The Flash Friendly File-System (F2FS) updates were sent out on Monday for Linux 6.13 and include one very interesting new feature for this file-system: device aliasing as a means of being able to temporarily carve out a portion of the partition for other purposes.

Google engineer Ricardo Ribalda has proposed a set of patches for the common "uvcvideo" kernel driver that supports UVC-compliant web cameras and the like to provide granular power saving support.

Now that Linux 6.12 has a fix for the Lunar Lake performance with the ASUS Zenbook I have been using for my Core Ultra 200V series Linux testing as well as there recently being an updated Intel Compute Runtime with Lunar Lake fixes, I have been working on some fresh Lunar Lake Xe2 graphics benchmarks using the very latest upstream open-source code. In today's article is exploring how the Xe2 Lunar Lake graphics is performing for OpenCL / GPU compute relative to the prior Meteor Lake Arc Graphics that were already a nice step-up over earlier Intel integrated graphics.

With GIMP 3.0-RC1 out for testing since earlier this month, the hope is that GIMP 3.0 stable will in fact ship in time for the release of Ubuntu 25.04 next April. The current GIMP 3.0 release candidate is working its way to Debian Unstable and in turn soon should be available via the Ubuntu 25.04 archive.

The I3C subsystem updates were submitted for the Linux 6.13 kernel on Monday and include support for another I3C HCI controller used on AMD systems.

Overnight the Rust for Linux lead developer Miguel Ojeda submitted the big set of Rust infrastructure/toolchain updates for the Linux 6.13 holiday kernel.

In between managing all of the pull requests being submitted during this two week long merge window for the Linux 6.13 kernel, Linus Torvalds has merged some of his own code this cycle.

The RDMA subsystem updates were sent out last Friday for the ongoing Linux 6.13 kernel cycle. Most notable with the RDMA updates is the NVIDIA Mellanox "MLX5" network driver introducing a new Data Direct Placement (DDP) feature to further help with performance.

Either due to a mistimed blog post or other factors, a big feature article is out talking up the new ROCm 6.3 features... But the updated ROCm 6.3 open-source GPU compute software doesn't appear to actually be released yet at all their usual sources. In any event there are new features and big performance gains being talked up for ROCm 6.3.

Sent out today were the big set of PCI subsystem updates ready to be merged for the Linux 6.13 kernel. Most notable of the PCI updates is PCI Express TLP Processing Hints (TPH) with that kernel support worked on by AMD engineers as part of one of the new hardware features found with the AMD EPYC 9005 server processors. Over on the Intel side is the new PCIe cooling driver and other changes.

The KVM changes were merged yesterday for Linux 6.13 in further enhancing the open-source virtualization stack.

The GCC 15 code compiler that is releasing as stable in the early months of 2025 has removed all support for the Altera Nios II CPU target.

With my recent AMD EPYC 9005 1P 4U server build using a Supermicro H13SSL-N motherboard, SilverStone kindly sent over their two Socket SP5 cooling options for AMD EPYC processors: the XE04-SP5 4U-compatible heatsink fan and then the XE360-SP5 AIO liquid cooler with a triple 120mm fan radiator to allow effectively cooling up to the new 400~500 Watt EPYC Turin processors. Here is a look at these two high-end AMD EPYC cooling options for those carrying out 4U EPYC 9004/9005 server builds along with thermal and performance benchmark results.

The FUSE feature enhancements were submitted today for the Linux 6.13 kernel as part of improving the file-system in user-space capabilities.

Huawei engineer Zhang Yi posted a set of nine patches today for enabling large folio support for regular files with the EXT4 file-system. These patches enable large folios for EXT4 on regular files except when using FSVERITY, FSCRYPT, or the journaled data mode. Long story short, these large folio patches can deliver some nice performance gains for both reads and writes.

Sent out last night for the ongoing Linux 6.13 merge window were all of the perf tool changes for the wonderful "perf" subsystem for performance profiling and the like. In addition to adding the HWMON PMU to "perf stat", leader sampling for inherited task events, and various other tooling improvements, there are also vendor event updates. Most notable with the updated CPU vendor events are new AMD Zen 5 processor events.

Complementing the Raspberry Pi Pico 2 that launched this summer, the Raspberry Pi Pico 2 W was announced today for $7 as the wireless-enabled variant of this small microcontroller board.

Richard Hughes of Red Hat has released Fwupd 2.0.2 as the newest update to this open-source firmware updating solution for Linux systems.

While the end of year holidays are fast approaching, my commitment to Linux hardware and open-source software remains and there still is a lot of interesting content to come this year still -- each and every day, without change for roughly a decade. Unfortunately though due to the (sad) state of the ad industry, many major companies focusing on the likes of Facebook/Meta ads, and the frequent use of ad-blockers by Linux/FLOSS readers make ongoing operations increasingly difficult. But if you'd like to show some love this holiday season, the Phoronix Premium "Cyber Week" / "Black Friday" special is now taking place so you can enjoy the site ad-free, native dark mode support, multi-page articles on a single page, and other benefits while hopefully allowing the site to continue for years to come.

The AMDXDNA kernel driver for Linux systems that was made open-source in January for supporting the Ryzen AI NPU on laptop SoCs going back to the Ryzen 7040 "Phoenix" series is now one step away from appearing in the mainline Linux kernel in the near future.