Merged during this second week of the Linux 6.19 feature merge window were the many x86 platform driver changes. As usual, much of the x86 platform driver activity surrounds bettering Linux hardware laptop support but also a growing number of handheld computers / gaming devices...

The past few years Oracle has been working on bpftune as a solution for BPF-based, automatic tuning of Linux systems. Bpftune has been available via Oracle Linux and GitHub while finally their open-source GitHub code has seen the first new tagged release in a while...

SystemRescue is an Arch-based Linux system on a bootable CD-ROM or USB drive, designed for repairing a system and data after a crash. It also aims to provide an easy way to carry out administration tasks on a computer, such as creating and editing hard disk partitions. It contains many useful system utilities (GNU Parted, PartImage, FSTools) and some basic ones (editors, Midnight Commander, network tools). It aims to be very easy to use. The kernel of the system supports all of today's most important file systems, including ext2, ext3, ext4, ReiserFS, Reiser4FS, btrfs, XFS, JFS, VFAT, NTFS, ISO9660, as well as network file systems, such as Samba and NFS.

The Network File-System (NFS) client changes were merged today for the Linux 6.19 kernel with the most notable feature addition being initial support for basic directory delegations...

The Real Time Clock (RTC) driver changes were merged today for Linux 6.19 ahead of the merge window wrapping up on Sunday...

The GNOME.org Extensions hosting for GNOME Shell extensions will no longer accept new contributions with AI-generated code. A new rule has been added to their review guidelines to forbid AI-generated code...

The LoongArch CPU architecture changes have been merged for the Linux 6.19 merge window. This domestic Chinese CPU architecture inspired by MIPS and RISC-V began with 64-bit LoongArch64 but with Linux 6.19 the foundation is being laid for LoongArch32 as a 32-bit variant...

Rust for Linux lead developer Miguel Ojeda posted the patch a short time ago to "conclude the Rust experiment". The "experiment" of Rust programming language code in the Linux kernel is over as it's now accepted to be a success and "Rust is here to stay" in the kernel...

It's an exciting week in KDE Plasma development land ahead of the holidays. Plasma 6.6 continues tacking on more feature work for Wayland...

The BeOS-inspired Haiku operating system has received a recent port of the Go programming language to the platform. Plus Haiku also saw app improvements and more over the month of November...

Following last week's Wine 11.0-rc1 release that marked the feature freeze as well in working toward Wine 11.0 in January, out today is Wine 11.0-rc2...

The Kernel-based Virtual Machine "KVM" updates for Linux 6.19 include preparations by AMD for handling up to a possible 4,096 virtual CPUs for VMs...

With the first of RISC-V RVA23-compatible hardware expected to be released in 2026, we are beginning to see more Linux developers prepare for this RVA23 profile and the now-mandated extensions. Sent out this week was an initial "request for comments" patch series on RVA23 adjustments for the Linux kernel...

The second Ubuntu 26.04 snapshot is ready to download, making testing of 'Resolute Raccoon' ahead of next April's stable release easier. Details inside.

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Merged a few days ago for the ongoing Linux 6.19 merge window were all of the "char/misc" updates. A lot of random changes throughout this time from the Industrial I/O "IIO" drivers to an interesting new feature for User-Space I/O "UIO" for PCI/PCIe devices...

One missed from earlier this week with the onslaught of news - Mounts of Mayhem released for Minecraft as the latest major update for the popular sandbox game.

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Over the past year Intel engineers have worked a lot on Cache Aware Scheduling for the Linux kernel. The yet-to-be-merged functionality allows for the Linux kernel to better aggregate tasks sharing data to the same last level cache (LLC) domain to reduce cache misses and cache bouncing. The Cache Aware Scheduling development was led by Intel but helps other CPU vendors too for processors with multiple cache domains. Back in October I showed some nice performance wins for AMD EPYC Turin with Cache Aware Scheduling while today's article are some benchmarks of the newest CAS code and looking at the performance benefit on Xeon 6 "Granite Rapids" processors.

Terminator 2D: NO FATE from Bitmap Bureau / Reef Entertainment has released today to give you some retro themed action-platformer goodness.

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The Blender 3D modeling software could enjoy better macOS support with better cross-platform code paths thanks to in-development work for leveraging KosmicKrisp for Vulkan API usage on macOS via Metal...

Kali Linux (formerly known as BackTrack) is a Debian-based distribution with a collection of security and forensics tools. It features timely security updates, support for the ARM architecture, a choice of four popular desktop environments, and seamless upgrades to newer versions.

Grml is a bootable CD (live CD) based on Debian GNU/Linux. It includes a collection of GNU/Linux software especially for users of text tools and system administrators. It also provides automatic hardware detection. Grml can be used as a rescue system, for analysing systems and networks, or as a working environment. Due to on-the-fly decompression, Grml includes about 2 GB of software and documentation on the CD.

Bringing more classic gaming goodies with the Vulkan-based translation layer for Direct3D 7, D7VK 1.0 is out now for Linux.

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Sure enough, yesterday's inaugural TheRock 7.10 release tag ended up being a precursor to ROCm 7.10 as predicted in the earlier article. Overnight ROCm 7.10 was released as a new developer preview and with it comes expanded hardware support -- including for Ryzen AI 300 Strix Point APUs finally being officially mentioned...

A new Recommended / Certified Linux driver release from NVIDIA with version 580.119.02 now available.

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