While Intel FRED was merged back in Linux 6.9 in advance of Intel processors shipping with this Flexible Return Event Delivery functionality, there ended up being a late, incompatible change to the specification as a result of security research into it. For Linux 6.18 those FRED changes have been merged,

In addition to some Intel Linux kernel drivers being "orphaned" following the corporate restructuring at Intel between developers being laid off and others deciding to pursue opportunities elsewhere, these changes have also led to a number of Intel-related software packages within Debian being orphaned. In turn these Intel packages are also relied on by Ubuntu and other downstream Debian Linux distributions.

The F2FS file-system enhancements have been merged for the Linux 6.18 kernel and include some new performance optimizations.

Cairo-Dock is back after a decade hiatus! From the early 2010's you may remember Cairo-Dock / GLX-Dock as a complementary dock for your Linux desktop. The last time writing about it was the Cairo-Dock 3.4 release in 2014 when it was working toward EGL/Wayland support. Since then it was rather inactive the past decade besides a small 3.5 update one year ago with a few fixes. But out this week is now Cairo-Dock 3.6 with the long-awaited port to Wayland, HiDPI display handling, and other improvements.

The IOMMU driver changes were merged this week for Linux 6.18 with new material to benefit Intel, AMD, Apple, and RISC-V systems.

ISD is an independent interactive systemd management tool with a nice text user interface "TUI" for dealing with systemd units and other systemd functionality. Out today is isd 0.6 with many fixes and other refinements to this helper for administering systemd-backed Linux systems.

For those making use of Server Message Block (SMB) protocol support on Linux, the SMB3 client code and KSMBD server code has landed some performance work and other fixes for the in-development Linux 6.18 kernel.

The DeviceMapper changes have been merged for the Linux 6.18 kernel that includes the new DM-PCACHE target.

KDE Plasma 6.5 Beta 2 released this week and more fixes have landed for this desktop update due out later this month. Plus KDE developers have begun landing more feature work intended for Plasma 6.6.

Just a friendly heads-up that some brief downtime of Phoronix.com will happen overnight due to replacing a drive in the web server's RAID array.

Wine 10.16 is out today as a very exciting bi-weekly development release of this software for enjoying Windows games and applications under Linux.

A set of patches merged via the networking pull request for the Linux 6.18 will help servers better cope with distributed denial of service "DDoS" attacks. Thanks to a Google engineer there are some significant optimizations found in the Linux 6.18 kernel code for more efficiently handling of UDP receive performance under stress, such as in DDoS scenarios.

The sound changes were merged this week for the pngoing Linux 6.18 merge window. There is some interesting new API additions as well as new audio hardware support and enhancements to existing sound drivers.

After recently carrying out ROCm 7.0 benchmarks on AMD Ryzen AI Max+ "Strix Halo", I ran some complementary tests looking at the OpenCL performance. In particular, the ROCm OpenCL performance compared to using the Mesa-based Rusticl OpenCL driver on Strix Halo. It was an interesting benchmark battle with some healthy competition.

In addition to the Arm and RISC-V SoC changes and new platforms/machines added for the Linux 6.18 kernel, the separate Device Tree pull request was merged for this next kernel version that also now adds the strings for the upcoming Arm C1 Nano, Pro, Premium, and Ultra processor cores.

Intel today released a new version of their NPU Linux driver user-space components that interface with the upstream IVPU kernel driver.

Announced over the summer by Canonical was Stubble as a way to improve the ARM64 experience by providing a minimal UEFI kernel boot stub for loading machine-specific Device Trees embedded within a kernel image. The initial focus with Stubble is on improving the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite laptop experience on Ubuntu Linux. Thanks to some granted feature freeze exceptions, the support is ready for Ubuntu 25.10.

All of the multimedia subsystem feature updates have been merged for the Linux 6.18 merge window.

A new Free Software Foundation president has been elected.

Andrew Morton on Thursday submitted his collection of "non-MM" patches for areas of the kernel he oversees. There is one patch series that stands out in this pull request for Linux 6.18.