great feature work with the Wine 5.x bi-weekly snapshots leading up to the Wine 6.0 release early next year, Wine 5.0.2 is the latest stable point release with a variety of bug-fixes back-ported to this code-base that was minted at the start of this year

There are a few driver core changes for the Linux 5.9 kernel worth mentioning.

Exciting changes to the core driver infrastructure for the mainline Linux kernel are rare though this time around are a few alterations worth pointing out:

- The recently covered work by Sony on being able to allow restricting user-space access to DebugFS while keeping the debug feature enabled is in Linux 5.9. While most distributions / Linux configurations already restrict DebugFS access to root / admin privileges, as this file-system often exposes sensitive system

It looks like Intel will soon be tagging their oneAPI Level Zero specification as version 1.0.

At the end of last year Intel published the oneAPI Level Zero specification as a low-level API for direct-to-metal interfaces for offload accelerators like FPGAs and GPUs. In the months since they have continued advancing the Level Zero interface and implementation within the Intel software stack (along with the other oneAPI components at large) while it's looking like Level Zero v1.0 is around the corner.

Currently