Intel's iNet Wireless Daemon (IWD) for Linux systems is out with a v3.0 release for this featureful and modern alternative to WPA_Supplicant.

Over the past week Linux creator Linus Torvalds has been active on a Linux kernel mailing list thread around avoiding barrier_nospec() in copy_from_user() due to being "overkill and painfully slow." The conversation evolved into low-level discussions over CPU behavior and how to best handle, differing behavior/requirements with new Intel CPUs supporting Linear Address Masking (LAM), and the overall headaches these days around CPU security mitigations.

Building off Friday's release of Wine 9.20 for running Windows games/applications on Linux, Hangover 9.20 is now available for this extension of Wine that builds off that codebase while pairing it with an x86/x86_64 emulator for running Windows programs on other CPU architectures like ARM64 Linux. With Hangover 9.20 they have restored the ability for running Win64 applications on ARM64 Linux hosts.

The Unvanquished 0.55 open-source game that was recently teased for its OpenGL 4.6 renderer work is out today with its shiny new release. As it's been more than one and a half years since Unvanquished 0.54, this new beta comes with a load of improvements especially around optimizing its Daemon open-source engine that is long derived from id Tech 3.

Meson 1.6 was published on Sunday as the newest feature update to this popular cross-platform build system.

Linux 6.12-rc4 is out today as the half-way point to releasing the Linux 6.12 stable kernel around this time of the month in November.

Since purchasing an Intel Core Ultra Series 2 "Lunar Lake" laptop for Linux testing last month, the performance has been coming in below expectations. Among the tests were finding Xe2 graphics on Lunar Lake performing slower that under Windows 11 and in comparison slower than Meteor Lake graphics on Linux. Intel engineers have been able to reproduce my original findings and they uncovered the culprit is a new ASUS laptop feature called AIPT. In turn a patch was posted today for supporting ASUS AIPT controls under Linux to fix this low Lunar Lake Linux performance.

Several Phoronix readers have written in this Sunday over concerns of Bitwarden further moving away from open-source. Bitwarden is a password management service that leverages an encrypted vault and supports multiple clients/platforms. Bitwarden operates on a freemium model and has provided some code as open-source while there are new concerns over Bitwarden further pivoting away from open-source.

With ReiserFS having been deprecated for two years with plans to remove it in 2025, the upcoming Linux 6.13 cycle for what will be the first major kernel release of the new year and past the Linux 6.12 LTS kernel is expected to do just that... ReiserFS is set to be stripped from the mainline kernel codebase.

Patches posted this week by Oracle's Lorenzo Stoakes are the latest attempt at lightweight guard pages for the Linux kernel.

Qualcomm has upstreamed the audio firmware for the Qualcomm Snapdragon X1 "X1E80100" series laptop SoCs to linux-firmware.git.

GNU Boot is a "100% free software project aimed at replacing the non-free boot software" and is a downstream of Coreboot, GRUB, and SeaBIOS. While priding itself on being "100% free", last December they had to drop some motherboard support and CPU code after discovering they were shipping some files that are non-free by their free software standards. Today they announced another mistake in having inadvertently been shipping additional non-free code.

Thanks to funding from the Sovereign Tech Fund, GNOME developers have been working on greater USB permissions/controls for Flatpak-based Linux applications.

Building off yesterday's release of Wine 9.20, Wine-Staging 9.20 is now available for this experimental blend of Wine featuring 357 extra patches currently atop the upstream codebase for various testing/experimental features and functionality.

Merged back in 2019 was the Fieldbus system for connecting different systems/components/instruments within industrial environments. Five years later the code isn't being well maintained and looks like it will be on its way out the door if no one steps up to better maintain this driver support for industrial systems for process automation.

KDE developers are wrapping up addressing initial fallout/regressions from the recent Plasma 6.2 desktop release as well as pushing ahead with more feature work for Plasma 6.3.

Sent out overnight were a few input subsystem patches ahead of the Linux 6.12-rc4 kernel release tomorrow. Notable from this pull is adding input support for the MSI Claw A1M gaming handheld as well as the 8BitDo Ultimate 2C Wireless gaming controller.

Wine 9.20 is out today as the newest bi-weekly development version of this open-source software to enable running Windows games and applications under Linux and other platforms.

Intel announced earlier this week ahead of the OCP Global Summit that they have partnered with the 9elements consulting firm for getting Coreboot up and running on Intel Xeon 6 "Granite Rapids" platforms.

As a possible change for Ubuntu 25.04, Canonical is evaluating the use of Dracut to replace initramfs-tools for initrd generation on Ubuntu Linux.