Linux kernel developers continue building out the support around the Compute Express Link (CXL) specification for benefiting modern high performance servers. With the in-development Linux 6.16 kernel there are more CXL features now in place.

Ubuntu developers have recently started a discussion over possibly splitting up the "linux-firmware" package into multiple sub-packages given the growing size of all the different firmware binaries needed to support the diverse range of hardware supported by the Linux kernel. It's nice in theory for helping to reduce the install footprint of Ubuntu Linux but in practice will be difficult to pull off without potentially risking the out-of-the-box hardware support on Ubuntu Linux.

One of the niftiest kernel innovations to be upstreamed into Linux over the past year was sched_ext for extensible scheduler behavior in allowing kernel schedulers to be implemented via BPF programs. Sched_ext can allow for interesting scheduler improvements with a variety of use-cases and showed much potential even before being upstreamed. The work on sched_ext isn't yet over though and yet more improvements landed for Linux 6.16.

The numerous hardware monitoring "HWMON" subsystem updates were merged to Linux 6.16 on Tuesday for further enhancing the desktop hardware reporting capabilities and more with this next kernel release.

SquashFS-Tools 4.7 is out today as a big feature update to the user-space utilities for creating/modifying/extracting SquashFS read-only file-system images. SquashFS 4.7 delivers some big performance improvements and other nice enhancements.

While Linux 5.13 back in 2021 added support for the Apple Magic Mouse 2, only now with the Linux 6.16 kernel is there support arriving for the USB-C version of the Apple Magic Mouse 2 that debuted last year.

The wide assortment of x86 platform driver updates have been merged for the Linux 6.16 kernel due out as stable in July. As is usually the case, there are a number of Intel and AMD platform updates along with a wide assortment of driver improvements primarily for laptops from the major OEMs/ODMs.

While Intel opted against implementing Hyper Threading for their latest Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake processors, Simultaneous Multi-Threading (SMT) still proves very effective on the AMD side. Even though the top-end AMD Ryzen AI MAX "Strix Halo" SoCs provide 16 Zen 5 cores, the presence of SMT for 32 threads still proves worthwhile from both a performance and power efficiency perspective. Here is an on/off comparison for SMT with the flagship AMD Ryzen AI MAX+ PRO 395 within the HP ZBook Ultra G1a.

AMD compiler engineer Joseph Huber is the one who ported DOOM to run on GPUs atop ROCm + LLVM libc as part of taking standard C/C++ code to run on GPUs and more recently has also been pursuing Flang/Fortran support atop GPUs. The latest in this ongoing quest is implementing efficient malloc support for memory allocation support on GPUs via the LLVM libc library.

Valve engineer Pierre-Loup A. Griffais contributed ByoWave Proteus controller support to the Linux kernel. ByoWave Proteus are some modular controller designs that can be adapted based upon the needs of the gamer and even what title you may be playing at the moment. The triggers and buttons are all repositionable for a very customized controller experience. The only downside is the modular gaming controller kit retails for $299 USD, but at least now works off the mainline Linux kernel.

Merged last week for the Linux 6.16 kernel coming later this summer were the many block subsystem updates as well as the IO_uring feature updates.

The FUSE improvements have been merged for the Linux 6.16 in enhancing the capabilities for file-systems implemented in user-space.

More Rust programming language abstractions for core code of the Linux kernel continues to land for the ongoing Linux 6.16 merge window.

One day after Steam on Linux set a recent high with the Steam Survey, a new Steam client beta is out today to fix an excruciating annoyance affecting some Linux gamers.

Intel's Linux graphics driver engineers continue working on enabling support for the Xe3 integrated graphics premiering with next-gen Core Ultra "Panther Lake" SoCs. Today a number of additional PCI device IDs have been merged to the Mesa 25.2 code to reflect the growing family.

Kexec HandOver "KHO" was merged for the in-development Linux 6.16 kernel as part of all the memory management "MM" changes. Kexec HandOver is providing the basis for some nifty low-level features moving forward.

Researchers from the Technical University of Munich (TUM) have announced TPDE as a fast and adaptable compiler back-end framework. The code is now open-source and they are talking up some very wild compile time improvements... Compiling code for x86_64 and AArch64 with TPDE can be ten to twenty times faster than using the LLVM Clang compiler.

A very convenient addition to Linux 6.16 for system administrators is reporting to user-space via sysfs counters for the number of hard and soft lock-ups as well as RCU stalls.

In April we looked at the Framework 13 updated for the AMD Ryzen AI 300 series and its great out-of-the-box performance and nice power efficiency of Strix Point. Via ACPI platform profiles the power/performance mode can be tuned if desiring a longer battery life or preferring even greater performance. Today's article is looking at that power/performance impact of the different ACPI platform profiles available on the Framework 13 motherboard with the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370.

For those running an Network File System "NFS" server, the upcoming Linux 6.16 kernel will allow optionally enabling a larger payload size that may yield better performance. Eventually the default payload size may be increased if all goes well from user feedback and testing.