New Wayland Protocol Proposed For VNC/Remote Software
Prominent Wayland developer Simon Ser sent out a merge request today for introducing the new ext-transient-output protocol. With ext-transient-output, it’s intent is for helping remoting software like VNC servers in a Wayland world… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.4 Sound Changes Merged: “The AI Flood Continues”
Linux sound subsystem maintainer Takashi Iwai of SUSE began the Linux 7.4 sound pull request by noting that “the AI flood continues” with there continuing to be a lot of new patches coming as a result of AI/LLM agents devising patches as well as uncovering new kernel bugs… ⌘ Read more

Cheap GameSir Nova Lite Gaming Controller Supported By Linux 7.4
Following all the HID driver updates/additions in Linux 7.4, the input subsystem changes were merged this weekend for this new kernel version… ⌘ Read more

AV2 Video Codec Adoption Talked Up, SVT-AV2 Being Developed
Back in May the AV2 v1.0 specification was released for this next-generaton, royalty-free video codec. This week the Alliance For Open Media issued a press release talking up the early adoption of AV2… ⌘ Read more

Realtek rtl8723bs Driver Graduates Out Of Staging Area In Linux 7.4
After nearly a decade in the Linux kernel’s staging area and being worked on by many different kernel developer newcomers, the Realtek rtl8723bs graduated out of the staging area and is now a full-fledged member of the Linux networking subsystem… ⌘ Read more

AMD 600 Series Chipsets Now Have Temperature Monitoring Support On Linux
With the Linux 7.4 kernel and also marked for back-porting to the v7.2 and v7.3 series is finally the ability to monitor temperature sensors on AMD 600 Series chipsets that launched alongside the Ryzen 7000 series processors… ⌘ Read more

Google’s C Binder Driver Removed With Rust Binder Ready For “Few Billion Devices”
Linus Torvalds merged the “char/misc” changes for the Linux 7.4 kernel driver on Saturday. Most notable this cycle for char/misc is what’s being removed: Google’s C-written Binder driver has left the kernel with the Rust-based modern Binder driver ready to take for the role of being used by all future Android devices… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.4 Block Updates Range From Floppy Disk Driver Fixes To Apple M4 NVMe Support
The Linux 7.4 block/storage and IO_uring updates were merged today for the ongoing merge window. With the breadth of Linux hardware support, the pull request varies from fixes to Linux’s floppy driver to enabling support for NVMe storage on Apple M4 devices… ⌘ Read more

SteamOS 3.9.5 Released With Linux 7.2 Kernel, KDE Plasma 6.7 Desktop & Other Updates
On Friday Valve released SteamOS 3.9.5 as their first stable release in the SteamOS 3.9 series. This brings all the great improvements previously available in preview form with many package updates and other enhancements… ⌘ Read more

Linux’s Early Boot-Time Physical Memory Allocator Sees Big Speed-Up: ~268s To ~50ms
Sent out today for the Linux 7.4 kernel were a set of memblock improvements. Most notable is a performance optimization within mm/memblock.c that implements the kernel’s early boot-time physical memory allocator that is used prior to the bring-up of the full page allocator… ⌘ Read more

539 MM Patches Merged For Linux 7.4 From Optimizations To More DAMON
Andrew Morton sent out the big set of memory management “MM” related patches for the Linux 7.4 merge window. This cycle it topped out at 539 total patches and a reviewed rate of 76%… ⌘ Read more

systemd Merges Support For Rust Programs
As of today in systemd Git it’s now possible for the systemd programs to be written in the Rust programming language as an alternative to C… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.4 Graphics Driver Changes Headlined By AMDGPU HDMI 2.1 Features
Merged overnight were all the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver updates consisting of many kernel graphics/display driver improvements. Arguably most exciting with these updates for Linux 7.4 is the AMD Radeon (AMDGPU) driver seeing HDMI 2.1 FRL enabled by default along with other HDMI 2.1 features… ⌘ Read more

KDE Plasma 6.9 Stabilizes KWin’s Wayland Picture-In-Picture Support
With the wonderful KDE Plasma 6.8 having shipped just more than one week ago, KDE developers are beginning to go heavy on new features for Plasma 6.9… ⌘ Read more

OBS Studio 33.0 Released With Massive Update To CEF, Improved Plugin Loading
OBS Studio 33.0 is out tonight as the latest major update to this popular open-source and cross-platform video recording and live streaming application… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.4 Merges Slab Updates With A Nice Performance Improvement
The slab pull request was just merged for Linux 7.4. For end users nothing too incredibly exciting but there is one change that does yield a 24% throughput improvement in a benchmark exercising the kernel’s memory management subsystem… ⌘ Read more

HPFS Is The Latest File-System Slated For Removal On Linux
HPFS is the latest file-system driver for the Linux kernel facing removal. The High Performance File-System (HPFS) was developed by IBM and Microsoft for OS/2… ⌘ Read more

