Linus Torvalds has just tagged Linux 6.10-rc5 as the newest weekly test release leading up to the Linux 6.10 stable release by mid-July.

Back in 2019 after various speculation-based CPU vulnerabilities began coming to light, Amazon engineers proposed process-local memory allocations for hiding KVM secrets. They were striving for an alternative mitigation for vulnerabilities like L1TF by essentially providing some memory regions for kernel allocations out of view/access from other kernel code. Amazon engineers this week laid out a new proposal after five years of ongoing Linux kernel improvements for MM-local memory allocations for dealing with current and future speculation-based cross-process attacks.

Red Hat engineer Leonardo Bras has laid out a proposal for QPWs, or "Queue PerCPU Work", as a better means of handling per-CPU operations within the Linux kernel especially for real-time (RT) workloads.

The Linux kernel community has sadly lost one of its longtime, prolific contributors to the wireless (WiFi) drivers.

The uutils project has released Rust Coreutils 0.0.27 as the newest feature update to this Rust-written, drop-in replacement to the GNU Coreutils as the common set of utilities found on Linux systems and other platforms.

On Friday more AMDGPU/AMDKFD kernel driver changes were submitted for the upcoming Linux 6.11 cycle by way of DRM-Next. We're nearing the end of feature work to DRM-Next before the Linux 6.11 merge window begins in mid-July while this latest AMD pull request continues preparing for upcoming RDNA4 graphics hardware among other changes.

Flathub as the centralized repository for serving Flatpak sandboxed Linux applications crossed the threshold this weekend of serving more than two billion downloads.

Another round of Bcachefs file-system fixes were merged today for the in-development Linux 6.10 kernel.

Merged on Friday to LLVM 19 Git is a generic MLIR to SPIR-V pass for lowering the Multi-Level Intermediate Representation down into SPIR-V as the intermediate representation consumed by OpenGL / OpenCL / Vulkan drivers.

GNOME developers continue to be very busy with a variety of initiatives thanks to the Sovereign Tech Fund (STF) financing as well as other general development efforts as they work their way toward GNOME 47 in September.

Following this week's great KDE Plasma 6.1 desktop release, developers have been fixing some minor bugs and other issues that were raised by early users of this updated open-source Qt6-powered desktop.

Mike Blumenkrantz of Valve's open-source/Linux graphics driver team has submitted a merge request to "massively" improve the OpenGL glReadPixels performance within the common Mesa state tracker.

While more software piles on AI features these days, today's release of the Darktable 4.8 RAW photography software has removed one of its AI features after realizing it only delivers mediocre quality.

VKD3D-Proton 2.13 is now available as the newest version of this Direct3D 12 over Vulkan API translation later that is used by Valve's Steam Play (Proton) for accelerating D3D12 Windows games on Linux.

With some Linux users not liking the recently showcased new Linux "Blue Screen of Death" for kernel panics, Red Hat engineer Javier Martinez Canillas who has been one of those involved in the new DRM Panic infrastructure showed that it can also be a "black screen of death" if so desired.

Cloud Hypervisor 40.0 is out today for this open-source Rust-written VMM that started off as an Intel software project and evolved into a multi-vendor initiative with backing from the likes of Microsoft, Arm, AMD, and others for a cloud-focused, security-critical virtualization hypervisor.

Earlier this week was a proposal for creating a new Mesa legacy driver branch for clearing out older OpenGL drivers like the ATI R300, AMD R600, Lima, Nouveau NV30, and other older GPU drivers. However, other upstream Mesa developers aren't convinced by the proposal.

Intel software engineers have been upstreaming the Lunar Lake support for Linux a number of months already and the basics appear in good shape, aside from the Xe2 graphics enablement being an ongoing matter. Much of the rest of the core functionality has appeared to be in good shape ahead of Lunar Lake laptops launching in Q3, but it seems there have been a few missing power management related bits.

Newly merged patches for Mesa 24.2 slightly enhance the default out-of-the-box build experience for the open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers on POWER/PowerPC platforms.

The Intel Xe driver is working on supporting PMT functionality with a new set of patches that may be mainlined for Linux v6.11~6.12.