The Linux 6.9-rc4 weekly test release is due out later today and ahead of that this week's "x86/urgent" material has been sent in that includes several patches for various x86 speculation mitigation fixes.

In addition to a SLUB optimization for extreme scenarios, faster AES-XTS disk/file encryption for modern Intel/AMD CPUs, and other performance optimizations on the way for Linux 6.10, another minor one was queued up this week.

Mike Blumenkrantz with Valve's open-source Linux graphics driver team has merged a big optimization / bug fixing effort he's recently been tackling for the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver.

A change proposal has been filed for building the CPython interpreter and the Python standard library using the "-O3" compiler optimization flag rather than Fedora's imposed default of the "-O2" optimization level. This is being sought in the name of greater Python performance on Fedora 41.

KDE developers had a very busy week with a lot of new feature work continuing to land for Plasma 6.1 plus continuing to address bugs and other fallout from the recent Plasma 6 introduction.