Merged today to the Linux kernel are fixes for two vulnerabilities with the Xen hypervisor. One of them concerns a malicious network backend being able to crash a guest after a suspend/resume cycle of a Linux guest. The other more pressing issue addressed is a Xen hypercall page being unsafe against speculative CPU attacks.

System76 has been offering AMD-powered Linux laptops for a few years now and before rounding out 2024 they have announced the new Pangolin "Pang15" laptop with an updated SoC, 2K display with 16:10 screen ratio and 120Hz refresh rate, and other refinements to this all-aluminum build Linux laptop.

Last week with the availability of the Intel Arc B-Series Battlemage graphics cards I ran benchmarks looking at the GPU compute performance, Linux gaming benchmarks, and also the workstation graphics capabilities. The Intel Arc B580 graphics showed some nice generational uplift under Linux for most workloads but there were some anomalies where clearly the Intel Linux graphics driver had room to better optimize the new Xe2/Battlemage graphics support. Windows benchmarks of the Intel Arc B580 also showed it performing more competitively to the likes of the GeForce RTX 4060 compared to what I was seeing under Linux. Thus I spent the past few days working on some Windows 11 vs. Ubuntu Linux graphics benchmarks for both Intel Arc Graphics of Alchemist and Battlemage GPUs to see how the performance compares.

Fedora Asahi Remix 41 as the re-base of the Asahi Linux work for Apple Silicon devices atop the recently released Fedora 41 is now ready for Apple device users.

The LLVM compiler stack offers a number of sanitizers like the AddressSanitizer, MemorySanitizer, UndefinedBehaviorSanitizer, and others for detecting different coding issues like data races, memory addressing issues, use of uninitialized memory, and more. The newest sanitizer addition to LLVM mainline is TySan as a Type Sanitizer.

NVIDIA today announced the Jetson Orin Nano Super Developer Kit as their "most affordable generative AI Supercomputer" with this upgraded Jetson Nano offering 1.7x better GenAI performance while also costing less than its predecessor. This new product looks like an exciting addition to the NVIDIA Jetson line-up and will have performance benchmarks soon on Phoronix.

Greg Kroah-Hartman has decided to extend the Linux 6.1 LTS planned lifespan from four to five years.

While Fedora is often times eager to introduce new spins and other variants as well as supporting a comprehensive set of CPU architectures, it doesn't always drive new users. In the case of atomic versions of Fedora Linux for desktop use on POWER hardware, it turns out there are seemingly no active users.

Merged yesterday as part of "fixes" to the Linux 6.13 were new Intel support additions for their next-generation Core Ultra and Xeon processors.

Qt 6.9 beta is out today as the first test release for this updated Qt6 toolkit.

Fedora is among the Linux distributions that package up the Intel Compute Runtime stack to make it easy to run OpenCL and oneAPI Level Zero workloads on Intel graphics hardware via the distribution package manager and without having to jump through any extra hoops. But now with upstream Intel Compute Runtime dropping support for Ice Lake and older leaves the Fedora support in a pickle. Currently they are focusing on the "legacy" branch with older hardware support but for Fedora 42 are looking at upgrading the support to focus on newer Intel graphics hardware support while leaving that older hardware support behind.

Hyprland 0.46 is out today as the newest update to this Wayland compositor that is packing in many new features ahead of the holidays.

Git maintainer Junio Hamano today announced Git 2.48-rc0 as the first test release toward the Git 2.48 distributed version control system release.

Queued up this past week within the Linux kernel's networking subsystem for the upcoming Linux 6.14 cycle is transmission handling for jumbo data packets as well as RACK-TLP support for managing packet loss and re-transmission. This is work toward supporting larger network transmission windows and higher data throughput.

With Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 now in public beta this month, I have begun testing out the RHEL 10 beta on a few systems in the lab. In this first look at RHEL 10 performance is seeing how well the RHEL 10 beta is performing relative to RHEL 9.5 stable on an AMD EPYC server.

For further enhancing the AMD EPYC virtualization experience on Linux, the upcoming Linux 6.14 looks like it will support Zen 5's new RMPREAD instruction and segmented RMP mode as part of Secure Encrypted Virtualization Secure Nested Paging (SEV-SNP).

The upcoming Linux 6.14 kernel cycle is set to introduce support for the Blaize BLZP1600 SoC series that is powering various PCIe add-in-card and M.2 adapters for local AI edge processing.

Sent out today was the latest drm-misc-next pull request of various Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) changes queuing up ahead of the Linux 6.14 kernel cycle. Most exciting this week is the DRM boot logger being queued for landing to better present kernel messages.

For those interested in using Linux on the Samsung Galaxy Book line of laptops that ship with Microsoft Windows out-of-the-box, a new "samsung-galaxybook" driver is being worked on for supporting additional laptop functionality not currently found with these laptops under Linux.

Ahead of AMD's approaching RDNA4 next-generation graphics card launch, today a set of last minute improvements to the AMD GFX12 graphics IP were merged to Mesa 25.0 for the open-source Linux graphics driver support.