Last week the block subsystem and IO_uring updates were merged for the Linux 6.18 kernel with a few items to draw attention to.

In addition to the Linux 6.18 kernel bringing initial bindings for writing Rust USB drivers, the main USB/Thunderbolt subsystem updates for Linux 6.18 brought a variety of other enhancements.

Last week System76 released the Pop!_OS 24.04 beta along with the beta COSMIC desktop. This long overdue update to Pop!_OS re-bases against the Ubuntu 24.04 LTS base while featuring their modern, Rust-based desktop environment. For those curious I ran some benchmarks of Pop!_OS 24.04 beta compared to the current Pop!_OS 22.04 stable release.

Following last week's RISC-V pull request that brought support for the MIPS Vendor Extensions and other changes plus separately the SoC pull that added mainline ESWIN EIC7700 SoC support and the HiFive Premier P550, a secondary round of RISC-V architecture updates was submitted for the Linux 6.18 merge window.

Beta builds of the Blender 5.0 3D modeling software are now available ahead of the planned stable release in mid-November.

Tvrtko Ursulin of Igalia has been leading the work on developing a "fair" DRM scheduler for Linux kernel graphics drivers. This scheduling algorithm is inspired by CFS and aims to improve the experience of running interactive graphical clients in parallel with heavy GPU workloads. This scheduler is inching closer to being ready for the mainline Linux kernel.

The GNU Compiler Collection will be shifting to its "stage three" development in November as focusing more on bug fixing now and new ports and less on existing compiler functionality/features.

In recent days there have been two rounds of Kernel-based Virtual Machine "KVM" feature updates to be merged for Linux 6.18 in enhancing the open-source virtualization stack.

In addition to the NTFS3 driver changes to land last week for the Linux 6.18 kernel, the exFAT file-system driver for that other Microsoft file-system has also seen some notable updates this cycle.

Meta already has Zstd (Zstandard) compression while this week they announced the release of OpenZL as a new open-source, format-aware compression framework.

In addition to a lot of rust code merged last week for Linux 6.18, more Rust code has since landed by way of the char/misc pull request.

Python 3.14 is now available as the newest annual major feature release for the Python programming language.

AMD today announced the Ryzen Embedded 9000 series for industrial computing and automation platforms.

The many memory management "MM" changes were recently merged into the Linux 6.18 kernel, consisting of a number of interesting patch series.

Qualcomm announced today that they are acquiring Arduino, the popular open-source hardware/electronics prototyping platform for single-board micro-controllers.

Being worked on for the past roughly three years has been Linear Address Space Separation "LASS" for the Linux kernel as a security improvement in light of Spectre/Meltdown.

The Memory Technology Device "MTD" subsystem updates are merged for the in-development Linux 6.18 kernel.

Initially released two years ago was an Intel QuickAssist/QAT adaptation for Zstd compression. The v0.1 release happened just over two years ago followed by a v0.2 release one year later... Since then, it had been all quiet. Arriving today to surprise is the QAT Zstd 1.0 plug-in release.

For any Amiga 4000 hobbyists running a Linux m68k operating system, a PCI driver was finally published three decades later for Linux. Patches posted for mainline Linux kernel review today enable the Mediator 4000 PCI bridge available for the Amiga 4000 computer from the early 90's.

Qt 6.10 is now available as the latest feature update to this open-source and cross-platform toolkit.