Patches posted on Thursday for the Linux kernel add support for the newest hotkey being found on Lenovo ThinkPad laptops... The "Phone Link" hotkey for launching the Microsoft Phone Link software for linking your Android/iOS smartphone to your laptop. This hotkey can be adapted for similar purposes on Linux.

GCC 15 feature development is soon wrapping up to focus on bug fixing before releasing GCC 15.1 as stable in the early months of 2025. One of the latest features to make it in the compiler codebase is code generation support around Arm Guarded Control Stack (GCS) functionality.

A number of Steam Controller improvements have been merged for SDL, this widely-used hardware/software abstraction layer that is common to cross platform games. Among the latest Steam Controller improvements in SDL are enabling the support by default.

In addition to the release today of OpenMP 6.0 ahead of the SC24 supercomputing conference in Atlanta, over at The Khronos Group they have provided an update on upcoming SYCL improvements to benefit high performance computing (HPC) and scientific computing applications.

The OpenMP Architecture Review Board announced from SC24 that OpenMP 6.0 is now available as a major upgrade to the OpenMP specification for multi-process programming within C / C++ / Fortran. A big emphasis on OpenMP 6.0 is making it easier for developers to embrace.

A new patch series posted today to the Linux kernel mailing list would block kernel modules/drivers from TUXEDO Computers from accessing GPL-only symbols in the kernel.

While it's difficult still finding Intel Xeon 6 "Granite Rapids" motherboards/servers widely available at Internet retailers/distributors, when it comes to the AMD EPYC 9005 "Turin" processors that launched just last month, there is better availability thanks in large part to leveraging the existing SP5 socket. For those wanting to assemble a single socket AMD EPYC 9005 series server, one of the readily available options in the retail channel is the Supermicro H13SSL-N motherboard.

The first public beta of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 (RHEL 10) was released on Wednesday with a wide variety of new/updated packages, new features, and other changes over RHEL 9.

Last month AMD Linux engineers posted patches for a 3D V-Cache Optimizer driver for Linux that allows the user to communicate their cache vs. frequency preference depending upon workload and for the 3D V-Cache processors where some CCDs have the larger cache but not all. That driver is now ready for appearing in the upcoming Linux 6.13 kernel.

A patch queued yesterday ino the Linux power management subsystem's "linux-next" branch ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.13 merge window will tune Intel Xeon Granite Rapids processors for better performance out-of-the-box.

Linux 6.10 introduced TPM bus encryption and integrity protection for enhancing the Trusted Platform Module support to protect against interposers from compromising them with TPM sniffing attacks. There is now a new option being added to opt-out of this protection due to a discovered performance bottleneck.

The newest Linux driver being developed by Intel is for the Touch Host Controller (THC) as a new high performance input tech for enhancing touch screen, touch pad, and stylus input handling.

Ahead of the expected final Linux 6.12 stable kernel release this weekend, a last round of Bcachefs file-system fixes were submitted today for this next kernel version.

AMD today went public with details on the "AMD Next-Gen Fortran Compiler" as a new Fortran compiler they are working on based on LLVM's Flang.

Last week Mesa 24.3 was finally branched and Mesa 24.3-rc1 subsequently issued for getting the release process kicked off for this quarterly 3D graphics driver feature release. Out today is Mesa 24.3-rc2 with an initial batch of fixes.

Canonical's Interim Engineering Director for Ubuntu Desktop, Oliver Smith, has shared some early roadmap plans for the Ubuntu 25.04 development cycle.

Apple last week released their latest iMac, Mac Mini, and MacBook Pro products powered by their fourth-generation M-series Apple Silicon. The new Mac Mini in particular is interesting for under $600 starting out with the all re-designed Mac Mini with 10-core M4 and now the base model having 16GB of memory. It will take some time before there is any reasonable Linux support on the M4 hardware with Asahi Linux, but for those curious about how the M4 Mac Mini with macOS compares to AMD Ryzen and Intel Core CPUs under Linux, here are some preliminary benchmarks.

Framework Computer has been promoting a RISC-V motherboard option for their Framework Laptop 13 to complement their existing Intel Core and AMD Ryzen motherboard options. This RISC-V motherboard is being developed in cooperation with DeepComputing. Early access pricing and more details on this quad-core StarFive JH7110 powered mainboard for the Framework 13 have now been announced.

Back in Linux 6.11 support for getrandom() in the vDSO was upstreamed for much better performance in providing speedy yet secure random number generation (RNG) needs. Since Linux 6.11 getrandom in the vDSO has expanded to more CPU architectures and now there's a notable user-space user ready to go: the GNU C Library "glibc" support was merged.

The Intel In-Memory Analytics Accelerator (IAA) found in various Xeon SKUs since Sapphire Rapids can be of big benefit to Linux servers/workstations with a Linux kernel patch series that has been in the works to provide Zswap IAA compress batching.