The XFS file-system updates have been merged for the Linux 6.18 merge window.

So far on this last day of Q3'2025 we are at just over 800 original Linux news articles for the quarter on Linux hardware and open-source software. Here is a look back at what proved to be most popular for the quarter.

While IEEE-1394 Firewire hardware in the wild is increasingly rare, modern Linux IEEE-1394 subsystem maintainer Takashi Sakamoto has committed to maintaining Firewire support until 2029. With the in-development Linux 6.18 kernel there are more incremental improvements to this code.

The Error Detection And Correction "EDAC" subsystem continues seeing a lot of new hardware support and code churn across AMD, Intel, and Arm hardware platforms for the Linux kernel. With Linux 6.18 there are several notable additions.

With Linux 6.17 was the decision by Linus Torvalds to mark Bcachefs as "externally maintained" and not accept any new Bcachefs code into the mainline kernel but keeping the existing code within the tree. That was useful for those relying on Bcachefs to still boot a mainline kernel at least. Now for Linux 6.18, the Bcachefs code was removed from the mainline kernel.

Following AMD announcing the end of the AMDVLK Vulkan driver development in favor of focusing on the Mesa RADV driver for Linux systems, Red Hat engineer David Airlie who was one of the co-lead developers of the RADV driver shared some interesting insight on NVK as the open-source NVIDIA Vulkan driver being developed within Mesa.

Introduced this year with the Linux 6.16 kernel was the new functionality for reporting to users when running on outdated Intel CPU microcode since it can pose security vulnerability issues and/or functionality problems. The Linux kernel support for propagating this "old_microcode" reporting via sysfs relies on a static list of microcode versions corresponding to different Intel CPU generations. For the Linux 6.18 kernel this list is being updated to reflect modern baselines for Intel recommendations on CPU microcode.

WineConf as the annual Wine developer conference, for this open-source software allowing Windows games and applications to run on Linux, took place this weekend in The Hague. Several interesting talks took place including the usual keynote by Wine project leader Alexandre Julliard.

Linux ACPI and power management maintainer Rafael Wysocki today sent out all of the feature updates and changes intended for the now-started Linux 6.18 merge window. There are some new Intel additions as well as for the growing range of different ARM-based SoCs and other hardware.

Earlier this year NVIDIA announced Newton as an open-source physics engine focused on robotic simulations. This physics engine was developed by NVIDIA in cooperation with Google DeepMind and Disney Research. Today it's been contributed to the Linux Foundation.

Back in August Intel released LLM-Scaler 1.0 as part of Project Battlematrix for help getting generative AI "GenAI" workloads running on Arc (Pro) B-Series graphics cards. Out today are two new LLM Scaler beta releases for further enhancing the AI capabilities on Intel Battlemage GPUs.

Blender 5.0 is working its way toward an official release in mid-November and is soon transitioning from its alpha to beta stage. Among the key changes with Blender 5.0 are its Vulkan renderer being in good shape overall, HDR support when using Vulkan and Wayland on Linux, and other enhancements. Today some brief details were shared around the current state of the Vulkan support for Blender 5.0.

Back during the Linux 6.17 merge window the RISC-V changes were rejected as "garbage" for being submitted too late in the merge window and with some code choices that upset Linus Torvalds. With lessons learned, the RISC-V changes for Linux 6.18 were submitted today during the first official day of this new kernel cycle.

Building off yesterday's release of Linux 6.17, the GNU Linux-libre 6.17-gnu kernel is now available for this downstream kernel variant that strips away support for loading non-free microcode and other elements not aligned with the Free Software Foundation principles. This ultimately ends up limiting the hardware support available with most of today's modern hardware requiring microcode/firmware but alas here is the latest release with a fresh round of de-blobbing.

With Q3 coming to an end this week, here is a look back at the most popular Linux hardware reviews and featured multi-page benchmark articles during the third quarter of this year on Phoronix.

While the Linux 6.18 kernel merge window is just getting formally started following yesterday's Linux 6.17 release, one thing is already quite clear: there is a a lot of new Rust programming language code set to head into Linux 6.18.

Control-Flow Enforcement Technology "CET" is coming to the virtualized world with support for running within KVM guest VMs on Linux 6.18+. This CET virtualization support works for both AMD and Intel processors.

As expected, Linus Torvalds just released the Linux 6.17 kernel on-schedule as the kernel version powering Ubuntu 25.10, Fedora 43, and other upcoming Linux distribution releases and rolling releases.

Ahead of the stable Linux 6.17 kernel release expected in the coming hours, Bcachefs lead developer Kent Overstreet put out a blog post around the current multi-Linux distribution support for the out-of-tree DKMS packages for this copy-on-write file-system, some of their plans moving forward, and still aiming to graduate from the "experimental" phase at the end of the year.

GraalVM has been an interesting and performant Java JDK that over time added support for additional programming languages and execution models. Following their 2022 announcement that GraalVM CE Java code would be donated to OpenJDK, Oracle recently announced that moving forward GraalVM will focus on non-Java languages.