It looks like the long ongoing work for compressing the Linux kernel image with Zstd might finally soon be mainlined, potentially for next month's Linux 5.9 cycle kicking off as the "v6" patches sent out this week were done as a Git pull request.

The mouse reporting functionality offered by the Linux VT console is rather basic and seemingly seldom used by text-based, mouse-aware programs. However, a series of patches was sent out this week for improving the implementation to provide for more xterm-like mouse reporting.

While last Sunday Linus Torvalds was concerned over a big Linux 5.8-rc3 release, this Sunday he is reporting that Linux 5.8-rc4 is on the smaller side.

Following the drm-misc-next pull request to DRM-Next last week that exposes VRR ranges via DebugFS and other improvements, another round of DRM-Misc-Next material has now been sent in for queuing ahead of the Linux 5.9 cycle.

Prominent upstream Linux kernel developers are working on adding "inclusive terminology" guidelines to the Linux kernel coding style requirements.

Back in May we reported on work being done for a readfile() system call to read small files more efficiently. Greg Kroah-Hartman has now volleyed those patches for review on the kernel mailing list for this improvement for reading small to medium file sizes on Linux systems.

Linus Torvalds just pushed out Linux 5.8-rc3 as the newest weekly test candidate for the upcoming Linux 5.8 that should debut as stable around early August.

The Linux 5.9 kernel is slated to begin introducing new restrictions on allowing writes to CPU model specific registers (MSRs) from user-space.

A Google engineer has posted patches for review so that the mainline Linux kernel can be built with Link-Time Optimizations (LTO) by the LLVM Clang code compiler.

One of many high profile features that didn't make it in time for Linux 5.8 is FGKASLR, Function Granular Kernel Address Space Layout Randomization.

Linus Torvalds as the father of the Linux kernel marked Father's Day 2020 with the release of Linux 5.8-rc2, right on schedule following last week's big 5.8-rc1 kernel with this cycle being one of the largest ever for this open-source kernel.

A few days ago I mentioned that it looked like the FSGSBASE patches could finally land for Linux 5.9 and indeed this performance-sensitive x86_64 feature is on track for premiering the next kernel cycle. But additional testing is encouraged.

The past number of months Facebook engineering has been working on a new slab memory controller for Linux that can offer less memory fragmentation and lower memory use and slab utilization. The sixth version of these patches were published earlier this month.

Linux 5.8 is shaping up to be one of the biggest kernel releases ever and while there are many new Linux 5.8 features, here is a look at some prominent and recently discussed material that didn't make the cut this cycle.

As a change past the Linux 5.8 merge window now that the flurry of code activity has settled down was changing the use of zero-length arrays in structs with flexible array members. Linus Torvalds did pull the change into Linux 5.8 but then decided shortly afterwards to drop the change at least for the time being.

Since yesterday's big release of Linux 5.8-rc1 I have begun benchmarking this new kernel on various systems. Here are some tests on the first system that was being vetted, the Intel Core i9 10900K Comet Lake with Radeon RX 5700 XT graphics.

Linus Torvalds just released the Linux 5.8-rc1 test build as what he describes as one of the biggest releases of all time.

Merged this weekend ahead of Linux 5.8-rc1 is the long-standing work on introducing a general notification queue for the kernel. The general notification queue was pushed back last year from merging but now the initial code is in shape for Linux 5.8.

Merged overnight into the Linux 5.8 code-base is KCSAN, the Kernel Concurrency Sanitizer that is a dynamic race detector for spotting flaws in the kernel code.

The first round of "x86/urgent" fixes have been sent in to Linux 5.8 just ahead of this weekend's 5.8-rc1 milestone while many of these fixes are marked for back-porting to the stable series.

While Linux 5.6-ck1 was much delayed due to Dr. Con Kolivas being busy designing COVID-19 equipment, that work has settled down and the retired anaesthetist is out with his newest Linux patches for improving system responsiveness.

Canonical's Andrea Righi who is on the Ubuntu Kernel Team sent out a set of patches last week working on opportunistic memory reclaim support as a means of achieving much speedier system hibernation and resume performance.

With the staging/IIO subsystem changes for Linux 5.8 arguably most notable is what didn't make the cut this round.

On Sunday Greg Kroah-Hartman began sending in his pull requests to the different areas of the kernel he oversees for the ongoing Linux 5.8 merge window.

Adding to the Linux 5.8 changes is the landing of modernization work for the proc special-purpose file-system.

One week after the release of the big Linux 5.7 kernel release with its many new features, the first point release is now available and overall it's quite light for being the first point release in a new series.

POWER10 is the forthcoming IBM + OpenPOWER processor expected to be shipping in 2021 and manufactured on a 7nm process and offer big improvements over the existing POWER9 microarchitecture.

The GNU Linux-libre 5.7-gnu kernel was released following last weekend's Linux 5.7 kernel release. But the info-gnu mailing list was slow and thus just hitting the wire today for the latest version of this sanitized version of the Linux kernel. One interesting change in GNU Linux-libre 5.7-gnu is dropping the Intel Gen7 "iGPU Leak" security mitigation over not liking the sources.

As part of the many areas of the kernel managed by Ingo Molnar, on Tuesday he submitted the pull request with all of the scheduler code updates for Linux 5.8.

The usual assortment of cryptography updates have landed within Linux 5.8.