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Coming out this week was an updated AVX10 whitepaper from Intel with the surprising decision that 512-bit floating point and integer support is no longer considered optional for AVX10.2. AVX10.2 now mandates 128 / 256 / 512-bit support and in turn also dropped the 256-bit embedded rounding support with the focus on 512-bit. The LLVM/Clang compiler had seen its AVX10 support designed around Intel's original AVX10 design assumptions and thus now is being modified to address these changes...

Among the earliest of pull requests this week ahead of the Linux 6.15 merge window expected to begin tomorrow were the media subsystem updates. In addition to continuing to improve the common "uvcvideo" web camera driver and other routine refinements, there is also some new media hardware support slated to be included as part of the Linux 6.15 kernel...

This past week a lot of new code for the Rust "gccrs" front-end began being merged for the upcoming GCC 15.1 stable release... The Polonius borrow checker landed along with other big improvements to the Rust code ahead of this annual GNU Compiler Collection release. A third round was merged on Friday adding yet more gccrs features...

The sched_ext code for extensible scheduler support and being able to quickly prototype new Linux kernel scheduling improvements continues evolving nicely since its much anticipated merging to the mainline kernel in 2024. Ahead of the imminent Linux 6.15 merge window, the sched_ext feature updates were sent out today for this next kernel cycle...

Last weekend FreeDesktop.org began transitioning to their new server/cloud infrastructure after recently finding out their sponsored Equinix Metal services were shutting down. Following the complex migration process this past week, FreeDesktop.org GitLab is up and running on the Hetzner server infrastructure in Germany...

Ingo Molnar began sending out the pull requests today for the upcoming Linux 6.15 merge window of code areas he oversees for the Linux kernel. Among those early pulls are of the x86/build updates, which includes removing some seemingly useless CRC-32 checksum code from the kernel...

Ahead of the imminent Linux 6.15 merge window expected to begin next week, a batch of AMDGPU/AMDKFD Radeon kernel driver updates were sent out on Friday for this next kernel cycle. It's mostly about bug fixes but does contain cleaner shader support for AMD RDNA 3.5 graphics...

There is some new Wayland protocol support activity this week worth mentioning for both the KDE Plasma and GNOME desktops...

Ahead of the Linux v6.14 kernel expected for release tomorrow and in turn the Linux 6.15 merge window, Linux engineer Christian Brauner at Microsoft began sending out his pull requests today of new code he's hoping to see merged for this next cycle. One of those interesting pulls is the work for block devices to allow for block sizes to be greater than the page size...

Haiku OS developer X512 has managed a rather impressive feat: porting NVIDIA's open-source kernel modules to Haiku. Not only did he get NVIDIA's official Linux kernel modules running on Haiku but he also ported the Mesa NVK Vulkan driver to be able to run atop the NVIDIA kernel driver interface...

KDE developers continue pushing ahead with new feature development on the Plasma 6.4 desktop to further refine Plasma 6...