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The LWN.net Weekly Edition for October 14, 2021 is available.

A group of researchers at Trinity College in Dublin has released the
results of a study into the data collected by a number of Android
variants. There are few surprises here, but the picture is still
discouraging.

We find that the Samsung, X…

One does not normally expect a lot of controversy around a patch series
that makes changes to platform-specific configurations and drivers.
The furor over some work on the Samsung Exynos platform may thus be
surprising. When one looks into the…

Jörg Schilling, a longtime free-software developer, has passed on. Most
people will remember him from his work on cdrtools and the seemingly endless drama that surrounded that
work. He was a difficult character to deal with, but he also contri…

The 5.15-rc5 kernel prepatch is out for
testing. “So things continue to look quite normal, and it looks like
the rough patch (hah!) we had early in the release is all behind us. Knock
wood.”

The
5.14.11,
5.10.72,
5.4.152,
4.19.210,
4.14.250,
4.9.286, and
4.4.288
stable kernel updates have all been released; each contains another set of
important fixes.

For the time being, the effort to add the folio
concept to the memory-management subsystem appears to be stalled, but appearances can
be deceiving. The numerous folio discussions have produced a number of
points of consensus, though; one of tho…

Among the many new features pulled into the mainline during the 5.15 merge
window is the ksmbd
network filesystem server. Ksmbd implements the SMB protocol
(also known as CIFS, though that name has gone out of favor) that is
heavily used in the…

The LWN.net Weekly Edition for October 7, 2021 is available.

Version 13.0.0 of the LLVM compiler suite is out.
There is a long list of changes, as always; see the numerous sets of
release notes below for details.