While more code enabling Apple Silicon is reaching the mainline Linux kernel, a lot of important functionality so far remains under development or out-of-tree in the downstream Asahi Linux repository. One piece that's quite important for modern computing and still working its way to the mainline kernel is enabling USB3 functionality with Apple Silicon devices on Linux.

Now that the Linux 6.18 merge window is over with Linux 6.18-rc1 having released yesterday, here is a look at all the interesting new features and changes to find with this kernel. Making Linux 6.18 all the more exciting is that it's expected to become the 2025 Linux LTS kernel once its stable release occurs in December.

Mir 2.23 is out today as the newest version of this Canonical-led library for crafting Wayland-based shells and for smaller desktops to ease the adoption of Wayland, with a focus on Ubuntu Linux platforms.

In the works the past number of months has been cache-aware load balancing / cache aware scheduling support for Linux. The latest iteration of those patches by Intel were posted this weekend and are enjoying the most uplift on AMD EPYC Genoa and newer platforms.

Box64 0.3.8 is now available for this x86_64 user-space emulator for Linux that allows ARM64 and RISC-V 64-bit and LoongArch 64-bit systems to enjoy running x86_64 games and applications. Box64 along with the likes of FEX-Emu are the leading options for those needing to run x86_64 programs on ARM64 and elsewhere.

One year ago updated Intel documentation noted AMX-TRANSPOSE as one of the new ISA additions for Diamond Rapids. But in updated Intel architecture documentation last month, it oddly removed all references to AMX-TRANSPOSE. Confirming that the Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX) addition for TRANSPOSE is now dead, an Intel engineer posted a patch to remove AMX-TRANSPOSE from the GCC compiler.

The ReactOS project that continues striving toward being an "open-source Windows" ABI compatible operating system has been seeing some activity recently around supporting Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM) display drivers as the newer evolution of XDDM drivers.

With last month's GNOME 49 release, the 32-bit Compatibility extension for the GNOME Flatpak Runtime is no more. This is part of the broader effort of phasing out 32-bit support.

As part of Blender continuing to build out the Vulkan API capabilities for this open-source 3D modeling software, a proof of concept merge request was opened for beginning to make use of Vulkan ray queries.

Linux 6.18-rc1 is now available for testing with the Linux 6.18 merge window closed. Linux 6.18 will be out in December and is anticipated to become this year's Linux LTS kernel version.

Well, here is a weekend surprise... Red Hat engineer and Rusticl lead developer Karol Herbst has opened a Mesa merge request for "CLUDA" as a compute-only driver that implements the Gallium3D API atop the NVIDIA CUDA driver API. Wow.

Intel engineers continue working on SR-IOV support for the Xe open-source kernel driver as part of Project Battlematrix for ensuring good virtualization support for the latest Intel GPUs on Linux.

Patches were posted this week for implementing Microsoft's extensions around the ACPI fan device for allowing the operating system to set fan speed trip points. In turn this should help some HP systems and likely other OEMs too in getting fan information working under Linux.

Git developers have been talking in recent weeks around release plans for Git 3.0. If all goes well we could potentially see Git 3.0 released before the end of 2026.

The first beta release of the FreeBSD 15 operating system is now available for testing.

Merged today for the Mesa 25.3 graphics driver code is enabling support for more PowerVR Imagination GPUs within the "PVR" Vulkan driver albeit not officially supported nor in active development. Your mileage may vary but for some users with certain GPUs may work out well enough.

The Linux 6.18 merge window is winding down this weekend ahead of Linux 6.18-rc1 expected on Sunday. Merged today were some remaining x86 core updates, which includes a Retpoline optimization patch intended to help out Intel E core CPUs.

The Solus Linus project is preparing for an "epoch bump" so they can make breaking / high-impact changes to in effect bump the binary version of their package repository.

Last week during the Intel Tech Tour in Arizona, the Intel XPU Manager 1.3.3 software was released. Intel XPU Manager is a management and monitoring tool focused on Intel data center GPUs for simplifying administration, reliability, and maximizing utilization. Somewhat surprisingly, the Intel XPU Manager now deprecated the Data Center GPU Max Series as well as the Data Center GPU Flex Series.

Intel engineer and Linux power management subsystem maintainer Rafael Wysocki posted a set of patches this week to simplify the energy model used by Core Ultra hybrid systems with a mix of P and E cores while lacking SMT support, such as with the current Lunar Lake SoCs and upcoming Panther Lake.