ARM Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life (Terry Pratchett, Jingo)

AMD-Pensando Ionic RDMA Driver Added To Linux 6.18, Intel IPU E2000 Hardware Too

([Linux Networking] 5 October 12:48 PM EDT RDMA)

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.



Linux 6.18 DRM Pull Includes New Tyr & Rocket Drivers, More AMD & Intel GPU Enhancements

([Linux Kernel] 5 October 09:34 AM EDT Linux 6.18 Direct Rendering Manager)

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.



Improved Diagnostics For GCC 16 - Including Support For Outputting To HTML

([GNU] 5 October 06:39 AM EDT GCC 16 Diagnostics)

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.



Haptic Touchpad Support Makes It Into Linux 6.18

([Hardware] 5 October 06:17 AM EDT Haptic Touchpad)

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



Case-Insensitive OverlayFS Support Merged For Linux 6.18

([Linux Storage] 5 October 06:00 AM EDT Case-Insensitive OverlayFS)

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



AMD Versal TRNG Driver Upstreamed To Linux 6.18, Intel Adds New Telemetry For QAT Gen6

([Linux Kernel] 5 October 05:43 AM EDT Linux 6.18 Crypto)

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



CXL Poison Injection Added To Linux 6.18

([Hardware] 4 October 08:15 PM EDT Poison Injection)

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



Linux 6.18 Lands Intel FRED Update For Late Incompatible Change To Spec

([Intel] 4 October 03:40 PM EDT Intel FRED + Linux 6.18)

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,



Many Debian/Ubuntu Packages For Intel Accelerators & Other Intel Software Have Been Orphaned

([Intel] 4 October 10:13 AM EDT Debian Packages Orphaned)

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.



F2FS Lands Performance Improvements In Linux 6.18

([Linux Storage] 4 October 09:09 AM EDT Flash-Friendly File-System)

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



Cairo-Dock 3.6 Released With Wayland Support & HiDPI

([Desktop] 4 October 06:18 AM EDT Cairo Dock / GLX-Dock)

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.



Linux 6.18 IOMMU Changes For Intel, AMD, Apple & RISC-V

([Hardware] 4 October 05:55 AM EDT IOMMU)

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 0.6 Released For Interactive Systemd Management

([systemd] 4 October 05:43 AM EDT interactive systemd)

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.



SMB3 & KSMBD See Performance Improvements With Linux 6.18

([Linux Storage] 4 October 05:31 AM EDT Linux 6.18 SMB)

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.



DM-PCACHE Merged For Linux 6.18 Along With Other DeviceMapper Changes

([Linux Storage] 4 October 05:10 AM EDT Linux 6.18 DeviceMapper)

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



KDE Plasma 6.5 Sees More Fixes & More Early Feature Work For Plasma 6.6

([KDE] 4 October 05:17 AM EDT KDE This Week)

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.



Notice: Brief Server Downtime Overnight

([Hardware] 3 Hours Ago Brief Downtime)

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 Released With Fast Synchronization Support Using NTSYNC

([WINE] 3 October 08:16 PM EDT Wine 10.16)

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.



Linux 6.18 Will Be A Big Improvement For Servers Encountering DDoS Attacks

([Linux Networking] 3 October 02:55 PM EDT Linux Networking)

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.



Linux 6.18 Lands Compress-Offload API For Opus Audio Codec

([Multimedia] 3 October 12:38 PM EDT Compress-Offload)

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.



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The Hollywood tradition I like best is called "sucking up to the stars."
-- Johnny Carson