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The open-source Panthor DRM driver for supporting newer Arm Mali GPUs was queued in drm-misc-next at the start of March ahead of the Linux 6.9 merge window. It ultimately though didn't see a drm-misc-next pull to DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 6.9 merge window and thus being held off until the Linux 6.10 cycle. This week though that drm-misc-next submission to DRM-Next took place as that driver and other changes begin queuing for Linux 6.10...

Now that Linux 6.9-rc1 was released on Sunday to mark the end of the merge window, here is a look at all of the new features that have been merged for the Linux 6.9 kernel cycle.

Ubuntu Long-Term Support (LTS) releases have been support for 10 years of updates by Canonical while now that has been extended to 12 years but only for Ubuntu Pro customers going for their legacy support add-on. This 12 year support is extended retroactively going back to Ubuntu 14.04 LTS...

The latest upstream development code for the Inkscape vector graphics program has transitioned to using the GTK4 toolkit...

The Linux 6.9 kernel will be able to boot systems with large amounts of memory -- and in particular making use of HugeTLB pages -- much faster than with previous kernels, netting a noticeable reduction in boot times...

AMD open-source Linux driver patches posted last summer enabled the new "VPE" IP block as a general purpose copy engine for future AMD GPUs. This VPE block might premiere in the upcoming AMD RDNA3.5 refresh (RDNA3+) integrated graphics but in any event AMD is already working on the incrementally improved VPE 1.1 IP with that now being supported by the Mesa 24.1 RadeonSI driver code...

It was just last week that Tiny Corp put their AMD Radeon graphics powered compute boxes "on hold" after being frustrated with the lack of select firmware source code and ultimately hitting various bugs. This wasn't the first time they had put their AMD Radeon graphics plans on-hold or dismissed it outright. With the start of the new week now comes plans to re-introduce an AMD Radeon graphics option for their compute boxes alongside their recently announced NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 compute rigs...

Intel today published a new version of its NPU Linux driver user-space components that goes along with their iVPU accelerator kernel driver for enabling the Neural Processing Unit (NPU) found within their latest Meteor Lake systems...

Since last year Red Hat engineers have been developing xwayland-run and wlheadless-run for spawning X11 clients within its own dedicated XWayland rootful instance and for running a Wayland client on a set of supported Wayland headless compositors, respectively. The intent is on improving the Wayland headless experience as well as being able to get classic X11 sessions up and running via rootful XWayland. Out today is the XWayland-Run v0.0.3 release...

While most Linux distributions have long since moved on from SysVinit in favor of systemd for init duties, this weekend SysVinit 3.09 was released for any legacy users and holdouts still enjoying the System V-init style experience...

Linus Torvalds just released the first release candidate for Linux 6.9 that now marks the formal end of the two-week merge window...

Sam Lantinga released an SDL preview release today of SDL3 for helping to encourage developers to test out the new SDL 3.0 API...

The Kernel-based Virtual Machine changes for Linux 6.9 continue to enhance the capabilities of the open-source Linux virtualization software stack...

Out this weekend is a new version of uutils' Coreutils 0.0.25 as the Rust-written drop-in replacement to GNU Coreutils for common utilities found on Linux platforms and other systems...

The speakup driver that's long existed within the Linux kernel is a speech synthesizer that can interface with various synthesizer hardware and from user-space software can interface with /dev/synth for submitting data to the synthesizer. With Linux 6.9 the speakup driver is seeing two useful improvements...

Linux 6.8 dropped the SLAB allocator after its deprecation in v6.5 and now just leaving SLUB for all allocation duties. For Linux 6.9 there is continued cleaning from that SLAB removal as well as making more SLUB improvements...

With security concerns at all-time highs in the industry, Linux 6.9 is seeing yet more work to beef up its security hardening with various additional safety checks and other compile-time defenses for ensuring security best practices...

The IO_uring changes were merged early during the nearly-over Linux 6.9 merge window. This round brought yet a few more features to this wonderful and innovative kernel feature...

Workqueues are commonly used within the Linux kernel for asynchronous process execution contexts. With Linux 6.9 the workqueue (WQ) code has seen "significant and invasive" changes...

The Linux 6.9 changes for the Error Detection And Correction (EDAC) subsystem are heavy on the AMD changes...