All of the networking subsystem feature updates were merged today for the Linux 7.3 kernel's merge window. There are a lot of wired and wireless networking improvements this cycle but also a ton of bug fixes -- including many not so important fixes spun up by AI/LLM agents. The networking subsystem maintainers admit now they are "completely overwhelmed" due to this code churn from the output of AI large language models...

Rust 1.98 released today and is headlined the debut of new algebraic floating-point methods...

KMSCON 10.0.2 debuted today as the latest update to this leading user-space terminal emulator for Linux systems. KMSCON is built around Linux's KMS/DRM interfaces and the most viable alternative to date for in-kernel VTs...

With today's release of KIO-Snapshot, KDE software now has stable integration of Btrfs file-system snapshots...

With the Intel Xeon 678X "Granite Rapids WS" processor that I have been recently testing within the HP Z4 G6i workstation, there are 48 cores plus with Hyper Threading is a total of 96 threads for this high-end workstation processor with a 300 Watt TDP. For those curious about the performance impact of HT/SMT on this Intel Xeon 600 series workstation processor, here are some comparison benchmarks.

FSCRYPT is the Linux file-system encryption framework for supporting per-directory, transparent encryption. FSCRYPT so far is used by the likes of EXT4, F2FS, and CephFS. For Linux 7.3 there is an important clean-up to the FSCRYPT code to simplify it while also opening the door for new features moving forward into future kernel versions...

The PreSonus Quantum 2626 is a high-end, Thunderbolt 3 based audio interface. PreSonus just maintains Windows and macOS drivers for this high-end audio interface while now an open-source Linux driver has been posted after being independently developed via reverse engineering...

RPM 6.1 is out today as the newest feature release for this package management system. With RPM 6.1 comes a number of features and improvements as well as a new release model...

For those preferring the tradition of waiting for the first point release of a new Mesa feature release before upgrading, Mesa 26.2.1 is available today with a healthy round of bug fixing...

The Linux kernel has supported the CONFIG_COMPAT_32BIT_TIME Kconfig build time option for optionally disabling of legacy 32-bit time system call support. This is intended to disable the code that uses a 32-bit integer for time that is thus not Year 2038 safe, but at the cost of breaking compatibility for legacy 32-bit applications. Even if building without Linux 32-bit time support, it turns out some 32-bit time code persisted but that is now being fixed with Linux 7.3...

KDE Gear 26.08 was released today to deliver the latest collection of KDE application updates...

Following today's release of XWayland 26.1 RC1, X.Org Server 26.1 RC1 was tagged. This xorg-server 26.1 release is aiming to become the first major feature release in five years, succeeding the xorg-server 21.1 series...

In addition to the IOmap improvements helping EXT4 performance in Linux 7.3, the main EXT4 feature pull request has now been submitted for this next kernel version. That pull is set to land yet more performance optimizations for EXT4...