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• NVIDIA Posts Open-Source DRM Kernel Driver For NVDLA — NVIDIA has posted 13k lines of new Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) kernel driver code for review for supporting their NVDLA IP block.
• Sony Contributes ~73%+ Performance Improvement For exFAT Linux Driver — In turn this improved block request handling leads to 73% and higher performance improvements for tests carried out by Sony engineer Yuezhang Mo on an Arm test platform with SD card storage that is common for Microsoft exFAT file-system usage.
• KDE Has Many Plasma Wayland Fixes — It was a mostly bugfixy week, without so much feature and UI work.
• Google Chrome/Chromium Experimenting With A Qt Back-End — It looks like Google is at least evaluating the prospects of Qt toolkit support for the Chromium/Chrome UI. A Phoronix reader tipped us off to newly-started Gerrit code reviews for Qt support with Chromium.
• Legacy BIOS Support Remains Important For Some On Fedora, May Shift Responsibility To SIG — Earlier this month the change proposal was laid out for Fedora 37 looking to deprecate legacy BIOS support.
• LINUX Unplugged 454: Double Distro Details — Has Fedora pulled ahead of Ubuntu? We take a look at the new Fedora 36 and Ubuntu 22.04 releases.

Plus, why Western Digital might be to thank for your next ultimate Linux workstation.

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• Debian 11 “bullseye” Released — After 2 years, 1 month, and 9 days of development, the Debian project is proud to present its new stable version 11 (code name bullseye), which will be supported for the next 5 years thanks to the combined work of the Debian Security team and the Debian Long Term Support team.
• Phoronix: Debian 11 “Bullseye” Released
• Debian Live install images
• Microsoft & Others Form The eBPF Foundation - Phoronix — For driving eBPF usage moving forward for these sandboxed programs within the Linux kernel, the eBPF Foundation has been formed with backing from The Linux Foundation, Microsoft, Facebook, Netflix, Google, and others.
• Linux Foundation Press Release
• eBPF - Introduction, Tutorials & Community Resources
• RISC-V Developers Continue Working On KVM Support — This KVM RISC-V support has been led by Western Digital who remains very active with various elements of RISC-V Linux support.
• Progress Report: August 2021 - Asahi Linux
• Restore/upgrade firmware of iOS devices
• Apple M1 PCIe Driver Under Review For The Linux Kernel
• Elementary OS 6 Odin released on a ‘pay what you want’ basis • The Register
• Pantheon-tweaks: A system settings panel for the Pantheon desktop environment.

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• Linux Action News 166
• The AMD Radeon Graphics Driver Makes Up Roughly 10.5% Of The Linux Kernel
• The New Microsoft exFAT File-System Driver Is Set To Land With Linux 5.7
• The Linux Kernel’s Scheduler Apparently Causing Issues For Google Stadia Game Developers
• Torvalds’ Comments On Linux Scheduler Woes: “Pure Garbage”
• Thanks Oracle! New Patches Pending Can Reduce Linux Boot Times Up To ~49%
• Systemd Had A Pretty Big 2020
• Systemd-Homed Merged As A Fundamental Change To Linux Home Directories
• Linux Action News 163
• New Linux Features, Timely Hardware Support & More
• Red Hat Recommends Disabling The Intel Linux Graphics Driver Over Hardware Flaw
• A KVM Virtualization bug on Intel Processors because of Unfinished Code
• Intel Gen12/Xe Graphics Have AV1 Accelerated Decode - Linux Support Lands
• AMD Wowed Linux Users In 2020 With Their Fantastic Zen 3 CPUs, and Timely New Open-Source GPU Support
• Linus Torvalds Switches To AMD Ryzen Threadripper After 15 Years Of Intel Systems
• Balancing the needs around the CentOS platform – Blog.CentOS.org
• 2020 Was Another Interesting Year For Microsoft Around Open-Source/Linux
• WSL2 Reaching General Availability In Windows 10 v2004
• Microsoft President Brad Smith Acknowledges They Were Previously Wrong On Open-Source
• Microsoft Is Writing Its Own Wayland Compositor As Part Of WSL2 GUI Efforts
• Microsoft Edge Is Coming Out For Linux Next Month
• KDE Saw Its Wayland Support Stabilize Nicely In 2020, Much Polishing Throughout
• KDE Plasma 5.18 LTS Released After A Lot Of Polishing, New Features
• LINUX Unplugged 385: The 2020 Tuxies
• GNOME In 2020 Saw Many Optimizations, GTK 4.0 Released, GNOME 40 In Development
• GNOME OS Is Taking Shape But Its To Serve For Testing The Desktop
• GNOME Circle Officially Announced For Letting More Apps/Libraries “Join GNOME”
• GTK 4.0 Toolkit Officially Released
• ledger, a powerful command-line accounting system — Ledger is a powerful, double-entry accounting system that is accessed from the UNIX command-line. Ledger, begun in 2003, is written by John Wiegley and released under the BSD license. It has also inspired several ports to other languages.

