Submitted for code review this weekend was a new MSI WMI Platform driver that was developed via reverse engineering MSI laptops. Initially this MSI WMI Platform driver is just exposing fan speed sensors but ultimately can be more useful for other Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) features.

While there is a growing number of PCIe 5.0 consumer NVMe SSDs available through Internet retailers, when it comes to PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSD data center / enterprise grade solid-state drives there aren't as many yet and even for announced ones they have been relatively in short supply. In preparing for some upcoming Ubuntu 24.04 LTS tests and ahead of next-gen servers arriving, I was recently searching for some new PCIe 5.0 data center solid state drives. Arriving so far are the Kioxia KCD8XPUG1T92 CD8P-R and Kioxia KCMYXVUG3T20 CM7-V PCIe 5 SSDs. Here are a few benchmarks of those drives for those curious about the performance.

The Audacity open-source digital audio editor is out today with a big feature update in the form of Audacity 3.5.

A patch is undergoing work to add Steam Deck IMU support to the HID-Steam kernel driver for supporting the accelerometer and gyroscope sensors of the Steam Deck controller.

Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver engineers have been busy working to enable the display support for the upcoming Battlemage graphics cards as the successor to DG2/Alchemist.

AMD's upstreaming effort around Secure Encrypted Virtualization Secure Nested Paging (SEV-SNP) to the mainline Linux kernel appears to be nearly wrapped up with the latest hypervisor patches now at their fourteenth revision.

After recently announcing they'd be working to get out Micro-Engine Scheduler (MES) firmware documentation and open-source code, AMD said they would be working to open-source more of their software stack and hardware documentation. AMD repeated those calls over the weekend.

Right now for buggy HID hardware or other input devices not exactly aligning to specs or having known hardware workarounds required, a new Linux kernel driver tends to be needed or at least quirks to be added to existing kernel driver code. There's no shortage of wonky HID hardware/drivers out there to deal with such odd cases. Due to the lengthy kernel cycles and other factors involved, leveraging (e)BPF has long been talked about as one of the areas where it may make sense for being able to more quickly send out hardware support fixes in the form of eBPF programs. The Rust-written udev-hid-bpf project is ready to help in that enabling effort.

The Intel Media Driver 2024Q1 release is now available that serves as the company's modern Video Acceleration API (VA-API) driver for Linux systems. The Intel media driver allows for iGPU/dGPU-based video encode/decode for HEVC, VP9, AV1, and other formats supported by the respective graphics hardware.

The fifth weekly release candidate of Linux 6.9 is now available as the kernel cycle looks to get wrapped up by mid-May.

This weekend AMD upstreamed a number of new AMDGPU firmware files into the linux-firmware.git repository that serves as a basis for all of the binary firmware/microcode files used by the Linux kernel drivers. This big set of new AMDGPU firmware files is likely for the upcoming RDNA 3.5 / "RDNA3 refresh" / RDNA3+ as it appears will be called updated RDNA3 graphics for upcoming AMD Ryzen SoCs.

GNOME Mutter 46.1 was released this weekend as the developers prepare to release the GNOME 46.1 point release. This Mutter update brings several exciting feature/bug changes back-ported for the GNOME 46 series.

The GNU Portability Library for common portability code across platforms has seen a major rewrite to gnulib-tool, the program for importing modules from gnulib into their packages. This code rewrite of gnulib-tool is said to offer between eight and 100 times faster performance than the existing implementation.

The good news is that with the upcoming Linux 6.10 kernel cycle the ARM-based Acer Aspire One laptop will feature "almost full" support for this Qualcomm Snapdragon powered laptop. The downside though it's now a three year old device with far more interesting ARM laptops on the market and more powerful options coming to the market this year.

The open-source EROFS read-only file-system that is popular with mobile/embedded devices and containerized applications has been making good progress on performance, showing itself to be rather robust, and has an ambitious roadmap of new feature plans for this RO file-system.

Ahead of the Linux 6.9-rc5 test kernel being released later today, this week's batch of "x86/urgent" fixes were sent out this morning.

Niri as an innovative, scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor is out today with its newest feature release.

This Week in GNOME is out with its latest issue that outlines ongoing exciting work to the desktop thanks to the additional funding from Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund plus a variety of other ongoing desktop/app enhancements.

A new set of Linux kernel patches were sent out on Friday for tweaking th Native BHI mitigation introduced earlier this month for Intel processors.

The past year there's been an independent open-source driver developer working on "Terakan" as a Vulkan driver for old Radeon HD 6000 series GPUs. These pre-GCN GPUs never received any official Vulkan driver support from AMD but thanks to open-source and a strong desire to pull off such a feat, Vitaliy Kuzmin "Triang3l" has been pursuing this challenge and has been pulling off some basic results. The work so far has been predominantly been carried out with the open-source Linux graphics stack while this weekend the Terakan driver was demonstrated under Microsoft Windows.