Borealis: Asahi Linux’s Apple Silicon Mesa Vulkan Driver Forked For Vibe Coding
Seeing a Vulkan API driver pull request this morning for introducing a new “Borealis” driver ID caught me by surprise as it was the first time I was hearing of such a driver. It turns out to be a fork of the Asahi Linux project’s HoneyKrisp driver in Mesa for Apple Silicon hardware… ⌘ Read more

oneDNN 3.14 Released With ACE Support, Initial AMD Zen Optimizations
The UXL Foundation announced today the release of oneDNN 3.14 as the latest feature update to this library providing optimized deep learning operations for software like PyTorch, TensorFlow, OpenVINO, and others. While oneDNN began as an Intel software project, making this version notable is beginning to see AMD Zen CPU optimizations land in oneDNN proper… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.4 Power Management Preps For AMD Ryzen Zen 6 & Intel Rugged Panther Lake
The power management subsystem updates were merged this week for Linux 7.4 along with the related ACPI and thermal control updates too… ⌘ Read more

OpenSSL 4.1 Released With More AVX-512 Optimizations
OpenSSL 4.1 stable is out today with new AVX-512 optimizations, other performance improvements, and finally retiring Windows on Itanium and Windows CE support… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.4 Brings Hibernation Improvement For Helping Meet Energy Certifications
The PCI/PCIe subsystem improvements have been merged for the ongoing Linux 7.4 merge window… ⌘ Read more

Vulkan 1.4.366 Released With SMPTE ST 2094-50 HDR Support
Vulkan 1.4.366 is out and representing the past two weeks of specification fixes, clarifications, and one new Vulkan API extension… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.4 Introduces New Driver For The Nintendo Switch 2 - Thanks To Valve
The HID subsystem updates have been merged for the Linux 7.4 kernel that included a few new drivers… ⌘ Read more

LibreSSL 4.4 Released With Faster SHA3, Bug Fixes
LibreSSL 4.4 released on Thursday as the newest release of this decade-old OpenSSL fork maintained by OpenBSD developers… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.4 Fixes AMD CPU TLB Size Reporting For Zen 5 & Newer
As a follow-up to the article in September about a Linux patch for fixing under-reported AMD Zen 5 TLB sizes, that work is now merged for the Linux 7.4 kernel… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.4 Workqueue Changes Bring A “10 To 100 Times Faster” Optimization
Adding to all the exciting performance optimizations and other improvements for Linux 7.4 is an exciting workqueue improvement. It’s not too often getting to talk about “10 to 100 times faster” software improvements… ⌘ Read more

Fedora 45 Hits A Second NO-GO: Not Releasing Until November
Fedora 45 wasn’t released this week as its ideal early release target due to not having a release candidate build in time for last week’s Go/No-Go meeting. At today’s Go/No-Go meeting, Fedora 45 was delayed by at least one more week due to open blocker bugs… ⌘ Read more

AI Helping To Improve Linux’s AMD Zen CPU Microarchitecture Detection
A request for comments (RFC) was sent out last night on the Linux kernel mailing list in seeking to clean-up the AMD Zen microarchitecture detection within the kernel. This is for enhancing the kernel where there are code paths specific to a certain generation of AMD Zen processors or select generations such as Zen 3 through Zen 5 CPUs. AI was leveraged in helping to clean-up this AMD Zen code in the Linux kernel… ⌘ Read more

Modular’s MAX Source Code Now Fully Opened, Under New MAX License
Back in August Modular’s Mojo language was open-sourced following the acquisition of Chris Lattner’s company by Qualcomm. The latest achievement now out of the company is their MAX software being fully opened up with the entire source tree available… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.4 Improves Scheduling Latency For Short-Slice Tasks, NVIDIA Vera SMT Preference
The scheduler updates have been merged for the in-development Linux 7.4 kernel to deliver several nice scheduling enhancements… ⌘ Read more

x86 Kernel Shadow Stacks Being Worked On For Linux As Powerful Control Flow Protection
Linux user-space for several years had shadow stack support for hardware-enforced control-flow enforcement in defending against return oriented programming (ROP) attacks. Intel Tigerlake and newer CPUs or AMD Zen 3 and newer have the necessary hardware shadow stacks support. Shadow stacks have been effective for helping user-space software fend ROP attacks while now there is new work toward bringing shadow stack support for k … ⌘ Read more

Mesa Loosens Rules Around AI Agents For Code Comments / Commit Messages
The Mesa 3D graphics driver project has loosened its rules laid out in their AGENTS.md for AI agents to permit AI/LLM assistance in generating code comments and commit/patch messages, as long as a human is ultimately reviewing/editing it in the end… ⌘ Read more

Myrlyn 1.1 Released For SUSE/openSUSE GUI Package Manager
Myrlyn, the package manager GUI that began as YQPkg during a SUSE Hack Week and has evolved quite well, is out with version 1.1 as the first new feature update since the beginning of the year… ⌘ Read more

