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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...

The DIRT 5 racing game was one of the titles that hadn't worked on Intel graphics under Linux due to the sparse memory support for the ANV Vulkan driver. But with sparse support now enabled, the game was crashing at launch. But now a workaround is in place to allow Intel's Mesa 24.1 Vulkan driver to work with DIRT 5...

The hardware monitoring "HWMON" subsystem updates were merged at the start of the Linux 6.9 merge window and include the recent trend of more all-in-one liquid/water cooling systems seeing Linux driver support to enable convenient monitoring and controls...

So far when it comes to Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) / Kernel Mode-Setting (KMS) display drivers for Linux, there are Rust efforts underway for the Apple Silicon kernel graphics driver with the Asahi Linux project as well as the new Nova effort for a modern open-source NVIDIA kernel driver from Red Hat. Also now out from Red Hat is posting the Rust bindings for KMS to review plus porting the existing Virtual KMS driver over to Rust as the "RVKMS" driver...

KDE developers continue to be quite busy fixing a variety of regressions -- including some crashes -- with the new KDE Plasma 6 desktop stack. Plasma 6.0.3 will ship next week with yet more fixes while some feature work toward Plasma 6.1 is also underway...

Wine 9.5 is out as the newest bi-weekly development release for this open-source software to enjoy Windows games and applications under Linux...

Microsoft is rolling out WSL 2.2.1 to WIndows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) users with more reliable networking support, hang fixes, and other improvements...

The RISC-V architecture updates were sent out today for the in-development Linux 6.9 kernel ahead of the v6.9-rc1 release this Sunday...

While there is AOMP for OpenMP device offloading based on the LLVM/Clang compiler, less talked about and not as feature-rich is the AMDGCN back-end within the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) that is also worked on for OpenMP device offloading capabilities to Radeon GPUs. Squeezing in for the upcoming GCC 14.1 stable release is GFX1103 support for AMD APUs with RDNA3 integrated graphics...

Loongson continues enabling more kernel functionality for their LoongArch processor port for the upstream Linux kernel. With Linux 6.9 they sent out today a set of patches enabling more features for this Chinese CPU architecture...

The latest LibreOffice drawing code has enabled support for making use of multi-threaded 3D rendering...

Due to some games checking the graphics card's vendor ID and matching to NVIDIA then just assuming it's NVIDIA's official (proprietary) driver in use, the Mesa NVK Vulkan driver has added a workaround to allow concealing the vendor ID in order to bypass NVIDIA-specific checks such as for the driver version in use...

BOLT that was upstreamed into LLVM in 2022 by Facebook/Meta allows for optimizing the layout of binaries as a post-linking step to yield increased performance. BOLT like Profile Guided Optimizations (PGO) first requires the profiling step to generate perf recordings to feedback in for the optimization process, but the gains can be significant...

AMD on Thursday published AOMP 19.0-0 as the newest version of their LLVM/Clang downstream compiler focused on delivering the latest OpenMP device offloading support for their Radeon GPUs and Instinct accelerators...

With the frame-buffer device "FBDEV" subsystem changes sent out today for the Linux 6.9 kernel, there is support for larger console fonts to better handle today's ~4K displays...

After not making its early beta target for 12 March and then failing to make its intended release date of 19 March, Fedora Linux 40 Beta is now cleared for releasing next week...