Ahead of FreeBSD 14.2 hopefully releasing in just over one week, FreeBSD 14.2-RC1 is out this weekend as the last planned development release for testing ahead of that much anticipated point release.

A Microsoft Research project that was quietly announced a few years ago to some fanfare but not hearing much about since has been Demikernel as their library OS architecture for kernel-bypass I/O. A Phoronix reader brought up Demikernel this week and while it hasn't been talked about much in recent years it does remain under active development with the most recent commits as of hours ago.

IBM isn't formally releasing Power11 processors until next year, but their software engineers continue being quite busy preparing the Linux kernel and other open-source software for Power11. The newest on the kernel side is enabling support for KVM nested guests on IBM Power11 platforms.

For those still running a 1st Generation Xeon Scalable "Skylake" era server, support for it within the open-source Coreboot firmware may continue to improve all these years later thanks to firmware consulting firm 9elements.

Wine 9.22 is out this weekend ahead of the Wine 10.0-rc1 in two weeks.

KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his traditional weekly development recap that highlights all of the interesting work taking place within the KDE desktop space.

Following the recent messaging from Bcachefs lead developer Kent Oversteet that Bcachefs changes for Linux 6.13 were rejected on the basis of his Code of Conduct, the Linux CoC committee has now formally announced their decision.

The x86 platform driver updates were merged this week for the in-development Linux 6.13 and include some nice refinements, especially for those using AMD Ryzen on Linux.

There are some new improvements in Linux 6.13 for the Intel TDX code for Trust Domain Extensions in providing hardware-based security protections for virtual machines on recent Xeon processors.

Following the Linux 6.13 DRM feature pull this week that brought many new open-source kernel graphics driver features, it's now time to further stabilize that new feature code with fixes. Sent out today were a batch of fixes for the AMDGPU/AMDKFD kernel driver code targeting the early Linux 6.13 state. In addition to fixes though is also allowing the AMDGPU Display Core "DC" code to build properly on LoongArch hardware for allowing recent AMD Radeon GPUs to work on these Chinese systems.

Going back to early in the year AMD Linux engineers began preparing support for a new Bus Lock Trap feature with Zen 5 CPUs. With the in-development Linux 6.13 kernel that support is being merged.

One of the most prominent new features in Linux 6.12 was the merging of sched_ext for allowing extensible scheduler innovations by altering the scheduling behavior through (e)BPF programs. With the Linux 6.13 kernel there are some nice refinements to this extensible scheduler class.

The XFS file-system updates were merged yesterday for the ongoing Linux 6.13 merge window.

Version 1.4 of the Intel NPU Acceleration Library was released today as the Python library for use on Windows and Linux for interacting with the Intel Neural Processing Unit (NPU) for AI offloading on recent Intel Core Ultra processors.

SUSE engineer and sound subsystem maintainer Takashi Iwai has submitted all of the sound driver updates for the Linux 6.13 kernel.

In addition to the pull requests managed by Microsoft engineer Christian Brauner for VFS untorn writes for atomic writes with XFS and EXT4, Tmpfs case insensitive file/folder support, new Rust file abstractions, and the renewed multi-grain timestamps work, another interesting Linux 6.13 pull submitted by Brauner revolves around VFS file enhancements.

The Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) subsystem updates have been submitted for the Linux 6.13 merge window in bringing many updates to the open-source kernel graphics/display drivers as well as the accelerator subsystem.

Linus Torvalds just merged the change to the Linux 6.13 kernel that goes ahead and deletes the ReiserFS file-system from the source tree. Removing ReiserFS from the Linux tree lightens the kernel by 32.8k lines of code.

Mesa 24.3 has managed to make it out today, one week ahead of the previous release plans due to the lack of any major blocker bugs appearing. Mesa 24.3 has a lot of new feature work on the contained open-source Vulkan drivers as well as evolutionary improvements to their OpenGL drivers and other user-space 3D driver code.

The four pull requests adding various SoC and board/platform support have now been merged for the Linux 6.13 kernel. This includes support for many older Apple iPad/iPhones, supporting another SoC with a combination of RISC-V and ARM cores, and a wide variety of other mostly ARM hardware support.