The latest Linux distribution being brought to Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) with Microsoft's blessing is none other than Red Hat Enterprise Linux... Microsoft and Red Hat jointly announced today that RHEL is coming to WSL.

The Debian 13 "Trixie" release is slated for 2025 and with the artwork voting now underway for the default desktop theme is a reminder that the release is quickly approaching.

WayVNC 0.9 is out today as the newest feature release for this VNC server catering to wlroots-based Wayland compositors. WayVNC makes it easy to get a VNC server up and running on Sway and other wlroots-based compositors while with today's update is much more capable.

A few weeks back I wrote about Intel engineers preparing SNC6 support with Linux for six nodes per L3 cache. That was the first time hearing of SNC6 with SNC 1/2/3/4 sub-NUMA clustering modes being more common. That support is now ready for merging with the Linux 6.13 kernel cycle.

Ahead of SC24, MiTAC Computing has published their open-source firmware for their Open Compute Project (OCP) designed Capri2 AMD EPYC server. This open-source firmware stack makes use of AMD's in-development openSIL for open-source CPU silicon initialization.

Arch Linux package sources with its PKGBUILD files and similar have lacked carrying a clear license. Arch Linux developers have been working to come together to allow all Arch Linux package sources to be licensed under a BSD zero-clause "BSD0" license.

The GNU Linux-libre 6.12-gnu kernel is now available as the downstream of the newly-christened Linux 6.12 kernel that aims to remove code depending upon non-free microcode/firmware or relying on other elements of code deemed non-free software even with much of today's hardware requiring proprietary firmware for operation.

As of today the first handful of commits have landed in LLVM Git ahead of next year's LLVM 20.0 for beginning to enable the AMDGPU compiler back-end for "GFX950", the next iteration of the CDNA family for Instinct accelerators.

The Linux kernel Workqueue (WQ) is used for handling asynchronous process execution. For the past many years there has been an upper limit on the number of workqueue execution contexts per CPU at 512, but with Linux 6.13 that is being quadrupled to a limit of 2048.

Over the past year we have seen Canonical engineers focus more on optimizing the performance potential of Ubuntu Linux. With Ubuntu 25.04 they are now using the -O3 compiler optimization level by default and there has been other efforts like better performance tooling on Ubuntu and frame pointers by default. Another area they have been exploring is making use of Profile Guided Optimizations (PGO) for faster performance in certain scenarios.

All of the block subsystem changes were sent out today for the in-development Linux 6.13 kernel, including a prominent set of NVMe additions.

At the beginning of November I wrote about AMD Linux engineers posting Linux patches enabling a new "ERAPS" feature for Zen 5. ERAPS wasn't talked about by AMD at the Zen 5 launches of the Ryzen 9000 / Ryzen AI 300 series or with the more recent EPYC 9005 "Turin" launch but when enabled, the Enhanced Return Address Prediction Security feature can help deliver some additional gains on new AMD Zen 5 systems by allowing some existing software security mitigations to be avoided. Here are some preliminary comparison benchmarks showing the benefit in affected workloads for using ERAPS on Linux with AMD Zen 5.

GCC 15 feature development is now officially over with entering stage three development to focus on fixing compiler bugs.

With last month's Raspberry Pi OS update they now default to Wayland on all Raspberry Pi models alongside various other operating system improvements. Out today is the latest iteration of the Debian-based Raspberry Pi OS with software updates and other changes.

Following AMX-FP8 support, AMX-AVX512, and other new Intel CPU ISA features being added to the LLVM Clang 20 compiler codebase, the Intel Diamond Rapids target is now upstreamed for allowing "-march=diamondrapids" targeting for these next-generation Xeon processors.

DXVK 2.5 released one week ago with better video memory management handling, various Direct3D additions, and more. DXVK 2.5.1 is out today to fix a "major regression" as well as a few other bugs.

Along with the early Bcachefs pull request for Linux 6.13, SUSE engineer David Sterba submitted all of the Btrfs file-system feature updates in an early pull request for this next kernel version. Btrfs is seeing new performance optimizations and other enhancements for Linux 6.13.

The third weekly beta release of FreeBSD 14.2 is now available for testing ahead of the planned stable release in early December. Besides a few fixes notable to FreeBSD 14.2-BETA3 is that they are now putting out OCI container images among their release media.

The ARM64 (AArch64) architecture changes have been submitted for the now-open Linux 6.13 merge window.

As expected, minutes ago Linus Torvalds just released the Linux 6.12 kernel as stable. Linux 6.12 brings many new features, new hardware support, and is rounded out by the fact of expected to become this year's Long Term Support (LTS) kernel version.