The Real Time Clock (RTC) driver changes were merged today for Linux 6.19 ahead of the merge window wrapping up on Sunday.

The GNOME.org Extensions hosting for GNOME Shell extensions will no longer accept new contributions with AI-generated code. A new rule has been added to their review guidelines to forbid AI-generated code.

The LoongArch CPU architecture changes have been merged for the Linux 6.19 merge window. This domestic Chinese CPU architecture inspired by MIPS and RISC-V began with 64-bit LoongArch64 but with Linux 6.19 the foundation is being laid for LoongArch32 as a 32-bit variant.

Rust for Linux lead developer Miguel Ojeda posted the patch a short time ago to "conclude the Rust experiment". The "experiment" of Rust programming language code in the Linux kernel is over as it's now accepted to be a success and "Rust is here to stay" in the kernel.

It's an exciting week in KDE Plasma development land ahead of the holidays. Plasma 6.6 continues tacking on more feature work for Wayland.

The BeOS-inspired Haiku operating system has received a recent port of the Go programming language to the platform. Plus Haiku also saw app improvements and more over the month of November.

Following last week's Wine 11.0-rc1 release that marked the feature freeze as well in working toward Wine 11.0 in January, out today is Wine 11.0-rc2.

The Kernel-based Virtual Machine "KVM" updates for Linux 6.19 include preparations by AMD for handling up to a possible 4,096 virtual CPUs for VMs.

With the first of RISC-V RVA23-compatible hardware expected to be released in 2026, we are beginning to see more Linux developers prepare for this RVA23 profile and the now-mandated extensions. Sent out this week was an initial "request for comments" patch series on RVA23 adjustments for the Linux kernel.

Merged a few days ago for the ongoing Linux 6.19 merge window were all of the "char/misc" updates. A lot of random changes throughout this time from the Industrial I/O "IIO" drivers to an interesting new feature for User-Space I/O "UIO" for PCI/PCIe devices.

Over the past year Intel engineers have worked a lot on Cache Aware Scheduling for the Linux kernel. The yet-to-be-merged functionality allows for the Linux kernel to better aggregate tasks sharing data to the same last level cache (LLC) domain to reduce cache misses and cache bouncing. The Cache Aware Scheduling development was led by Intel but helps other CPU vendors too for processors with multiple cache domains. Back in October I showed some nice performance wins for AMD EPYC Turin with Cache Aware Scheduling while today's article are some benchmarks of the newest CAS code and looking at the performance benefit on Xeon 6 "Granite Rapids" processors.

The Blender 3D modeling software could enjoy better macOS support with better cross-platform code paths thanks to in-development work for leveraging KosmicKrisp for Vulkan API usage on macOS via Metal.

Sure enough, yesterday's inaugural TheRock 7.10 release tag ended up being a precursor to ROCm 7.10 as predicted in the earlier article. Overnight ROCm 7.10 was released as a new developer preview and with it comes expanded hardware support -- including for Ryzen AI 300 Strix Point APUs finally being officially mentioned.

Framework Computer had worked to keep their memory prices lower than other laptop vendors amid the ongoing memory shortages throughput the industry worldwide. But today they've finally had to cave in and increase their DDR5 memory modules for the Framework Laptop DIY Editions by 50%.

A new patch series from an NXP engineer optimizes the secure erase performance for certain Kingston eMMC devices. Currently with the Linux kernel performing a secure erase on 1GB of data can take around ten minutes. With these new patches that 1GB secure erase can be done in around two seconds.

Vulkan 1.4.336 is out today as the first spec update in two weeks for this high performance graphics and compute API.

Ubuntu Studio is the variant of Ubuntu Linux focused on content creation and audio recording needs, video editing, and other creative workloads. Ubuntu Studio's desktop hasn't seen too many changes since Ubuntu 12.04 LTS some 13+ years ago. But Ubuntu Studio developers are now considering desktop layout changes to help modernize its appearance.

All of the PCI subsystem updates were merged last week for the nearly-over Linux 6.19 merge window. Standing out this cycle are Resizable BAR improvements as well as introducing a few new PCIe controller drivers.

Microsoft today released WSL 2.7.0, the newest version of their Windows Subsystem for Linux code that enables running Linux binaries atop Windows 11 hosts.

TheRock is an interesting open-source build platform for ROCm and HIP that has taken shape over the past year. It's become an official ROCm effort albeit still in early stages and relying on community contributions for enhancements for different consumer GPU targets and more. To date its users have largely relied on running the latest TheRock Git while today TheRock v7.10 was tagged.