In addition to the Linux 6.10 USB changes and char/misc with the new NTSYNC driver, Greg Kroah-Hartman on Wednesday also sent out the staging updates for Linux 6.10. There isn't much in the way of new code but some 19k lines of code removed thanks to removing an unused driver as well as a broken driver.

Similar to the GCC compiler dropping support for the Xeon Phi Knights Mill and Knights Landing accelerators a few days ago, Intel has also gone ahead and seen to the removal of Xeon Phi support for the LLVM/Clang 19 compiler.

Andrew Morton sent out more patches on Wednesday that have been pulled into the Linux 6.10 kernel. Notable from this latest round of "non-MM" updates is enabling more compiler warnings by default and getting newer AMD GPUs working on the RISC-V architecture.

GNOME Shell and Mutter had been covered by Ubuntu's GNOME MicroReleaseException "MRE" policy that allows for new point releases to ship rather easily as stable updates to existing Ubuntu Linux releases. But breaking the camel's back is GNOME 46.1 shipping explicit sync support. Due to landing a "significant new feature" into a point release, the GNOME Shell and Mutter are no longer covered by this exception.

All of the VirtIO updates are now ready for the Linux 6.10 merge window that is closing this weekend.

It looks like systemd 256 will officially debut as stable in the near future with systemd 256-rc3 being released today and not tacking on any new features compared to the prior release candidates.

Greg Kroah-Hartman today sent in the char/misc updates for Linux 6.10 alongside the other areas of the kernel he oversees. Among the char/misc changes is adding the NTSYNC driver that exposes the /dev/ntsync character device for use by the likes of Wine and Valve's Steam Play (Proton). But for Linux 6.10 the driver is effectively "broken" as most of the feature patches have yet to be included.

Eric Engestrom has announced the release of Mesa 24.1 as this quarter's feature release to these open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers.

The latest RISC-V port updates have been merged for the in-development Linux 6.10 kernel.

Back in February 2022 prior to the Valve Steam Deck being released, a Steam Deck Platform Driver was posted for the Linux kernel. Sadly, more than two years later, this driver still hasn't been upstreamed into the mainline Linux kernel and it looks like it could still be months before it happens.

Introduced last year with the Linux 6.7 kernel was a hardening configuration to allow for "make hardening.config" as an easy way of building a security-hardened Linux kernel with sane defaults. With Linux 6.10 there are some additional security minded features now enabled.

Greg Kroah-Hartman sent out the USB/Thunderbolt changes this morning for the Linux 6.10 merge window that is wrapping up this weekend. Surprisingly, in 2024, a new USB to parallel printer port adapter variant is being introduced with Linux 6.10.

The FUSE updates have been submitted for the Linux 6.10 kernel in supporting file-system implementations within user-space.

Alpine Linux 3.20 has been released as the newest feature release to this security-minded, lightweight Linux distribution that is popular for embedded and container use. Alpine Linux continues to set itself apart from others by making use of musl libc, Busybox, and other modifications in the name of security and small footprint.

Sent out on Tuesday were all of the perf tool changes for the Linux 6.10 kernel. This includes perf event support for recent Intel CPUs as well as initial AMD Zen 5 processor support.

Eclipse OpenJ9 v0.45 is now available as the newest version of this high performance JVM for Java applications.

The KVM changes for the Linux 6.10 kernel were merged a few days ago for this important piece to the open-source Linux virtualization stack.

Last week the main SoC/platform updates were sent in for Linux 6.10 that included more ARM-based handheld game consoles and other new Arm devices from ASUS wireless routers to set-top boxes to enabling various SoCs. This week a secondary set of updates were submitted for the Linux 6.10 kernel merge window.

Box64 is out as the newest version of this Linux user-space x86_64 emulator for running on ARM64 Linux devices. There is also an updated version of Box86 too for that x86 32-bit version on ARM.

As a follow-up to this morning's AMD EPYC 4004 review and benchmarks, Supermicro, ASRock Rack, Giga Computing, Tyan, and others have announced new motherboards/servers for these entry-level EPYC servers. In addition with the likes of ASRock Rack they have already published BIOS updates enabling existing AM5 Ryzen server boards to officially support the EPYC 4004 series processors.