Unisoc, the Chinese SoC provider for smartphones that is part of the Tsinghua Unigroup, has published a new open-source DRM display driver that ultimately they are looking to get into the mainline kernel.

Opportunistic Wireless Encryption (OWE) provides a means of encrypting wireless data transfers without having any secret/key. Opportunistic Wireless Encryption is advertised as Wi-Fi Certified Enhanced Open.

Purism announced today a Librem 5 USA model of their smartphone that has the same specifications and features of their Librem 5 Linux smartphone but manufactured in the US. That pushes the 720x1440 display, i.MX8M, 3GB RAM, 32GB eMMC, 802.11n device from $699 USD to $1,199 USD. Update: Errr the price was raised now apparently to $1999 USD.

With the PowerPC changes for the Linux 5.5 kernel comes the initial infrastructure work on preparing to be able to handle a Secure Boot implementation for POWER9 hardware.

We weren't too enthusiastic about the performance of Amazon's initial Graviton ARM-based CPU cores offered via their Elastic Compute Cloud, but their next-gen Graviton2 CPUs that are "coming soon" should be much more capable for good ARM Linux performance.

Imagination today announced the IMG A-Series as their next-generation GPU cores and architecture that deliver 2.5x faster performance for the same area and same power to their current-generation PowerVR graphics processors.

While there has been the Libre RISC-V community-driven effort to create a RISC-V graphics processor that basically amounts to a RISC-V core with vector extensions/improvements and running a Vulkan software implementation (though they are now reportedly eyeing POWER instead of RISC-V), Think Silicon has announced the first actual RISC-V ISA based 3D graphics processor.

When the Raspberry Pi 4 launched earlier this year it was quickly realized active cooling was almost required if wanting to run the quad-core Cortex-A72 SoC at full performance without thermal throttling. Fortunately, the latest Raspberry Pi 4 firmware has improved the thermal/power behavior to lessen the need for extra cooling although it's still recommended for achieving peak performance potential out of this popular low-cost ARM SBC.

The HID area of the kernel is always eventful when it comes to improving the input device support for newer hardware. With Linux 5.5 the HID story means a new Logitech driver and other enhancements.

Sent in on Thursday were the platform-drivers-x86 updates targeting the Linux 5.5 kernel.

Earlier this week as part of his series of pull requests, Greg Kroah-Hartman has submitted the USB subsystem updates for the in-development Linux 5.5 kernel.

The Cedrus video decode driver developed by Bootlin after successful crowdfunding for creating an open-source Linux video decoder for Allwinner SoCs now has H.265 support!

The ACPI and power management updates were sent in back on Tuesday for the Linux 5.5 kernel and punctually landed in the mainline tree.

While coming a few weeks later and two months after the original "shipping" of Librem 5 smartphones, the Librem 5 Birch batch has begun shipping to actual consumers who pre-ordered the privacy-minded Linux smartphone.

The RISC-V kernel code has some interesting changes ready for Linux 5.5.

As covered earlier this month, the next version of the Linux kernel is finally offering mainline support for SGI's Octane / Octane II MIPS workstations from the SGI IRIX days about two decades ago. Not only is the vintage SGI IP30 hardware seeing mainline kernel support, but there is other new MIPS hardware support too.

As part of the sound subsystem updates coming with the Linux 5.5 kernel is wake-on-voice capabilities with newer Google Chromebook device hardware.

Since 2016 the Linux kernel on ARM has invoked the EFI random number generator (RNG) protocol for serving as an additional source of entropy during early boot. With Linux 5.5 in early 2020 that code is finally happening for x86/x86_64.

Linux for years has supported monitoring NVMe drive temperatures when installing the nvme user-space utility and run as root, etc. But now finally with Linux 5.5 the kernel is supporting NVMe drive temperature reporting through the hardware monitoring "HWMON" infrastructure alongside other hardware sensors.

VIA-owned Centaur Technology has finally announced their newest project past the decade old VIA Nano... Centaur Tech is rolling out an eight-core x86 SoC that features an integrated AI coprocessor.

With a change merged Friday night for the nearly over Linux 5.4 cycle, the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Extreme 2nd Gen laptop should see better touchpad input support.

Making waves this afternoon is word of the NUVIA server CPU start-up landing its series A funding round and thus making more information known on this new silicon start-up.

Librem 5 "Birch" batch was supposed to be shipping from 29 October to 26 November. They are now preparing to start shipping this second iteration of the Librem 5 Linux smartphone after early units in this batch were missing a resistor.

From System76 setting up their own manufacturing facility for Linux desktops to Dell offering more Linux laptop options, the demand for pre-loaded Linux PCs continues to increase. One of the smaller Linux PC vendors also now expanding is German-based TUXEDO Computers.

The Thunderbolt changes have been merged to char-misc ahead of the upcoming Linux 5.5 merge window.

Rob Clark and his gang working on the Freedreno/MSM driver stack have prepared their kernel driver changes slated for the upcoming Linux 5.5 cycle.

The Linux 5.5 kernel due out as stable in early 2020 will finally have mainline support for the MIPS-powered SGI Octane and Octane II workstations that originally ran with SGI's IRIX operating system about two decades ago.

With more cameras moving their image processing operations from micro-controllers to the CPU to save on manufacturing, libcamera was started last year to serve as an open-source camera support library across Linux / Android / ChromeOS for supporting these modern cameras.

For looking at any difference in thermal throttling and peak frequencies, I ran the Dell XPS with Intel Core i7-1065G7 "Ice Lake" processor out in a cold garage overnight compared to normal operating temperatures inside across dozens of benchmarks.

In recent years we have seen prominent automobile manufacturer BMW engaging more with open-source and Linux. At this week's Open-Source Summit Europe / Embedded Linux Conference Europe they talked more about their increasing usage of Linux from their assembly line to within automobiles.