The ARM SoC platform and driver changes landed on Monday during the first full day of the Linux 5.4 merge window. There is some exciting ARM hardware support improvements for this kernel while doing away with some older platforms.

While Linux 5.4 is bringing a new driver to help SGI systems back to their Origin boxes, this kernel meanwhile dropping support for the SGI Altix that is newer than the some of the Origin systems. SGI Altix being removed from the Linux kernel is the latest in the path for winding down Itanium (IA64) support.

It looks like CentOS 8.0 as the community and cost-free re-spin of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.0 will finally ship next week.

The Linux 5.4 scheduler changes are fairly exciting on multiple fronts.

While PipeWire may be seeing a lot of investment by Red Hat for improving audio/video streams on Linux, PulseAudio isn't letting up yet as the de facto Linux desktop sound server. Quietly released last week was PulseAudio 13.0 as the newest feature update and their first big update in some fifteen months.

Given the interest last week in how Clear Linux dropped their kernel boot time from 3 seconds to 300 ms, here are some fresh boot time benchmarks of Clear Linux compared to Ubuntu 19.10 on both Intel and AMD hardware.

Vulkan 1.1.123 is the latest weekly update to this high performance graphics API and it's formally introducing two more extensions.

When it comes to ARM-powered workstation boards there hasn't been a whole lot to get excited about with the likes of the Socionext 96Boards Developerbox being quite expensive and not yielding good performance or featureful boards compared to alternative Intel/AMD/POWER workstation/enthusiast boards. One of the more promising ARM workstation boards we have been following is the HoneyComb LX2K (formerly the "ClearFog" board) and it's looking like it could end up being a decent offering in this space.

A kernel patch from CodeWeavers is landing in the Linux 5.4 kernel and will help some 64-bit Windows games run nicely under Wine (and the likes of CrossOver / Valve's Proton) with newer Intel and AMD systems.

Hot off last night's Linux 5.3 release, the GNU folks have this morning released GNU Linux-libre 5.3-gnu as their downstream flavor of the kernel that strips out support for loading proprietary kernel modules and the ability to load binary-only microcode/firmware files, among other steps for aiming at a pure free software kernel.

One of the areas the RadeonSI OpenGL and RADV/AMDVLK Vulkan drivers have had a challenging time promptly support with AMD Navi GPUs has been the NGG (Next-Gen Geometry) functionality but it's slowly getting worked out.

WireGuard sadly isn't slated for the now-open Linux 5.4 merge window, but lead developer Jason Donenfeld has put out a new development snapshot of this open-source secure VPN tunnel.

Linux kernel engineer Eric Biggers of Google has sent in a pull request adding FS-VERITY support to the Linux 5.4 but it remains to be seen if Linus Torvalds is content with pulling the code at this stage.

Of the exciting changes so far for Qt 5.14, one of the big ticket items on the path to Qt 6 is the experimental implementation of Qt's new graphics API independent scenegraph renderer. Rather than being limited to OpenGL, Qt 5.14+ can target Vulkan, Direct3D 11, and even Apple's Metal API for rendering.

One of the early pull requests for the just-opened Linux 5.4 kernel merge window is the hardware monitoring "hwmon" subsystem changes. This time around the notable change is CPU temperature reporting for Ryzen 3000 series processors.

Linus Torvalds just went ahead and released the Linux 5.3 kernel as stable while now opening the Linux 5.4 merge window.

The Linux 5.3 kernel is expected to be released as stable today and that will mark the opening of the two-week Linux 5.4 merge window. Here is a look ahead at some of the material expected to make it into this next version of the Linux kernel that will also be the last major stable release of 2019.

KDE's annual Akademy developer conference took place this past week in Milan, Italy. But even with that in-person event the development of the KDE desktop environment didn't let up in landing new improvements.

Currently the Mesa OpenGL/Vulkan drivers have relied upon matching executable names for applying game/application-specific workarounds. But with Vulkan as part of the instance creation information and VkApplicationInfo it's possible to optionally advertise the rendering engine and version in use. The Mesa Vulkan drivers are now making use of that information to allow for more uniform workarounds.

While the Linux kernel is well known for not offering a stable API/ABI, Google and other enterprise Linux distribution vendors tend to aim at providing their own stable ABI for the lifespan of their products. Google engineers talked in Portugal this week at Linux Plumbers Conference 2019 about some of their means to maintaining a stable API/ABI for Android's Linux kernel.

