IBM last week made the bold announce that they will be transitioning to LLVM/Clang-based compilers across their hardware portfolio for C, C++, and Fortran compilation.

For those that have managed to get their hands on the Pinebook Pro as the $199 ARM 64-bit laptop powered by a Rockchip RK3399 SoC and with 4GB of RAM, 1080p panel, 64GB eMMC, and other decent features for the price, mainline Linux kernel support could be in order possibly even for Linux 5.7.

The latest benchmarks for your viewing pleasure are looking at the dual Intel Xeon Platinum 8280 performance up against the dual AMD EPYC 7742 CPUs while using the in-development Linux 5.6 kernel as the first time trying out these highest-end server processors on this new kernel debuting as stable in about one month's time.

As we've been expecting to happen with the Linux EFI code being cleaned up before the introduction of a new architecture, the RISC-V patches have been posted for bringing up UEFI boot support.

Linux-friendly industrial PC vendor OnLogic has announced an expanded line-up of their mini PC offerings with Ryzen Embedded processors and also word that next quarter they will be getting into EPYC-powered edge servers.

While the Linux 5.5 kernel landed Broadcom BCM2711 SoC and Raspberry Pi 4 enablement, one of the loose ends has been getting the open-source "VC4" DRM driver wired up for the display hardware on this latest Raspberry Pi. Patches are now pending for VC4 DRM to provide that display support and could potentially see it mainlined for Linux 5.7.

Following the PCI Express 6.0 announcement from last summer that called for 64 GT/s transfer rates, version 0.5 of the PCIe 6.0 specification is now out for evaluation.

While two weeks past the Linux 5.6 merge window some late changes for the C-SKY CPU architecture were accepted today.

For some interesting Sunday debates in the forums, how important to you is having a completely open CPU design? Additionally, is POWER dead? This comes following interesting remarks by an industry leader this weekend.

Broadcom developers have been recently volleying open-source Linux driver patches for enabling their "VK Accelerators" on the platform.

While web-based GUIs for system management on server platforms with BMCs is far from anything new, Raptor Computing Systems with their libre POWER9 systems does now have a full-functioning web-based solution for their OpenBMC-powered systems and still being fully open-source.

More high-end audio gear is finally transitioning from Firewire to USB-C and one of these new high-end audio interfaces will be supported by the Linux 5.7 kernel this spring.

Linux has supported the Apple Magic Keyboards since 2018 handling the Bluetooth connectivity and also needing some special handling for the numeric keypad. While that normally would be the end of the story, recent firmware updates to the Apple Magic Keyboard have caused problems.

The Linux 5.7 kernel that will be out in the late spring / early summer is poised to see support for USB fast charging support for Apple iOS devices.

Red Hat's Richard Hughes has released Fwupd 1.3.8 as the latest version of this Linux utility for performing firmware updates of various system components.

Last summer it was announced that IBM's POWER ISA would be open-source and the OpenPOWER Foundation joining the Linux Foundation. Finally we're getting a look at how the end-user license agreement (EULA) is looking for those wishing to make use of the POWER CPU instruction set architecture.

It looks like the Cavium/Marvell OCTEON MIPS-based processor support is being restored for Linux systems after some of its drivers were briefly removed.

RISC-V's Supervisor Binary Interface "SBI" is the interface between the platform-specific firmware and the running operating system or hypervisor for interacting with the supervisor execution environment in the higher privileged mode. The Linux kernel has been working to support a newer version of the SBI that is more extensible moving forward.

There is a lot of new Arm SoCs and boards/platforms to be supported by the Linux 5.6 kernel.

In recent Linux kernel releases we have seen a new gaming keyboard driver, better wireless device support, and a number of new device additions to the Logitech HID driver. With Linux 5.6, there is more Logitech work in tow but not quite as much as the recent kernels.

The new "cpuidle_cooling" thermal driver in Linux 5.6 is similar to Intel's PowerClamp driver and RAPL framework but is generic for working across CPUs/architectures as an idle cooling driver to cool down CPUs/SoCs by injecting idle cycles at run-time.

Adding to the Linux 5.6 excitement is the hardware enablement of the MIPS-based Ingenic X1000 SoC.

With the V3D Gallium3D driver hitting OpenGL ES 3.1 compliance, the Raspberry Pi Foundation and their partners have turned to focusing on getting their Vulkan driver off the ground for Raspberry Pi 4 and future SBCs.

Ahead of USB4 devices expected to begin appearing later this year, the Linux 5.6 kernel is wired up with initial USB4 support.

It turns out Sony is now maintaining the mainline Linux kernel's hid-sony input driver in an "official capacity now across various devices." This hid-sony driver is what traditionally has supported the various PlayStation controllers and other input devices for their hardware. But their newfound "official" support for this open-source input driver could lead to interesting predicaments.

As part of the Linux 5.6 development dance, Ingo Molnar began sending in all of the pull requests this morning for the different areas of the Linux kernel he oversees.

Linux sound subsystem maintainer Takashi Iwai of SUSE today sent in all of the sound driver updates for this next version of the Linux kernel.

Linux power management subsystem maintainer Rafael Wysocki is punctual as always in sending in his feature pull requests for the new merge window.

Chris Lattner, the founder of the LLVM compiler stack and sub-projects like the Clang C/C++ compiler front-end, has joined RISC-V firm SiFive.

More than a decade after Apple acquired the CUPS source-code and its lead developer, that developer, Michael Sweet, recently parted ways with Apple.