Linus Torvalds Wonders If Linux’s AI-Prompted Patch Flood Has Peaked
The Register writes that “The worst of the patchpocalypse may be behind us, according to Linus Torvalds.” In his weekly kernel update post, Torvalds said Linux 7.4 rc2 was a big release partly because it contained code he’d left out of rc1 because he’d been busy and it was already the largest such release in kernel history.
But Torvalds s … ⌘ Read more

Critical Apache HTTP/2 Flaw Could Let Unauthenticated Attackers Execute Code Remotely
A critical flaw in Apache HTTP Server’s HTTP/2 module could allow unauthenticated attackers to remotely execute code and potentially take control of affected server processes. Tracked as CVE-2026-119618, the vulnerability affects Apache HTTP Server 2.4.55 through 2.4.70 when HTTP/2 is enabled and is fixed … ⌘ Read more

GTA VI Is Now Available For Preloading
Ancient Slashdot reader Lank writes: GTA VI is now available for preloading. The download weighs in at a whopping 210+ gigabytes on the PS5! Start downloading now and remember to take Nov. 19th off from work. “On Xbox, preloads for digital versions went live at 12 a.m. GMT on November 10 for Series X and Series S, which translates to 7 p.m. EST / 6 p.m. CST / 5 p.m. MST / 4 p.m. PT on Monday, Nov … ⌘ Read more

Blender 5.3 Released With Nvidia DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction, Vulkan Default
Blender 5.3 has been released with support for 3D Gaussian Splats, Nvidia DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction and Vulkan as the default graphics backend on Linux. Phoronix reports: Blender now allows importing Gaussian Splats from PLY, SPZ, and glTF files. Also new to Blender 5.3 is NVIDIA DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction support as a new … ⌘ Read more

Blender 5.3 Released With NVIDIA DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction, Vulkan Default
Blender 5.3 is out today as the newest stable release for this leading open-source 3D modeling software… ⌘ Read more

exfatprogs 1.4.4 Brings Speed-Up For Making New exFAT Filesystems
The exfatprogs 1.4.4 release was issued today for these user-space open-source programs for managing exFAT file-systems on Linux… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.4-rc2 Released With FAT32 Optimization, AMDGPU HDMI 2.2 Improvement
Linus Torvalds just released the second weekly release candidate of Linux 7.4 with some notable bug fixes and other changes routed in past the merge window. It’s another big one in the AI era… ⌘ Read more

Do Data Centers Have a Smaller Effect on Electricity Prices Than We Think?
“According to a new study by researchers at Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania, data centers are probably having only a small effect on residential electricity prices,” reports the Washington Post.

“The researchers calculated that these operations were responsible for just 4% of the utility rate increase … ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.5 To Provide More AMD Ryzen AI NPU AIE4 Enablement
Even before the Linux v7.4 merge window was over, there were already two pull requests of drm-misc-next material targeting for what will be Linux 7.5. This week already saw the third drm-misc-next pull request of more feature patches targeting this next kernel version… ⌘ Read more

AMD PerfOpt Performance Boosting Code Tweaked For Linux 7.4-rc2
Of the many exciting changes in Linux 7.4, one of the exciting out-of-the-box performance improvements is the new “PerfOpt” functionality for AMD SoCs with integrated Radeon graphics. AMD PerfOpt can deliver some nice iGPU performance improvements especially for AI/LLM workloads. With today’s Linux 7.4-rc2 kernel release there are a few tweaks to the PerfOpt code in the IOMMU area… ⌘ Read more

Linux Fixes Faulty Mitigation Selection For BHI Vulnerability
This week’s batch of x86 fixes have been sent out ahead of the Linux 7.4-rc2 kernel releasing later today… ⌘ Read more

Vulkan 1.4.368 Released With New Extensions From Valve & NVIDIA
Vulkan 1.4.368 is out as the newest weekly spec update for this high performance graphics and compute API… ⌘ Read more

How come no one ever talks about Mambos 1-4? Is there some big secret about them? Did they contain some forbidden dance steps or something?

