The newest Mesa 26.0-devel code as of today has landed initial support for Qualcomm Adreno Gen 8 graphics into the Freedreno Gallium3D driver. The Adreno Gen 8 graphics so far are most notably used by the new Snapdragon X2 Elite laptop SoC with its X2-85 GPU as well as the new Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 with Adreno 840 graphics.

Last week Linux 6.19 landed the DRM kernel graphics driver changes including the Adreno Gen 8 support being added to the

Beginning with the Linux 6.19 kernel, the hung task detector and system lock-up detector are now optionally able to provide greater insight into the issues by dumping additional system information. The new lockup_sys_info and hung_task_sys_info sysctl knobs were merged over as part of the pull requests managed by Andrew Morton.

Andrew Morton first sent in the memory management "MM" updates for Linux 6.19. Overall a number of low-level kernel code clean-ups and

Google engineers for the past number of months have been working on the Live Update Orchestrator as a new way of applying live Linux kernel updates . The Live Update Orchestrator "LUO" builds atop the Kexec Handover "KHO" functionality already within the kernel. Google has since been deplyoing LUO in their production environments for faster security updates to kernels , especially when involving VMs. LUO is now upstream in Linux 6.19.

Merged to the Git tree this weekend for Linux 6.19 were the non-MM updates

Meson 1.10 is out today as the newest feature release for this popular cross-platform build system.

With the Meson 1.10 build automation tool the cross-platform support is even better... There is now official support for OS/2. Yes, as we get ready to roll into 2026, the Meson build system now has support added to OS/2.

The Mozilla Firefox 146.0 release binaries are now available with a very exciting improvement for Linux users relying on Wayland.

With Firefox 146, the most exciting change for this last browser release before the holidays is:

"Firefox now natively supports fractional scaled displays on Linux(Wayland), making rendering more effective."

Yes, Firefox on Linux is now natively supporting fractional scaling on Wayland!

While just half-way through the Linux 6.19 merge window, over the weekend I began running some benchmarks of the current Linux 6.19 Git state compared to Linux 6.18 LTS stable. There are some minor performance improvements to note in a few of the tests on the first system I tested but also some regressions at this very early pre-RC1 state of the Linux 6.19 kernel.

During the wekend I ran some initial Linux 6.18 vs. Linux

One of the new Linux engineering initiatives out of AMD is working to further enhance Linux performance on today's large core count systems by introducing push-based load balancing.

AMD's Linux kernel scheduler work as we end out 2025 is focused on introducing push-based load balancing to address current scheduler issues with the busy load balancing always being tasked to the first CPU of the group balance mask (all the work always ending up on the same single CPU), scalability bottlenecks on large core count systems

All of the Human Interface Devices (HID) subsystem updates were merged a few days ago for the ongoing Linux 6.19 kernel merge window. Standing out this cycle on the HID side are seeing new/improved support for several Logitech devices.

The HID logitech-dj driver added support for the G Pro X Superlight 2. The Logitech G Pro X Superlight 2 is a high-end wireless gaming mouse retailing for ~$130+ USD. There was a new USB device ID needed and appropriate mapping