Last year an AMD engineer proposed the notion of "Attack Vector Controls" for the Linux kernel to re-think how the CPU security mitigation handling is done and making it easier for system administrators/users to toggle the mitigations they are concerned about or not.

A change to the Linux 6.13 kernel contributed by a Microsoft engineer ended up changing Linux x86_64 code without proper authorization and in turn causing troubles for users and now set to be disabled ahead of the Linux 6.13 stable release expected next Sunday.

Alibaba engineers have recently been working through some AMD Linux kernel graphics driver bugs uncovered during suspend-and-resume testing with AMD graphics cards.

Queued up into the networking subsystem's "net-next" branch last week ahead of the Linux 6.14 kernel cycle is AF_XDP zero-copy support for the common Intel Gigabit Ethernet "IGB" driver. With this the AF_XDP performance improvements can be quite dramatic in leveraging this zero-copy path.

A nice Christmas surprise for 2024 was Meta engineer Rik van Riel posting Linux kernel patches for making use of the AMD INVLPGB instruction found since Zen 3 processors for broadcast TLB invalidation.

Hyprland is now the latest Wayland compositor supporting the color management protocols and allowing High Dynamic Range (HDR) color support with capable displays.

Richard Biener of SUSE announced today that the GCC 15 compiler has entered its stage four of development, which is the last stage focused only on regression fixes and documentation updates.

Linux 6.13-rc7 is out as the newest weekly release candidate for Linux 6.13 is a more exciting one than weeks prior with many of the developers and kernel testers returning from the end-of-year holiday break. Linux 6.13 remains on track for releasing as stable during the back half of January.

OpenBLAS 0.3.29 is out today as a big update for this widely-used, open-source implementation for Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms and LAPACK APIs.

Set to make the upcoming Linux 6.14 kernel cycle even more exciting is that it looks like the completed NTSYNC driver will be ready for merging. The NTSYNC driver enhances Wine / Proton (Steam Play) gaming by better matching the Windows NT synchronization primitives to allow for better gaming performance. The NTSYNC code has long been a work-in-progress but this week the revised code made it into the relevant "-next" branch ahead of Linux 6.14.

Just over one year since the release of the Enlightenment 0.26 window manager, this weekend Carsten Haitzler released the Enlightenment 0.27 window manager and Wayland compositor. Enlightenment continues going now 28 years in development by Rasterman!

The cpupower utility lives within the Linux kernel source tree and for the upcoming Linux 6.14 kernel will see better reporting capabilities on modern AMD Ryzen and EPYC processors.

Niri 25.01 was released on Saturday as the newest version of this scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor that has developed a nice following among enthusiasts.

Fedora Linux has already supported making use of glibc HWCAPs for allowing libraries to be built for different x86_64 micro-architecture feature levels for performance-sensitive code where it can pay off when leveraging AVX/AVX2 or other newer Intel/AMD CPU instruction set extensions. For Fedora 42 is now a proposal to extend that further to allow binary executables to also leverage glibc HWCAPs for better performance.

Debian 12.9 was just released as the latest install media refresh for those wishing to run the latest Debian 12 packages.

On Friday AMD sent out another round of patches that are destined for the upcoming Linux 6.14 kernel cycle.

This week Intel engineers sent out a number of kernel graphics driver pull requests of new code for the upcoming Linux 6.14 cycle. In addition to the UHBR for Panther Lake and lower Alchemist GPU power use with whitelisted GPUs and fixing old Intel Haswell era graphics platforms, on Friday another (smaller) pull request was sent in for the modern Xe kernel driver.

GNOME 48 is moving along with the GNOME 48 Alpha packages due this weekend followed by the beta in early February. GNOME 48 is still making good progress in its goal to release on 19 March.

Sony engineers are proposing that the LLVM Clang compiler changes its default C++ mode from C++17 to C++20. This coincides with Sony planning to soon upgrade their PlayStation 5 compiler downstream to C++20 by default.

This week brought the KDE Plasma 6.3 beta as well as a number of last minute feature changes for this desktop update due for release in February.