Phoronix

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...

The DeviceMapper changes have been merged for the Linux 6.18 kernel that includes the new DM-PCACHE target...

Just a friendly heads-up that some brief downtime of Phoronix.com will happen overnight due to replacing a drive in the web server's RAID array...

Wine 10.16 is out today as a very exciting bi-weekly development release of this software for enjoying Windows games and applications under Linux...

A set of patches merged via the networking pull request for the Linux 6.18 will help servers better cope with distributed denial of service "DDoS" attacks. Thanks to a Google engineer there are some significant optimizations found in the Linux 6.18 kernel code for more efficiently handling of UDP receive performance under stress, such as in DDoS scenarios...

The sound changes were merged this week for the pngoing Linux 6.18 merge window. There is some interesting new API additions as well as new audio hardware support and enhancements to existing sound drivers...

After recently carrying out ROCm 7.0 benchmarks on AMD Ryzen AI Max+ "Strix Halo", I ran some complementary tests looking at the OpenCL performance. In particular, the ROCm OpenCL performance compared to using the Mesa-based Rusticl OpenCL driver on Strix Halo. It was an interesting benchmark battle with some healthy competition.

In addition to the Arm and RISC-V SoC changes and new platforms/machines added for the Linux 6.18 kernel, the separate Device Tree pull request was merged for this next kernel version that also now adds the strings for the upcoming Arm C1 Nano, Pro, Premium, and Ultra processor cores...

Intel today released a new version of their NPU Linux driver user-space components that interface with the upstream IVPU kernel driver...

Announced over the summer by Canonical was Stubble as a way to improve the ARM64 experience by providing a minimal UEFI kernel boot stub for loading machine-specific Device Trees embedded within a kernel image. The initial focus with Stubble is on improving the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite laptop experience on Ubuntu Linux. Thanks to some granted feature freeze exceptions, the support is ready for Ubuntu 25.10...

All of the multimedia subsystem feature updates have been merged for the Linux 6.18 merge window...

A new Free Software Foundation president has been elected...

Andrew Morton on Thursday submitted his collection of "non-MM" patches for areas of the kernel he oversees. There is one patch series that stands out in this pull request for Linux 6.18...

As the first update to the Intel Thermal Daemon since February when v2.5.9 brought Panther Lake support, Intel Thermal Daemon 2.5.10 was tagged on Thursday...

The Slab pull request was merged this evening for the ongoing Linux 6.18 merge window. Most notable with the Slab updates is the introduction of Sheaves...

For those wanting to run virtual machines with more than 255 vCPUs on modern AMD EPYC servers, an important code refactoring was merged for Linux 6.18 to ensure the proper topology information is exposed to KVM guest VMs...

After Linus Torvalds yesterday shot down RISC-V big endian prospects for the Linux kernel, today he has used his authority to wage a war on "crazy" Rust code formatting as well as to critique poor text formatting...

ZLUDA 5 is out today as the newest version of this open-source software for running CUDA software on non-NVIDIA GPUs...

The many SoC and platform/machine DeviceTree additions have been merged for the Linux 6.18 kernel! This includes finally having mainline support for the SiFive HiFive Premier P550 RISC-V development board and its EIC7700 SoC, Apple M2 Pro / Max / Ultra DeviceTrees added and associated Apple Mac system support, various new Snapdragon X1 laptops now being supported by the mainline kernel and much more...

The Kbuild changes have been merged for the in-development Linux 6.18 kernel...

Following last month's release of the first KDE Plasma 6.5 Beta, a second beta milestone was released today ahead of the stable release coming later in October...

So far Intel has posted very few Linux kernel driver enablement patches around Nova Lake but it looks like that is about to change...

Following the recent Raspberry Pi 500+ launch, the latest Raspberry Pi news is the release of Raspberry Pi OS now re-based against Debian 13 "Trixie" along with some additional changes...

The BPF changes have been merged for the in-development Linux 6.18 kernel...

Valve just published the Steam Survey results for September with a slight increase to the Linux gaming userbase...

TrueNAS 25.10-RC1 is out today as the newest test release of this OpenZFS+Linux-based operating system for network attached storage (NAS) hardware and other storage devices...

Sent out today was the x86/mm pull request of the x86/x86_64 memory management changes destined for this next version of the Linux kernel. This pull has just one new patch but is worth mentioning...

Made public and mitigated within the mainline Linux kernel last month was the VMSCAPE vulnerability affecting both AMD and Intel CPUs. Now merged for the in-development Linux 6.18 kernel is adding VMSCAPE to the recently-introduced Attack Vector Controls functionality...

The hardware monitoring "HWMON" subsystem updates have been sent out for the Linux 6.18 kernel with some notable additions...

During the month of September on Phoronix were 271 original Linux/open-source news articles and another 19 featured Linux hardware reviews and benchmark articles, all written by your's truly. Here is a look back at what excited Linux enthusiasts the most on Phoronix during September...

In addition to XFS enabling online fsck by default, Bcachefs being stripped from the mainline Linux kernel, and Btrfs improvements making for a notable first few days of the Linux 6.18 window, there's more. The EXT4, EROFS, and NTFS3 drivers are bringing the latest batch of file-system changes for Linux 6.18...