Manjaro 24.0 has been released today as the newest version of this Arch Linux derived desktop OS. Manjaro 24.0 ships with the latest the newly-released Linux 6.9 kernel and a slew of other updated packages.

There's another Rust upgrade coming for the Linux 6.10 kernel to bump the Rust version baseline required for building the Rust in-tree kernel components. This raising of the baseline will continue until a suitable minimum version is achieved where official Rust compiler "just works" well with the Rust'ed kernel bits. The Rust upgrade in Linux 6.10 also does away with its in-tree "alloc" fork for big code savings and simplifying maintenance.

The various ARM SoC/platform pull requests were already merged today by Linus Torvalds for the in-development Linux 6.10 kernel.

While the Raspberry Pi 5 debuted last September already, sadly the mainline Linux kernel still lacks support for booting this popular single board computer... The support on Raspberry Pi OS and other downstream distributions/kernels is good, but the mainline kernel support for the Raspberry Pi SBCs remains a sore spot for this popular ARM single board computer. SUSE engineers have been working on implementing minimal boot support for the Raspberry Pi 5 that will hopefully make it to the mainline kernel.

Mozilla has pushed out its release images of the Firefox 126 web browser ahead of its official debut on Tuesday.

The work written about one month ago on Phoronix for much faster AES-XTS on modern Intel/AMD CPUs for speeding up disk and file encryption by as much as 155% with AMD Zen 4 CPUs has been submitted for Linux 6.10! As expected, this work providing new AES-XTS implementations for modern x86_64 processors is going into Linux 6.10 as part of the crypto subsystem updates.

Back at Supercomputing 23, the Linux Foundation announced their intent on forming the High Performance Software Foundation for helping to advance open-source software for high performance computing (HPC). The Linux Foundation is now using ISC 24 this week in Hamburg, Germany for announcing that the High Performance Software Foundation has launched.

Today marks the first official day of the Linux 6.10 merge window. Among the horde of pull requests sent out today were the numerous x86 pull requests of material that's been queuing up in TIP.git of which there are many changes benefiting both Intel and AMD.

Building off last night's release of Linux 6.9 stable, GNU Linux-libre 6.9-gnu has debuted as this kernel downstream that works on stripping out support for any drivers/hardware depending upon closed-source firmware/microcode and other alterations in the name of software freedom.

Intel, HPE, and Argonne National Laboratory have announced at ISC High Performance 2024 that the Aurora Supercomputer has broken the Excascale barrier and is now the fastest AI supercomputer currently in existence.

Arch Linux derived CachyOS is known for its aggressive performance optimizations and running well on modern hardware. It's also leading when it comes to adopting other new Linux/open-source features. With this weekend's May 2024 ISO update, CachyOS has rolled out initial support for installing to a root file-system based on Bcachefs.

Following last week's release of FreeBSD 14.1 Beta 1, this weekend brought the second beta candidate right on time.

Linux 6.9 is out! Linux 6.9 has been released on time as the newest stable kernel version for rolling-release Linux distributions and other summer releases/updates. Linux 6.9 has a number of exciting features and improvements for those habitually updating to the newest version.

Barring any last minute reservations by Linus Torvalds, Linux 6.9 stable should release later today. In turn the Linux 6.10 merge window will then open for the next two weeks and already some early pull requests have been submitted for this next kernel version. Here is a look at some of what to expect with the Linux 6.10 kernel.

The recent AMD P-State Linux driver patches for heterogeneous core CPU topology, Fast CPPC, and Core Performance Boost haven't made it to the Linux power management's "-next" branch ahead of the imminent Linux 6.10 cycle. Thus it looks like those features won't be ready to make it for v6.10 unless by chance being deemed ready in the coming days and then sent in as part of a secondary set of merge window changes. However, some other AMD P-State fixes/improvements are queued up.

With the new Intel "Xe" Direct Rendering Manager kernel driver that's been in development one of the touted benefits of the clean sheet driver design is that it would enable using Intel discrete GPUs on non-x86 CPU architectures. The long-used "i915" DRM kernel graphics driver has many x86'isms in the code-base built up over the many years of Intel integrated graphics that were only ever found within their x86/x86_64 processors. But now in the era of Intel discrete graphics, there's been issues in trying to run Intel Arc Graphics on say ARM, POWER9, and RISC-V, among others. The experimental Intel Xe driver was recently successfully demonstrated in running on ARM using an Ampere Altra workstation.

Following all of the GFX12 code and related IP landing within the AMDGPU Linux kernel driver as well as the LLVM AMDGPU shader compiler back-end and other code in enabling the next-generation of AMD Radeon graphics, the RadeonSI OpenGL driver support for RDNA4 (GFX12) was merged this Sunday into Mesa.

Linux I/O expert and subsystem maintainer Jens Axboe has submitted all of the IO_uring feature updates ahead of the imminent Linux 6.10 merge window.

The Linux 6.9 kernel should debut as stable later today unless Linus Torvalds has second thoughts and decides to delay it by issuing a v6.9-rc8 kernel instead that would then push out the official release by an extra week. In any event, as a last-minute "x86/urgent" pull request is another Zen 5 PCI ID being added.

The ReactOS project has posted their latest newsletter that outlines progress made during the past two months. ReactOS continues working to be an open-source operating system that offers application and driver binary compatibility with Microsoft Windows to in effect serve as a "open-source Windows" albeit the hardware support and application support are still an ongoing affair.