Well this wasn't on my bingo card for 2025... There is now yet another NTFS file-system driver for Linux. There's long been the read-only NTFS driver in the Linux kernel, the more capable NTFS FUSE driver in user-space, and then in recent years the NTFS3 driver that was upstreamed to the Linux kernel by Paragon Software. NTFS3 offers read/write support and other improvements over the prior kernel driver. Now there is "NTFSPLUS" as a new driver with read/write support and claiming to offer better performance and features than NTFS3...

Earlier this month Intel Linux graphics driver engineers began posting the initial Intel Xe3P graphics enablement code with a focus on the integrated graphics to be found with Nova Lake. Xe3P will also later be found in Intel discrete graphics cards like Crescent Island and more. That very early Intel Xe3P code is now expected to be merged as part of the Linux 6.19 kernel as what will be the first Linux kernel release of 2026...

It was to much surprise waking up this morning and seeing the Servo 0.0.1 release for this Rust-based web layout engine that began as a Mozilla project and is now being developed independently via Linux Foundation Europe and other parties...

Linux 6.18-rc2 is now available with another week's worth of fixes for Linux 6.18, which is anticipated to be this year's Long Term Support (LTS) kernel version...

Linux 6.16 introduced the ability to report the cause of AMD system resets/reboots thanks to specialized information available on AMD Zen platforms for indicating the detected cause of previous resets. This is a handy addition and the information is automatically reported to the kernel log on the next system boot, but in some instances that information could be stale/inaccurate. Today's Linux 6.18-rc2 will fix that...

There has already been hardware monitoring support and other functionality in place under Linux for various AYANEO devices while a new platform driver is being worked on for the new AYANEO 3 device...

At the start of the calendar year there was a proposal for a new GCC front-end for the Algol 68 programming language. GCC developers deferred merging Algol 68 support into GCC for this rarely talked about vintage programming language. But as talked about back at the GNU Tools Cauldron 2025, the developer is still working on the support. Sure enough, this week brought a new version of this GCC front-end...

Posted to the Linux kernel mailing list one month ago were patches for a multi-kernel architecture design to allow multiple independent kernel instances to co-exist on the same single physical machine. This could let some CPU cores be running real-time "RT" kernels or other non-traditional uses between CPU cores. It wasn't clear how far the multi-kernel patches would get especially with some initial negative views toward it and Bytedance separately proposing "Parker" for multi-kernel usage just days later. In any event, today a second version of the multi-kernel Linux patches were posted...

FreeBSD 15.0 Beta 2 is out as the newest weekly test release of FreeBSD working its way toward a stable release in early December...

Back during the Linux 6.18 merge window Linus Torvalds commented on "mindless and completely crazy Rust format checking" and that the RUst format checking "is all bass-ackwards garbage" with condensing multi-line import statements into single lines. Merged minutes ago to Linux Git ahead of tomorrow's Linux 6.18-rc2 are fixes to the Rust format checking and updated guidelines to address Torvalds' criticism...

Since Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon X2 Elite last month, Linux patches for the X2 Elite "Glymur" platform have begun flowing. Among the recent Linux patches for the Snapdragon X2 is this past week seeing initial display support...

For those evaluating new options for high performance, cross-platform graphics and/or compute for simulations and other purposes, Tellusim Technologies has made their Tellusim Core SDK publicly available via GitHub...

A few days back we reported on a Meta engineer uncovering an architectural issue with RDSEED usage on AMD EPYC 9005 "Turin" CPUs. It ended up being found to affect more CPU models than originally anticipated and a new patch posted to the Linux kernel mailing list would disable RDSEED usage across all AMD Zen 5 processors...

Building off yesterday's release of Wine 10.17 is now wine-Staging 10.17 that is carrying 295 extra patches atop the upstream Wine codebase for testing at the leading edge of this open-source software for enjoying Windows games and applications on Linux...

LACT 0.8.2 is out this weekend as the newest feature release to this Linux GPU control application. This Rust-based software provides a GUI for controlling AMD, NVIDIA, and Intel GPUs under Linux with various monitoring metrics, information reporting, power configuration, thermals configuration, and overclocking with supported hardware...

With plans to release next Tuesday (21 October), KDE developers this week have been putting the finishing touches on this next open-source desktop update. Prominent KDE developer Nate Graham says he thinks it's going to be "a pretty darn good release" when it officially debuts...

Following the release of Wine 10.16 with initial NTSYNC support from two weeks ago, Wine 10.17 is now available as the latest development release in working toward Wine 11.0 stable in early 2026...

For those interested in scanning files for malware and other threat detection under Linux and using the GNOME desktop, Lenspect is a new GNOME-aligned application that is a GUI powered by VirusTotal for being a Linux-native security threat scanner...

An interesting technical collaboration between AMD and Intel as well as other industry players like Google, Bytedance, Microsoft, MiTAC, HPE, and others is openSFI. The new openSFI "Open Silicon Firmware Interface" project is aiming to work toward vendor-neutral low-level firmware interfaces for more interoperable firmware solutions across vendors...

Due to Intel CPU microcode sizes continuing to get larger and late-loading new CPU microcode onto a running system can lead to (brief) disruptions/downtime while the update is applied, future Intel CPUs are introducing a microcode "staging" feature to reduce that microcode updating downtime. The Linux 6.19 kernel in the new year is set to support the Intel microcode staging feature with capable processors...