While on one side of the table is the Purism Librem 5 Linux smartphone on the high-price/high-end side, the Pine64 folks continue working on the PinePhone as a lower-end Linux smartphone. A new video now shows the PinePhone running on Linux 5.0 with Wayland's Weston.

Coming as a late addition to the Linux 5.1 kernel are some long overdue keyboard key mappings for different functionality.

While the U2F Zero has already been superseded by the "Solo" FIDO2 security key, this USB-based U2F token for two-factor authentication is finally seeing mainline support come Linux 5.2.

For those currently using a Raptor Talos II or awaiting the Raptor Blackbird or are running another IBM POWER system like the recently covered cheap POWER servers, there is a CPU Idle patch-set on the way that helps improve the power/performance.

LVFS, the Linux Vendor Firmware Service, that pairs with Fwupd integration for offering firmware/BIOS updates to Linux users could be offering up more than ten thousand distinct firmware files before the end of the calendar year.

In the AI races for dedicated hardware accelerators, Habana Labs is off to an early lead when it comes to having a mainline, open-source kernel driver and now is also the first AI processor having a back-end implemented within Facebook's Glow AI open-source compiler.

Purism announced today they are partnering up with Private Internet Access (PIA) for offering out-of-the-box VPN services to Librem 5 smartphone users as well as offering the VPN integration inside their Debian-based PureOS for Librem 13/15 laptop users.

Edge computing solutions vendor SolidRun is working on "ClearFog" as an ITX-based ARM64 workstation platform. They hope for an early bird launch price later this year of around $500~500 USD for this board that has 16 ARMv8 cores, multiple 10 GbE SFP+ connections, Gigabit Ethernet, multiple USB 3.0 and 2.0 ports, 2 x mPCIe, four SATA ports, and can handle up to 64GB of laptop DDR4 memory.

Back in February the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) was celebrating having served more than five million firmware files over the duration of this service for providing BIOS/firmware files to Linux users for different hardware components from different vendors ranging from mice/peripheral firmware to new system/motherboard BIOS from major hardware vendors. That count is quickly shooting up these days and they are now serving 500k files per month.

Ampere Computing and Packet announced on Thursday that eMAG servers will now be available through this public cloud/server provider. The initial configuration allows for 32 Arm cores at 3.3GHz and 128GB of RAM and 480GB of SSD storage for just $1 USD per hour on-demand access. I have run some initial benchmarks from this new compute instance for those interested.

Logic Supply, a manufacturer of several industrial-grade Linux-supported PCs in the past, has introduced the Karbon 300 has their latest compact and rugged PC intended for IoT/edge computing use-cases.

The MOTU 8Pre is a Firewire-connected device for digital audio workstations to be able to connect eight microphone inputs. The hardware itself is more than one decade old and in fact the manufacturer already discontinued the product, but with Linux 5.2 the kernel will be supporting this device.

A few weeks back I wrote about Xilinx looking at contributing their Alveo FPGA accelerator drivers to the mainline Linux kernel. They are continuing to work on that goal and pushed out their latest kernel driver patches this week for these Alveo PCIe accelerator cards.

SiFive has announced an upgraded Freedom Everywhere SoC as well as the HiFive1 Revision B developer board using this FE310-G002 SoC.

Purism has today shared some details on their planned hardware kill switches for the upcoming Librem 5 Linux smartphone.

Libinput is fairly mature at this stage for offering a unified input handling library for use on both X.Org and Wayland Linux desktops. Libinput has largely reached a feature plateau with new releases no longer coming out so often and no glaring gaps in support. With it already being a half-year since the last major release, libinput 1.13 is now being buttoned up for release and available today is the first release candidate.

Thanks to the Qualcomm / Linux Foundation Code Aurora, patches are pending for the Freedreno MSM DRM kernel driver to allow the latest-generation Adreno 600 series hardware to leave its "secure" mode.

The input subsystem updates for the in-development Linux 5.1 kernel include a number of touch-screen driver additions.

While we are expecting to see more Intel Optane NVDIMMs this year that offer up persistent memory using 3DXPoint memory on the DDR4 bus for persistent storage, the Linux 5.1 kernel might pick-up support for treating this persistent memory back as traditional RAM if so desired.

Linux 5.1 is bringing another change to help bolster the security of Linux systems in light of recent exploits.

The Lemote Yeeloong netbooks came out a decade ago and based on the MIPS Loongson 2F processor clocked up to 900MHz, offered up to 1GB of RAM, some models featuring an 8GB SSD, and driving the display was a Silicon Motion controller. The Yeeloong netbooks/laptops were even used by Richard Stallman for being open-source friendly and he used the devices as his own system for several years. Finally in 2019, better mainline Linux kernel support is being worked on.

The upcoming Linux hardware accelerator subsystem could get even bigger with Xilinx now wanting to mainline their FPGA accelerator drivers.

The HID subsystem updates for Linux 5.1 is another busy cycle with new hardware support.

Now that the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) and Fwupd updating mechanism for firmware/BIOS updates is supported by all major vendors and has already served up more than five million firmware files, their newest focus is on easing the roll-out of firmware updates in enterprise settings.

The networking subsystem is busy as always and not any different pace with the in-development Linux 5.1 kernel.

The upstream Linux kernel support for the MIPS architecture continues to be improved upon, which is great news especially with this processor ISA going open-source. With the Linux 5.1 kernel are more MIPS improvements.

In System76's road to manufacturing their own laptops and desktops, the Linux-focused Denver-based company has their eyes on offering ARM-based products.

Back in January the startup Habana Labs posted an open-source Linux kernel driver for their Goya AI processor. That AI accelerator focused on speeding up deep learning inference workloads better than CPUs and GPUs will now see this new driver mainlined with Linux 5.1 while a user-space thunk driver has now been published.

The sound subsystem updates were submitted today for the upcoming Linux 5.1 kernel cycle. The pull request was submitted early due to the maintainer Takashi Iwai of SUSE traveling next week, but this is another exciting PR for audio hardware on Linux.

Seeming to affect mostly Apple MacBook laptops, some systems since Linux 4.17 and newer have failed to boot but fortunately a fix is now queued for landing into the mainline tree and being back-ported to the stable branches.