Adding to the Linux storage/file-system excitement for Linux 6.18 is enhancements to some of the core FUSE code for supporting file-systems in user-space.

The past several months has seen AMD engineers working on a new RDMA driver for Ionic hardware through which they acquired Pensando a few years ago. That AMD-Pensando Ionic RDMA driver is now part of the upstream Linux 6.18 kernel.

The Direct Rendering Manager "DRM" pull request ended up leading to Linus Torvalds complaining over text and Rust code formatting but in the end he pulled all of these kernel graphics driver updates and also the associated "accel" accelerator subsystem drivers too.

Next year's GCC 16 compiler release is continuing the trend of enhancing the compiler diagnostics support, including new features like optionally outputting compiler error/warning diagnostics to HTML format for better analysis.

The HID changes have been merged for Linux 6.18 and are headlined by initial support in the mainline kernel for haptic touchpad handling.

For benefiting container usage on Linux, support for case-folding / case insensitive files and folder support has been added to OverlayFS.

All of the crypto subsystem changes have been merged for the in-development Linux 6.18 kernel.

The Compute Express Link (CXL) changes have been merged for the in-development Linux 6.18 kernel.

While Intel FRED was merged back in Linux 6.9 in advance of Intel processors shipping with this Flexible Return Event Delivery functionality, there ended up being a late, incompatible change to the specification as a result of security research into it. For Linux 6.18 those FRED changes have been merged,

In addition to some Intel Linux kernel drivers being "orphaned" following the corporate restructuring at Intel between developers being laid off and others deciding to pursue opportunities elsewhere, these changes have also led to a number of Intel-related software packages within Debian being orphaned. In turn these Intel packages are also relied on by Ubuntu and other downstream Debian Linux distributions.

The F2FS file-system enhancements have been merged for the Linux 6.18 kernel and include some new performance optimizations.

Cairo-Dock is back after a decade hiatus! From the early 2010's you may remember Cairo-Dock / GLX-Dock as a complementary dock for your Linux desktop. The last time writing about it was the Cairo-Dock 3.4 release in 2014 when it was working toward EGL/Wayland support. Since then it was rather inactive the past decade besides a small 3.5 update one year ago with a few fixes. But out this week is now Cairo-Dock 3.6 with the long-awaited port to Wayland, HiDPI display handling, and other improvements.

The IOMMU driver changes were merged this week for Linux 6.18 with new material to benefit Intel, AMD, Apple, and RISC-V systems.

ISD is an independent interactive systemd management tool with a nice text user interface "TUI" for dealing with systemd units and other systemd functionality. Out today is isd 0.6 with many fixes and other refinements to this helper for administering systemd-backed Linux systems.

For those making use of Server Message Block (SMB) protocol support on Linux, the SMB3 client code and KSMBD server code has landed some performance work and other fixes for the in-development Linux 6.18 kernel.

The DeviceMapper changes have been merged for the Linux 6.18 kernel that includes the new DM-PCACHE target.

KDE Plasma 6.5 Beta 2 released this week and more fixes have landed for this desktop update due out later this month. Plus KDE developers have begun landing more feature work intended for Plasma 6.6.

Just a friendly heads-up that some brief downtime of Phoronix.com will happen overnight due to replacing a drive in the web server's RAID array.

Wine 10.16 is out today as a very exciting bi-weekly development release of this software for enjoying Windows games and applications under Linux.

A set of patches merged via the networking pull request for the Linux 6.18 will help servers better cope with distributed denial of service "DDoS" attacks. Thanks to a Google engineer there are some significant optimizations found in the Linux 6.18 kernel code for more efficiently handling of UDP receive performance under stress, such as in DDoS scenarios.