The Linux 6.18 kernel is anticipated for release this coming Sunday while this week a last-minute crisis was averted following reports of a kernel crash from recent ACPI code changes.

NVIDIA engineers are interested in helping Google bring Vulkan Video accelerated GPU video decoding to the Chrome/Chromium web browser.

Sean Christopherson of Google sent out the pull requests to the KVM tree of the various x86_64-related areas of virtualization he oversees. With these updates ahead of the Linux 6.19 merge window there is a significant overhaul of Intel's Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) code to address various outstanding problems.

Following the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10.1 earlier this month, Rocky Linux 10.1 is now available for this popular community-driven alternative to RHEL 10.1.

FreeBSD 15.0-RC3 shipped just a few days ago as what was expected to be the final release candidate before FreeBSD 15.0 stable is officially unveiled next week. But squeezing out today is FreeBSD 15.0-RC4 to address last minute issues.

Those following Phoronix and the open-source AMD Linux kernel graphics driver know that the HDMI Forum has prevented AMD from implementing HDMI 2.1 support in their open-source "AMDGPU" driver as due the driver implementation would run afoul to the organization's licensing requirements. It's been pointed out online this week that the AMD-Xilinx DRM driver though does have some HDMI 2.1 support albeit different hardware.

Over the past two months I have been publishing a number of fresh benchmarks of the Intel Xeon 6980P "Granite Rapids" flagship processor performance under Linux. All of those new Xeon 6900 series benchmarks on Phoronix have been from the Gigabyte R284-A92-AAL1 2U rack server that has proven to be a very robust and reliable server platform.

Announced last month was the NTFSPLUS driver as a new NTFS file-system driver for the Linux kernel with better write performance and more features compared to the existing NTFS options. A second iteration of that driver was recently queued into "ntfs-next" raising prospects that this NTFSPLUS driver could soon attempt to land in the mainline Linux kernel.

While TUXEDO Computers recently ended their efforts for a Snapdragon X Elite Linux laptop, their Linux Intel/AMD laptop efforts continue going well and recently they have been posting patches working to enhance the upstream kernel support for those x86_64 devices.

Following approval of the /nix top-level directory with Fedora Linux, the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has additionally signed off on allowing the Nix package tool to appear in the Fedora 44 repository.

A Huawei engineer sent out a proposed driver for the Linux kernel to enable "cache lockdwon" behavior for HiSilicon ARM64 processors for greater control over the processor's L3 cache usage.

For those continuing to make use of the X.Org Server, a new point release is now available in the 21.1 series. While most often X.Org Server stable releases these days are driven by shipping new security fixes, the X.Org Server 21.1.21 release is to fix several regressions introduced for various functional issues.

Intel software engineers continue to be hard at work on LLM-Scaler as their solution for running vLLM on Intel GPUs in a Docker containerized environment. A new beta release of LLM-Scaler built around vLLM was released overnight with support for running more large language models.

Red Hat's leading Linux input expert Peter Hutterer released libinput 1.30 today as the newest update to this input handling library used on both X.Org and Wayland desktops.

With Advanced Performance Extensions (APX) on upcoming Intel processors doubling the number of general purpose registers (GPRs) among other advantages, Intel engineers are beginning to think of possible kernel uses for the extra registers.

Alex Gaynor recently announced he is formally stepping down as one of the maintainers of the Rust for Linux kernel code with the removal patch now queued for merging in Linux 6.19.

Building off the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10.1 from two weeks ago, AlmaLinux 10.1 is now available in GA form for this community-oriented RHEL10 downstream. Making AlmaLinux 10.1 all the more interesting is the project's decision to promote Btrfs file-system support.

A year and a half after the Linux kernel patches were first posted, SDCIAE that is found with AMD Zen 5 server processors is set to finally be supported by the mainline kernel come Linux 6.19.

The most exciting hardware to arrive this month in the Phoronix lab is Dell having sent over two of their new Dell Pro Max with GB10 systems. The Dell Pro Max with GB10 is their build-out around NVIDIA's GB10 superchip with ten Cortex-X925 CPU cores and ten Cortex-A725 cores plus the GB10 Blackwell GPU. With 128GB of LPDDR5X memory and 2TB or 4TB SSD by default all within the small chassis, this is an interesting workstation for AI developers.

A set of patches implementing async I/O IOCB_NOWAIT support for the loop block device is heading to the Linux 6.19 kernel with some performance improvements that will make loop block device users "wow".