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.

Patches have been posted to the Linux kernel mailing list for getting various Lenovo devices supported by the mainline Linux kernel that rely on the Qualcomm MSM8916 and MSM8939 platforms.

Linux 6.10 stable should be released later today. It's been a fairly calm week in the kernel world and thus Linus Torvalds will most likely opt for tagging v6.10 as opposed to doing a v6.10-rc8 extra release candidate. So with Linux 6.10 likely upon us, here's a reminder about some of the most interesting changes in this new kernel release.

The alpha release of GNOME 47 is now available for testing and comes with a number of shiny new features for this big open-source desktop update due out in September.

A patch posted for the Intel i915 kernel graphics driver finally allows for fan speed reporting with Arc Graphics and other Intel discrete graphics cards under Linux.

Last week it was noted AMD would be squeezing in more patches for "new IPs" to "get them tied off" with the upcoming Linux 6.11 cycle. This is principally about RDNA4 support and sure enough on Friday more patches were submitted to DRM-Next.

The I2C host changes are ready for the upcoming Linux 6.11 merge window.

Git 2.46-rc0 was published on Friday as the first tagged development release on the trek toward Git 2.46.

Pingora started out as an in-house replacement to Cloudflare's Nginx usage that was written in Rust and eventually open-sourced earlier this year. Pingora has evolved into a Rust framework for building fast and reliable networked systems. Ending out the week is the release of Pingora 0.3 as the latest step forward for this Rust code that is widely used within the confines of Cloudflare.

This Week in GNOME is out with their latest issue to highlight all of the interesting work that has taken place over the past seven days in the GNOME camp.

For fans of OBS Studio as a popular cross-platform solution for gaming live-streamers and used for other desktop screen-casting purposes, OBS Studio 30.2 is now available as stable.

System76 continues working vigorously on COSMIC, their Rust-written Linux desktop environment being written for Pop!_OS and to see availability on other Linux distributions as well. They are finishing up last minute changes before putting the flag on a COSMIC alpha release.

It was just announced at the end of last year that Holly Million was named as the GNOME Foundation Executive Director. After a little more than a half-year, this previous outsider to GNOME announced she will be stepping down from her post. A new interim executive director will be starting while the search begins for a permanent replacement.

Oliver Smith with Canonical has been communicating a lot in recent months around the great improvements planned for Ubuntu 24.10. Canonical engineers and the Ubuntu community have been working on many significant improvements for the desktop in Ubuntu 24.10. Today is a new blog post by Oliver to highlight some of the recent changes.

Thunderbird 128 "Nebula" is now available as the newest Extended Support Release (ESR) of this open-source and cross-platform mail client.

This week AWS announced that Graviton4 went into GA with the new R8G instances after Amazon originally announced their Graviton4 ARM64 server processors last year as built atop Arm Neoverse-V2 cores. I eagerly fired up some benchmarks myself and I was surprised by the generational uplift compared to Graviton3. At the same vCPU counts, the new Graviton4 cores are roughly matching Intel Sapphire Rapids performance while being able to tango with the AMD EPYC "Genoa" and consistently showing terrific generational uplift.

Over the past year there have been a lot of GTK4 graphics offload improvements including work on its Vulkan renderer. Another round of graphics offload improvements have been recently wrapped up for this open-source toolkit.

openSUSE's Aeon desktop operating system that brings automated maintenance and other features to be a platform that "just works" is preparing for what they describe as comprehensive full disk encryption.

Libavif 1.1 has arrived as the newest feature release to this library for implementing the AV1 Image File Format with image encode and decode capabilities.