Phoronix

While the Intel In-Memory Analytics Accelerator (IAA) so far is just found on newer Xeon server processors, prior Linux patches acknowledge IAA being found on at least select Panther Lake SoCs. New patches ready for merging to the Linux 6.18 kernel are indicating IAA accelerator(s) will also be found on at least some of the lower-cost Wildcat Lake SoCs too...

The networking subsytem updates for Linux 6.18 have been merged. There is a lot of enticing performance optimizations in different areas of the networking stack for this new kernel. Plus new wired and wireless networking hardware support and other improvements to get excited about for this LTS kernel version...

At the start of the year, a new GCC compiler front-end was proposed for the half-century old ALGOL 68 programming language. Not exactly a popular programming language in recent decades and ahead of the GCC 15 release it was decided to not merge it yet to GCC. Even with that setback, development on the ALGOL 68 GCC compiler continues...

The x86 platform drivers area of the Linux kernel continues to see a lot of code churn for supporting new laptops and enhancing support for existing laptop models. Plus the likes of AMD PMF and Intel PMC continue to see ongoing improvements too...

The Intel Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) updates for the Linux 6.18 kernel allow it to work with Kexec for being able to load and boot into a new kernel from another currently running kernel...

The VFIO subsystem updates were merged last week for the ongoing Linux 6.18 merge window...

FreeBSD 15.0 continues working its way toward a stable release in early December and out today is the fifth alpha release...

Adding to the Linux storage/file-system excitement for Linux 6.18 is enhancements to some of the core FUSE code for supporting file-systems in user-space...

The past several months has seen AMD engineers working on a new RDMA driver for Ionic hardware through which they acquired Pensando a few years ago. That AMD-Pensando Ionic RDMA driver is now part of the upstream Linux 6.18 kernel...

The Direct Rendering Manager "DRM" pull request ended up leading to Linus Torvalds complaining over text and Rust code formatting but in the end he pulled all of these kernel graphics driver updates and also the associated "accel" accelerator subsystem drivers too...

Next year's GCC 16 compiler release is continuing the trend of enhancing the compiler diagnostics support, including new features like optionally outputting compiler error/warning diagnostics to HTML format for better analysis...

The HID changes have been merged for Linux 6.18 and are headlined by initial support in the mainline kernel for haptic touchpad handling...

For benefiting container usage on Linux, support for case-folding / case insensitive files and folder support has been added to OverlayFS...

All of the crypto subsystem changes have been merged for the in-development Linux 6.18 kernel...

The Compute Express Link (CXL) changes have been merged for the in-development Linux 6.18 kernel...

While Intel FRED was merged back in Linux 6.9 in advance of Intel processors shipping with this Flexible Return Event Delivery functionality, there ended up being a late, incompatible change to the specification as a result of security research into it. For Linux 6.18 those FRED changes have been merged,..

In addition to some Intel Linux kernel drivers being "orphaned" following the corporate restructuring at Intel between developers being laid off and others deciding to pursue opportunities elsewhere, these changes have also led to a number of Intel-related software packages within Debian being orphaned. In turn these Intel packages are also relied on by Ubuntu and other downstream Debian Linux distributions...

The F2FS file-system enhancements have been merged for the Linux 6.18 kernel and include some new performance optimizations...

Cairo-Dock is back after a decade hiatus! From the early 2010's you may remember Cairo-Dock / GLX-Dock as a complementary dock for your Linux desktop. The last time writing about it was the Cairo-Dock 3.4 release in 2014 when it was working toward EGL/Wayland support. Since then it was rather inactive the past decade besides a small 3.5 update one year ago with a few fixes. But out this week is now Cairo-Dock 3.6 with the long-awaited port to Wayland, HiDPI display handling, and other improvements...

The IOMMU driver changes were merged this week for Linux 6.18 with new material to benefit Intel, AMD, Apple, and RISC-V systems...