Merged this week for Linux 7.1 was a rework of the high resolution timer "HRTIMER" subsystem for reducing the overhead of frequently-armed timers, such as the HRTICK scheduler timer. The HRTICK scheduler timer is useful for enhancing system responsiveness and fairness.

This HRTIMER overhaul now in Linux 7.1 is what was covered back in early March on Phoronix with improvements for reducing HRTICK timer overhead and in turn delivering a nice efficiency win.

KDE Plasma 6.7 enjoyed a lot of recent feature development work thanks to a developer sprint in Graz, Austria. Also because of that developer sprint, This Week In Plasma wasn't published last week and so in turn a new issue is now available to highlight the changes over the past two weeks.

KDE Plasma 6.7 saw a lot of exciting developments over the past two weeks including:

- Per-screen virtual desktops support was merged in being a sought after feature for more than 20 years.

As a very exciting follow-up to the recent article around the new NTFS driver being submitted for Linux 7.1 to address the shortcomings of the current Paragon NTFS3 driver and the prior read-only NTFS kernel driver, that work has been merged!

Linux developer Namjae Jeon has been overhauling the original NTFS kernel driver the past four years with its cleaner codebase to add write support, provide better support, and implement more modern features compared to the NTFS3 driver that merged a few years ago to the mainline kernel

Made public today was the Floating Point Divider State Sampling bug (stylized as FP-DSS or FPDSS) affecting original AMD Zen 1 (and Zen 1+) processors. The Linux kernel is already to go with a security fix for those still relying on the very first Ryzen or EPYC processors.

Security researchers discovered a transient execution vulnerability that could lead to a user-privileged attacker to leak sensitive data via the floating point divisor units. This just affects local user access to the system and AMD believes risk of data loss

For those using upstream Wine for running your Windows games/apps on Linux rather than the likes of the Proton 11.0 beta , out today is Wine 11.7 as the newest bi-weekly development release.

Wine 11.7 begins working on a new Microsoft MSXML implementation that doesn't depend upon the common Linux libxm2 library. Wine 11.7 also brings VBScript compatibility fixes and optimizations.

Some other notable changes include SRGB filter support in D3DX and DirectSound now enabling 7

The open-source Linux graphics driver work continues around AMD's GFX11.7 GPU target for some yet-to-be-launched APUs/SoCs and to be branded as "RDNA 4m" .

The AMD RDNA 4m (GFX 11.7) GPU began appearing in the AMDGPU LLVM shader compiler back-end a few months ago as first reported on Phoronix. Since last week, the RDNA 4m enablement began for Mesa's RadeonSI Gallium3D and RADV Vulkan drivers .

Loongson's LoongArch processors are running decent in our recent Loongson 3B6000 benchmarks but even better performance is on the way with the next GNU C Library "glibc" release.

Merged yesterday to Glibc Git is a LoongArch-specific change to enable transparent hugepages (THP) aligned load segments by default for LoongArch64. Aligning ELF load segments to THP boundaries is providing a consistent performance win for large binaries by reducing transparent lookaside buffer (TLB) pressure and improving instruction fetch efficiency.

Benchmarks for compiling

Linux libcrypto cryptography subsystem changes for the v7.1 kernel are enabling more optimizations by default and in turn helping to achieve better crypto/hashing performance on this next kernel version.

The crypto pull this week from Eric Biggers of Google migrates more hashing algorithms from the traditional crypto subsystem to the new designated area of lib/crypto/ within the Linux kernel source tree. This simplifies the implementations, helps achieve better performance, and opens the door to more simplifications and code cleaning.

AES CBC-based MACs (AES-