For those making use of the Microsoft exFAT file-system on Linux systems, the upcoming Linux 6.13 kernel brings an optimization that will help some operations by reducing the FAT chain traversal.

Back in April AMD announced the Versal Gen 2 Adaptive SoCs for AI-driven embedded systems. In preparing for Versal2 evaluation kits expected around the middle of the year and production silicon by the end of 2025, AMD software engineers have begun ramping up their open-source and upstream-focused Linux driver support.

The RISC-V CPU port updates have been sent out for the in-development Linux 6.13 kernel.

For those building your own server around the new Intel Xeon 6 "Granite Rapids" or AMD EPYC 9005 "Turin" platforms and using DDR5-6000/DDR5-6400 memory (or the interesting MRDIMM-8000 memory with Xeon 6 P), one of the factors you need to be much more mindful about than in the past is that at least the initial generation of DDR5-6000+ memory is running much hotter than prior server memory. There's been guidance from Intel and AMD as well as sever vendors about the thermal considerations with DDR5-6000/DDR5-6400 and extra precautions. Here's a look at the DDR5-6000 thermals on a recent AMD EPYC 9655 Turin server build and then taming the DDR5 server memory modules using Corsair Vengeance Airflow Memory Cooling Fans.

The SoundWire subsystem updates were sent out today for the Linux 6.13 kernel. This cycle brings new AMD driver support as well as supporting the MIPI DisCo 2.0 specification.

Sent out on Tuesday was the modules pull request for Linux 6.13 that have some low-level improvements but it noted that the biggest kernel modules highlight wasn't in that pull request itself but had been added by way of the memory management pull. This was a change by a Microsoft engineer around caching of kernel modules into huge pages.

MIPS has begun working on the open-source compiler toolchain support for their P8700 RISC-V based processors. Initial patches posted today bring-up the MIPS P8700 RISC-V support for the LLVM compiler stack.

Merged for the Linux 6.12 kernel was the long-awaited real-time "PREEMPT_RT" kernel support and allowing it to be enabled across x86/x86_64, ARM64, and RISC-V CPU architectures. With the Linux 6.13 kernel, LoongArch is joining the RT party.

Days after announcing the Raspberry Pi Pico 2 W for $7, Raspberry Pi today announced the Compute Module 5 at the $45 price point.

In prior years the Free Software Foundation (FSF) has published an Ethical Tech Giving Guide for holiday shopping where they recommend products like old AMD Opteron motherboards and USB to parallel printer cables that "respect your freedoms" and meet their strict free software definitions. Out today is their newest annual FSF Ethical Tech Giving Guide.

There are some new open-source/Linux details to note when it comes to the AMD accelerators in the Instinct "CDNA" land.

The Flash Friendly File-System (F2FS) updates were sent out on Monday for Linux 6.13 and include one very interesting new feature for this file-system: device aliasing as a means of being able to temporarily carve out a portion of the partition for other purposes.

Google engineer Ricardo Ribalda has proposed a set of patches for the common "uvcvideo" kernel driver that supports UVC-compliant web cameras and the like to provide granular power saving support.

Now that Linux 6.12 has a fix for the Lunar Lake performance with the ASUS Zenbook I have been using for my Core Ultra 200V series Linux testing as well as there recently being an updated Intel Compute Runtime with Lunar Lake fixes, I have been working on some fresh Lunar Lake Xe2 graphics benchmarks using the very latest upstream open-source code. In today's article is exploring how the Xe2 Lunar Lake graphics is performing for OpenCL / GPU compute relative to the prior Meteor Lake Arc Graphics that were already a nice step-up over earlier Intel integrated graphics.

With GIMP 3.0-RC1 out for testing since earlier this month, the hope is that GIMP 3.0 stable will in fact ship in time for the release of Ubuntu 25.04 next April. The current GIMP 3.0 release candidate is working its way to Debian Unstable and in turn soon should be available via the Ubuntu 25.04 archive.

The I3C subsystem updates were submitted for the Linux 6.13 kernel on Monday and include support for another I3C HCI controller used on AMD systems.

Overnight the Rust for Linux lead developer Miguel Ojeda submitted the big set of Rust infrastructure/toolchain updates for the Linux 6.13 holiday kernel.

In between managing all of the pull requests being submitted during this two week long merge window for the Linux 6.13 kernel, Linus Torvalds has merged some of his own code this cycle.

The RDMA subsystem updates were sent out last Friday for the ongoing Linux 6.13 kernel cycle. Most notable with the RDMA updates is the NVIDIA Mellanox "MLX5" network driver introducing a new Data Direct Placement (DDP) feature to further help with performance.

Either due to a mistimed blog post or other factors, a big feature article is out talking up the new ROCm 6.3 features... But the updated ROCm 6.3 open-source GPU compute software doesn't appear to actually be released yet at all their usual sources. In any event there are new features and big performance gains being talked up for ROCm 6.3.