Over the past year we have seen Raspberry Pi working a lot on Wayland support for the Raspberry Pi OS desktop and using it on their latest Raspberry Pi models. With today's new Raspberry Pi OS update, Wayland is being used by default across all Raspberry Pi devices.

While the Linux 6.12 kernel enables Intel Xe2 Battlemage discrete GPU support out-of-the-box as a sign of its maturing state, there are a number of patches for the open-source Battlemage driver support that are ongoing. One of the areas seeing some patches recently are around enhancing the display features with Battlemage's upgraded capabilities. Plus there's ongoing work around next-gen Xe3 graphics too.

It turns out the latest AMD Ryzen desktop processors offer support for AMD Smart Trace Buffer (STB) that previously was only limited to mobile platforms.

Intel has issued their newest quarterly feature release of their FFmpeg Cartwheel, which is their developer staging area of new video acceleration related patches for Intel graphics hardware that they are working to upstream within the widely-used, open-source FFmpeg library.

Sway 1.10 released on Sunday as the newest version of this i3-inspired Wayland compositor for the Linux desktop.

Following a busy week of kernel drama stemming from the Russian sanctions impacting Linux maintainers, Linus Torvalds is out with the Linux 6.12-rc5 weekly test candidate.

Sent out in original patch form this past week and already iterated to a second version this Sunday, a new proposal is underway to introduce "hung_task_detect_count" as a convenient means of tracking the number of times hung tasks are detected since boot.

Intel merged Linear Address Masking into the Linux kernel last year as a means of allowing user-space to store metadata within some bits of pointers without masking it out before use. LAM can be useful for virtual machines, sanitizers / profiling / memory tagging, and other uses. While the brand new Intel Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake CPUs support LAM, the Linux kernel is now disabling LAM out of security concerns.

For the past year Intel software engineers have been developing a PCIe cooling driver to reduce the PCIe link speed to cope with thermal issues. In the future with PCI Express 6.0 this driver may be further adapted to also reduce the PCIe link width when encountering thermal problems. This cooling driver is now ready for merging with the upcoming Linux 6.13 kernel.

In addition to Eric Biggers of Google being busy working on various crypto and hashing performance optimizations, the longtime Linux developer has also been working on "dm-inlinecrypt" for better leveraging inline block device encryption.

The Linux NETFS code as a network file-system helper library is seeing patches to help enhance the read performance for solutions like CIFS as well as adding single blob object support.

Vulkan 1.3.300 debuted on Friday with a handful of fixes and one new extension.

With Linux 6.13 there is going to be the initial kernel graphics driver support for Xe3 in integrated form to be found with next-gen Panther Lake processors. Merged today for Mesa 24.3 this quarter is the initial OpenGL and Vulkan driver enablement for Xe3 graphics.

Submitted today were a set of x86 platform driver fixes for merging ahead of the Linux 6.12-rc5 release due out on Sunday. For the most part mostly mundane fixes. But notable is an ASUS WMI fix to address the Core Ultra 200V "Lunar Lake" performance issue I've pointed out now in several articles.

Following the recent concerns over Bitwarden potentially moving further away from open-source given SDK changes that appeared, Bitwarden has now further addressed the situation to ease the community concerns.

KDE developers continue being very busy prepping more bug fixes for the Plasma 6.2.x series while continuing to work on new feature material for Plasma 6.3.

Linus Torvalds took to some coding himself today to fix a user-address masking non-canonical speculation issue. The Linux kernel needed an adaptation for this "Meltdown Lite" issue due to different behavior with the latest AMD Zen 5 processors.

Yesterday for the Intel Core Ultra 200S Arrow Lake launch date was my extensive look at the Core Ultra 9 285K under Ubuntu Linux for that 24-core desktop processor. Under focus today is the lower-tier Intel Core Ultra 5 245K with a large variety of Linux performance benchmarks for showing how this 14-core processor compares to prior Intel Core CPUs as well as the AMD Ryzen competition atop Ubuntu 24.04 LTS.

A big batch of AMDGPU/AMDKFD kernel graphics and compute driver updates were mailed in for DRM-Next ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.13 kernel cycle.

While last week Qualcomm canceled their Snapdragon X Elite Dev Kit as a $899 USD mini PC built for Windows 11 on ARM and powered by the X1 Elite SoC, the upstreaming Linux support for it is continuing.