Asahi Linux developers have published a status report following the recent Linux 6.19 kernel release to outline recent progress and upcoming items around Apple Silicon support on Linux. This year will also mark five years that Asahi Linux has been around for bringing Linux to the Apple M-Series hardware.

Last year we began seeing Linux patches preparing the kernel for Intel Data Streaming Accelerator "DSA" 3.0 IP. Finally with the Linux 7.0 kernel those patches in updated form have now been merged.

As part of enhancing the FreeBSD experience on laptops and desktops, FreeBSD developers have been working toward adding a convenient desktop install option to their text-based installer for easily deploying the KDE Plasma desktop along with the necessary GPU drivers. After it didn't get wrapped up in time for the FreeBSD 15.0 release, that desktop installer option is now ready for testing.

All of the KVM virtualization feature changes were recently merged for the in-development Linux 7.0 kernel.

As a late stage change for GNOME 50 ahead of its official debut next month and following last week's GNOME 50 beta is plumbing the Mutter compositor for a new "sdr-native" color mode option.

The NTFS3 driver maintained by Paragon Software for Microsoft NTFS file-systems today saw a batch of improvements merged for Linux 7.0 This comes as there is also the competing "NTFS Remake" driver that began a few months ago as the "NTFSPLUS" driver. That NTFS Remake driver isn't looking like it will be submitted for the Linux 7.0 merge window so at least for now the NTFS3 driver continues seeing improvements with the latest mainline kernel code.

AMD sent out a set of Linux kernel patches today for enabling use of a new instruction dubbed RMPOPT. Given the timing of these patches, RMPOPT is presumably a feature coming with next-gen AMD EPYC Zen 6 "Venice" processors.

The LED subsystem updates for the Linux kernel typically aren't too noteworthy each kernel cycle but with Linux 7.0 is a new TI RGB LED driver that captured my attention in being curious over its "autonomous animation engine" integration.

The close_range system call for closing all file descriptors "FDs" in a given range should enjoy a nice speed boost with the in-development Linux 7.0 kernel.

One of the limitations of the AMDGPU Linux kernel graphics driver has been the lack of its support for HDMI 2.1 and later. AMD has wanted to support HDMI 2.1+ functionality under Linux but it's been legally blocked by the HDMI Forum. But anxious independent users have been working on open-source patches for wiring up HDMI 2.1 into the AMDGPU driver outside of the realm of AMD and the HDMI Forum's blessings.

GhostBSD lead developer Eric Turgeon published an update regarding X.Org Server vs. XLibre vs. Wayland planning for the GhostBSD distribution moving forward as well as some future uncertainties to this desktop-focused, FreeBSD-derived OS.

With memory pricing being as wild as it is these days and with MRDIMMs on Xeon 6 Granite Rapids offering much more memory bandwidth than conventional DDR5 RDIMMs, you may be wondering about the performance impact when not populating all twelve memory channels on the Xeon 6900 series processors. In this article are benchmarks to demonstrate the performance difference of MRDIMM-8800 memory across using six, eight, ten, and twelve MRDIMMs with a Xeon 6980P server.

A pull request for the Microsoft .NET Runtime build on Linux to use IO_uring for sockets is showing some massive performance benefits.

The latest Nova Lake enablement work for the Linux kernel to land is adding support for Nova Lake S platforms to the Intel LPSS driver in the upcoming Linux 7.0 kernel.

DNF 5.4 is out today as the latest release for this next-generation RPM package management solution used by Fedora, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and various other RPM-based Linux distributions.

KDE Plasma 6.6 is now officially out as the newest feature update to this prominent open-source desktop environment. Plasma 6.6 is self-described by KDE developers as "the best desktop in the known universe (according to us). Plasma 6.6 is all about making your life as easy as possible without sacrificing any of the flexibility."

The Gentoo Linux project last year announced plans to move their code hosting to Codeberg rather than GitHub. Gentoo's desire to move away from GitHub was motivated by Microsoft's Copilot training on GitHub repositories. Those plans are turning into action now with the main Gentoo project up on Codeberg and honoring pull requests.

A long-in-development feature for AMD EPYC Zen 5 server platforms now merged for the Linux 7.0 kernel is ACPI PRMT-based address translation for the Compute Express Link (CXL) subsystem.

DRM Panic is the Linux kernel infrastructure now supported by most of the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) kernel graphics/display drivers for being able to render a QR code kernel error message or similar when a kernel panic occurs to provide a cleaner interface should your system run into serious problems. An idea has been raised now within the Fedora Linux camp to provide an improved experience around this feature akin to Windows' "Blue Screen of Death" functionality.

For fans of Lutris as the open-source desktop client for installing and playing many games on Linux, Lutris 0.5.20 is out today with new features that further enhance the integration with different emulators and compatibility layers.