While the Linux 6.12 merge window has been closed for more than one week, the modern NTFS "NTFS3" driver has seen some late feature enhancements as well as some fixes merged today for this new kernel version.

For more than one year Arm engineers have been working on Guarded Control Stack "GCS" support for the Linux kernel as a means of protecting against return-oriented programming (ROP) sttacks with modern AArch64 processors. It looks like for Linux 6.13 this Arm GCS support will be ready for upstreaming.

With the Xeon 6980P Granite Rapids benchmarking at Phoronix the past few weeks it's been in a dual socket (2S / 2P) configuration. For those curious about the Intel Xeon 6980P 128-core server performance for a single socket (1S) configuration, here are those complementary results out today and for both DDR5-6400 and MRDIMM-8800 memory configurations. Thus a well-rounded look at the single Xeon 6980P performance compared to other single and dual socket Intel Xeon and AMD EPYC server processors.

Intel's oneAPI Rendering Toolkit with the likes of OSPRay, Embree, OpenVKL, Open Image Denoise, and others has been open-source for years. But it's not been exactly an open-source development model with making it easy for independent contributors to propose code changes. But Intel has now decided to make these projects more like traditional open-source projects and welcoming community contributions -- including from different hardware vendors.

KDE Plasma 6.2 is now available as the latest refinement to the modern Plasma 6 desktop environment.

Merged as part of last week's Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) graphics/display driver fixes for Linux 6.12-rc2 are a few performance tuning updates for Intel Xe2 graphics to benefit the recently released Core Ultra 200 Series "Lunar Lake" laptops.

While there is the open-source MoltenVK project that implements the Vulkan API atop Apple's Metal graphics drivers on iOS/macOS, the 3D graphics consulting firm LunarG is exploring the possibility of implementing Vulkan to Metal translation using Mesa.

Today marks the release of Qt 6.8 as not only a new feature release but also the latest long-term support (LTS) release for this open-source, cross-platform toolkit.

While the recently-departed GNOME Foundation Executive Director in the summer statement was described as "drafting a bold five-year strategic plan for the Foundation, securing two important fiscal sponsorship agreements with GIMP and Black Python Devs, writing our first funding proposal that will now enable the Foundation to apply for more grants, vastly improving our financial operations, and implementing a break-even budget to preserve our financial reserves." It turns out that wasn't enough. The GNOME Foundation today announced some new cost-cutting measures for the project overseeing the open-source GNOME desktop.

OpenBSD 7.6 is out this evening as another major step forward for this BSD operating system with enhanced hardware support, security improvements, updating various user-space software, and enabling other kernel enhancements.

FEX 2410 is out as the newest monthly update to this open-source emulator that allows running Linux x86/x86_64 binaries on Linux AArch64 (ARM 64-bit) systems, including for games and software like Steam. With FEX 2410 there are yet more fixes as well as some new JIT optimizations.

Following a last minute delay due to a performance regression, Python 3.13 stable is out today as the annual major feature release to this widely-used scripting language implementation.

Git 2.47 is out today as the newest feature release to this immensely popular distributed revision control system.

Gentoo Linux will be working on better support for ARM64/AArch64 and 32-bit ARM now that they have received an Ampere Altra Max server to help expedite their ARM build times for binary packages and installation stage builds.

While not expected to reach general availability (GA) state until October of 2025, available today in pre-alpha form is the openSUSE Leap 16.0 distribution.

RPM 4.20 is out today as the newest feature release to this package manager system that's been in development the past year and featuring a variety of improvements for the likes of RHEL and Fedora based distributions.

Yesterday when announcing the Linux 6.12-rc2 kernel, Linus Torvalds asked that the kernel maintainers do a better job moving forward with their commit messages.

The NVGRACE-GPU VFIO driver was introduced for handling Virtual Function I/O support with the NVIDIA Grace Hopper Superchip so that the GPU device could be assigned to guests using KVM/QEMU and similar for virtualization. The NVGRACE-GPU driver is now being extended for supporting the forthcoming NVIDIA Grace Blackwell "GB" designs.

For those on Debian experimental or planning on upgrading to Ubuntu 24.10 that is releasing this week, the Ptyxis terminal emulator is now available in the package archive if wanting to try out this speedy terminal option.

Following work last month for extending the Dell WMI sysman Linux driver to handle Alienware systems for managing the system BIOS within the confines of Linux, another separate improvement is on the way for enhancing Alienware hardware support under Linux. This newest effort is introducing the "dell-wmi-awcc" driver for handling functionality found under Windows with the Alienware Command Center.