Just prior to the Mesa 24.2 code branching / feature freeze on Thursday, two merge requests landed working on cleaning up some Mesa interfaces and code modernization.

Kees Cook submitted all of the hardening updates this week for the Linux 6.11 merge window in beefing up the kernel's defenses against various attack vectors and vulnerabilities.

A change proposal was raised this week for upgrading Fedora's LXQt desktop offering to the recently released LXQt 2.0 for the upcoming Fedora 41 release.

The Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) updates for Linux 6.11 have been merged and it's a very exciting one for AMD EPYC servers with SEV-SNP guest VM support finally being in the mainline kernel.

Palmer Dabbelt on Saturday sent out the RISC-V architecture updates for the ongoing Linux 6.11 merge window.

OpenMandriva ROME 24.07 debuted as stable today for this rolling release model of OpenMandriva. With the new release comes the transition to the KDE Plasma 6 desktop but the OpenMandriva developers aren't yet comfortable enough to use Wayland by default and thus the X11 session is preferred.

Greg Kroah-Hartman on Friday sent out all of the USB/Thunderbolt subsystem feature updates destined for the Linux 6.11 kernel of which there are many different patches across the board.

The crypto subsystem updates have landed for the Linux 6.11 kernel.

With Linux 6.11 support for the Lenovo Yoga Slim7x and ASUS Vivobook S15 are upstreamed for some of the first Qualcomm Snapdragon X1 Elite powered laptops. But for follow-on kernel cycles you can expect yet more Snapdragon X1 Elite/Plus powered laptop support to appear with new DeviceTree additions. On Friday, Linaro engineer Konrad Dybcio sent out the patches for enabling the X1 Elite powered Lenovo ThinkPad T14s Gen 6 laptop.

With Linux 6.11 over on the Arm-focused SoC side there were three new SoCs and 59 new machines/boards added for Arm and RISC-V. The MIPS pull request was submitted overnight for this next kernel version and there is just two new SoCs being introduced.

KDE developer Nate Graham is out with a summer time update that highlights the interesting improvements made to the KDE desktop and related apps over the past two weeks.

Eric Engestrom is once again serving as the Mesa release manager and today took to forking the Mesa 24.2 codebase followed by issuing the first release candidate.

Back in January AMD quietly posted an XDNA Linux kernel driver for enabling the Ryzen AI NPUs. The driver has been maintained within that GitHub repository since but without any clear effort for getting this accelerator driver reviewed and merged into the upstream Linux kernel. Today that first step is finally being taken with the Ryzen AI XDNA Linux kernel driver patches posted to the Linux kernel mailing list and dri-devel to begin facilitating the upstream review process for getting this AI accelerator driver in the mainline kernel.

Red Hat developer Karol Herbst continues improving the support for Rusticl, the Rust-based modern OpenCL implementation for Mesa's Gallium3D drivers.

All of the SoC and platform updates slated for the Linux 6.11 kernel have been merged including new SoCs and adding DeviceTree files for a number of new systems, including some of the first Qualcomm Snapdragon X1 powered laptops.

NVIDIA's EGL-Wayland library continues to be maintained as an EGLStream-based Wayland external platform library for client-side Wayland support to EGL atop EGLDevice/EGLStream.

Linux sound subsystem maintainer Takashi Iwai has sent out all of the sound driver patches for the in-development Linux 6.11 kernel.

Vulkan 1.3.291 was published this morning and with this specification update comes one prominent new extension: VK_AMD_anti_lag.

The SLAB pull request landed in Linux 6.11 Git on Thursday with kmem_buckets-based hardening of kernel memory allocations.

The Freedreno Gallium3D driver that started out a decade ago providing reverse-engineered, open-source 3D driver support for Qualcomm Adreno hardware has now enabled support for the X1-85 GPU that is found within the Snapdragon X1 Elite and Snapdragon X1 Plus laptop SoCs.