While many have been excited around the prospects of laptops powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite SoC, the Linux support so far still leaves a lot to be desired... The initial Snapdragon X Elite laptops aren't utilizing ACPI standards and the bring-up under Linux has been slow, but patches have begun appearing for some models. But even with patches, the Adreno GPU remains a big obstacle still being tackled along with other features like web camera, USB4, Bluetooth, etc. With a new kernel patch, the GPU for the Snapdragon X Elite (X1E80100) is being disabled by default.

For the past year and a half Intel engineers have been working on Linux kernel improvements for Sub-NUMA Clustering (SNC) in the presence of Resource Director Technology (RDT). Intel has been advising its customers not to use Sub-NUMA Clustering when making use of Resource Director Technology since these features would effectively fight eachother. Well, with the Linux 6.11 kernel that's finally being addressed.

There's a new driver subsystem being introduced in the Linux 6.11 kernel for power sequencing.

Stemming from a recent investigation into a GCC compiler regression on Zen 4, it was discovered that the unaligned load/store costs for the Zen 4 and Zen 5 targets were inaccurate and have now been tweaked within GCC Git.

Linus Torvalds began the Linux 6.11 merge window yesterday by merging some of his own feature code for this next kernel version.

The Solus Linux project announced today they will be dropping the AppArmor patches carried by their kernels. In turn this means their Snap packaging support will only run with partial confinement.

While there have been various efforts like HIPIFY to help in translating CUDA source code to portable C++ code for AMD GPUs and then the previously-AMD-funded ZLUDA to allow CUDA binaries to run on AMD GPUs via a drop-in replacement to CUDA libraries, there's a new contender in town: SCALE. SCALE is now public as a GPGPU toolchain for allowing CUDA programs to be natively run on AMD graphics processors.

Following last night's release of the Linux 6.10 kernel, the FSF LA developers have released GNU Linux-libre 6.10-gnu as their downstream kernel flavor that strips out the ability to load binary-only kernel modules and the ability to load non-free firmware/microcode into open-source drivers, among other alterations in the name of software freedom.

Alongside all of the exciting Ryzen 9000 and Ryzen AI 300 series details shared last week at the AMD Tech Day in Los Angeles, what I also found to be very interesting was AMD sharing a bit more about a "Unified AI Software Stack" they are working to release in the coming quarters.

Last week I had the pleasure to be out in Los Angeles for the AMD Tech Day focused on their new Ryzen 9000 "Granite Ridge" and Ryzen AI 300 "Strix Point" processors. This was an exciting event with many new details shared around Zen 5 CPU cores and the RDNA 3.5 integrated graphics found with the upcoming Ryzen AI 300 series mobile processors. The embargo concerning those architectural details have now expired while the review/benchmarking embargo isn't until a later date.

The Chrome platform changes for Linux 6.11 as code predominantly for enabling Chromebooks with the mainline Linux kernel is set to introduce two new drivers.

Coming in as a rather late change proposal for Fedora 41 is to support self-encrypting drives from within the OS installer.

Among the flurry of pull requests submitted now that the Linux 6.11 merge window is open are the hardware monitoring (HWMON) subsystem updates.

Bcachefs maintainer Kent Overstreet has already sent out all of the exciting Linux 6.11 feature updates for this copy-on-write file-system. Bcachefs continues maturing nicely within the mainline Linux kernel while continuing to tack on new functionality.

Wine 9.13 was released on Sunday as off its usual bi-weekly Friday release regiment for this newest development build.

As anticipated the Linux 6.10 kernel was released as stable a few minutes ago by Linus Torvalds.

With Linux 6.10 expected to be released in the coming hours, in turn the Linux 6.11 merge window will open tomorrow unless there is any last-minute v6.10 release delay. With that said, here's a look at some of the features you can likely expect to see for this next kernel version.

Arch Linux based CachyOS has released their "July 2024" release that also introduces an AMD Zen 4 optimized repository that caters to current Ryzen 7000/8000 and EPYC 4004/8004/9004 (Zen 4) procssors and upcoming Zen 5 processors.

Linux engineer Christian Brauner at Microsoft sent out his various pull requests for areas of the kernel he oversees ahead of the Linux 6.11 merge window. One of the more interesting pull requests from Brauner this cycle are the "vfs procfs" updates that now allow restricting access to the /proc/[pid]/mem files of processes.

While Fedora 41 isn't even out yet, early feature planning is already underway for Fedora 42 that will debut in the early months of 2025. One of the interesting proposals raised so far is for making use of the new DRM Panic screen functionality for a "Blue Screen of Death" of sorts for better presenting kernel error messages in case of kernel panics.