Phoronix

In addition to the Linux 6.18 kernel bringing initial bindings for writing Rust USB drivers, the main USB/Thunderbolt subsystem updates for Linux 6.18 brought a variety of other enhancements...

Last week System76 released the Pop!_OS 24.04 beta along with the beta COSMIC desktop. This long overdue update to Pop!_OS re-bases against the Ubuntu 24.04 LTS base while featuring their modern, Rust-based desktop environment. For those curious I ran some benchmarks of Pop!_OS 24.04 beta compared to the current Pop!_OS 22.04 stable release.

Following last week's RISC-V pull request that brought support for the MIPS Vendor Extensions and other changes plus separately the SoC pull that added mainline ESWIN EIC7700 SoC support and the HiFive Premier P550, a secondary round of RISC-V architecture updates was submitted for the Linux 6.18 merge window...

Beta builds of the Blender 5.0 3D modeling software are now available ahead of the planned stable release in mid-November...

Tvrtko Ursulin of Igalia has been leading the work on developing a "fair" DRM scheduler for Linux kernel graphics drivers. This scheduling algorithm is inspired by CFS and aims to improve the experience of running interactive graphical clients in parallel with heavy GPU workloads. This scheduler is inching closer to being ready for the mainline Linux kernel...

The GNU Compiler Collection will be shifting to its "stage three" development in November as focusing more on bug fixing now and new ports and less on existing compiler functionality/features...

In recent days there have been two rounds of Kernel-based Virtual Machine "KVM" feature updates to be merged for Linux 6.18 in enhancing the open-source virtualization stack...

In addition to the NTFS3 driver changes to land last week for the Linux 6.18 kernel, the exFAT file-system driver for that other Microsoft file-system has also seen some notable updates this cycle...

Meta already has Zstd (Zstandard) compression while this week they announced the release of OpenZL as a new open-source, format-aware compression framework...

In addition to a lot of rust code merged last week for Linux 6.18, more Rust code has since landed by way of the char/misc pull request...

Python 3.14 is now available as the newest annual major feature release for the Python programming language...

AMD today announced the Ryzen Embedded 9000 series for industrial computing and automation platforms...

The many memory management "MM" changes were recently merged into the Linux 6.18 kernel, consisting of a number of interesting patch series...

Qualcomm announced today that they are acquiring Arduino, the popular open-source hardware/electronics prototyping platform for single-board micro-controllers...

Being worked on for the past roughly three years has been Linear Address Space Separation "LASS" for the Linux kernel as a security improvement in light of Spectre/Meltdown...

The Memory Technology Device "MTD" subsystem updates are merged for the in-development Linux 6.18 kernel...

Initially released two years ago was an Intel QuickAssist/QAT adaptation for Zstd compression. The v0.1 release happened just over two years ago followed by a v0.2 release one year later... Since then, it had been all quiet. Arriving today to surprise is the QAT Zstd 1.0 plug-in release...

For any Amiga 4000 hobbyists running a Linux m68k operating system, a PCI driver was finally published three decades later for Linux. Patches posted for mainline Linux kernel review today enable the Mediator 4000 PCI bridge available for the Amiga 4000 computer from the early 90's...

Upstreamed for the Linux 6.18 kernel is supporting the Loongson Security Engine chip found on modern versions of these Chinese computing platforms...

Qt 6.10 is now available as the latest feature update to this open-source and cross-platform toolkit...

The LED subsystem updates don't tend to be too exciting each kernel cycle but for those with QNAP network attached storage (NAS) devices and wanting to run the mainline kernel, now you can have working red and green status LEDs...

Fedora 43 is working its way toward release in the coming weeks and is now going through a very late change. A change was announced and accepted today for increasing the size of the /boot partition. This is driven by the ever-increasing number of firmware files needed for different devices to function under Linux with open-source drivers. A large motivator to this change was the very large and growing NVIDIA GPU firmware file sizes for Nouveau and the future Nova driver...

The NFS server (NFSD) improvements were merged today for the Linux 6.18 kernel. Most exciting is a new experimental feature that can help with scaling NFSD both for low-end/low-cost servers up through high-end larger server platforms...

A patch series posted today for Nouveau, the open-source NVIDIA kernel driver within the mainline Linux tree, can help overcome some performance obstacles currently observed with the Mesa NVK Vulkan driver...

The PCI subsystem updates were merged today for the in-development Linux 6.18 kernel. The PCI changes this cycle are mostly a random assortment of different changes to the wide assortment of PCIe drivers. Standing out is a workaround for dealing with a possible PCI Express performance issue for latest-generation Xeon 6 servers...

The Rust-written Redox operating system written from scratch is now enabling multi-threaded support by default for x86-based systems...