Plus, our thoughts on Apple's seeming abandoning of CUPS, the latest and greatest open source podcast player, and an important show update.

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• Plasma 5.20: One absolutely massive release — A massive release, containing improvements to dozens of components, widgets, and the desktop behavior in general.
• KDE Plasma 5.20 is Here – And It's an Epic Update
• LibreOffice rains on OpenOffice's 20th anniversary parade — To mark the 20th anniversary of Apache OpenOffice, the project's main rival, LibreOffice, published a letter asking OpenOffice to tell its users to switch
• Google and Intel warn of high-severity Bluetooth security bug in Linux — The flaw resides in BlueZ, the software stack that by default implements all Bluetooth core protocols and layers for Linux. Besides Linux laptops, it's used in many consumer or industrial Internet-of-things devices. It works with Linux versions 2.4.6 and later.
• Intel Blows the Coms Again
• Greg K-H on Twitter — "They are now claiming you need a 5.10 kernel or newer to solve this. 5.10 will be released at the end of December 2020. Intel knows better, and knows how to do this properly, this feels malicious at this point..."
• CUPS Printing System Open-Source Development Has Seemingly Dried Up — The open-source CUPS code-base is now at a stand-still. There was just one commit to the CUPS Git repository for all of 2020.
• Has Apple abandoned CUPS?
• LPC 2020 - Open Printing MC - YouTube
• OpenPrinting News - September 2020
• Antennapod 2.0 Released — AntennaPod version 2 released with a range of new features, bug fixes and improvements. Below you’ll find an extensive list of highlights, with each time the Pull Request ID.
• AntennaPod
• AntennaPod - Apps on Google Play
• AntennaPod | F-Droid

Plus the PinePhone UBports edition goes up for pre-order, and our reaction to Huawei joining the Open Invention Network.

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• Linux kernel 5.6 release announcement — This has a bit more changes than I'd like, but they are mostly from davem's networking fixes pulls, and David feels comfy with them. And I looked over the diff, and none of it looks scary. It's just slightly more than I'd have preferred at this stage - not doesn't really seem worth delaying a release over.
• The Best Features Of The Linux 5.6 Kernel
• WireGuard Christened As A Modern Secure VPN Alternative
• WireGuard VPN makes it to 1.0.0 — It's a good day for WireGuard users—DKMS builds will soon be behind us.
• WireGuard VPN review
• PinePhone UBports Community Edition Pre-orders — Today we're pleased to announce the first PinePhone 'Community Edition', which will ship with Ubuntu Touch pre-installed.
• PINEPHONE – “Community Edition: UBports” - PINE Store
• Ubuntu Touch Q&A 72 — We are very pleased to announce that we are now working together with German phone startup Volla. They are joining us as a sponsor and will have a place on our Advisory Board. We expect that UT will be available as a pre-installed option with the new Volla phone.
• Linux phones running postmarketOS can now run (some) Android apps — “Android in a Box” solution that basically installs Android in a container in a way that lets you run Android apps as if they were native apps.
• LineageOS 17.1 based on Android 10 is now officially available — The team has also decided to jump up on the subversion, going from 17.0 to 17.1
• Huawei signs non-aggression patent pact with membership of Open Invention Network — Chinese giant plays nice with open source
• Press Release Details - Open Invention Network
• Xbox co-creator Rob Wyatt sues Atari for failing to pay him for design of VCS console — Xbox co-creator Rob Wyatt has filed a lawsuit against Atari for failing to pay him for the design work he did in creating the Atari VCS console.
• Game over: Atari VCS architect quits project, claims he hasn’t been paid for six months
• Atari VCS: Managing the Unexpected — We believe it would be unfair to use the balance to fulfill only a small number of Indiegogo orders, so Atari’s plan is to ship to all backers at the same time when enough VCS units and peripherals are available.

