An AMD compiler engineer posted a patch on Saturday for the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC). The two-line patch adjusts the misprediction cost for Zen 4 and Zen 5 processors, which ends up yielding a 12% improvement in one SPEC CPU benchmark on Zen 5 and a 9% improvement on Zen 4.

Eric Biggers of Google continues carrying out great work on the Linux kernel crypto code. For Linux 7.3 he's landed work on new library APIs for most of the AES encryption modes used within the kernel. Moving forward this will open the door to more performance optimizations, reducing code duplication, and other enhancements.

The big set of input subsystem updates were merged earlier this week for the Linux 7.3 cycle. It's a random assortment of different improvements as well as bug/security fixes driven in part by the flow of AI/LLM generated discoveries.

The eCryptfs stacked cryptographic filesystem implementation for the Linux kernel to transparently encrypt files saw a number of bug fixes for the Linux 7.3 kernel. A number of these bug fixes deal with potential maliciously-crafted data and vulnerable going back to the 2006 introduction of eCryptfs as this option known for its use on Ubuntu home directory encryption and Chrome OS.

The Rust-written, from-scratch Redox OS operating system has switched to using an EEVDF based scheduler design. In doing so they are promoting a 2.6x increase in throughput and a 782x improvement in fairness.

In early 2025 it was being discussed to potentially drop the HFS and HFS+ file-system support with the code having been orphaned over a decade and becoming a maintenance burden. But that dismal outlook quickly turned around with some developers stepping up to maintain the old Apple file-system support. Over a year later, fortunately, it's turned out to be a success story with more HFS/HFS+ file-system fixes continuing to work their way into the mainline Linux kernel.

There is a changing of the guard with Linux 7.3 as the maintainer of the Common Internet File System (CIFS) / SMB3 code within the Linux kernel. Longtime maintainer, principal Linux CIFS author, and current Microsoft employee Steve French has stepped down due to health reasons.

A reported security vulnerability for the NTFS3 driver has gone unaddressed since being reported earlier this summer. The vulnerability allows a pre-crafted NTFS image on a USB flash drive or similar to allow the user to gain root access to the running Linux system.

In addition to AMD's Friday afternoon big code drop of all the UALink enablement patches for the Linux kernel and the AMDGPU driver, there was another big drop from AMD to end out the week... Upstreamed to the linux-firmware.git repository is all the firmware binaries needed by the open-source driver stack for initializing their forthcoming RDNA 4m "GFX 11.7" graphics.

The newest major feature to land in Mesa's open-source NVIDIA "NVK" Vulkan driver is support for Vulkan Video!

The extensible scheduler framework "sched_ext" that allows for custom schedulers as BPF programs has been working on sub-scheduler support in recent kernel cycles. With Linux 7.3, sub-scheduler support is now deemed feature complete.

Tuned 2.28 released this Saturday as the newest version of Red Hat's tuning profile delivery mechanism for Linux. Tuned is used notably out-of-the-box on Fedora Linux for monitoring and adaptively tuning systems.

The open-source, reverse-engineered Etnaviv driver stack that began for providing accelerated graphics support on Vivante GPU IP and since expanded to handle Vivante NPUs as well is now able to handle YOLOX object detection.

The highlight of this week's x86/mm pull request of changes for the Linux 7.3 kernel are fixes that reduce the time that the TLB flushing code has interrupts disabled. This helps significantly with latency-sensitive workloads but Intel engineer Dave Hansen noted in the pull request that "it's certainly something to keep an eye on" in looking out for any regressions.

This Week in Plasma is out with its latest issue to highlight interesting developments in the trek towards Plasma 6.8.

OpenZFS 2.4.4 is out today as the newest stable point release for this ZFS file-system implementation for Linux and FreeBSD systems.

Wine 11.16 is out today as the newest bi-weekly development release for this software enabling Windows games and applications to run on Linux and other platforms.

Just in time for those that enjoy their Linux / Steam Play gaming on weekends, Valve and CodeWeavers today released Proton 11.0-2 as the newest stable release of this Wine 11.0 downstream that powers Steam Play for running Windows games gracefully on Linux.

Whether coincidental or intentional, AMD engineers tend to drop interesting, feature patches for the open-source/Linux space on Friday afternoons. Hitting the kernel mailing list minutes ago were two patch series sent out by AMDGPU maintainer Alex Deucher for introducing UALink infrastructure.

At a time when Linux continues dropping older hardware drivers due to the influx of AI/LLM-generated bug reports and patches for hardware extremely unlikely to be used with modern versions of the mainline Linux kernel, Voodoo graphics cards and vintage Atari computers are seeing some reprieve with the upcoming Linux 7.3 kernel release.