Phoronix

Being worked on for several years now on the Linux desktop has been high resolution scrolling including work for it around X Input, the libinput library used both by X.Org and Wayland systems, and the kernel driver side for the HID/input devices to support it. The latest user-space work is high resolution scroll wheel support within the next libinput release. Separately, with Linux 5.15 is now additionally support for high resolution scrolling with the Apple Magic Mouse...

One of the kernel patch series that has seen ongoing work for more than one year now is around introducing the FUTEX2 system call to better match the behavior of Microsoft Windows' NT kernel in order to allow for more efficient Proton/Wine usage that powers Steam Play for enjoying Windows games on Linux...

With Linux 5.15 there are optimizations for EXT4, big improvements for XFS, and significant work on Btrfs too. Rounding out the notable file-system work on Linux 5.15, the F2FS updates were submitted and subsequently landed for this next kernel version...

Released at the start of August was dav1d 0.9.1 for this high performance CPU-based AV1 open-source video decoder while now another point release is available with yet more optimizations...

After more than two decades of maintaining the Linux CD-ROM driver code, Jens Axboe who also serves as the block subsystem maintainer, IO_uring lead developer, and filling other roles, announced he was looking for someone to take over the CD-ROM code...

Stemming from an ongoing Mesa GBM discussion over introducing new gbm_bo_create_with_modifiers2 / gbm_surface_create_with_modifiers2 functions since the original "gbm_*_create_with_modifiers" functions lack support for passing usage flags, NVIDIA confirmed that the Sway Wayland compositor is working fine with their forthcoming driver supporting GBM...

While Samsung has explicitly stated before that queued TRIM works for Samsung 860 SSDs on Linux and thus leading to only older Samsung 840/850 drives being blocked from queued TRIM usage, that turns out to be inaccurate and now more quirks are added for the Samsung 860 and 870 series SSDs on Linux...

While Linux 5.13 landed initial Apple Silicon M1 support, it was just the very initial bits. Now for Linux 5.15 we are seeing another step in the bring-up with the community-created Apple M1 IOMMU driver being merged...

KDE developers have kicked off September by landing many fixes for their desktop stack, including around their Plasma Wayland session...

X.Org's DMX DDX driver for supporting Distributed Multi-Head X looks like it will be removed from the source tree after finding out the code has been rather broken for the past 14 years...

Landing via Andrew Morton's patch series today in the Linux 5.15 kernel is handling for demoting pages during memory reclaim, which can be used for punting cold pages off to slower, tiered memory devices (like Intel persistent memory) when under system memory pressure...

It looks like Paragon Software's NTFS3 kernel driver providing much better Linux support for the Microsoft NTFS file-system will land for the 5.15 kernel!..

The last release of Gzip was v1.10 back at the end of 2018 while now it's finally been succeeded today by Gzip 1.11...

With the in-development Linux 5.15 kernel there is a new option for further protecting the kernel around side channel attacks and information leakage. Enabling the option will ensure that any caller-used register contents are zeroed prior to returning from a function. While the reported performance cost is said to be small, I decided to run some benchmarks when toggling this new Kconfig hardening option.

Canonical is preparing to soon release Snapcraft 6.0 as the latest version of their utility for packaging and distributing Snaps, the Ubuntu-preferred route for sandboxed apps...

The Freedesktop SDK as a platform and SDK run-time for Flatpak apps/run-times is out with its first major stable update in one year...

The BeOS-inspired Haiku open-source operating system project has upstreamed its GNU Binutils support...

The latest security effort being pursued by Google's Kees Cook is to provide full compile-time and run-time coverage of all detectable buffer overflows...

While Linux 5.15 has added KSMBD as an SMB3 in-kernel file server, the NFS code within the Linux kernel continues advancing as well for network file sharing needs. With NFS in Linux 5.15 are a few notable improvements...

Red Hat is said to be establishing a "small team" to work on activities around EPEL, the "Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux" that is popular with RHEL/CentOS users for easily fetching extra packages not available via RHEL proper...