For those still using an AMD GCN 1.1 "Sea Islands" GPU like the Radeon R9 290/390 series, HD 7790 / 8870, or other Radeon Rx 200 / Rx 300 series GPUs, there is an exciting early Christmas present this year. Timur Kristóf of Valve's Linux graphics driver team sent out the patch series on Sunday for enabling the GCN 1.1 GPUs to use the newer AMDGPU driver on Linux

Rust Coreutils continues moving fast on their goal "toward full GNU compatibility" with the GNU Coreutils. The uutils project announced Rust Coreutils 0.4 this evening with better compatibility, performance optimizations, and other improvements.

Rust Coreutils 0.4 is up to passing 544 tests from the GNU test suite, an increase of 12 from the prior release and around 85% compatibility overall.

As we work toward the stable Linux 6.18 kernel release expected around the end of December, out today is the Linux 6.18-rc5 test kernel.

Linus Torvalds christened the Linux 6.18-rc5 kernel just minutes ago. It's been another week of mostly small changes throughout kernel space. The changes on my radar this week include many DRM kernel graphics driver fixes, electronic privacy screen hotkey handling for some Dell laptops , and partially addressing a performance regression that is most

Two patches queued into the Linux kernel's build system development tree, kbuild-next, would enable the compiler argument everywhere for allowing GCC and LLVM/Clang to use the Microsoft C Extensions when compiling the Linux kernel. Being in kbuild-next these patches will likely be submitted for the Linux 6.19 kernel merge window next month but remains to be seen if there will be any last minute objections to this change.

The -fms-extensions compiler option honored by the GNU Compiler Collection and LLVM/Clang

Queued into the platform-drivers-x86 "for-next" Git branch ahead of the Linux 6.19 merge window is introducing the handling for the "Rapid Charge" USB-C charging mode to the Lenovo IdeaPad laptop driver.

Rong Zhang contributed the patches to add the "rapid charge" mode handling to the ideapad-laptop driver. Rong Zhang explained with the patch series:

"The GBMD/SBMC interface on IdeaPad/ThinkBook supports Rapid Charge mode (charge_types: Fast) in

For anyone dealing with Minix file-systems still for this nearly 40 year old creation, the upcoming Linux 6.19 kernel is expected to bring some fixes to the Minix driver for better handling corrupted file-system images.

Syzbot has uncovered some corruption bugs within the Linux kernel's Minix file-system driver. When trying to mount and deal with corrupted Minix file-systems, some problems were uncovered that are now being addressed to be able to report said corruption and fixing the underlying bugs detected.

AMD continues preparing more kernel driver code for Linux 6.19 . This week another round of AMDGPU kernel graphics driver updates were submitted to DRM-Next ahead of the early December merge window.

In addition to prior AMDGPU updates intended for Linux 6.19 like more GCN 1.0 era hardware work for the AMDGPU driver driven by Valve, this week's round of AMDGPU and AMDKFD updates is mostly around bug fixes and other low-level work.

Enhancing the user mode queues "UserQ" support remains

For what began as an Intel open-source project focused on delivering a modern VMM for cloud workloads and written in Rust is seeing increasingly more exposure on AArch64 and Microsoft Windows platforms. In fact, Intel remains largely inactive now with Cloud Hypervisor after their lead maintainer left the company last year and has now been one year since seeing any significant contributions from Intel to this open-source project.

Cloud Hypervisor brings more Microsoft Hyper-V (MSHV) support improvements. In particular, better MSHV support on 64

For those dealing with SquashFS compressed, read-only file-systems, a new version of the user-space tools were released this week.

SquashFS remains a popular choice for embedded systems for read-only file-system needs as well as the likes of Linux live images. The new 4.7.3 release while a point release does bring a few notable changes.

SquashFS 4.7.3 optimized the reading of sparse files. For file-systems with SEEK_DATA lseek operation to skip holes when