Linux 7.4-rc2 Change Yields As Much As 162x Improvement For FAT32
In addition to a FAT32 optimization yielding as much as a 265x improvement that was merged for the Linux 7.4 cycle and separately another big FAT32 improvement expected for Linux 7.5, merged this week as part of the non-MM fixes for Linux 7.4-rc2 was another big FAT32 performance optimization… ⌘ Read more

Arch Linux vs. CachyOS vs. Omarchy 4.5 Performance Benchmarks
With CachyOS recently having rolled out its Linux 7.3 based kernel and various other improvements plus with Omarchy 4.5 having been released this week, this article provides a look at how CachyOS and Omarchy are competing on the performance front relative to upstream Arch Linux. ⌘ Read more

Sound Subsystem Seeing Lots Of Fixes & Laptop/Device Quirks For Linux 7.4-rc2
The sound subsystem is seeing a “unsurprisingly high amount” fixes and device workarounds/quirks for this weekend’s Linux 7.4-rc2 kernel release… ⌘ Read more

AMDGPU Driver Seeing HDMI 2.2 FRL Fixes For Linux 7.4
With Linux 7.4 the AMDGPU driver enables HDMI 2.1 FRL functionality by default for driving higher refresh rate and higher resolution displays. That default enabling comes as HDMI FreeSync/VRR and ALLM features are also in place for Linux 7.4. Now coming by way of fixes for Linux 7.4 is also improving the Fixed Rate Link support with the newer HDMI 2.2 specification… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.4’s Build Time Performance From Optimizations But Also Larger Codebase
With Linux 7.4 the patches to speed-up the kernel build process began to land. This is the work that’s yielded extremely fast incremental builds and noop builds. The patch series in full is also allowing kernel build times approaching just ten seconds with enough CPU cores. In today’s article is a look at the Linux 7.3 vs. 7.4-rc1 build time performance on the Framework Laptop 13 Pro powered by Intel Panther Lake… ⌘ Read more

Zlib 1.4 Released With More Than One Dozen Security Fixes
Zlib 1.4 is now available for this widely-used compression library. In these AI times, Zlib 1.4 ships with more than a dozen security fixes… ⌘ Read more

Linux’x New Core MM Tree Ready With Numerous Fixes For “Nasty Long-Standing Bugs”
New to the Linux 7.4 kernel cycle is the Core MM tree as the route for herding some of the core memory management Linux kernel patches to the mainline kernel rather than it all going through Andrew Morton’s “MM” tree. As the second pull request from this new kernel tree, a number of fixes were sent out today to address “nasty long-standing bugs” within the kernel… ⌘ Read more

Omarchy 4.5 Released With Apple Silicon Support, More Desktop Customizations
Omarchy 4.5 is out today as a big feature update to this Arch Linux based operating system… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.4 Showing Few Performance Gains With Initial Benchmarks On AMD Ryzen Threadripper
In the first round of benchmarking the in-development Linux 7.4 kernel there are some performance improvements – and some small regressions – worth noting over the current Linux 7.3 stable kernel. This first round of Linux 7.4 kernel benchmarking was on a System76 Thelio Major workstation with AMD Ryzen Threadripper 9980X. ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.3 Will More Than Likely Be This Year’s LTS Kernel
While the Linux 7.4 kernel will be released in the 2026 calendar year in the last week or two of December if the schedule holds, it turns out Linux 7.3 is likely to be this year’s Long Term Support kernel version… ⌘ Read more

@itsericwoodward@itsericwoodward.com Not much honestly 😅 During the storms Picket sat at ~0.2 of a CPU core (peaks ~0.4), up from ~0.02 at idle, so ~10× but still tiny. Memory didn’t budge: ~650 MiB working set before, during and after. Picket’s doing its job; it’s the git forge behind it that would’ve fallen over.

Linux 7.4 Features Steam Frame VR Headset, More AMD Zen 6 Enablement & Initial Apple M4 / A18 Pro Bring-Up
The Linux 7.4 kernel is hopefully going to be this year’s Long Term Support (LTS) kernel version and is coming jam-packed with new features and changes. ⌘ Read more

Linux Preparing Faster FAT32 Performance In 2027 With Up To 4.06x Improvement
In addition to some significant performance improvements for FAT32 in Linux 7.4, more performance improvements are on the way. For what will likely land in Linux 7.5 is up to a 4.06x improvement demonstrated for this aging file-system… ⌘ Read more

Steam Survey - October 2026 shows an uptick for the Linux user share
Valve just published the Steam Hardware & Software Survey for October 2026, showing an uptick in the Linux user share putting it back to nearly 4%.

