This Week in GNOME is out with their newest issue to detail changes made by various GNOME components over the first few days of July.

It's been a busy start to July with KDE developers tackling more features for Plasma 6.2 while continuing to deliver fixes to the modern KDE Plasma desktop stack.

Intel's IDXD driver is what enables the Data Streaming Accelerator (DSA) under Linux as found since Sapphire Rapids as part of Intel's accelerator offerings on their Xeon processors. With patches posted today, the IDXD driver will help the hardware recover in case of errors to provide a more robust experience.

Back in Linux 6.9 the Mobileye EyeQ5 SoC support was upstreamed for that MIPS-based platform powering Mobileye's level-5 autonomous driving system. With the upcoming Linux 6.11 kernel, support for the newer Mobileye EyeQ6 is being upstreamed.

One of several nice Linux performance optimizations recently by Eric Biggers of Google has been speeding up DM-Verity via multi-buffer hashing. DM-Verity is used for transparent integrity checking of block devices and this multi-buffer hashing code looks like it will land with the upcoming Linux 6.11 cycle.

As part of the memory management changes expected to be merged for the upcoming Linux 6.11 cycle is allowing more fine-tuned control over the swappiness setting used to determine how aggressively pages are swapped out of physical system memory and into the on-disk swap space.

While there were plans of adding getrandom() in the vDSO with the upcoming Linux 6.11 merge window to speed up user-space random number generation access, Linus Torvalds is unconvinced by the work and intends to reject any pull request with it for Linux 6.11.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation has released Raspberry Pi OS 2024-07-04 as the newest update to this default operating system for Raspberry Pi ARM single board computers.

A Debian General Resolution was called following a lengthy and contentious period among Debian stakeholders on moving forward tag2upload, a system that lets Debian developers and maintainers more easily carry out source-only uploads by using a signed Git tag.

It's been nearly one decade since Intel began working on 5-level paging support for the Linux kernel to allow for greater virtual and physical address space with expanding memory sizes. The 5-level paging kernel-side bits were upstreamed back in Linux 4.12 in 2017 and enabled by default since 2019 with Linux 5.5. Intel CPUs for a while (since Ice Lake) have supported 5-level paging and AMD CPUs too since Zen 4. The Linux kernel may move to unconditionally enabling 5-level paging support for x86_64 kernel builds.

While Linux 6.10-rc7 is due out this weekend and it's usually around the -rc6 timeframe when is the effective new material cut-off to DRM-Next of new graphics/display driver code aiming for the next kernel cycle, AMD is working to squeeze a bit more in for the upcoming Linux 6.11 cycle.

Patches have been posted for enabling the ROCK 5 ITX board for working with the mainline Linux kernel.

This month's FEX 2407 release as the open-source emulator for running x86_64 binaries on AArch64 (64-bit ARM) is a big one with now handling AVX/AVX2.

The OpenMandriva ROME 24.07 RC is available for testing over the US holiday weekend or just summer downtime.

Oracle today published their newest release of UEK-Next, their forward-looking version of the "Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel" targeting Oracle Linux users.

In the making the past two years by developer Jason Donenfeld (of WireGuard fame) is adding getrandom() to the vDSO in the name of better performance. In some tests this has yielded as much as a ~15x speed-up to performance for user-space obtaining crypographically secure random number generation. It's looking like for the upcoming Linux 6.11 merge window, this work will finally be merged.

Linux 6.10 introduces DRM Panic for providing a new panic screen in case of kernel errors and situations where the VT support may be disabled. This new kernel functionality is akin to Windows' Blue Screen of Death or thanks to open-source can be adapted to take on other forms such as a black screen of death and conveying monochrome logos rather than ASCII art. New patches provide for the ability to show QR codes of error messages within the DRM Panic screens.

For years Meta/Facebook has been exploring using BOLT with the Linux kernel to optimize the layout of the Linux kernel binary. Since BOLT was upstreamed into LLVM, they've continued work around BOLT'ing the kernel. There is now a public guide for carrying out a BOLT-optimized Linux kernel build and roughly 5% better system performance to expect from such an optimized kernel.

While CentOS 7 reached end of life a few days ago, CentOS Stream 10 as the future basis of RHEL 10 continues advancing along with other ongoing initiatives in the CentOS Stream space.

UC San Diego researchers have gone public with Indirector, high-precision branch target injection attacks on the indirect branch predictor. This UCSD security researchers found Indirector impacting recent Intel Alder Lake and Raptor Lake processors. Intel believes though that no further mitigations are required.