For those continuing to make use of the X.Org Server, a new point release is now available in the 21.1 series. While most often X.Org Server stable releases these days are driven by shipping new security fixes, the X.Org Server 21.1.21 release is to fix several regressions introduced for various functional issues.

Red Hat engineer Olivier Fourdan released X.Org Server 21.1.21 this morning and it simply consists of various code reverts in order

Intel software engineers continue to be hard at work on LLM-Scaler as their solution for running vLLM on Intel GPUs in a Docker containerized environment . A new beta release of LLM-Scaler built around vLLM was released overnight with support for running more large language models.

Since the "LLM-Scaler 1.0" debut of the project back in August there have been frequent updates for expanding LLM coverage on Intel GPUs and exposing more features for harnessing the AI compute power on Intel graphics hardware. The versioning scheme though remains

Red Hat's leading Linux input expert Peter Hutterer released libinput 1.30 today as the newest update to this input handling library used on both X.Org and Wayland desktops.

Easily most significant in libinput 1.30 and of any libinput release in recent times is introducing a Lua-based plug-in system . Lua plug-ins for libinput make it easy to modify device and input events in a secure/sandboxed manner. Here's an example of a Lua libinput plug-in to swap

With Advanced Performance Extensions (APX) on upcoming Intel processors doubling the number of general purpose registers (GPRs) among other advantages, Intel engineers are beginning to think of possible kernel uses for the extra registers.

To date there hasn't been much thought given to kernel uses for these extra registers with the enablement thus far of APX primarily focused on user-space software. There is some thinking that these EGPRs (Extended General Purpose Registers) may be useful to help reduce kernel stack pressure. But it also needs to

Alex Gaynor recently announced he is formally stepping down as one of the maintainers of the Rust for Linux kernel code with the removal patch now queued for merging in Linux 6.19.

Alex Gaynor was one of the original developers to experiment with Rust code for Linux kernel modules. He's drifted away from Rust Linux kernel development for a while due to lack of time and is now formally stepping down as a listed co-maintainer of the Rust code. After Wedson Almeida Filho stepped down last year as a Rust

Building off the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10.1 from two weeks ago, AlmaLinux 10.1 is now available in GA form for this community-oriented RHEL10 downstream. Making AlmaLinux 10.1 all the more interesting is the project's decision to promote Btrfs file-system support.

While Red Hat deprecated their Btrfs plans long ago (back in RHEL 6.8!) in favor of XFS+LVM, AlmaLinux developers recently decided to support Btrfs -- including optionally for

A year and a half after the Linux kernel patches were first posted, SDCIAE that is found with AMD Zen 5 server processors is set to finally be supported by the mainline kernel come Linux 6.19.

SDCIAE is Smart Data Cache Injection Allocation Enforcement. AMD first posted the Linux patches back in August 2024 that at the time were for "upcoming" CPUs. AMD since formally unveiled SDCI/SDCIAE as one of the new features of 5th Gen EPYC CPUs .

This feature allows an I/

A set of patches implementing async I/O IOCB_NOWAIT support for the loop block device is heading to the Linux 6.19 kernel with some performance improvements that will make loop block device users "wow".

Jens Axboe last week queued up the patches into the Linux block subsystem's "for-next" Git branch ahead of the Linux 6.19 merge window in early December. The merge message sums it up and the performance impact rather well:

"This patchset improves loop aio perf by