Over the past year and a half a number of open-source drivers in the Linux kernel have been orphaned as a result of departures from the company. The impact has ranged from the Intel CPU "coretemp" temperature driver being orphaned without a maintainer to other lesser known Intel drivers. Another lesser known Intel driver is now being orphaned with no longer having a maintainer at the company: the Intel Specific Absorption Rate Driver...

It was back in May that the surprising event happened of AMD posting HDMI 2.1 FRL patches for their open-source AMDGPU Linux driver as part of their broader HDMI 2.1 bring-up. For years the open-source HDMI 2.1 support in AMDGPU was blocked by the HDMI Forum but whether it was due to Valve or some other event, the code was finally unblocked. While it's been part of the kernel since Linux 7.2, it's been disabled by default -- except that is now changing...

Following last week's main set of memory management "MM" related updates for Linux 7.3, another batch of MM code updates were submitted and merged today as we prepare to close out the Linux 7.3 merge window. There are a few optimization patches that stand out along with other mostly small fixes/changes...

Back in July ROCm 7.14 was announced as their new production release built atop TheRock build system and introducing Ryzen AI 400 series support. The versioning choice was a bit odd since ROCm 7.2 was the stable release at the time while ROCm 7.9+ turned into "tech preview" releases. With ROCm 7.14, it was declared stable. In clearing up that versioning mess, they have done a major version bump... to ROCm 10.0...

Earlier this week I showed off some of the very nice Btrfs performance gains on Linux 7.3. For those wondering what kernel optimizations may have carried over to other file-systems or other file-system specific enhancements, here are Linux 7.2 vs. 7.3 Git performance benchmarks across Btrfs, EXT4, F2FS, and XFS on the same system.

With the never-ending quest for greater I/O performance in the HPC space and the demands all the more relentless in the AI era, the Linux kernel block subsystem activity continues to be as vibrant as ever along with the ongoing innovations in the IO_uring space...

For those interested in making use of the recently released DeepSeek V4 Flash model, AMD developers have released Lemonade 11.8 that now makes it rather trivial to get DeepSeek V4 Flash up and running on AMD Ryzen AI+ Max "Strix Halo" systems...

Werner Koch announced today the release of Libgcrypt 1.12.3 with various bug fixes and more exciting are the performance improvements...

Merged back in 2023 was Intel ANV Vulkan Video support for H.265 decoding. But it's been slightly out of compliant with the Vulkan spec, which is now fixed with the newest code for Mesa 26.3 by engaging the HuC firmware...

The AppArmor improvements have been merged for Linux 7.3 for this kernel security module providing per-program Linux application security controls around system resources. Most notable this cycle is being able to load user-space compressed policies...

The LLVM/Clang compiler toolchain merged overnight better support for the nearly decade-old AMD Zen 1 processors and also helps with Zen+ and Zen 2 processors too. This latest work thanks to the open-source community is for providing more informed instruction scheduling around PDEP and PEXT that end up being quite costly for these original Zen processors...

The Network File-System (NFS) improvements for both the client and server code have been merged for the nearly-over Linux 7.3 merge window...

The Asahi Linux crew working to bring Linux support to Apple Silicon hardware is out today with a new status update on their initiatives, largely around Apple M3 bring-up as well as some M4/M5 achievements...