Some post-merge-window code changes merged overnight ahead of Linux 7.2-rc2 this weekend is hardening the kernel's BPF code against JIT spraying attacks.

Currently measuring in at 32 patches, SUSE engineer Juergen Gross has been leading the effort to end the Linux kernel's usage of their 32-bit model specific register (MSR) interfaces so the more modern 64-bit interfaces can be exclusively used. This allows for better code unification and cleaning up the MSR code.

The ReactOS project that is striving to be the "open-source Windows" with Windows driver and software binary compatibility hit another milestone today. ReactOS to date has primarily targeted Windows NT 5.2 as the architecture from Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 but with an eye toward Windows NT 6.0 for Windows Vista and later compatibility with software. ReactOS has now landed their first NT6 system call.

A change proposal under consideration for Fedora Linux 45 would enable x86_64 Shadow Stack usage by default in the name of better security on modern Intel and AMD systems.

The EFS file-system was used for non-ISO9660 CD-ROMs and disk partitions on SGI IRIX before IRIX 6.0 switched over to XFS. Inside the Linux kernel has been a read-only EFS file-system driver without a maintainer for 20+ years while for Linux 7.3 it's expected to be removed.

When AI/LLM agents are used in the creation of Linux kernel patches, the policy for a while now has been that it should be specified using an "Assisted-by" tag as part of the patches/commits. But Linux kernel developers this week have been discussing whether to revise that policy or to potentially eliminate it.

Since May we have been benchmarking the SpacemiT K3 RISC-V SoC as one of the first to market RISC-V chips supporting the RVA23 profile. The SpacemiT K3 has shown how far RISC-V performance has come in the past half decade and one of the promising elements of this modern RISC-V SoC with its X100/A100 cores is supporting the RISC-V Vector Extension "RVV" 1.0. In this article are some initial benchmarks looking specifically at the RISC-V RVV 1.0 performance impact in different supported software.

The x86 Ecosystem Advisory Group led by Intel and AMD recently firmed up the AI Compute Extensions (ACE) specification for optimizing x86 for AI computation tasks around matrix multiplication and the like for machine learning workloads. The cross-vendor ACE extension is ultimately a successor to Intel's Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX). Posted to the GCC mailing list today by Intel engineers are the initial patches in preparing the compiler support for ACE.

One month ago we reported on YSERVER as a modern X11 server written in Rust with the help of Claude Code. Since then YSERVER has continued to advance in supporting more X11 functionality thanks to the help of Claude Code (AI) and out today is version 1.3 o this display server.

A security disclosure has been made public today for a yet-to-be-patched arbitrary code execution vulnerability with the KDE Plasma desktop.

It's not only old x86 i486 CPU support being removed from the Linux kernel but a number of older ARM platforms and features are on the chopping block too. A proposal has been laid out for deprecating and then removing a number of outdated ARM platforms and features from the Linux kernel in early 2027.

Back in May the FFmpeg project introduced Vulkan-accelerated decoding for the APV video format. The Advanced Professional Video (APV) codec was being handled using Vulkan shaders in a similar way to how FFmpeg implemented Vulkan acceleration for Apple ProRes. Now there is Vulkan-accelerated APV encoding too.

Red Hat engineer Karol Herbst has landed his latest optimization work to Rusticl in Mesa 26.2. The latest effort for this Rust-based OpenCL driver that works across Gallium3D drivers is around better hardware utilization.

A new release of libjxl is now available for this reference implementation of the JPEG-XL image format, including both image encode and decode support.

Erin Catto who has been developing the Box2D 2D physics engine for games announced the release of Box3D. Box3D is now providing a new open-source 3D physics engine that is forked off from the Box2D code.

Stemming from the widely varying views over the recent Fedora proposal for an "AI Developer Desktop" catering to running local AI and machine learning workloads in pre-configured environments with a seamless hardware-accelerated experience, the Fedora Council issued a statement this evening to effectively shutdown discussions for now over a Fedora AI Developer Desktop and to pause the Fedora Community Initiatives process.

Back in March Steam on Linux use shot up to 5.33% as a big 3.1% improvement over February. In April it dropped to 4.52% and then fell to 3.99% in May. Valve just published the Steam Survey numbers for June and it points to another minor setback from the recent all-time high of Steam on Linux.

With the start of the new month comes a new progress report on the KDE Linux distribution for the prior month. Even with KDE developers being busy to ship Plasma 6.7 in June, they still accomplished a lot when it comes to KDE Linux.

System76 today announced their new Lemur Pro high-end Linux laptop that is now powered by the Core Ultra Series 3 "Panther Lake" SoCs.

While the Linux 7.2 feature merge window ended just days ago and the better part of two months now before v7.2 will be released as stable, there are already features beginning to accumulate that will target the Linux 7.3 cycle. The most exciting change I've seen to kick off that dance ahead of Linux 7.3 is addressing a "significant" bottleneck affecting small direct I/O performance with speedy storage such as PCIe Gen5 NVMe SSDs.