Merged for Linux 6.18 was a new feature called Sheaves as an opt-in, per-CPU array-based caching layer. Plus there is a per-NUMA-node cache of Sheaves called a "Barn". In continuing to build out the Linux kernel usage of Sheaves, a set of initial patches were posted this week to replace the CPU slabs with Sheaves within the slub allocator code.

Merged this week to Linux Git ahead of Linux 6.18-rc3 this Sunday were the latest power management fixes for the kernel. Standing out in the power management code is a fix for a "serious performance regression" affecting some Intel-powered Chromebooks.

With Amazon recently launching their M8a AWS instances powered by 5th Gen AMD EPYC "Turin", for their M8 class instance types there now are all the latest-generation CPU options with AMD EPYC Turin (M8a), Intel Xeon 6 Granite Rapids (M8i), and their in-house Graviton4 processors (M8g). After recently looking at the M7a vs. M8a performance with Amazon EC2, many Phoronix readers expressed interest in seeing an M8a vs. M8i vs. M8g performance showdown so here are those benchmarks.

AMD's ISP4 image signal processing IP is so far just used by the HP ZBook Ultra G1a laptop but will presumably be used by more of the higher-end AMD Ryzen next-gen laptops. AMD engineers today posted their fifth iteration of their open-source Linux driver for enabling the ISP4 use.

Vulkan 1.4.330 is out today with a few specification corrections/clarifications plus five new extensions.

The Asahi Linux developers involved with working on Linux support for Apple Silicon M-Series devices have put out a new progress report on their development efforts.

Valve contractor Timur Kristóf for their Linux graphics driver team has been working on improving Linux driver support for old AMD Radeon GCN 1.0 and GCN 1.1 generation GPUs. This has been about improving the AMDGPU driver to fill remaining gaps in GCN 1.0/1.1 support with those graphics cards by default relying on the older "Radeon" DRM kernel graphics driver compared to the AMDGPU driver used by default with GCN 1.2 and later. Another feature gap for AMDGPU is now being addressed with Video Coding Engine 1.0 support.

Patina 13.0 is now available as this Rust implementation of UEFI firmware. Patina has been working to replace the core UEFI firmware components in a pure Rust implementation to avoid the use of C code.

Back in August, open-source developer Masahiro Yamada stepped down from maintaining the Kconfig and Kbuild areas of the Linux kernel. While Kbuild maintainership was quickly passed on, no one immediately stepped up to maintain Kconfig as the infrastructure code for configuring the Linux kernel builds. That led to Kconfig officially being orphaned code within the kernel but now that situation has been addressed.

Intel recently began sending out Xe3P kernel graphics driver patches for Nova Lake that will begin landing in the upcoming Linux 6.19 kernel cycle. Now on the user-space side, merged today for Mesa 26.0 were the first enablement patches for Xe3P Nova Lake for their open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers on Linux.

Fedora 43 complete with its rocket-themed default desktop background on Fedora Workstation 43 is cleared for lifting off next week.

Back in May AMD announced the Radeon AI PRO R9700 with 128 AI accelerators, 32GB of GDDR6 video memory, and other advantages for this AI-focused RDNA4 based graphics card over the RDNA3-based Radeon PRO W7900. The Radeon AI PRO R9700 was supposed to be available in July while today AMD announced it will be going on sale next week.

KDE KWin developer Xaver Hugl published a new blog post today outlining the KMS overlay planes support present within the newly-released Plasma 6.5 desktop. While not yet enabled by default, enabling the overlay planes functionality can result in some nice power savings such as during video playback.

In addition to announced Snap-based silicon-optimized AI large language models, Canonical used the ongoing Ubuntu Summit 25.10 virtual event to announced Canonical Academy. Canonical Academy is their new effort for badges/certifications around Ubuntu Linux.

Besides the early fallout of switching to Rust Coreutils on Ubuntu 25.10 causing some breakage, a more pressing issue has been discovered: Ubuntu 25.10's unattended upgrades functionality for automatic security updates is currently broken due to a Rust Coreutils bug.

Canonical's new push for their Snap app packaging/sandboxed format on Ubuntu Linux is for AI large language models (LLMs). Making it more interesting though is that they are working to deliver silicon-optimized AI LLMs for your hardware and to make it easily deployable for Ubuntu sers.

The past number of months has seen a lot of work by Intel Linux kernel engineers on cache-aware scheduling / load balancing for helping modern CPUs that have multiple caches. With cache aware scheduling, tasks that will likely share resources could be aggregated into the same cache domain to enjoy better cache locality. With the cache aware scheduling patches recently updated and now working past the "request for comments" stage, I was eager to try out these new patches. Especially with a 44% time reduction reported for one of the benchmarks, I was eager to run some tests and the first of those results are being shared today.

GTK has long supported Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) for icons but with up until recently relying on the external librsvg library, the integration hasn't been perfect. But Red Hat engineer Matthias Clasen has been working on having the GTK toolkit natively support SVG.

For those looking for a new RISC-V desktop option, ESWIN is launching a EBC7702 mini-DTX board powered by the EIC7702X dual-die SoC. The EBC7702 Mini-DTX is aiming for developers who want RISC-V under their desk for working on AI and other development tasks.

Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) usage is long obsolete even where it had enjoyed some successes in the likes of Germany and Norway. With no activity in years to the ISDN and mISDN subsystem code for the Linux kernel, a patch was sent out today for orphaning the code.