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There is a changing of the guard with Linux 7.3 as the maintainer of the Common Internet File System (CIFS) / SMB3 code within the Linux kernel. Longtime maintainer, principal Linux CIFS author, and current Microsoft employee Steve French has stepped down due to health reasons...

Tuned 2.28 released this Saturday as the newest version of Red Hat's tuning profile delivery mechanism for Linux. Tuned is used notably out-of-the-box on Fedora Linux for monitoring and adaptively tuning systems...

The highlight of this week's x86/mm pull request of changes for the Linux 7.3 kernel are fixes that reduce the time that the TLB flushing code has interrupts disabled. This helps significantly with latency-sensitive workloads but Intel engineer Dave Hansen noted in the pull request that "it's certainly something to keep an eye on" in looking out for any regressions...

LILYGO has updated its T-Display K230 handheld, packaging its Kendryte K230-based development platform into a compact enclosure with a physical keyboard. The device combines dual-core 64-bit RISC-V processing with a 4.1-inch AMOLED touchscreen, LoRa, Wi-Fi, Ethernet, camera support, HDMI output, and an nRF52840 companion microcontroller. The T-Display K230 is based on the Kendryte K230 SoC, […]

This Week in Plasma is out with its latest issue to highlight interesting developments in the trek towards Plasma 6.8...

While the past few weeks have been quite busy with the new Framework Laptop 13 Pro testing with that all-new laptop model and paired with Intel's Core Ultra Series 3 "Panther Lake", at the same time Framework Computer has begun shipping some updated components for the Framework Laptop 16 laptop. If looking for a bit more GPU compute power hor larger form factor than the 13-inch model, the Framework Laptop 16 can now be equipped with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 GPU as well as a haptic touchpad and one-piece keyboard for improving the input experience.

OpenZFS 2.4.4 is out today as the newest stable point release for this ZFS file-system implementation for Linux and FreeBSD systems...

IEI has detailed the NANO-X100, a compact EPIC single-board computer based on AMD’s Ryzen AI Embedded X100 Series. The 115 × 165mm board integrates 64GB of LPDDR5X memory, dual 2.5GbE networking, three M.2 expansion slots, four USB 3.2 ports, HDMI and DisplayPort outputs, and multiple serial interfaces for embedded and industrial applications. The preliminary specifications […]

The Thunderbird team has officially released Thunderbird 154, delivering several useful new features alongside a substantial collection of fixes for email, calendars, address books, authentication, and stability... Thunderbird 154 is now the latest monthly release of the popular open-source email client.

It's pretty rare to see Linus Torvalds author patches himself pertaining to the open-source Linux graphics drivers, but waking up this morning I was surprised to see he authored and committed an Intel Xe kernel graphics driver change himself. It ended up being after he encountered a "debug session from hell" but was ultimately helped by AI in fixing a bug that had been irking him...

M5Stack’s new PaperMono and PaperMono-Lite are compact ESP32-S3-based e-paper development platforms built around a 3.97-inch grayscale touchscreen. Both models include Wi-Fi, microSD storage, an IMU, real-time clock, frontlight, microphone, buzzer, and an integrated 1150mAh battery, while the higher-end PaperMono adds LoRa and NFC connectivity. Both devices are based on the ESP32-S3R8, which integrates a dual-core […]

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...

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...

Intel's open-source Mesa drivers for Iris Gallium3D (OpenGL) and ANV (Vulkan) on Linux are no longer treating next-gen Nova Lake processors with integrated graphics as experimental and off-by-default. With today's Mesa 26.3-devel code, the Intel driver code across Nova Lake's S, U, H, and HX product families are considered stable and enabled by default...

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...

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.

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...

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...

Andrew Morton on Tuesday sent out all of the memory management "MM" updates for the Linux 7.3 merge window. The MM pull was particularly heavy as he noted 1,250 "added-to-MM" emails were sent out this cycle compared to 920 the prior cycle. With a lot of patch churn, he also turned to Google's Gemini AI for writing his patch summaries. In going through the very verbose AI-generated summary, there are two patch series that get me excited on the performance front with Linux 7.3...

COSMIC Epoch 1.6 was released this evening as the latest milestone for this open-source, Rust-based desktop environment led by System76 as part of the work on their Pop!_OS Linux distribution...