Mesa RADV Change Satisfies More Steam Play Games On Aging AMD GFX8 GPUs
Valve landed a patch in Mesa 27.0 and to be back-ported to current Mesa stable series to satisfy more games running under Steam Play with VKD3D-Proton for working on AMD GFX8 GPUs like Polaris… ⌘ Read more

Several Linux Kernel Vulnerabilities Accidentally Posted To Public Kernel Mailing List
Seemingly as an accident, overnight several new Linux kernel vulnerability reports were posted to the public Linux kernel mailing list rather than the private security mailing list. The vulnerabilities have yet to be patched on mainline but at least in some cases there are patches undergoing testing or queued in “-next” branches. The CVSS scores are as high as 9.0… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.4 Adapts AMD Zen 6 For Less Costly CPU Security Mitigation
The x86/bugs pull request was merged this week for the Linux 7.4 kernel. Most notable here is adjusting the CPU security mitigations for AMD Zen 6 processors… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.4 Begins Landing Patches To Speed Up The Kernel Build Process
There are notable patches by Arm engineer Lorenzo Stoakes that have begun landing in Linux 7.4 for speeding up the Linux kernel build process. This work can provide some significant reductions in the Linux kernel build time… ⌘ Read more

Linus Torvalds Eliminates Unsafe __get_user() & __put_user() Functions In Linux 7.4
Linus Torvalds continues with his recent uptick in kernel patches himself, assisted in part by AI with Claude Code. Merged today was removing the historical and unsafe __get_user() and __put_user() kernel functions… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.4 Kernel Crypto Library Enjoying Optimized AES Implementations On x86 & RISC-V
The latest Linux kernel cryptographic subsystem performance work carried out by Google engineer Eric Biggers is migrating x86/x86_64 and RISC-V optimized implementations of different AES modes into the lib/crypto kernel crypto library to enjoy faster performance there… ⌘ Read more

Snapdragon X2 Performance On Linux Exceeding Expectations In Initial Benchmarks
For your viewing pleasure today are the first Linux benchmarks of the Qualcomm Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme on Linux using the new Ubuntu 26.10 X1E Concept ISO for Snapdragon X laptop support on Linux. The Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme flagship SoC is tested within the ASUS Zenbook A16 UX3607OA laptop. ⌘ Read more

PHP Updates Released For Two Critical Code Execution Vulnerabilities
PHP 8.5.12, 8.4.27, 8.3.36 and 8.2.35 were just released to fix two critical vulnerabilities that can allow for unauthenticated remote code execution. Server administrators are advised to update immediately… ⌘ Read more

AMD Working On Ryzen Overclocking Driver For Linux
AMD recently published patches for the Linux kernel to implement AOD, an AMD Overclocking driver for Ryzen processors. Linux enthusiasts have long sought an official AMD Ryzen CPU overclocking driver for Linux akin to Ryzen Master on Windows and it’s finally coming, at least from the kernel driver perspective… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.4 To Close Files Synchronously For close_range, exec & exit
Of the many VFS changes to be merged for Linux 7.4 is now closing files synchrously for close_range, exec, and exit calls. In turn when needing to close many file descriptors this provides for much lower latency than the status quo… ⌘ Read more

Fwupd Working Toward Proper Android Integration
Google Chromebooks already have a mandate for nice Fwupd support with the Linux Vendor Firmware (LVFS) while now there is work on improving the Android integration for Fwupd/LVFS… ⌘ Read more

Meta Makes Improvements To Kernfs Scalability With Linux 7.4
Kernfs as the functions/frameworks used for creating pseudo file-systems on Linux like sysfs and configfs have seen some nice scalability work carried out by Meta. After Meta engineers discovered some system daemons getting stuck for minutes on their massive fleet of servers, they uncovered some scalability bottlenecks within Kernfs that now look to be resolved for Linux 7.4… ⌘ Read more

XFS Sees Small Performance Optimizations & Bug Fixes For Linux 7.4
The XFS file-system updates have landed for the in-development Linux 7.4 kernel… ⌘ Read more

Dynamic PAMT Merged For Linux 7.4 To Help Intel Servers Save Precious RAM
Dynamic PAMT has made it for Linux 7.4! Dynamic PAMT is a new feature for reducing memory overhead on Intel TDX servers where there may not be many concurrent virtual machines occupying a majority of the system. In today’s world with high memory prices and tight availability, Dymanic PAMT provides nice memory overhead reduction for modern Intel Xeon servers… ⌘ Read more

COSMIC Epoch 1.11 Released With Wayland xdg-dialog-v1, Better Multi-GPU Handling
System76 developers just released COSMIC Epoch 1.11 as the newest point release to their Rust-written open-source desktop environment catering to their in-house Pop!_OS Linux distribution… ⌘ Read more

Improved Performance & Resource Usage For XFS Checksumming With Linux 7.4
Among the many VFS pull requests merged as the initial material for the in-development Linux 7.4, the VFS IOmap pull introduced lazy bounce buffering for checksummed reads. This improvement is benefiting checksumming on XFS with improved performance and lower resource usage… ⌘ Read more