Over the weekend Greg Kroah-Hartman sent out his various pull requests for the areas of the kernel he oversees. Among those is the staging area where this time around the notable activity isn't too much about feature work but many developers making some of their first contributions to the upstream kernel.

Greg KH explained in the staging pull :

"Here is the "big" set of staging driver changes for 7.1-rc1.

Nothing major in here at all, just lots of little cleanups for the staging

AMD on the software side continues investing heavily in GAIA "Generative AI Is Awesome" as their cross-platform solution built around the Lemonade SDK for running local AI agents on your AMD-powered hardware from CPUs to GPUs and NPUs. With today's GAIA update, custom-generated AI agents are now portable with easy import and export support.

Earlier this month AMD's GAIA software was updated to make it easy to build custom AI agents via chat and became packaged as a "true desktop app".

Released at the beginning of the month was a new version of HarfBuzz, a widely-used, open-source text shaping engine. With this HarfBuzz 14.0 release it introduced a GPU-based text rasterization library that supported GLSL shaders as well as HLSL, WGSL, and APple's Metal MSL. Since then this GPU-accelerated library has been seeing more improvements.

HatfBuzz 14.2 is out today with more improvements to its GPU library as well as vector and raster libraries. The GPU library

The Kernel-based Virtual Machine changes were recently merged for the Linux 7.1 merge window for further enhancing KVM as this important piece of the open-source virtualization stack.

KVM on the Arm side adds "very experimental" support for pKVM protected guests. With pKVM protected guests, pages are unmapped from the host as they are faulted into the guest and then shared back from the guest using pKVM hypercalls. This pKVM protected guests support is working toward full isolation from the host. For now the support is highly experimental

Last week saw the "NTFS resurrection" as Linux Torvalds put it with the new/overhauled NTFS driver having been merged for Linux 7.1. Even still, the NTFS3 driver that was contributed a few years ago by Paragon Software remains in the mainline kernel and today were some fixes/improvements merged for that existing driver.

Konstantin Komarov of Paragon Software today sent out a batch of new additions and bug fixes to that NTFS3 driver. Nothing too exciting but a number of different fixes and lower-level improvements

While FEX-Emu has been garnering a lot of attention due to being sponsored by Valve and slated to be used by the Steam Frame for running Linux x86_64 binaries on AArch64, the Box64 project continues moving along with similar goals for x86_64 binaries on other CPU architectures.

Released today was Box64 0.4.2 and beyond its AArch64 ambitions, it has also merged an initial PPC64LE back-end in beginning to

Git developers continue working toward Git 3.0 while out today is Git 2.54 with a few interesting additions.

Most notable of Git 2.54 is the new, experimental git history command. The git history usage is an easier approach for rewriting some elements of a repository's history that is less complex than existing tooling. Git history currently supports "reword" and "split" sub-commands. Using git history reword [commit] opens your editor and allows rewiring in place the specific commit

It's not only the uutil's Rust Coreutils project seeing performance improvements but some increased healthy competition now from GNU Coreutils. With today's release of GNU Coreutils 9.11 the wc command is up to multiple times faster and even cat can be up to 15 times faster.

Commands such as cat and yes are now up to 15x faster! This is achieved thanks to leveraging zero-copy I/O on Linux with modern systems. The 15x faster claim was made in

Mozilla today published their Firefox 150 release binaries as the latest milestone for this open-source web browser with growing AI ambitions.

For Firefox 150 on Linux there is now support for the GTK emoji picker. Users can insert emoji using the system shortcut of Ctrl + . .