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.

While most Linux file-systems are rather robust in recovering when the system experiences a power loss, the UBIFS file-system is more prone to problems when a power-cut happens. With patches submitted for the Linux 6.11 merge window, UBIFS is seeing some hardening so it can better cope with the loss of power.

In addition to refining the KDE Human Interface Guidelines, KDE developers have been busy with a variety of other tasks this week in polishing their open-source desktop stack.

Merged today for Q4's Mesa 24.3 feature release is a brand new open-source Vulkan driver: Honeykrisp, the driver providing Vulkan API support for Apple Silicon GPUs as part of the Asahi Linux effort.

Following Linus Torvalds receiving an Ampere Altra Max workstation from Ampere Computing, he's been dabbling more with ARM64 now that it affords him more AArch64 compute power than his Apple Silicon powered MacBook. Torvalds kicked off the Linux 6.11 merge window by landing some of his own code to further enhance the ARM64 kernel and as we approach the end of the v6.11 merge window this weekend, he's merged some more ARM64 code.

With the recently introduced NVIDIA 555 Linux driver stable series their open-source GPU kernel driver modules are in great shape across consumer and professional graphics products. Over the past two years the support has evolved so much that NVIDIA is now promoting their open-source kernel driver usage and with the NVIDIA 560 Linux driver beta posted this week they are defaulting to using their open-source kernel driver modules in place of the proprietary option -- on the Turing and newer GPUs supported by the open-source code. Here is a fresh look at the impact.

LLVM 19.1-rc1 was released today as the first tagged development snapshot of LLVM 19 that is working its way toward the stable LLVM 19.1 version expected in September.

Richard Hughes of Red Hat just released Fwupd 1.9.22 as the newest version of this open-source solution for allowing system and peripheral firmware updates to be carried out quickly and easily from Linux systems.

With the Linux 6.11 kernel merge window wrapping up this weekend, I've begun "kicking the tires" on the new kernel that will then see the weekly release candidates over the next two months. For some initial Linux 6.10 vs. 6.11 Git benchmarking on an AMD Ryzen Threadripper workstation, the new kernel is appearing fit and offering some nice performance gains in a few areas.

For those striving for a quiet PC while having high-end specs, ASRock today announced passively-cooled Radeon RX 7900 XT and Radeon RX 7900 XTX graphics cards.

The x86 platform driver updates were merged last week for the Linux 6.11 merge window. The x86 platform drivers predominantly benefit Intel/AMD laptops on Linux but also some other x86 non-laptop hardware and then more recently also some ARM64 laptop drivers appearing in this area of the kernel.

While Red Hat Enterprise Linux is very popular with the VFX crowd, those relying on the SideFX Houdini 3D animation software are running into a bit of a pickle if trying to use RHEL 9.4. There's a glibc bug causing random crashes for Houdini that Red Hat has been slow to pickup but is now going to be shipped by AlmaLinux early to satisfy VFX users.

Back in early June the KDE Human Interface Guidelines "HIG" were updated. These design principles for KDE software were updated to modern standards, adapt to the latest Qt toolkit behavior, and also making it more inviting to new contributors. Since then the KDE HIG has continued to see more refinements.

Oracle today released the first public beta of their VirtualBox 7.1 virtualization software.

Linux Mint 22 was formally released today as the newest major release of this desktop-focused Linux distribution built atop the Ubuntu 24.04 LTS package base while featuring its in-house Cinnamon desktop environment and other software apps.

While the hope remains that GPU resets are a very infrequent task, AMD Linux driver engineers have recently been working on the ability to support a per-queue GC reset capability for more precise reset capabilities when needed.