The LED subsystem updates for the Linux kernel typically aren't too noteworthy each kernel cycle but with Linux 7.0 is a new TI RGB LED driver that captured my attention in being curious over its "autonomous animation engine" integration.

The close_range system call for closing all file descriptors "FDs" in a given range should enjoy a nice speed boost with the in-development Linux 7.0 kernel.

One of the limitations of the AMDGPU Linux kernel graphics driver has been the lack of its support for HDMI 2.1 and later. AMD has wanted to support HDMI 2.1+ functionality under Linux but it's been legally blocked by the HDMI Forum. But anxious independent users have been working on open-source patches for wiring up HDMI 2.1 into the AMDGPU driver outside of the realm of AMD and the HDMI Forum's blessings.

GhostBSD lead developer Eric Turgeon published an update regarding X.Org Server vs. XLibre vs. Wayland planning for the GhostBSD distribution moving forward as well as some future uncertainties to this desktop-focused, FreeBSD-derived OS.

With memory pricing being as wild as it is these days and with MRDIMMs on Xeon 6 Granite Rapids offering much more memory bandwidth than conventional DDR5 RDIMMs, you may be wondering about the performance impact when not populating all twelve memory channels on the Xeon 6900 series processors. In this article are benchmarks to demonstrate the performance difference of MRDIMM-8800 memory across using six, eight, ten, and twelve MRDIMMs with a Xeon 6980P server.

A pull request for the Microsoft .NET Runtime build on Linux to use IO_uring for sockets is showing some massive performance benefits.

The latest Nova Lake enablement work for the Linux kernel to land is adding support for Nova Lake S platforms to the Intel LPSS driver in the upcoming Linux 7.0 kernel.

DNF 5.4 is out today as the latest release for this next-generation RPM package management solution used by Fedora, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and various other RPM-based Linux distributions.

KDE Plasma 6.6 is now officially out as the newest feature update to this prominent open-source desktop environment. Plasma 6.6 is self-described by KDE developers as "the best desktop in the known universe (according to us). Plasma 6.6 is all about making your life as easy as possible without sacrificing any of the flexibility."

The Gentoo Linux project last year announced plans to move their code hosting to Codeberg rather than GitHub. Gentoo's desire to move away from GitHub was motivated by Microsoft's Copilot training on GitHub repositories. Those plans are turning into action now with the main Gentoo project up on Codeberg and honoring pull requests.

A long-in-development feature for AMD EPYC Zen 5 server platforms now merged for the Linux 7.0 kernel is ACPI PRMT-based address translation for the Compute Express Link (CXL) subsystem.

DRM Panic is the Linux kernel infrastructure now supported by most of the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) kernel graphics/display drivers for being able to render a QR code kernel error message or similar when a kernel panic occurs to provide a cleaner interface should your system run into serious problems. An idea has been raised now within the Fedora Linux camp to provide an improved experience around this feature akin to Windows' "Blue Screen of Death" functionality.

For fans of Lutris as the open-source desktop client for installing and playing many games on Linux, Lutris 0.5.20 is out today with new features that further enhance the integration with different emulators and compatibility layers.

The RISC-V architecture updates have been merged for Linux 7.0 with a few items to note.

Merged a few days ago for the Linux 7.0 kernel were all of the driver core enhancements. As has been the common theme in recent kernel releases, a lot of the driver core code churn revolves around additions for allowing more Rust kernel driver usage.

Linux 6.19.1 was released earlier today while it's since been replaced by Linux 6.19.2 to address fallout from that first point release with some systems not booting. This also resulted in new LTS kernel releases too due to the problematic code being picked up there too.

This month I have been doing a lot of Panther Lake benchmarking under Linux with the Core Ultra X7 358H. One of the areas of much interest has been the Arc B390 Xe3 graphics that have been working nicely out-of-the-box with the Intel open-source driver stack on Linux although there still are some gaps to fill against Windows. Those Intel Arc B390 Linux benchmarks so far have been focused on OpenGL and Vulkan graphics, but what about OpenCL and GPU compute with the open-source Intel Compute Runtime? Today's article is looking at the performance of the Xe3 Panther Lake graphics on the newest Compute Runtime release compared to prior Intel graphics generations and the AMD Ryzen AI competition.

The PCI subsystem updates for Linux 7.0 are aplenty as usual and contain a wide assortment of different fixes and code improvements.

Upstreamed last week to the linux-firmware.git repository by Qualcomm was the GPU firmware files needed for enabling the Adreno GPU on the new Snapdragon X2 Elite laptop SoC.

While the OpenRISC project began ten years before RISC-V was started, it hasn't enjoyed the hardware ecosystem successes of the latter but still the upstream Linux kernel support continues moving forward and the ability to run OpenRISC on FPGA developer boards.