It's been nearly one decade since Intel began working on 5-level paging support for the Linux kernel to allow for greater virtual and physical address space with expanding memory sizes. The 5-level paging kernel-side bits were upstreamed back in Linux 4.12 in 2017 and enabled by default since 2019 with Linux 5.5. Intel CPUs for a while (since Ice Lake) have supported 5-level paging and AMD CPUs too since Zen 4. The Linux kernel may move to unconditionally enabling 5-level paging support for x86_64 kernel builds...

While Linux 6.10-rc7 is due out this weekend and it's usually around the -rc6 timeframe when is the effective new material cut-off to DRM-Next of new graphics/display driver code aiming for the next kernel cycle, AMD is working to squeeze a bit more in for the upcoming Linux 6.11 cycle...

Patches have been posted for enabling the ROCK 5 ITX board for working with the mainline Linux kernel...

This month's FEX 2407 release as the open-source emulator for running x86_64 binaries on AArch64 (64-bit ARM) is a big one with now handling AVX/AVX2...

The OpenMandriva ROME 24.07 RC is available for testing over the US holiday weekend or just summer downtime...

Oracle today published their newest release of UEK-Next, their forward-looking version of the "Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel" targeting Oracle Linux users...

In the making the past two years by developer Jason Donenfeld (of WireGuard fame) is adding getrandom() to the vDSO in the name of better performance. In some tests this has yielded as much as a ~15x speed-up to performance for user-space obtaining crypographically secure random number generation. It's looking like for the upcoming Linux 6.11 merge window, this work will finally be merged...

Linux 6.10 introduces DRM Panic for providing a new panic screen in case of kernel errors and situations where the VT support may be disabled. This new kernel functionality is akin to Windows' Blue Screen of Death or thanks to open-source can be adapted to take on other forms such as a black screen of death and conveying monochrome logos rather than ASCII art. New patches provide for the ability to show QR codes of error messages within the DRM Panic screens...

For years Meta/Facebook has been exploring using BOLT with the Linux kernel to optimize the layout of the Linux kernel binary. Since BOLT was upstreamed into LLVM, they've continued work around BOLT'ing the kernel. There is now a public guide for carrying out a BOLT-optimized Linux kernel build and roughly 5% better system performance to expect from such an optimized kernel...

While CentOS 7 reached end of life a few days ago, CentOS Stream 10 as the future basis of RHEL 10 continues advancing along with other ongoing initiatives in the CentOS Stream space...

UC San Diego researchers have gone public with Indirector, high-precision branch target injection attacks on the indirect branch predictor. This UCSD security researchers found Indirector impacting recent Intel Alder Lake and Raptor Lake processors. Intel believes though that no further mitigations are required...

Two years after originally posting patches for working on Unified Shared Memory (USM) support for OpenMP with the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), there is finally an updated patch-set for implementing this shared memory functionality with both AMD and NVIDIA GPUs...

A new Ubuntu utility seeing an uptick in development recently is crypto-config as a means of system-wide cryptography configuration...

The GNU Hurd team has put out their Q2'2024 status update to outline recent activity around this micro-kernel platform...

The RADV Radeon Vulkan driver in Mesa 24.2-devel has received support for task shaders with the NVIDIA Device Generated Commands "DGC" extension...

A new preview release is available of Microsoft's Azure Linux 3.0 operating system...

In addition to proposed opt-in data metrics collection and the new web-based installer UI, some of the other early proposals for Fedora Linux 42 that isn't due out until April of 2025 is expanding the possibilities for unprivileged users...

The Intel kernel graphics driver code being queued for the Linux 6.11 kernel already has added the initial Intel Battlemage PCI IDs, Battlemage display support, eDP Panel Replay support, Hardware Replay to help with hang debugging, SR-IOV preparations, and more Lunar Lake / Xe2 enablement. Today another unexpected last minute pull request was submitted of a bit more Xe driver code...

Back in May there were Linux kernel patches posted as a workaround for Arm CPU errata around the Speculative Store Bypass (SSB) handling. Initially this workaround was just noted as the Cortex-X4 and Neoverse-V3 as being affected, but now it turns out many more exciting Arm processor cores are impacted...