Merged today for the Linux 6.16 kernel were all of the Watchdog subsystem updates for monitoring system health and taking action such as rebooting if the system state goes bad. With the Linux 6.16 is the introduction of the Intel Overclocking Watchdog "OC WDT" driver.

The Linux 6.15 kernel that shipped as stable last week mistakenly shipped with a nasty CPU power regression for some systems. The issue is now fixed in Linux 6.16 Git and will be fixed shortly in the Linux 6.15 point releases.

The Linux kernel had not enabled support for Arm Scalable Matrix Extension (SME) due to bugs, but with the in-development Linux 6.16 kernel those issues have been resolved and so SME can now be enabled for the rare SoCs having said hardware support.

The Linux 6.16 merge window this weekend suffered an unexpected twist this weekend when Linus Torvalds noticed some unusual Git activity by a longtime Linux kernel developer. The issue is still being sorted through but it would appear that the possible malicious activity came down to some scripting issues around Git.

The release candidate of FreeBSD 14.3 is now available for testing ahead of the official operating system release this month.

May was another busy month when it comes to Linux hardware and software milestones albeit depressing when looking at the ongoing state of the web/ad industry. In any event there were 25 featured Linux hardware reviews / multi-page benchmark articles and another 268 original Linux-related news articles all written by your's truly for the month. Here is a look back at what excited Phoronix readers the most during May.

OpenBMC 2.18 released on Friday as the newest version of this Linux Foundation project providing an open-source baseboard management controller (BMC) firmware stack implementation. In recent years OpenBMC has been enjoying increasing success in deploying to server platforms from the mega hyperscalers to the more prominent OEM/ODM vendors seeing increasing customer demand for open-source BMC as part of broader open-source firmware interest from the industry.

To compile the Linux x86/x86_64 kernel has already enforced a minimum compiler version of GCC 8 while now with Linux 6.16 this requirement is in place for all other architectures. The GCC 8 and GNU Binutils 2.30 baseline for all Linux kernel architectures now allows removing a number of old workarounds from the codebase.

All of the big SoC and DeviceTree board updates have been submitted for the Linux 6.16 kernel including support for a number of new Arm SoCs as well as a RISC-V server SoC. Plus many new board additions, including continued work on bettering the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite/Plus laptop support under Linux.

In a blog post dated for 28 May that was only made public on Friday night followed by a new ROCm build tag, AMD engineers have begun sharing more details publicly about changes coming for ROCm 7.0. In particular, the HIP 7.0 interface is going to be "aligning HIP C++ even more closely with CUDA."

Merged back in late 2023 for Linux 6.7 was a cross-vendor solution for confidential computing attestation reports with the Linux Trusted Security Manager (TSM). In the succeeding kernel releases there weren't any further TSM updates issued but now for Linux 6.16 there finally is renewed work on this confidential computing code.

A few new media drivers have been introduced as part of the Linux 6.16 merge window.

The popular Arch Linux derived CachyOS operating system that is known for its nice out-of-the-box performance and other optimizations is out with a new build. CachyOS is closing out the month of May with some nice refinements in its newest ISO refresh of the year.

Along with this week bringing the Plasma 6.4 Beta 2 desktop, there's been other changes merged for Plasma 6.4 as well as some early feature work on Plasma 6.5.

The many power management subsystem updates and related changes have been merged for the in-development Linux 6.16 kernel.

Intel engineers are preparing the Linux kernel for future Data Center GPUs. This work confirms new Intel Data Center GPUs coming based on Battlemage.

Alpine Linux 3.22 is now available as the newest version of this Linux distribution popular for use with containers and embedded purposes due to its small, simple, and secure focus.

Sandisk earlier this month announced the WD_BLACK SN8100 as what they claim is the current world's fastest PCIe Gen 5.0 NVMe SSD for consumers. Given how well the WD_BLACK SN850X performs under Linux as a PCIe Gen 4.0 drive, I decided to buy a WD_BLACK SN8100 for some Linux testing at Phoronix to compare to various other drives in the lab. Here is a preliminary look at the WD_BLACK SN8100 2TB performance under Ubuntu Linux.

The latest upstream Linux kernel improvement for AMD's Secure Encrypted Virtualization "SEV" is the introduction of a virtual TPM driver.

With how well the open-source and upstream AMD Radeon Linux graphics driver stack is these days between the mainline Linux kernel and Mesa, the Radeon Software for Linux packaged driver releases are not usually notable these days on Phoronix... The packaged Radeon Software for Linux drivers haven't been popular with gamers/enthusiasts in years given how good the upstream support is and those packaged bits mostly useful for those just running enterprise Linux distributions with older versions of Linux and Mesa. But the next Radeon Software for Linux packaged driver release is set to introduce a big change.