There's the usual flurry of last minute fixes and other items being herded into the Linux 7.0 codebase today right ahead of the merge window being closed with the imminent Linux 7.0-rc1 release. Among that last minute work is now recognizing Stephen Rothwell's contributions to creating and maintaining Linux-Next over the past eighteen years.

Stephen Rothwell stepped down in mid-January from maintaining Linux-Next. He still plans to be around the Linux kernel community but a less grueling role than creating

Developers behind the widely-used GNU Awk text processing utility today released Gawk 5.4.

Gawk 5.4 is now using the new MinRX regular expression matcher as the default regexp engine. The old regex and DFA engines remain available but the MinRX engine is now used by default. This new matcher was written by Mike Haertel who was the original developer behind GNU grep. The MinRX matcher is fully POSIX compliant unlike the existing GNU matchers.

Separately, Gawk 5.4 should be faster for reading regular disk input files

While the Alliance For Open Media "AOMedia" is most known for developing the AV1 open video codec, the associated AV1 Image File Format (AVIF), and the next-generation AV2, they are now working on the Open Audio Codec (AOC).

I was tipped off this morning to the formation of the Open Audio Codec (OAC) becoming public this week. The Open Audio Codec is based off the Opus audio codec and intended to be its successor.

This commit this week took to establishing

Ahead of the Linux 7.0 merge window closing later today with the Linux 7.0-rc1 release, the performance "perf" subsystem tooling changes were merged on Saturday. Among the notable changes here are the performance events and metrics handling for upcoming AMD Zen 6 processors.

This now-merged code for Linux 7.0 adds support for AMD Zen 6 events and metrics. This includes the vendor event handling for Zen 6 core events, uncore events, metrics, and mapping changes. There is also a

Timur Kristóf of Valve's open-source Linux graphics driver team has been doing a fantastic job enhancing the older AMD Radeon GPU support under Linux. Last year he made enough improvements to the AMDGPU open-source driver that older Radeon GCN 1.0/1.1 dGPUs switched over to AMDGPU by default for nice performance gains , RADV Vulkan driver support out of the box, and all around better experience than using the legacy Radeon driver. He's also been fixing countless bugs affecting older AMD GPUs

The upstream Linux kernel appears largely ready for Intel's next-generation Xeon Diamond Rapids processors as the successor to Granite Rapids . Most of the driver support appears to have been settled for a while with just some stragglers remaining. With the ongoing Linux 7.0 kernel one new addition for Diamond Rapids is NTB driver support.

The NTB driver is for the non-transparent bridge handling for allowing separate memory systems from two or more computers to leverage the same PCI Express fabric. This allows for high speed data transfers and

For those dealing with Microsoft Hyper-V for virtualization, the Linux 7.0 mainline kernel has seen a number of improvements there. This work follows KVM also bringing some nice improvements in Linux 7.0 .

Hyper-V with Linux 7.0 has introduced support for the integrated scheduler with MSHV. This is the work covered back in January around Microsoft Working On Improved vCPU Scheduler Support For Hyper-V Linux VMs . This new code lets L1VH partitions schedule their own vCPUs and those of its guests across

Last week was the main feature pull of Rust programming language updates for the Linux 7.0 kernel merge window. Most notable with that pull was Rust officially concluding its "experimental" in now treating Rust for Linux kernel/driver programming as stable and here to stay. Sent out today was a round of Rust fixes for Linux 7.0 that includes preparations for the upcoming Rust 1.95 release.

Rust 1.95 is being branched from master on 27 February and aiming for its stable release on

The AppArmour security module for the Linux kernel, which most notably is backed by Canonical for Ubuntu, has some small improvements and fixes for Linux 7.0 .

AppArmor with Linux 7.0 adds support for loading per-permission tagging. John Johansen of Canonical explains of that patch, which he authored nearly one year ago and only now hitting the mainline kernel:

"Add support for the per permission tag index for a given permission set. This will be used by both meta-data tagging, to allow annotating accept