Qualcomm's Snapdragon 660 is approaching four years old and the Snapdragon 630 a bit younger than that, but these mobile phone SoCs may soon find renewed life on the upstream Linux kernel thanks to the work of community developers.

Recent hardware enablement work on the Linux kernel is HPE bringing up UV5 support.

There is some new feature code in the IBM POWER CPU architecture's "-next" Git tree for the Linux 5.10 kernel.

The project that started off as Libre-RISC-V with aims to be a Vulkan accelerator but then decided on the OpenPOWER ISA rather than RISC-V is still moving ahead under the "Libre-SOC" branding.

IBM announced today at the OpenPOWER Summit 2020 that they are contributing the A2O POWER processor core and Open Cognitive Environment to the OpenPOWER community.

With Lenovo working to expand their Linux line-up and already Fedora being offered on the ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 8, more Linux support improvements are on the way.

Chinese company Zhaoxin that continues working on x86_64 CPUs based on VIA Centaur Technology is working on supporting their "7" family processors with the Linux kernel.

Creative Labs last year released the high-end SoundBlaster AE-7 sound card. Sadly the company is back in their state where they do not provide official Linux support, but coming up for Linux 5.10 is the support for this sound card thanks to Connor McAdams who has worked on supporting prior SoundBlaster hardware under Linux.

As noted this weekend, Lenovo has begun offering Fedora pre-loaded on their systems beginning with the ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 8 laptop. Red Hat's Christian Schaller who serves as the senior manager for desktop chimed in with some additional thoughts and details on this achievement.

In addition to talking about code/hardware obsolescence from the Linux kernel, prominent upstream Linux kernel developer Arnd Bermann also presented at last week's Linux Plumbers Conference on the current SoC landscape and sharing his predictions for ten years down the road.

There has been the out-of-tree DKMS hid-nintendo driver to support the Nintendo Switch controller on Linux while with the Linux 5.10 kernel later this year that driver will be merged.

As a follow up from the news earlier this summer of Lenovo planning to certify their ThinkPad and ThinkStation lines for Linux from Ubuntu and Red Hat while also offering distribution choices like Fedora, that work is proceeding with Lenovo now offering up their first system from their web store that comes pre-loaded with Fedora.

One of the many interesting discussions for this week's virtual Linux Plumbers Conference is on planning code obsolescence moving forward. While this is about kernel features too, it's also about the steps and when to phase out old hardware support.

Sporting AGP, fabbed on a 350nm process, making use of a 64-bit memory interface, and clocking to nearly 100MHz, the Matrox G200 desktop graphics cards are set to see mainline open-source support come Linux 5.10.

Back in April the folks at Micron announced the "HSE" open-source storage engine optimized for SSDs and persistent memory. Version 1.8 of HSE was released on Friday as the first major update since going public earlier this year.

The Chinese-developed C-SKY CPU architecture for 32-bit SoCs and embedded processors could soon see an LLVM back-end to complement the C-SKY support found since GCC 9.

After System76 was teasing a new Bonobo WS in recent days as a high-end laptop with Core i9 10900K, up to 128GB of RAM, and Coreboot, they have now announced this $2399+ laptop.

While Raptor Computing Systems has been making fabulous 100% open-source/libre hardware systems based around POWER9 with the likes of their Talos II and Blackbird systems, don't hold your breath on quickly seeing fully-open POWER10 systems even with "OpenPOWER" being trumpeted in recent years and similar for being more open-source friendly than the likes of Intel and AMD.

SiFive today announced OpenFive as their custom silicon business now spun into its own self-contained, autonomous unit.

After covering the Linux/open-source POWER10 bring-up for a number of months already, IBM has finally announced firm information on their forthcoming POWER10 processors. POWER10 looks promising but these 7nm CPUs will not begin shipping until the second half of next year.

System76 has been on a spree of interesting hardware launches this year and their next one is a new Bonobo WS ultra high-end laptop.

While RISC-V is flourishing when it comes to this open-source CPU architecture, the related OpenRISC architecture is still advancing but not seeing as much hardware efforts around it. In any case, the Linux kernel support continues improving for OpenRISC and with Linux 5.9 are more improvements.

Since leaving stealth last year and hiring some prominent Linux/open-source veterans to complement their ARM processor design experts, we have been quite eager to hear more about this latest start-up aiming to deliver compelling ARM server products. Today they shared some early details on their initial "Phoenix" processor that is coming within their "Orion" SoC.

The open-source Fwupd firmware updating utility paired with LVFS as the Linux Vendor Firmware Service has seen explosive growth for vastly improving the BIOS/firmware updating experience on Linux. Many major hardware vendors distribute their firmware updates on LVFS for consumption by Fwupd and more than 17 million firmware files have been served. Now though there is a new "large hardware vendor" willing to distribute their firmware updates this way but they want a end-user license agreement (EULA) added.

The HID changes for Linux 5.9 aren't too many but there are a few worth mentioning for improving input device support on Linux.

With Linux 5.8 there is initial support for booting POWER10 CPUs while with Linux 5.9 there is more POWER10 work underway. Additionally, Linux 5.9 is bringing support for the newer and faster system call ABI for POWER9 and newer with the SCV instruction.

The Linux kernel continues supporting a lot more audio devices and much more punctual than a decade or two ago.

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

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 USB and Thunderbolt subsystem changes have already been merged into the in-development Linux 5.9 kernel.