The Linux Memory Technology Device (MTD) subsystem updates have been merged for the Linux 7.0 kernel and include introducing Octal DTR "8D-8D-8D" support in SPI NAND for better performance.

The MTD merge on Friday landed the octal DTR modes support in the Liux kernel's SPI NAND code. This Octal Dual Transfer Rate mode allows for commands, addresses, and data (the three "8D") to be transferred over eight lines on both edges of the clock signal.

For those that may be considering the new ASUS Zenbook 14 OLED (UM3406GA) laptop that has been refreshed for the new AMD Ryzen AI 400 series, Cirrus Logic has now upstreamed the necessary firmware for the cs35l41 audio amplifier for working speaker support.

This commit to the linux-firmware.git repository on Friday adds in the latest Cirrus Logic firmware for enabling speaker support on the new ASUS Zenbook UM3406GA (10431

KDE's Plasma 6.6 desktop release is due out next week (17 February) and there's been some last minute fixes to land. Additionally, KDE Plasma developers continue to be quite active in already landing feature work for Plasma 6.7.

This Week in Plasma is out with its newest issue for highlighting all of the interesting Plasma developments. This week in the lead-up to Plasma 6.6 there have been some last minute changes and fixes while the majority of the interesting work is

One of the latest exciting developments for the open-source Godot game engine is beginning to lay out support for Vulkan ray-tracing.

For helping to better position Godot with other commercial high-end game engines supporting ray-tracing, the cross-platform Godot engine is pursuing Vulkan ray-tracing support. Godot 4.7 Dev 1 was released today with some of the initial plumbing for ray-tracing.

Godot 4.7 Dev 1 is the first tagged development snapshot toward this next game engine release. Most exciting

The GNOME 50 beta release is now available ahead of the official GNOME 50 desktop due out in March.

GNOME 50 beta highlights include:

- The Epiphany browser has addressed crashes, remote denial of service, and other issues.

- GDM has added support for a "unified" authentication mechanism in using a single PAM conversation that runs multiple authentication methods at once.

- GDM has re-introduced a timeout while waiting for a primary GPU to appear.

- Glycin now has a Rust-based JPEG 20

One of the latest NVIDIA open-source contributions this week wasn't for the in-development Nova kernel driver but for enhancing the existing Nouveau kernel driver. The patch posted is for bringing up the NVIDIA GA100 GPU under Nouveau using the GPU System Processor (GSP).

Leveraging the GPU System Processor is the way for the best open-source NVIDIA driver support for features and performance with re-clocking / power management and is what's mandated by the newer in-development Nova kernel driver.

With the Serial Peripheral Interface "SPI" subsystem updates for the Linux 7.0 kernel comes support for multi-lane SPI.

Multi-lane SPI support is for SPI controllers and peripherals having multiple data lanes with those data lanes being independent sets of SDI/SDO lines and each with their own serialize/deserializer attached.

Adding to the exciting features for the big Linux 7.0 kernel release is support for the Module-Lattice-Based Digital Signature Algorithm "ML-DSA" quantum-resistant signature algorithm.

The ML-DSA/Dilithium signature algorithm support is initially going to be used for module signing while eventually other ML-DSA uses are expected throughout the kernel. This ML-DSA introduction for signing within the kernel comes in the same release of Linux finally removing SHA-1 module signing support .

The crypto library pull request that