The past number of months has seen a lot of work by Intel Linux kernel engineers on cache-aware scheduling / load balancing for helping modern CPUs that have multiple caches. With cache aware scheduling, tasks that will likely share resources could be aggregated into the same cache domain to enjoy better cache locality. With the cache aware scheduling patches recently updated and now working past the "request for comments" stage, I was eager to try out these new patches. Especially with a 44% time reduction reported for one of the benchmarks, I was eager to run some tests and the first of those results are being shared today.

Besides the early fallout of switching to Rust Coreutils on Ubuntu 25.10 causing some breakage, a more pressing issue has been discovered: Ubuntu 25.10's unattended upgrades functionality for automatic security updates is currently broken due to a Rust Coreutils bug...

Canonical's new push for their Snap app packaging/sandboxed format on Ubuntu Linux is for AI large language models (LLMs). Making it more interesting though is that they are working to deliver silicon-optimized AI LLMs for your hardware and to make it easily deployable for Ubuntu sers...

GTK has long supported Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) for icons but with up until recently relying on the external librsvg library, the integration hasn't been perfect. But Red Hat engineer Matthias Clasen has been working on having the GTK toolkit natively support SVG...

For those looking for a new RISC-V desktop option, ESWIN is launching a EBC7702 mini-DTX board powered by the EIC7702X dual-die SoC. The EBC7702 Mini-DTX is aiming for developers who want RISC-V under their desk for working on AI and other development tasks...

Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) usage is long obsolete even where it had enjoyed some successes in the likes of Germany and Norway. With no activity in years to the ISDN and mISDN subsystem code for the Linux kernel, a patch was sent out today for orphaning the code...

Crashes on NPUs and AI accelerators are unfortunately a thing and yet another obstacle to worry about it with modern computing. Qualcomm developers have sent out patches for Sub-System Restart "SSR" functionality for their Qualcomm AI Accelerator (QAIC) driver for Linux to handle restarts when workload crashes occur on their AI accelerator hardware...

The second weekly release candidate of Mesa 25.3 is now available for testing ahead of the official release in the coming weeks for this quarterly feature update to this set of open-source OpenGL, OpenCL, and Vulkan graphics drivers...

Oracle recently launched their E6 compute shape for Oracle Cloud and powered by AMD EPYC 9005 "Turin" processors. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure also launched their Compute Cloud@Customer X11 and Private Cloud Appliance X11 platforms that are all powered by the E6 compute shape with 5th Gen AMD EPYC. For those curious about the performance and value of the Oracle Cloud E6 shape compared to prior-gen E5 as well as alternatives from Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, these benchmarks are geared for you.

OpenZFS 2.4 stable should be out in the near future while out today is the third release candidate for this ZFS file-system implementation for Linux and FreeBSD operating systems...

Google engineer Rahman Lavaee today announced their work on a prototype software implementation to automatically insert optimal code prefetches into binaries for faster performance, especially for the latest Intel Granite Rapids and AMD Turin processors with new prefetching instructions...

While XP-PEN does provide out-of-tree drivers for their drawing tablets on Linux including the XP-PEN Artist 24 Pro, the Linux 6.19 kernel is set to provide upstream support for the XP-PEN Artist 24 Pro...

The Fedora Council has finally come to a decision on allowing AI-assisted contributions to the project. The agreed upon guidelines are fairly straight-forward and will permit AI-assisted contributions if it's properly disclosed and transparent...

Announced today at the PyTorch Conference was word that the Ray AI compute engine is becoming a project hosted by the PyTorch Foundation...

The EROFS read-only file-system continues enjoying nice uptick in use from embedded devices to containers. Merged today for Linux 6.18 is some new hardening to the EROFS driver where specially-crafted file-system images could lead to system crashes or infinite loops...

Germany's Sovereign Tech Agency (nee Sovereign Tech Fund) is out with their latest newsletter where they outlined some new investments in various key open-source projects...

Merged today to the LLVM/Clang compiler codebase are some long overdue adjustments to the AMD Zen 4 "znver4" CPU model for more accurately assessing various latency timings and micro-ops. These values were initially copied over from the Zen 3 (znver3) target but never adjusted properly for Zen 4 until now when an independent contributor took to sorting it out...

For those that happen to have the Dell G15 5530 laptop or considering this Intel Core i7 13650HX + NVIDIA GeForce RTX high-end laptop, the upcoming Linux 6.18 kernel is set to have AWCC platform profile support for this model as a nice enhancement. In turn this patch should also be back-ported to future stable Linux kernel point releases...

Earlier this month Intel Linux software engineers began posting patches for enabling Xe3P kernel graphics driver support with initial usage by Nova Lake processors and later the expected Celestial discrete GPUs. That initial Xe3P iGPU support is going into Linux 6.19 but expect more feature additions and optimizations in follow-on kernel cycles in 2026. Similarly the patches have now begun coming out for enabling the display engine capabilities for "Xe3P_LPD" for actually being able to drive displays (monitors) with Xe3P on Nova Lake...

Following last week LLVM/Clang 22 adding Intel Nova Lake with "-march=novalake" support, the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) has now received similar treatment for the promising next-generation desktop processors...