Huawei engineer Zhang Yi posted a set of nine patches today for enabling large folio support for regular files with the EXT4 file-system. These patches enable large folios for EXT4 on regular files except when using FSVERITY, FSCRYPT, or the journaled data mode. Long story short, these large folio patches can deliver some nice performance gains for both reads and writes...

Sent out last night for the ongoing Linux 6.13 merge window were all of the perf tool changes for the wonderful "perf" subsystem for performance profiling and the like. In addition to adding the HWMON PMU to "perf stat", leader sampling for inherited task events, and various other tooling improvements, there are also vendor event updates. Most notable with the updated CPU vendor events are new AMD Zen 5 processor events...

Complementing the Raspberry Pi Pico 2 that launched this summer, the Raspberry Pi Pico 2 W was announced today for $7 as the wireless-enabled variant of this small microcontroller board...

Richard Hughes of Red Hat has released Fwupd 2.0.2 as the newest update to this open-source firmware updating solution for Linux systems...

While the end of year holidays are fast approaching, my commitment to Linux hardware and open-source software remains and there still is a lot of interesting content to come this year still -- each and every day, without change for roughly a decade. Unfortunately though due to the (sad) state of the ad industry, many major companies focusing on the likes of Facebook/Meta ads, and the frequent use of ad-blockers by Linux/FLOSS readers make ongoing operations increasingly difficult. But if you'd like to show some love this holiday season, the Phoronix Premium "Cyber Week" / "Black Friday" special is now taking place so you can enjoy the site ad-free, native dark mode support, multi-page articles on a single page, and other benefits while hopefully allowing the site to continue for years to come...

The AMDXDNA kernel driver for Linux systems that was made open-source in January for supporting the Ryzen AI NPU on laptop SoCs going back to the Ryzen 7040 "Phoenix" series is now one step away from appearing in the mainline Linux kernel in the near future...

Earlier this week was the main power management updates for Linux 6.13 that included switching AMD EPYC Turin to using the amd_pstate driver on supported systems. Sent out this weekend was another set of power management updates that also includes a notable addition: the virtual CPUFreq driver...

Following all of the MM patches earlier this week sent in by Andrew Morton, on Sunday morning he sent out all of the non-MM patches that he manages for the Linux kernel. Notable for Linux 6.13 with this pull request is presenting the hung task counter as well as finishing off the folio conversion in the NILFS2 code...

Ahead of FreeBSD 14.2 hopefully releasing in just over one week, FreeBSD 14.2-RC1 is out this weekend as the last planned development release for testing ahead of that much anticipated point release...

A Microsoft Research project that was quietly announced a few years ago to some fanfare but not hearing much about since has been Demikernel as their library OS architecture for kernel-bypass I/O. A Phoronix reader brought up Demikernel this week and while it hasn't been talked about much in recent years it does remain under active development with the most recent commits as of hours ago...

IBM isn't formally releasing Power11 processors until next year, but their software engineers continue being quite busy preparing the Linux kernel and other open-source software for Power11. The newest on the kernel side is enabling support for KVM nested guests on IBM Power11 platforms...

For those still running a 1st Generation Xeon Scalable "Skylake" era server, support for it within the open-source Coreboot firmware may continue to improve all these years later thanks to firmware consulting firm 9elements...

Wine 9.22 is out this weekend ahead of the Wine 10.0-rc1 in two weeks...

KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his traditional weekly development recap that highlights all of the interesting work taking place within the KDE desktop space...

Following the recent messaging from Bcachefs lead developer Kent Oversteet that Bcachefs changes for Linux 6.13 were rejected on the basis of his Code of Conduct, the Linux CoC committee has now formally announced their decision...

The x86 platform driver updates were merged this week for the in-development Linux 6.13 and include some nice refinements, especially for those using AMD Ryzen on Linux...

There are some new improvements in Linux 6.13 for the Intel TDX code for Trust Domain Extensions in providing hardware-based security protections for virtual machines on recent Xeon processors...

Following the Linux 6.13 DRM feature pull this week that brought many new open-source kernel graphics driver features, it's now time to further stabilize that new feature code with fixes. Sent out today were a batch of fixes for the AMDGPU/AMDKFD kernel driver code targeting the early Linux 6.13 state. In addition to fixes though is also allowing the AMDGPU Display Core "DC" code to build properly on LoongArch hardware for allowing recent AMD Radeon GPUs to work on these Chinese systems...

Going back to early in the year AMD Linux engineers began preparing support for a new Bus Lock Trap feature with Zen 5 CPUs. With the in-development Linux 6.13 kernel that support is being merged...

One of the most prominent new features in Linux 6.12 was the merging of sched_ext for allowing extensible scheduler innovations by altering the scheduling behavior through (e)BPF programs. With the Linux 6.13 kernel there are some nice refinements to this extensible scheduler class...