In addition to Loongson working on Linux kernel support for their MIPS-derived LoongArch CPU architecture, the first bits of the GNU toolchain support for this Chinese CPU architecture have been merged.

For a number of months Mediatek engineers have been posting some Linux kernel driver code for bringing up the AI Processing Unit (APU) within the MT8192 SoC while out this weekend is the complete patch series at more than eight thousand lines of code.

Recently I wrote about Vortex86 processors seeing detection work under Linux for improving the state of these aging x86 32-bit SoCs. That work is now slated to be introduced in the upcoming Linux 5.16 cycle for those running these aging SoCs/processors.

Patches queued this week into the platform-drivers-x86 "for-next" branch ahead of the Linux 5.16 merge window will provide some useful improvements to System76 laptop owners.

The ongoing supply chain issues across the semiconductor industry (and more broadly) are now impacting the Raspberry Pi operations for end-users/customers when it comes to pricing.

It's been a half-year since talking about the Wii U gamepad driver that's been in development with mainline ambitions for supporting this wireless gamepad in conjunction with the Nintendo Wii U console. The driver has just been revised to address earlier code review comments, again renewing interest in the effort and possible mainlining in a future kernel version.

The PinePhone Pro is being announced this morning as the organization's new smartphone building upon the successes and experience of the original PinePhone Linux smartphone.

Chinese vendor Loongson continues working on their Linux kernel patches enabling the LoongArch processor ISA as their fork from MIPS. While early on when copying existing MIPS open-source code they were quick to call their new ISA "not MIPS", in these later patch series they continue to refer to their ISA as "a bit like MIPS or RISC-V."

FWUPD and the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) continue to serve as a resounding open-source success for allowing an increasing amount of hardware to support firmware updates on Linux from system/motherboard UEFI to disk drives and various peripherals. LVFS is now serving up more than two million firmware downloads a month while FWUPD 1.7 is out today with supporting firmware updates on even more hardware.

We have covered previously how Ampere Computing has been working on open-source firmware for their Ampere Altra processors and their reference server designs while now they are stepping up to the plate and committing to a monthly release cycle for their open-source firmware.

Announced this week was the Fairphone 4 as the latest iteration of this smartphone focused on being "sustainable and ethical" and now the initial patches have been sent out for providing mainline Linux kernel support.

Libcamera as an open-source camera stack that has been coming together over the past few years has been maturing quite well, broadening its supported hardware and feature set, and more in filling a void in the Linux camera ecosystem.

The nanoMIPS architecture that was announced by MIPS in 2018 for embedded devices to lower power consumption and yield smaller code footprints was announced for the MIPS I7200 but since then there hasn't been much of nanoMIPS. However, MediaTek is now looking to contribute upstream the compiler support for this processor ISA into GCC.

The latest batch of miscellaneous Direct Rendering Manager changes are on their way to DRM-Next for Linux 5.16. Notable from this new drm-misc-next batch is the new "panel-edp" driver.

With a change to the nct6775 hardware monitoring sensor driver, more ASUS motherboards should enjoy working sensor support come Linux 5.16.

One has to wonder how much longer the Linux kernel will keep around some very old and known to be borked hardware support but at least for now the DECpc AXP 150 "Jensen" platform support is sticking around and with Linux 5.15 is no longer marked as "broken" outright.

As covered several times going back to the end of last year, ACPI Platform Profile support has materialized in recent versions of the Linux kernel for the core infrastructure and implementations that work with the latest laptops from the likes of Dell, Lenovo, ASUS, and HP. This platform profile support is becoming increasingly important with expressing your power/cooling/performance preference so that your laptop behaves as one would expect.

The Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) in conjunction with FWUPD for offering easy-to-deploy firmware updates on Linux continues its meteoric rise.

HP's higher-end "OMEN" laptop series is set to see better support with the next kernel cycle.

Over the past two years we have seen work around bringing up privacy screen support on Linux whereby an increasing number of laptops can reduce the amount of visible light when viewed at wide angles to try to block the screen contents from anyone potentially snooping at the screen. Ready to go now is the DRM/KMS user-space interface and the Intel graphics driver support now that there is a user-space "client" ready.

Power E1080 server as their first in a new family of servers based on the IBM POWER10 processor. Sadly though not all of the POWER10 firmware is open-source.

While RISC-V garners most of the interest these days when it comes to open-source processor ISAs, OpenRISC continues pushing forward with its Linux kernel support.

Being worked on for several years now on the Linux desktop has been high resolution scrolling including work for it around X Input, the libinput library used both by X.Org and Wayland systems, and the kernel driver side for the HID/input devices to support it. The latest user-space work is high resolution scroll wheel support within the next libinput release. Separately, with Linux 5.15 is now additionally support for high resolution scrolling with the Apple Magic Mouse.

After more than two decades of maintaining the Linux CD-ROM driver code, Jens Axboe who also serves as the block subsystem maintainer, IO_uring lead developer, and filling other roles, announced he was looking for someone to take over the CD-ROM code.

The Linux 5.15 hardware monitoring "HWMON" subsystem changes were sent out and now merged for this next kernel version. Particularly notable this cycle is AMD catching up on some of their sensors support.

The ACPI and power management changes have landed for the Linux 5.15 merge window.

In addition to the block subsystem changes submitted for the Linux 5.15 merge window, Jens Axboe also sent in a separate pull request for this new kernel cycle to provide support for bio recycling. In turn this can enhance the Linux I/O limits by around 10%.

The Linux hardware monitoring "HWMON" subsystem for the 5.15 cycle is already seeing the AMD SB-RMI driver and AMD Cezanne Zen 3 APU temperature monitoring while there was also some last-minute additions around AMD next-gen "Yellow Carp" temperature reporting and separately support for another water cooling pump.

Current Linux block subsystem maintainer Jens Axboe started out in the late 90's taking over maintainership of the Linux kernel's CD-ROM driver code. However, as he's busy these days with IO_uring and other prominent I/O activities for Linux, he's hoping someone interested and capable would want to take over the Linux kernel's CD-ROM code.

Loongson this summer rolled out their 3A5000 processors built on their own "LoongArch" ISA. While the company continues claiming that LoongArch is "not MIPS", the Linux kernel code they continue proposing for the mainline Linux kernel points to it being a close facsimile to MIPS.