Plus Telegram's cryptocurrency is definitely happening. Honest.

Special Guest: Wes Payne.

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• exFAT in the Linux kernel? Yes! — It’s important to us that the Linux community can make use of exFAT included in the Linux kernel with confidence. To this end, we will be making Microsoft’s technical specification for exFAT publicly available to facilitate development of conformant, interoperable implementations. We also support the eventual inclusion of a Linux kernel with exFAT support in a future revision of the Open Invention Network’s Linux System Definition, where, once accepted, the code will benefit from the defensive patent commitments of OIN’s 3040+ members and licensees.
• The Initial exFAT Driver Queued For Introduction With The Linux 5.4 Kernel — Greg lived up to his talk and today committed the exFAT driver to staging-next. This nearly eleven thousand lines of new code did get the sign-off of Microsoft and with it being in the "-next" branch will be set for inclusion into the Linux 5.4 mainline code-base once Linux 5.3 is released.
• Chris Beard to step down as Mozilla CEO — This is a good place to recruit our next CEO and for me to take a meaningful break and recharge before considering what’s next for me. It may be a cliché — but I’ll embrace it — as I’m also looking forward to spending more time with my family after a particularly intense but gratifying tour of duty.
• Thunderbird 68 released — Thunderbird version 68.0 is only offered as direct download from thunderbird.net and not as upgrade from Thunderbird version 60 or earlier. A future version 68.1 will provide updates from earlier versions. Note that add-ons are only supported if add-on authors have adapted them.
• What’s New in Thunderbird 68 — Thunderbird 68 focuses on polish and setting the stage for future releases. There was a lot of work that we had to do below the surface that has made Thunderbird more future-proof and has made it a solid base to continue to build upon. But we also managed to create some great features you can touch today.
• Chrome OS gets first Chromebook Enterprise devices, faster Admin Console, and managed Linux environments — Google today announced a slew of Chrome Enterprise updates, including a faster Google Admin console and managed Linux environments. The company also unveiled the first Chromebook Enterprise laptops: Dell’s Latitude 5300 for $819 and Latitude 5400 for $699.
• GNOME Firmware Updater — A few months ago, Dell asked if I’d like to co-mentor an intern over the summer. The task was to create a GTK “power user” application for managing firmware. The idea being that someone like Dell support could ask the user to run a little application and then read back firmware versions or downgrade to an older firmware version rather than getting them to use the command line.
• GNOME Foundation launches Coding Education Challenge — The GNOME Foundation, with support from Endless, has announced the Coding Education Challenge, a competition aimed to attract projects that offer educators and students new and innovative ideas to teach coding with free and open source software. The $500,000 in funding will support the prizes, which will be awarded to the teams who advance through the three stages of the competition. 
• Telegram will launch its Gram cryptocurrency by October 31 or bust — Telegram’s cryptocurrency— the Gram — may be going public after all. The encrypted messaging app company plans to deliver “the first batches” of the coin in the next two months, according to a report at The New York Times.

Plus Google's new Linux hardware, Flatpaks have met their critic, and more.

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• Ubuntu Touch OTA 5 released — While many have already joined the community on 16.04 with OTA-4, in addition to the long-term support of upstream Ubuntu development, OTA-5 will include a more stable experience, new tweaks, and new features to show off this next stage of Ubuntu Touch development.
• Plasma 5.14 released — A lot of work has gone into improving Discover, Plasma's software manager, and, among other things, we have added a Firmware Update feature and many subtle user interface improvements to give it a smoother feel. We have also rewritten many effects in our window manager KWin and improved it for slicker animations in your work day. Other improvements we have made include a new Display Configuration widget which is useful when giving presentations.
• User Error Episode 50: Understand The Hype — It seems to be all about Plasma these days so we want to know if the hype is justified.
• Website criticises Flatpaks — To make matters worse, the users are misled to believe the apps run sandboxed. For all these apps flatpak shows a reassuring "sandbox" icon when installing the app
• Redis modules forked — Redis put some of the program's code under the anti-open-source Common Clause license. Now, developers are counterattacking by forking the code.
• Microsoft joins OIN — Joining OIN reflects Microsoft’s patent practice evolving in lock-step with the company’s views on Linux and open source more generally.
• ChromeOS tablet launched — The Pixel Slate is a Chrome OS tablet with a detachable keyboard cover that turns it into something very closely resembling a laptop.
• Restyling apps at scale