AMD processors along with older Intel processors will enjoy much faster AES-NI XTS crypto performance with the Linux 5.12 kernel this spring.

So far for the virtual CES this week there hasn't been any big CXL 2.0 announcements since the Compute Express Link 2.0 specification was finalized back in November, but the Linux kernel support for this CPU-to-device interconnect continues coming together and will be hopefully mainlined in a coming release.

Alyssa Rosenzweig who is known for her work on reverse-engineering Arm GPUs and in particular the multi-year effort so far working on the Panfrost open-source driver stack has taken up an interest in Apple's M1 graphics processor.

With Linux 5.12 the Broadcom BCM2711 SoC used by the Raspberry Pi 4 will see 10 and 12-bit color support with the VC4 Direct Rendering Manager driver.

There's nothing quite like some fun holiday-weekend reading as a fiery mailing list post by Linus Torvalds. The Linux creator is out with one of his classical messages, which this time is arguing over the importance of ECC memory and his opinion on how Intel's "bad policies" and market segmentation have made ECC memory less widespread.

Yesterday I wrote about the DTPM framework being sent in for Linux 5.11 but ultimately Linus Torvalds has decided not to accept it out of the merge window.

While the Linux 5.11 merge window has been over for one week where new features are normally added, a power management pull request sent in today for mainline is adding some tardy features including the Dynamic Thermal Power Management (DTPM) framework that in part is designed to help ensure users don't burn themselves with hot devices.

Thanks to the ongoing upstream improvements being pursued by Lenovo as part of their effort to enhance their product support, the Linux power management tree has picked up the initial ACPI Platform Profile implementation for benefiting newer devices like Lenovo laptops.

Much of the Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) steam was lost when AMD began focusing on its Radeon Open eCosystem (ROCm) software stack. While AMD was just one of several founding members, there doesn't seem to be much going on for the HSA effort as we roll into 2021 and in fact their website has been down for an extended period of time.

Bootlin working under contract for an unnamed NAS vendor has been working to update the Large Page Support for 32-bit ARM and ultimately coming up with an upstream-friendly way to be able to support more than 16TB of storage on 32-bit ARM devices.

Back in 2010 was a change to disable run-time power management of PCI devices by default and leaving it up to user-space to in turn override it if desired. Now as we gear up for 2021, some upstream kernel developers are wondering about that original decision and possibly changing the default behavior to yield better out-of-the-box power savings with modern systems.

Well here is a pleasant Christmas surprise... Sony has published a new "hid-playstation" Linux kernel driver for bringing up the PlayStation 5 DualSense controller and will also be used for supporting other PlayStation hardware on Linux.

AMD noted that EPYC Milan "Zen 3" server processors would be shipping to select customers this quarter ahead of the formal launch in Q1. That's accurate with at least one enterprise now making public inquiries over Linux kernel versions for the EPYC 7003 series. The recent Linux 5.10 kernel debut being a Long-Term Support (LTS) release is coming just in time for those users.

The OpenRISC and RISC-V processor architecture updates have both been submitted for the ongoing Linux 5.11 merge window.

The Linux 5.11 merge window continues being very active this week with Linus Torvalds hoping kernel maintainers will get in all of their new feature code well before Christmas.

As part of the areas of the kernel overseen by Greg Kroah-Hartman is the USB subsystem. The USB (and Thunderbolt) updates are now in mainline as part of the ongoing Linux 5.11 merge window.

The input subsystem changes for the Linux 5.11 kernel have now been submitted and merged. Along related lines, the HID subsystem changes were also submitted with notable updates as well.

The x86-platform-drivers area of the kernel has a lot of prominent additions with Linux 5.11 for benefiting a variety of AMD and Intel laptops.

With the PCI subsystem updates for the in-development Linux 5.11 kernel is the ability to report whether a device is making use of the 64 GT/s link speed allowed by PCI Express 6.0.

HWMON maintainer Guenter Roeck has sent in all of the hardware monitoring changes destined for the Linux 5.11 kernel.

Adding to the Linux 5.11 changes and set of new drivers is "lcd2s" as a driver for supporting a 20x4 LCD character display connected via SPI/I2C and with this support can serve as a kernel console output device.

Following the original, first-generation PowerPC CPU support being removed in the Linux 5.10 kernel, the original PowerPC 400 series is also looking like it will now be removed as well from the kernel.

Back in October RISC-V minded startup SiFive announced the HiFive Unmatched development board as the best RISC-V development board we've seen to date. But only having 8GB of RAM was one of the few critiques which the company is now addressing.

HP today announced a new Ubuntu Linux offering for select mobile workstations and notebooks in the form of the "Z by HP Data Science Software" package. This isn't just pre-loading the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS OEM version on the notebook but calling it a day, rather it's been pre-loaded as well with a variety of data science software packages.

While most hardware vendors don't support Linux to the extent that any products with configurable RGB lighting controls will officially be supported, OpenRGB has been one of the successful community projects for allowing many different devices to enjoy configurable, cross-vendor. and open-source RGB lighting controls.

Dell's Linux engineers continue working on improving the Linux kernel's handling around S0ix ACPI sub-states for greater energy savings.

Better support for Microsoft Surface laptops on Linux is slowly coming to the mainline kernel.

After a long run and being one of the early boutique Linux PC vendors, California-based laptop/desktop/server vendor ZaReason is the latest casualty of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Coming to the Linux 5.11 is the Auxiliary Bus infrastructure that allows creating an auxiliary device and binding an auxiliary driver to it. This is for a new core driver feature around increasingly complex devices that rely upon several drivers for support/operation.

While the Linux kernel has supported Kernel Address Space Layout Randomization (KASLR) for a decade and a half in varying forms, it hasn't been supported for all hardware targets. Only in 2021 is the mainline Linux kernel seeing KASLR working for the MIPS-based Loongson64 platform.