The GNU Linux-libre 6.12-gnu kernel is now available as the downstream of the newly-christened Linux 6.12 kernel that aims to remove code depending upon non-free microcode/firmware or relying on other elements of code deemed non-free software even with much of today's hardware requiring proprietary firmware for operation.

As of today the first handful of commits have landed in LLVM Git ahead of next year's LLVM 20.0 for beginning to enable the AMDGPU compiler back-end for "GFX950", the next iteration of the CDNA family for Instinct accelerators.

The Linux kernel Workqueue (WQ) is used for handling asynchronous process execution. For the past many years there has been an upper limit on the number of workqueue execution contexts per CPU at 512, but with Linux 6.13 that is being quadrupled to a limit of 2048.

Over the past year we have seen Canonical engineers focus more on optimizing the performance potential of Ubuntu Linux. With Ubuntu 25.04 they are now using the -O3 compiler optimization level by default and there has been other efforts like better performance tooling on Ubuntu and frame pointers by default. Another area they have been exploring is making use of Profile Guided Optimizations (PGO) for faster performance in certain scenarios.

All of the block subsystem changes were sent out today for the in-development Linux 6.13 kernel, including a prominent set of NVMe additions.

At the beginning of November I wrote about AMD Linux engineers posting Linux patches enabling a new "ERAPS" feature for Zen 5. ERAPS wasn't talked about by AMD at the Zen 5 launches of the Ryzen 9000 / Ryzen AI 300 series or with the more recent EPYC 9005 "Turin" launch but when enabled, the Enhanced Return Address Prediction Security feature can help deliver some additional gains on new AMD Zen 5 systems by allowing some existing software security mitigations to be avoided. Here are some preliminary comparison benchmarks showing the benefit in affected workloads for using ERAPS on Linux with AMD Zen 5.

GCC 15 feature development is now officially over with entering stage three development to focus on fixing compiler bugs.

With last month's Raspberry Pi OS update they now default to Wayland on all Raspberry Pi models alongside various other operating system improvements. Out today is the latest iteration of the Debian-based Raspberry Pi OS with software updates and other changes.

Following AMX-FP8 support, AMX-AVX512, and other new Intel CPU ISA features being added to the LLVM Clang 20 compiler codebase, the Intel Diamond Rapids target is now upstreamed for allowing "-march=diamondrapids" targeting for these next-generation Xeon processors.

DXVK 2.5 released one week ago with better video memory management handling, various Direct3D additions, and more. DXVK 2.5.1 is out today to fix a "major regression" as well as a few other bugs.

Along with the early Bcachefs pull request for Linux 6.13, SUSE engineer David Sterba submitted all of the Btrfs file-system feature updates in an early pull request for this next kernel version. Btrfs is seeing new performance optimizations and other enhancements for Linux 6.13.

The third weekly beta release of FreeBSD 14.2 is now available for testing ahead of the planned stable release in early December. Besides a few fixes notable to FreeBSD 14.2-BETA3 is that they are now putting out OCI container images among their release media.

The ARM64 (AArch64) architecture changes have been submitted for the now-open Linux 6.13 merge window.

As expected, minutes ago Linus Torvalds just released the Linux 6.12 kernel as stable. Linux 6.12 brings many new features, new hardware support, and is rounded out by the fact of expected to become this year's Long Term Support (LTS) kernel version.

Ahead of the Linux 6.12 kernel release expected today there is a last minute "x86/urgent" pull request. Notable with this last minute x86 urgent fixes for Linux 6.12 -- and also to be back-ported to prior kernel versions -- is working around an issue with AMD Ryzen Zen 4 client processors such as the Ryzen 7000/8000 series processors when making use of virtualization that could lead to the host randomly being rebooted.

As part of the SLAB (SLUB) allocator updates pending for the upcoming Linux 6.13 cycle is a new "slab_strict_numa" option that is reported to further help ARM Linux performance such as for Ampere Computing servers.

Rust Coreutils 0.0.28 "uutils" has been released for this implementation of the GNU Coreutils utilities within the Rust programming language for better memory safety and greater robustness. With the Rust Coreutils 0.0.28 there is increased GNU compatibility as well as better performance.

Archinstall is the convenient text/CLI-based installer for Arch Linux that allows getting the Linux distribution easily installed in a matter of minutes. Released today is Archinstall 3.0 that overhauls the Arch Linux installer with now using the curses library for rendering of the text interface.

Bcachefs has now joined the party of various kernel components sending in preemptive pull requests ahead of the Linux 6.13 merge window that is expected to open following the expected Linux 6.12 release on Sunday.

Google software engineer Pasha Tatashin has proposed Page Detective as a new kernel debugging tool that is able to provide greater insight around the usage and mapping of physical memory pages.