If you are running the likes of the Raptor Blackbird for a POWER open-source desktop and wanting to run Fedora on it, currently you need to use the Fedora "server" CLI installer and from there install the desired packages for a desktop. But moving forward, Fedora is beginning to spin Workstation and Live images for PPC64LE.

One of the steps Intel's open-source developers continue working on for Linux is supporting "execute only memory" that will already work with some of today's processors and serve as another defense for bettering the security of systems particularly in a virtualized environment.

While the upcoming Linux 5.4 kernel cycle is finally bringing a driver for Microsoft exFAT file-system read/write support, it's dated on an old Samsung code drop that has seen little public work over the years. Since queued for staging-next, there has been a big uptick in clean-ups and other activity, but there also exists another alternative out-of-tree exFAT Linux driver.

Borislav Petkov has taken to improve the Linux kernel's memset function with it being an area previously criticzed by Linus Torvalds and other prominent developers.

Intel's speedy Clear Linux distribution could be running under the hood of your car.

While Intel CPUs aren't shipping with 5-level paging support, they are expected to be soon and distribution kernels are preparing to enable the kernel's functionality for this feature to extend the addressable memory supported. With that, the mainline kernel is also looking at flipping on 5-level paging by default for its default kernel configuration.

KDE Frameworks 5.62 is out today as the latest monthly update to this collection of KDE libraries complementing the Qt5 tool-kit offerings.

There's an exciting patch set to GNOME Shell and Mutter now pending for finally wiring up the full-screen unredirected display / full-screen bypass compositing for helping the performance of full-screen games in particular on Wayland.

Based off yesterday's release of Wine 4.16, the Wine-Staging 4.16 update out today is more prominent with a number of new patches introduced to this experimental/testing flavor of Wine for running Windows games/applications on Linux.

For fans of the lightweight Slax Linux distribution, version 9.11 is now available and is re-based against upstream Debian 9.11 for this operating system that was resurrected two years ago.

In addition to the work being led by DigitalOcean on core scheduling to make Hyper Threading safer in light of security vulnerabilities, IBM and Oracle engineers continue working on Kernel Address Space Isolation to help prevent data leaks during attacks.

Radeon ROCm 2.7.2 is now available as the newest update to AMD's open-source GPU compute stack for Linux systems.

In time for any weekend gaming, Valve's team maintaining their Proton downstream of Wine for powering Steam Play to run Windows games on Linux has issued their v4.11-4 update.

Wine 4.16 is out as the newest bi-weekly development snapshot leading up to the Wine 5.0 release in just a few more months.

Newer high-end Lenovo ThinkPad laptops feature an option called "PrivacyGuard" for restricting the usable vertical and horizontal viewing angles of the LCD display, similar to what has been achievable previously using film covers and the like. With Linux 5.4 this feature will be supported by the kernel if concerned about others looking over your shoulders at your screen, etc.

Besides KDE seeing its own HiDPI improvements like fractional scaling on Wayland recently landing, the Qt5 tool-kit is seeing more HiDPI improvements on its end too.

Richard Hughes has released GNOME Firmware 3.34, his new project formerly known as the GNOME Firmware Update as an alternative interface outside of GNOME Software for managing firmware updates on Linux. Additionally, Fwupd 1.3.1 is out with the newest firmware updating bits.

After going through 40+ rounds of revisions and review, the Linux kernel "LOCKDOWN" feature might finally make it into the Linux 5.4 mainline kernel.

With Hyper Threading continuing to look increasingly unsafe in data centers / shared computing environments in light of all the speculative execution vulnerabilities exposed thus far particularly with L1TF and MDS having no SMT-secure mitigation, DigitalOcean continues working on their Linux kernel "core scheduling" patches so they can still make use of HT/SMT in a sane and safe manner.

A Phoronix reader pointed out recent patches by a SUSE engineer working on support for mounting root file-systems over SMB (Samba).

Linux 5.3 isn't being released until this weekend after being delayed by one week, but already there have been a few early pull requests submitted for the to-be-opened Linux 5.4 merge window.

While not quite as exciting as the big performance boost found with SVT-VP9 for AVX2 CPUs a few days ago, Intel's Scalable Video Technology team has released SVT-HEVC 1.4.1 as their newest feature release to this open-source H.265/HEVC video encoder.

This shouldn't come as much surprise, but the upcoming Fedora 32 will offer the latest "L.A.M.P." stack components.