The Linux 7.3 kernel is slated to be officially released on Sunday, 18 October, barring any last minute issues from coming about. With that said, here's a reminder about some of the most exciting features to look forward to in this next kernel version.

Longtime Linux kernel engineer Darrick Wong who stepped down as the XFS file-system maintainer in 2023 is now taking a step back from his other Linux kernel development roles after working on the kernel the past 23 years.

It's been nearly one year since receiving the Gigabyte R284-A92-AAL1 2U Granite Rapids server platform for continuing my testing of the flagship Xeon 6980P processors. Curious how the Xeon 6980P 2P performance has evolved on Linux since then, I ran some benchmarks on the newly-released Ubuntu Server 26.10 against the tests carried out last year on Ubuntu 25.10 with the same hardware.

Starling, the open-source desktop environment written in Swift and with its own Wayland compositor too and written largely via Claude Code, has now rolled out its own AI-generated office suite.

The RPM v4 packaging format has been used by Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora and its derivatives for more than two decades. With next year's Fedora 46 release, Fedora Linux may finally transition to the modern RPM v6 packaging format.

With pending code for Mesa, the LLVMpipe software-based Gallium3D/OpenGL driver could soon become faster on modern systems that support AVX-512. That's assuming the AI/LLVM-generated code is all in order.

Linux 7.4 is enabling support for a new Intel CPU feature for providing safety against possible denial of service attacks using Trust Domain Extensions "TDX" VMs. The new feature is Intel Instruction Timeout and previously in-development known as Notify VM Exit.

With the Linux 7.3 kernel due out for release on Sunday, I've continued running more benchmarks recently of this forthcoming kernel version and it looks great. In my Linux 7.3 testing of the Git state it's been looking great in testing on a variety of hardware shown across multiple systems. Recently I decided to try out this new kernel code on the 96-core AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 9995WX workstation.

Intel software engineers today released the latest version of LLM-Scaler-vLLM PV 1.5, their containerized Docker stack providing a convenient AI/LLM experience atop Intel Arc Graphics hardware and born out of their Project Battlematrix initiative.

Merged today to Mesa is initial video acceleration support for the generic Zink Gallium3D driver built atop the Vulkan APIs. What this implementation allows is exposing Video Acceleration API (VA-API) implemented atop the Vulkan Video interfaces.

For those eager to run the pristine Fedora 45 media, you will need to wait at least one more week.

Valve just dropped a new Steam client beta and it's a big one for Linux gamers.

A patch has been posted to the Linux kernel mailing list by an Intel engineer confirming that Nova Lake S and Nova Lake P processors with integrated graphics will support SR-IOV in conjunction with the Xe kernel graphics driver.

With the recently reviewed Star Labs StarFighter Ultra Linux laptop its BIOS allows for configurable memory speeds unlike many other laptop vendor BIOS implementations these days. Star Labs also made the default design decision to run the LPDDR5-7467 rated memory at LPDDR5-6400 speeds in the name of a balanced user experience for power/performance. So I was curious to run some benchmarks quantifying that power and performance impact of LPDDR5-6400 vs. LPDDR5-7467 plus tossed in LPDDR5-5467 testing as well as the third choice offered with this StarFighter Ultra laptop.

The open-source Memtest86+ program that is popular for RAM testing has expanded beyond the x86/x86_64 (and LoongArch64) world to now support memory testing on ARM64/AArch64 hardware.

3mdeb firmware engineers have been quite busy this year working on porting Coreboot and openSIL to an AMD Ryzen AM5 MSI motherboard and similarly getting openSIL and Coreboot up and running on a Gigabyte server motherboard for AMD EPYC 9005 CPUs. They haven't forgotten about their past projects though and today released an updated version of their Dasharo downstream firmware for the ASRock Rack SPC741D8-2L2T motherboard supporting 4th and 5th Gen Xeon Scalable processors.

AI/LLMs like Claude Code are beginning to prove capable of helping to reverse engineer hardware for Linux support, especially when it comes to the tedious reverse engineering tasks.

Ubuntu 26.10 "Stonking Stingray" is now officially available as the newest six-month non-LTS update to Ubuntu Linux.

For those using the generic ACPI Collaborative Processor Performance Control (CPPC) CPUFreq driver such as on a number of ARM64 Linux server platforms, if the CPUs support a "boost" mode it's disabled by default. But a patch from Huawei is now looking to enable CPU boost mode by default on Linux.

As an early improvement to Mutter to look forward to with GNOME 52 (Update: It will first appear in GNOME 51.2), the compositor is now tracking damage for secondary GPU copy buffers. This should improve the experience for those with multi-GPU setups such as some hybrid laptops.