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Read the full article on GamingOnLinux. ⌘ Read more

In more frustrating news, I did something to my primary laptop, and now it crawls along like a 2005 Celeron trying to run Windows Vista.

My laptop is nothing too special (a Lenovo powered by an i7-1255U (4+8) @ 4.70 GHz with integrated “Iris Xe” graphics), but I’ve been running Manjaro Linux (with KDE Plasma) on it for the past couple of years, and apart from the odd pamac / pacman / “Add Remove Software” inconsistency (or Plasma widget issue), it’s been running pretty well.

Then, a few days ago, it started bugging about updates, and yesterday it added complaints about an unsupported kernel, so I finally pulled the trigger on it, and boy do I regret it.

I initially kept having issues downloading all of the updates (it was trying to download some kind of non-existent Quake-related library, which I had to remove), and I also had issues getting rid of the unsupported 7.1 kernel (due to some “meta” packages that had been installed), but in the end, I resolved both issues, got the kernel removed and the updates installed, and everything seemed fine after the post-update reboot… for about 10 minutes.

And that’s when the machine just decided to start moving at 1/3 speed: typing, moving the cursor, changing windows - everything started acting like it was 2008.

When I first tried to diagnose it, top showed kwin_wayland eating 50% of the CPU, and plasmashell another 10%, but it wasn’t consistent (they both came and went). I disabled all of the desktop effects, which helped some, as did blanking my plasma config (setting my desktop back to default), but things are still noticeably laggier than they were a few days ago.

Someone online suggested freeing up 25% space total on my root drive (which typically runs 90-95% full), so I’ve been cleaning up (and offloading) as much as I can. If that doesn’t work and I don’t find a solution by the end of the week, I’ll probably have to backup my data, wipe the machine clean, and start fresh. 🙃

Steam On Linux Just Under 4% For October 2026
Valve just published their Steam Survey results for October and point to a small uptick in Linux gaming use on a relative basis… ⌘ Read more

Toyota’s EV Sales More Than Doubled In a Year, While Its Gas Car Sales Drop 20% In China
Toyota’s EV sales have jumped 127% through September, reports Electrek:

Including Lexus, Toyota sold 309,766 battery electric vehicles (BEVs) globally through the first nine months of 2026, up 127.4% from the same period last year. Except for January (+87.5%), Toyota’s EV sales have more than doubled … ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.4-rc1 Released With Nice Performance Improvements, AMD Ryzen Zen 6 Preparations & AMDGPU HDMI 2.1 Default
Even with Linus Torvalds having been on holiday, Linux 7.4-rc1 is out today on-schedule for capping off the Linux 7.4 merge window… ⌘ Read more

AI Makes Linux 7.4 Merge Window the Largest in Kernel History
“On a Git commit basis, the Linux 7.4 merge window has been the busiest on record,” writes Phoronix,” with 19,671 commits since Linux 7.3:

As of this morning in Linux Git ahead of v7.4-rc1, the kernel source tree is up to 41,605,120 lines. That’s from 5,193,578 blank lines, 4,993,604 lines of comments, and 31,417,938 lines of detected code. Or nearly … ⌘ Read more

The Linux 7.4 Merge Window Is Easily The Largest In Kernel History
After writing this morning with some stats about the size of the Linux 7.4 merge window and the kernel’s source tree approaching 42 million lines, I was curious to run some numbers for putting the size of the merge window into perspective against the major kernel releases of the past 15 years. This shows the definite recent uptick due to AI/LLM activity… ⌘ Read more

OverlayFS Sees Many Fixes Thanks To AI Code Review
Merged this weekend for Linux 7.4 and also marked for back-porting to current stable kernel versions are a number of fixes to the OverlayFS union mount file-system… ⌘ Read more

