Linux NewsEXT4 Introducing IOmap Buffered I/O Path With Some Performance Gains
EXT4 with the upcoming Linux 7.4 kernel looks like it will introduce opt-in support for IOmap buffered I/O in replacing the file-system's buffer_head usage with IOmap...
Linux 7.3-rc7 Released With Linux 7.3 Hopefully Out Next Weekend
Linus Torvalds has made available what is hopefully the final release candidate before Linux 7.3 is ideally minted next Sunday...
Linus Torvalds Working On A Hefty Linux Kernel Improvement With Claude Code
Linux creator Linus Torvalds has been known to use AI to help with kernel debugging and outside of the kernel tree has also done some vibe coding with Google's Antigravity. He has previously said he views AI as a useful tool. It turns out he's even now using Claude Code for working on new Linux kernel features...
Linux Landing Kernel Workaround For AMD TLBI Erratum #1718
AMD TLBI Erratum #1718 was worked around in CPU microcode for addressing a defect in certain Zen CPUs where the Translation Lookaside Buffer Invalidate Instruction use could lead to to stale translation entries. But for those on affected AMD CPUs and not running the updated microcode, a kernel workaround is being introduced with today's Linux 7.3-rc7 kernel and to be back-ported to prior kernel versions...
Microsoft Contributes Para-Virtualized IOMMU Hyper-V Driver For Linux
Microsoft is contributing a new kernel driver for the upcoming Linux 7.4 cycle. Queued up into the IOMMU subsystem's "-next" branch is a new para-virtualized IOMMU driver for benefiting Linux guest VMs running on Microsoft's Hyper-V virtualization platform...
Auto Vectorizing The RISC-V Linux Kernel Shows Promising Results
The Linux kernel build for RISC-V doesn't currently make use of the CPU ISA's Vector extension. but leveraging it with compiler auto vectorization is showing the ability to provide nice performance results for enhancing RISC-V Linux performance...
Drgn 0.3 Released For This "Natural" Programmable Debugger From Meta
Drgn is the open-source project out of Meta developing a very versatile debugger with the intent being a debugger focused on programmability with it striving to "make scripting as natural as possible so that debugging feels like coding." Drgn 0.3 released this weekend with the latest round of improvements...
Corsair Novablade Pro & 8BitDo Pro 2 Controllers To Be Supported With Linux 7.3-rc7
Sent out today as part of this week's input subsystem fixes are device ID additions to the XPad driver for enabling two more gaming controllers to work nicely under Linux...
Rolling Release Distros Superior To LTS Distros In The Patch-Heavy GenAI Era?
As some interesting food for thought and weekend forum discussions, this week at the Linux Plumbers Conference in Prague, Qualcomm engineer Khem Raj questioned the relevance of Linux Long Term Support (LTS) distributions in the era of generative AI with the constantly heavy patch flow and bug reports. Khem Raj argued the benefits of rolling release distributions in the GenAI era and the benefits it provides staying up-to-date with mainline...
Many Laptop & Gaming Handheld Support Improvements Coming For Linux 7.4
Many x86 platform driver improvements have been queuing ahead of the upcoming Linux 7.4 merge window to offer a variety of laptop and gaming handheld device improvements with this next kernel version...
KNOD Progressing For Linux In-Kernel GPU Offloading For Network Packet Processing
A while back we covered KNOD as an experimental solution for in-kernel network offloading to AMD GPUs. The open-source KNOD project allows leveraging GPUs to handle packet processing in a very performant and energy efficient manner without needing any specialized hardware. KNOD has continued and a development update was shared this week at the Linux Plumbers Conference in Prague...
Linux Networking Diverts 50+ Fixes To Next Kernel, Still Bombarded With AI Fueled Churn
Ahead of the Linux 7.3-rc7 kernel due for release on Sunday, this week's batch of networking fixes were submitted and merged. The vast networking subsystem of wired and wireless drivers plus the various other networking features continues to see a lot of activity due to AI-driven bug reports and patches...
KDE Plasma 6.8 Ready For Release Next Week, Sees Last Minute NVIDIA Fix
KDE Plasma 6.8 is gearing up for its official debut next week in coinciding with the 30th anniversary since the KDE project began...
SQLite 3.54 Released With Faster Performance, Drops Windows XP Support
SQLite 3.54 released today for this wildly popular embedded SQL database engine used by countless applications and other software. With SQLite 3.54, support for Microsoft Windows XP and older is finally removed...
Valve's Proton 11.0-2e Released To Fix EA App Issues
CodeWeavers working with Valve today released Proton 11.0-2e as their downstream of Wine that powers Steam Play for enjoying Windows games on Linux...