The kernel patches collected by Andrew Morton were upstreamed today for the Linux 6.12 kernel. Among those changes are pulling in the updated XZ Embedded code.

While not as exciting as some of the shiny new features for Linux 6.12 like real-time going mainline and Lunar Lake and Battlemage graphics by default, the Firewire (IEEE-1394) subsystem has seen some significant alterations this cycle. With Firewire hardware increasingly rare, the maintainer is hoping to get this Linux 6.12 code better tested by the community.

While there sadly the previously-annual Phoronix meet-up at Oktoberfest in Munich remains defunct, in honor of Oktoberfest 2024 kicking off this weekend in Munich, it's time for the annual Phoronix Premium special. With the Oktoberfest sale you can go ad-free, multi-page articles on a single page, native dark mode support, and other benefits while supporting the site and enjoying a discounted rate.

Linux 6.12 yesterday merged the real-time "PREEMPT_RT" patches that had been in development for two decades. Today another big hitting feature was merged for Linux 6.12 that's been in development nearly as long.

Oracle has shifted their Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel to a Linux 6.10 base with UEK-next.

KDE developers have been busy preparing for Plasma 6.2 with lots of bug fixing and polishing while also beginning to land some features for Plasma 6.3.

The SDL abstraction library commonly used by cross-platform games now prefers using Vulkan on Windows as its ideal graphics API. Direct3D 12 has been demoted lower in priority compared to Vulkan for this Simple DirectMedia Layer.

Following the AMD ROCm 6.2 release from early August, ROCm 6.2.1 was released on Friday evening as the first point release to that series for this AMD GPU compute stack for Linux systems.

Wine 9.18 is out today as the newest bi-weekly development release for this open-source software that enables running Windows games and applications under Linux and other platforms.

The beta release of Ubuntu 24.10 "Oracular Oriole" was released in time for some weekend testing.

For months there has been talk and speculations around Raspberry Pi working to release a Compute Module 5 (CM5) in putting the power of last year's Raspberry Pi 5 into the small form factor for various embedded/industrial applications. It's pretty much a given that the Compute Module 5 will come, it's just a matter of when. With recent activity by Canonical engineers working on Ubuntu Linux, it's looking like the CM5 could be here soon.

When it comes to the question of the fastest x86_64 Linux distribution the answer is very easy with Intel's Clear Linux. But what about in the AArch64 world? When having the AmpereOne server in the lab curiosity got the best of me and I ran benchmarks across seven different Linux distributions on this Supermicro ARM server for seeing what platform had the fastest out-of-the-box Linux performance. The Linux distributions tested on this AmpereOne A192-32X server included Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, Ubuntu 24.10 daily, Fedora Server 40, AlmaLinux 9.4, openSUSE Tumbleweed, Debian Testing, and CentOS Stream 10.

The HID subsystem updates have been merged for the in-development Linux 6.12 kernel. Notable this time around are some new feature additions for the popular Wacom drawing tablet support.

Most Linux distributions have been defaulting to MariaDB as the default MySQL server for years. Ubuntu though has been a notable outlier still relying on Oracle MySQL for the default MySQL service. A proposal raised by an Ubuntu developer hopes to change that for Ubuntu 25.04 in the new year.

After seven months under review, Google's Gfxstream code has been upstreamed into Mesa 24.3 as a Vulkan virtualization solution.

The Haiku open-source operating project known for letting the BeOS spirit live on is out with their newest monthly progress report.

The OpenZFS project has merged DirectIO (O_DIRECT) support for the ZFS file-system to bypass the ARC for reads and writes.

Following the other recent work around Linux enablement for Snapdragon X1 powered laptops, yesterday patches were posted for getting the X1 Elite powered Dell XPS 9345 working with Linux but not all functionality is currently working.

After many years in the making, it finally was merged overnight... The real-time "PREEMPT_RT" kernel support was merged a few hours ago into Linux Git for this year's Linux 6.12 kernel!

Well this is a hell of a surprise... Microsoft announced today that DirectX will be adopting SPIR-V as the interchange format of the future. Microsoft's DirectX 12 will accept shaders compiled to SPIR-V, the intermediate representation defined by The Khronos Group and commonly associated with Vulkan / OpenGL / OpenCL drivers.