Linux’s Perf Python Scripts More Robust & Faster With Linux 7.4
Merged this weekend to Linux 7.4 Git were all of the perf subsystem tooling updates. Most notable to these tooling updates for dealing with performance counters and more on Linux is an overhaul to the Python code… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.4 Merge Window Saw Nearly 20k Commits, Source Tree Approaching 42 Million Lines
Linux 7.3 started out just under 41 million lines in total in the kernel source tree. In the end the Linux v7.3 tag came in at 41,019,555 lines as measured by cloc while now with Linux 7.4 we are inching ever closer to 42 million lines. On a Git commit basis, the Linux 7.4 merge window has been the busiest on record… ⌘ Read more

OpenShot 4.1 Released With Auto-Optimize, CLI Automation & ARM64 Linux Builds
OpenShot is closing out the month of October by releasing OpenShot 4.1 as the latest major feature release for this useful open-source video editing solution… ⌘ Read more

New Linux 7.4 Feature For Reducing AI Noise Already Reverted Due To A “Crazy Beast”
A new feature merged last week for Linux 7.4 to help reduce AI/LLM generated noise from invalid/irrelevant testing configurations is now reverted due to a “crazy beast” in the VFIO subsystem… ⌘ Read more

Ceph In Linux 7.4 Adds Global Mount Option For Lazy I/O
The Ceph kernel client changes have been submitted for Linux 7.4 ahead of its merge window expected to wrap up on Sunday… ⌘ Read more

Google’s First Data Center Satellite Is Online and Writing Poetry
Google’s first experimental space-based data center is operational after launching earlier this month, successfully running its Gemma 4 AI model aboard a satellite and generating a haiku about being in orbit. TechCrunch reports: The satellite, which carries four Google Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) and generates up to 1 kW of electricity, is … ⌘ Read more

AMD Ryzen Zen 6 Looks Like It Will Be In Good Shape With Linux 7.4, Laptop Improvements
The x86 platform driver changes were merged this week to the Linux 7.4 kernel ahead of the merge window closing this weekend… ⌘ Read more

AMD PerfOpt Makes it Into Linux 7.4 As A Nice Performance Boost For AMD iGPUs
As anticipated, the AMD PerfOpt feature was picked up for the Linux 7.4 kernel. As shown already in multiple Phoronix benchmarks, AMD PerfOpt makes for a nice performance boost for AMD integrated graphics, especially for AI workloads… ⌘ Read more

Vulkan 1.4.367 Released With VK_KHR_maintenance12
Vulkan 1.4.367 is out this morning as the newest spec revision for this high performance graphics and compute API… ⌘ Read more

I3C Hub & HDR-DDR Support Merged For Linux 7.4
The I3C changes for Linux 7.4 were submitted this week by Bootlin’s Alexandre Belloni and subsequently merged… ⌘ Read more

RISC-V Has A Nice Portable Performance Optimization With Linux 7.4
The RISC-V architecture changes were merged today for the Linux 7.4 kernel with one nice optimization standing out… ⌘ Read more

F2FS Adds Opt-In Multi-Grain Timestamps With Linux 7.4, Other Improvements
The F2FS (Flash Friendly File-System) improvements have been merged for Linux 7.4 to further enhance this flash-optimized solution… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.4 Networking Brings Hardware Pacing Offload, New Drivers & More Performance
The many Linux wired and wireless networking driver improvements were merged this week for the ongoing Linux 7.4 merge window…. ⌘ Read more

DLSS Updater 5.2 released with AMD FSR 4.1.2 support
DLSS Updater enables you to scan your system for games, and then replace their upscaling and frame-generation with updated versions or something else entirely.

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Read the full article on GamingOnLinux. ⌘ Read more

D7VK 2.4 released along with GXVK for Vulkan-based 3Dfx Glide
A nice surprise for more retro gaming! Along with the release of D7VK 2.4 for older Direct3D, we also now have GXVK for Vulkan-based 3Dfx Glide.

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Read the full article on GamingOnLinux. ⌘ Read more

FAT32 File-System Seeing As Much As 265x Improvement With Linux 7.4
A change merged for Linux 7.4 is showing some mighty big speed-ups for the FAT32 file-system… ⌘ Read more