It was just two months ago that Oded Gabbay, the longtime maintainer of the Habana Labs kernel accelerator driver for Linux, announced he was stepping down from his software role and leaving Intel. Oded Gabbay was also a maintainer of the new Intel Xe kernel graphics driver. That was a surprising move with Oded Gabbay having been at Intel / Habana Labs for 7+ years and oversaw the creation of the Linux kernel's "accel" accelerator subsystem and more while prior to that having been at Red Hat and AMD. Ofir Bitton was named the Habana Labs driver maintainer following that but now he announced he too is leaving Intel.

While most Linux distributions are running on systemd as the init/service manager, SysVinit is continuing to be maintained. SysVinit 3.10 was released today with one new feature and some fixes. Coincidentally the new feature of SysVinit 3.10 is improving compatibility with systemd's machinectl command.

Immediately prior to the Linux 6.11-rc1 kernel being released yesterday, a set of Compute Express Link (CXL) patches were merged for the Linux kernel. There is some more CXL feature work this cycle but also notable is a documentation update as it now provides a concise look at the current state of CXL support on Linux.

As I noted in yesterday's AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 review and in particular the new RDNA3.5-based Radeon 890M graphics, I used updated DMCUB firmware with the open-source Linux graphics driver stack to workaround some screen freezes and kernel errors initially experience while using the Linux 6.10 kernel. That updated DMCUB firmware is now public within the upstream linux-firmware.git repository for those that may be picking up a new AMD Ryzen AI laptop with RDNA3.5 graphics in the coming days.

Intel is kicking off the new week with a new release to their open-source Compute Runtime stack that provides OpenCL and Level Zero support across Windows and Linux systems with Intel integrated/discrete graphics.

Alan Coopersmith of Oracle -- thanks to his work on Solaris and maintaining the X11 support -- continues to be one of the few developers left managing new X.Org software component releases. This weekend Coopersmith released libX11 1.8.10 as the newest version of this client-side library for the core X11 protocol.

Mike Blumenkrantz of Valve landed another interesting patch series in Mesa Git for next quarter's Mesa 24.3... This is what he proclaims to be "THE JUICIEST REFACTOR EVER" for the Mesa GLX code.

TigerVNC 1.14 released last week as the newest version of this high performance, cross-platform VNC client and server solution. Exciting with TigerVNC 1.14 is adding hardware acceleration support.

Wine 9.14 is another release off its usual Friday bi-weekly release regiment and instead debuted on Sunday evening. With this Wine 9.14 release there are yet more fixes and improvements while Wine-Staging 9.14 was also released near concurrently.

Vanilla OS 2 debuted on Sunday as a major release to this Linux distribution now built atop a Debian base for this distro that started out being an immutable and atomic version of Ubuntu. Vanilla OS 2 besides switching its packaging base has pulled in the GNOME 46 desktop, the Linux 6.9 kernel, and made a slew of other enhancements to polish its desktop experience while offering a great and secure platform.

While Linus Torvalds stated in mid-June that he intended to merge sched_ext for Linux 6.11 as the exciting extensible scheduler code, it didn't end up happening... The Linux 6.11-rc1 kernel was just released to close the Linux 6.11 merge window and the sched_ext code wasn't pulled.

The Linux 6.11 merge window is over with the Linux 6.11-rc1 release now out the door.

While the upcoming AMD Ryzen 9000 series desktop processors continue to make use of RDNA2 graphics, with the Ryzen AI 300 series shipping today in notebooks there are RDNA3.5 graphics being introduced alongside the Zen 5 CPU cores and upgraded Ryzen AI XDNA2 NPU. While just an evolution of RDNA3, the initial benchmarks of RDNA3.5 graphics with the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 are looking rather promising for both the raw graphics performance as well as the power efficiency. The Radeon 890M RDNA3.5 graphics are working on Linux when using a new enough software stack.

With the AMD Zen 5 generation, the timing is interesting where it's not the desktop processors launching first but happens to be in the form of AMD Ryzen AI 300 series laptops. With the last minute delay of the Ryzen 900 series by 1~2 weeks, the embargo lift for the Ryzen AI 300 series is timed for this Sunday morning where I can now present the first AMD Zen 5 Linux benchmark results. And with being the first Zen 5 chip in my lab, I have been pushing it hard... Here is an extensive look at the ASUS Zenbook S 16 I received with the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 current flagship SoC compared to a variety of other AMD and Intel laptop models. The focus was on both the raw performance and the package performance-per-Watt for the overall power efficiency of this Zen 5 SoC. And with it being the first Zen 5 hardware in the lab, I didn't limit the selection to just conventional laptop workloads but also explored the performance characteristics for various other workloads of interest to diverse Linux users and for an idea of the HX 370 potential or similar Zen 5 chips appearing in thin client / edge / IoT type devices. This initial taste of AMD Zen 5 has me extremely excited about the performance potential of the upcoming Ryzen 9000 series and EPYC Turin processors.

Merged back in 2021 for Linux 5.13 was Landlock as a means of unprivileged application sandboxing. The Landlock Linux security module has continued to be improved since but it turns out there's been a big hole within this security module since its introduction... The possibility for apps to drop restrictions on itself.

The mainline RISC-V Linux kernel port continues to become more featureful each kernel cycle... Last week for the start of the Linux 6.11 merge window there were new RISC-V ISA extensions wired up while in ending out the v6.11 merge window this weekend there is yet more enablement activity.

As part of the early Mesa 24.3 changes for this open-source 3D graphics driver stack coming out in Q4, a new "legacy-x11" build option has been introduced to its Meson build system.

OpenSUSE's Aeon is up to its third release candidate as what was formerly known as MicroOS Desktop GNOME for a container-based, immutable desktop operating system. With the Aeon RC3 release, full disk encryption is enabled by default as an exciting development.

Merged one year ago for Linux 6.6 was the EEVDF scheduler as a replacement to the CFS code and designed to provide a better scheduling policy for the kernel and being more robust. With a new set of patches for this "Earliest Eligible Virtual Deadline First" scheduling code, it's nearing the point of officially being completed.

Ahead of the Linux 6.11 merge window set to close tomorrow, Linux engineer Christian Brauner at Microsoft sent in a set of two VFS fixes. One of the fixes is more noteworthy that is for a five year old bug that could cause on-disk corruption, security issues, or a kernel crash.