Due to the possibility of DMA attacks from connected Thunderbolt devices, Linux and other platforms have built up safeguards over the years and different security levels for Thunderbolt to better protect systems having this high speed interface exposing PCIe. With the upcoming Linux 6.13 kernel, the logic of the kernel is being enhanced to better detect and trust built-in Thunderbolt controllers.

LXQt 2.1 is now available as the latest feature release to this Qt-based lightweight desktop environment. Most significant with LXQt 2.1 is the introduction of the lxqt-wayland-session component.

Queued up over the past month into DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 6.13 kernel cycle has been initial support for Xe3 graphics to be found with Panther Lake processors. The initial Xe3 graphics driver support patches have been trickling in while the final drm-intel-next pull ahead of the Linux 6.13 merge window has readied support for actually being able to light up a display connected to Xe3 LPD graphics with Panther Lake.

To clear up the ever-growing stack of laptops, I recently bought a TOUPUWAN 30-Slot Laptop/Tablet Storage Cart. This laptop/tablet storage cart can accommodate 32 devices in total while slots for up to 30 laptops/tablets 16.3-inches in size. It does have built-in power strips as well to easily facilitate charging of the devices while securely stored away but for my purposes I was just looking for something to better organize the mess of laptops I only occasionally pull out when running new Linux laptop benchmarks.

The x86-simd-sort project from Intel has been an interesting open-source software effort for much faster number sorting by using AVX-512. There's been lightning fast number sorting with AVX-512 and AVX2 code paths also added to broaden the appeal in helping CPUs without AVX-512. Projects like Numpy have been making use of this library while today x86-simd-sort 6.0 was released and also comes a few days after PyTorch has begun using this library too.

Posted to the Linux kernel mailing list last week and now queued already via tip/tip.git's "x86/cpu" Git branch is support for a new AMD CPU feature we haven't heard about until now... ERAPS, the Enhanced Return Address Prediction Security.

Arch-based Manjaro Linux is working on Manjaro Data Donor "MDD" as a new data collection tool of its users. This is intended to succeed their former ping-based solution for user counting plus incorporate hardware/software data collection on users. Once deployed, this will be opt-out handling for the data collection.

Fujitsu has upstreamed support for their next-gen "Monaka" Armv9 processor into the GNU Compiler Collection codebase in time for the GCC 15 release coming out early next year.

The Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) is adding a device aliasing file feature that could appear in the upcoming Linux v6.13 merge window.

Select newer Dell/Alienware laptops with a "WMAX" thermal interface will see ACPI Platform Profile support now exposed with the upcoming Linux 6.13 cycle.

AMD Linux engineer Borislav Petkov kicked off the new week by volleying a patch for adjusting the Speculative Return Stack Overflow (SRSO, a.k.a. "Inception") vulnerability mitigation handling for capabilities to be found with affected processors running on newer CPU microcode.

CachyOS continues to be a fascinating Arch Linux based distribution that pushes the boundaries of out-of-the-box performance with a variety of patches, optimization techniques, specialized package builds, and more. One of the latest areas they are exploring is making use of AutoFDO for their kernel builds.

Nine years after the Raspberry Pi Touch Display was announced as a 800 x 480 pixel LCD panel catering to the Raspberry Pi, today the Raspberry Pi Touch Display 2 was announced.

Linus Torvalds has just issued the Linux 6.12-rc6 kernel release as we close in on the stable Linux 6.12 kernel release later in November.

The Redox OS open-source Rust-based operating system project is out with their newest monthly development update.

The latest patches from AMD Linux engineers for working on x86 heterogeneous design identification were queued last week for introduction in the Linux 6.13 kernel.

The Linux Mint crew is out with their newest monthly status update that outlines the activities of this desktop Linux distribution over the course of October.

With this week's release of SVT-AV1 2.3 for open-source AV1 encoding citing significant performance improvements for running on ARM, I was eager to see how well this AV1 encoder would be performing on the new System76 Thelio Astra ARM developer desktop powered by Ampere Altra. Here are some benchmarks showing those big speed-ups for ARM-based AV1 encoding.

Alyssa Rosenzweig has pushed the latest Apple Silicon OpenGL "AGX Gallium3D" and Vulkan "Honeykrisp" code from the Asahi Linux development repository into the Mesa Git codebase ahead of this quarter's Mesa 24.3 release.

While the mainline Linux kernel has begun seeing initial support for various Snapdragon X1 Elite laptops, various feature limitations are outstanding before these Qualcomm-powered laptops really become usable for daily use. For instance, just a few days ago the audio firmware was finally upstreamed to make setting up X1 Elite laptops easier. Another important feature as an example is CPUFreq driver support for CPU frequency scaling to ensure optimal performance and power efficiency.