While Fwupd developers are working toward the Fwupd 2.0 release, out this morning is Fwupd 1.9.20 as the newest point release for this open-source solution for firmware updating on Linux that pairs with the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS).

Bcachefs lead developer Kent Overstreet today sent out his feature pull request of all the new file-system code that is ready in time for the Linux 6.10 merge window.

Released over a year ago was Golang 1.20 with support for Profile Guided Optimizations (PGO) and has since been improved with Go 1.21 for 2~7% faster Go binaries thanks to this optimization approach also found with other compilers. The engineers at Cloudflare have put out a blog post this week praising Go's PGO support and the CPU savings they are seeing as a result.

While EROFS is seeing Zstd support and Bcachefs is seeing performance optimizations with the in-development Linux 6.10 kernel, over on the mature EXT4 file-system side the changes are mostly small. There are some minor changes, more folio conversion work, and also adding support for the FS_IOC_GETFSSYSFSPATH ioctl that has been seeing some standardization and adoption by the common Linux file-systems.

Alongside all of the other pull requests by Ingo Molnar submitted at the start of the week during the opening of the Linux 6.10 merge window were the scheduler updates. As usual, the kernel scheduler work continues to see various tweaks and refinements to enhance its behavior.

A Linux patch has been posted for delivering a quirk so that the Bigscreen Beyond VR Headset can properly behave under Linux and in turn also jives with the likes of SteamVR.

Linux's Turbostat utility that is developed by Intel for reporting idle/power state statistics, temperatures, and other useful data on modern Intel/AMD processors has seen its changes submitted for the in-development Linux 6.10 kernel.

SUSE/openSUSE has been busy crafting a next-gen Linux installer that is a web-based installer and originally known as D-Installer but now going by the name Agama.

The Linux Network File System (NFS) server code (NFSD) is seeing a new Netlink protocol introduced in Linux 6.10 as part of laying the groundwork for the new "nfsdctl" utility.

Niri is a scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor inspired by PaperWM and heavy on the animations/effects. Out this morning is Niri 0.1.6 as the newest feature release for this Wayland compositor.

Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund continues providing the resources for various new GNOME desktop development initiatives. There are various efforts underway for new features and refinements with GNOME 47 in September and a renewed emphasis around GNOME OS.

The performance events updates were submitted today for the ongoing Linux 6.10 kernel merge window. This pull adds support for Advanced Performance Extensions (APX) and other new Intel CPU instructions to the x86 instruction decoder.

While machine check exception (MCE) events tend to be uncommon, a change made by Intel engineers is accommodating the ability in the Linux kernel to store more machine check records for "when things go seriously wrong" on increasingly high core count servers.

KDE development remains very busy ahead of next month's Plasma 6.1 desktop release.

Wine 9.9 is out as the newest bi-weekly development release for running Windows games/applications on Linux and other platforms.

Merged as part of the IRQ changes for the in-development Linux 6.10 kernel is support for posted interrupts on bare metal hardware.

Oliver Smith who is serving as the Interim Engineering Director for the Ubuntu Desktop team at Canonical has shared some roadmap plans around Ubuntu 24.10. With this being the first post-LTS release following last month's Ubuntu 24.04 Long Term Support, they are more free to innovate this cycle and they have a lot of great plans for enhancing the Linux desktop experience.

OpenSUSE is the first major Linux distribution to package up and offer Intel's OpenVINO open-source AI toolkit within its package repository.

FSCRYPT is the file-system encryption framework within the Linux kernel for supporting optional encryption on file-systems like EXT4, F2FS, and others. With Linux 6.10 an optimization is coming for enhancing the performance of opening files on file-systems supporting FSCRYPT-based encryption but when the files are unencrypted.

The Compute Express Link (CXL) subsystem development continues to be led by Intel engineers and with the in-development Linux 6.10 kernel there are yet more features in tow.