Ubuntu 25.10 is looking quite nice in the performance department ahead of its official release later this week. On various systems tested thus far, Ubuntu 25.10 is delivering nice gains over Ubuntu 25.04 and compared to the current Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. The latest Ubuntu 25.10 benchmarking at Phoronix is looking at the Intel Core Ultra Lunar Lake performance using the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition laptop.

While the Intel In-Memory Analytics Accelerator (IAA) so far is just found on newer Xeon server processors, prior Linux patches acknowledge IAA being found on at least select Panther Lake SoCs. New patches ready for merging to the Linux 6.18 kernel are indicating IAA accelerator(s) will also be found on at least some of the lower-cost Wildcat Lake SoCs too...

The networking subsytem updates for Linux 6.18 have been merged. There is a lot of enticing performance optimizations in different areas of the networking stack for this new kernel. Plus new wired and wireless networking hardware support and other improvements to get excited about for this LTS kernel version...

At the start of the year, a new GCC compiler front-end was proposed for the half-century old ALGOL 68 programming language. Not exactly a popular programming language in recent decades and ahead of the GCC 15 release it was decided to not merge it yet to GCC. Even with that setback, development on the ALGOL 68 GCC compiler continues...

The x86 platform drivers area of the Linux kernel continues to see a lot of code churn for supporting new laptops and enhancing support for existing laptop models. Plus the likes of AMD PMF and Intel PMC continue to see ongoing improvements too...

The Intel Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) updates for the Linux 6.18 kernel allow it to work with Kexec for being able to load and boot into a new kernel from another currently running kernel...

The VFIO subsystem updates were merged last week for the ongoing Linux 6.18 merge window...

FreeBSD 15.0 continues working its way toward a stable release in early December and out today is the fifth alpha release...

Adding to the Linux storage/file-system excitement for Linux 6.18 is enhancements to some of the core FUSE code for supporting file-systems in user-space...

The past several months has seen AMD engineers working on a new RDMA driver for Ionic hardware through which they acquired Pensando a few years ago. That AMD-Pensando Ionic RDMA driver is now part of the upstream Linux 6.18 kernel...

The Direct Rendering Manager "DRM" pull request ended up leading to Linus Torvalds complaining over text and Rust code formatting but in the end he pulled all of these kernel graphics driver updates and also the associated "accel" accelerator subsystem drivers too...

Next year's GCC 16 compiler release is continuing the trend of enhancing the compiler diagnostics support, including new features like optionally outputting compiler error/warning diagnostics to HTML format for better analysis...

The HID changes have been merged for Linux 6.18 and are headlined by initial support in the mainline kernel for haptic touchpad handling...

For benefiting container usage on Linux, support for case-folding / case insensitive files and folder support has been added to OverlayFS...

All of the crypto subsystem changes have been merged for the in-development Linux 6.18 kernel...

The Compute Express Link (CXL) changes have been merged for the in-development Linux 6.18 kernel...

While Intel FRED was merged back in Linux 6.9 in advance of Intel processors shipping with this Flexible Return Event Delivery functionality, there ended up being a late, incompatible change to the specification as a result of security research into it. For Linux 6.18 those FRED changes have been merged,..

In addition to some Intel Linux kernel drivers being "orphaned" following the corporate restructuring at Intel between developers being laid off and others deciding to pursue opportunities elsewhere, these changes have also led to a number of Intel-related software packages within Debian being orphaned. In turn these Intel packages are also relied on by Ubuntu and other downstream Debian Linux distributions...

The F2FS file-system enhancements have been merged for the Linux 6.18 kernel and include some new performance optimizations...

Cairo-Dock is back after a decade hiatus! From the early 2010's you may remember Cairo-Dock / GLX-Dock as a complementary dock for your Linux desktop. The last time writing about it was the Cairo-Dock 3.4 release in 2014 when it was working toward EGL/Wayland support. Since then it was rather inactive the past decade besides a small 3.5 update one year ago with a few fixes. But out this week is now Cairo-Dock 3.6 with the long-awaited port to Wayland, HiDPI display handling, and other improvements...

The IOMMU driver changes were merged this week for Linux 6.18 with new material to benefit Intel, AMD, Apple, and RISC-V systems...

ISD is an independent interactive systemd management tool with a nice text user interface "TUI" for dealing with systemd units and other systemd functionality. Out today is isd 0.6 with many fixes and other refinements to this helper for administering systemd-backed Linux systems...

For those making use of Server Message Block (SMB) protocol support on Linux, the SMB3 client code and KSMBD server code has landed some performance work and other fixes for the in-development Linux 6.18 kernel...

KDE Plasma 6.5 Beta 2 released this week and more fixes have landed for this desktop update due out later this month. Plus KDE developers have begun landing more feature work intended for Plasma 6.6...