The work written about earlier this year on New Intel Linux Patches Continue Working To Improve Hybrid CPU Task Placement looks like it will be merged for the upcoming Linux 6.12 cycle as the patches have now been queued into the power management subsystem's "-next" branch. This latest Intel Core hybrid handling work is particularly focused on hybrid P/E-core processors without SMT / Hyper Threading, such as found with the upcoming Core Ultra 200V "Lunar Lake" processors.

OpenBMC as the Linux Foundation project backed by vendors like Intel / Microsoft / Google / Meta for an open-source BMC firmware stack continues to be a growing success. This alternative to long-used proprietary BMC software stacks continues to grow in popularity with AMD now using it on their reference motherboards and Supermicro being another notable user with some of their server platforms. Not entirely new but been meaning to write about it and NVIDIA talked more openly about it this week: NVIDIA is also a big supporter and user of OpenBMC for their high-end AI/HPC servers and BlueField DPU hardware.

While RISC-V processors don't need to worry about Meltdown and Spectre or have any other severe CPU vulnerabilities at the moment, with the upcoming Linux 6.12 kernel the RISC-V code is set to enable the generic CPU vulnerabilities support.

Merged three years ago in Linux 5.12 was IDMAPPED mounts for new use-cases from containers to systemd-homed. IDMAPPED mounts allow for different mounts to expose the same file or directory with different ownership such as for sharing files between multiple users or multiple systems. With time all of the major Linux file-systems have seen support added for IDMAPPED mounts while for Linux 6.12 support is on the way for FUSE file-systems.

While KDE developers this weekend are busy attending Akademy 2024 as their annual developer conference taking place in Würzburg, Germany, prior to that there were a few last minute features merged for the upcoming Plasma 6.2 desktop.

Building off yesterday's release of Wine 9.17 with its latest improvements for enjoying Windows games/apps on Linux, Hangover 9.17 is now out. Hangover as a reminder is the Wine-based effort for running Windows x86 applications under ARM64 Linux by leveraging Wine with emulators like QEMU, FEX, and Box64 for the cross CPU architecture handling.

While C tends to be the go-to launguage for microcontrollers, Raspberry Pi is promoting the prospects of using Rust on their RP2350 microcontroller.

The Slimbook crew shared on Twitter/X that they are showing off the new Slimbook 6 (Slimbook VI) laptop this weekend during the KDE Akademy conference taking place in the wonderful Würzburg, Germany. This new Slimbook laptop features an AMD Ryzen 7 8845HS SoC and of course uses the KDE Plasma 6 desktop environment out-of-the-box.

We are just a week or two out from the start of the Linux 6.12 merge window and AMD has submitted a final round of feature updates to DRM-Next of kernel graphics driver changes they want to round out AMDGPU/AMDKFD for this next cycle.

Ahead of GNOME 47's imminent release, Matthias Clasen has released GTK 4.16 as the newest exciting update to this toolkit powering GNOME software. Notable with GTK 4.16 is the GSK renderer defaulting to its Vulkan back-end when running on Wayland.

Cairo 1.18.2 released this week nearly one year after Cairo 1.18's debut for this cross-platform 2D vector graphics library -- in turn that was the project's first stable release in five years. Cairo is important for the GTK toolkit, Mozilla's Gecko engine, and dozens of other software projects. With Cairo 1.18.2 there are many fixes that have accumulated over the past year for bettering this graphics library.

Wine 9.17 is out today as quite an exciting update for this open-source software that allows Windows games and applications to run on Linux systems and other platforms.

Intel has submitted more kernel graphics driver changes for the upcoming Linux 6.12 cycle. Following the pull requests to DRM-Next last week to enable Lunar Lake Xe2 graphics and Battlemage by default, some more lingering feature patches were merged today. Most exciting with this last round of patches before Linux 6.12? Intel graphics card fan speed reporting is finally wired up for their Linux driver.

One of the security changes with AMD Zen 5 processors that I haven't seen AMD publicly mention at least not prominently is that the new cores are not vulnerable to Speculative Return Stack Overflow (SRSO). Unlike Zen 4 and prior, under Linux I noticed that Zen 5 is no longer affected by the SRSO "INCEPTION" vulnerability. But of course there does remain other CPU security mitigations in place carried over from Zen 4. For those wondering about the mitigation costs or if it's worthwhile running Zen 5 with the "mitigations=off" insane mode, here are some benchmarks.

Back in 2022 were a set of patches that allowed compiling the ARM64 Linux kernel from Apple macOS hosts. The intent was for developers just wanting to do some build/smoke testing from under an Apple Silicon device running macOS to see at least any kernel changes are successfully compiling on macOS with its LLVM/Clang-based toolchain. An updated form of those patches were posted today for review.

With this week's announcement of the Intel Core Ultra 200V Series "Lunar Lake" processors, I've been very eager to try out the Meteor Lake successor for Linux testing. As sadly is usually the case, for delivering Linux support details and performance benchmarks around launch-time I'm typically left buying a laptop retail for Linux testing. In this case after seeing the Lunar Lake laptops announced this week and their availability, I ended up settling on the ASUS Zenbook S 14 (UX5406SA-S14.U71TB) for the initial Core Ultra 200V series Linux review.

We're very close to the finish line for the mainline Linux kernel being able to enable real-time "PREEMPT_RT" kernel support.

Sent out today were the DRM fixes for 6.11-rc7 ahead of the Linux 6.11-rc7 kernel being released on Sunday. As usual most of the changes revolve around the AMDGPU and Intel i915/Xe drivers plus random fixes to the smaller drivers. There is one change though with the AMD Radeon graphics driver side worth highlighting to address a performance regression affecting recent kernels.

FEX 2409 has been released for this open-source project that's known for allowing x86_64 Linux binaries -- including both games and applications -- to run rather well on AArch64. It's also been working on enabling x86_64 programs on RISC-V but there due to architectural differences it's more of a challenge than with ARM.

It's taken until now to add FreeBSD to the X.Org Continuous Integration (CI) automated testing so that all proposed changes to the X.Org Server can now be build-tested on FreeBSD rather than just Linux.