AMD has begun their open-source compiler enablement upstreaming effort for Zen 6 processors! The first "Znver6" patch was sent out on Friday in preparing for new instructions to be found with these next-generation AMD Ryzen and EPYC processors.

The GNU Binutils patch plumbing the new "Znver6" target to the GNU Assembler (Gas) most notably confirms the new CPU ISA additions over current-generation Zen 5 processors. On top of Znver5, the new Znver6 target adds: AVX512_

Released one Friday was the newest version of oneDNN as this library started off by Intel and now officially under the UXL Foundation umbrella for serving as building blocks for deep learning software.

While under the UXL Foundation umbrella and supporting other hardware from Arm CPUs to NVIDIA GPUs, oneDNN 3.10 is overwhelmingly still about optimizing for Intel hardware. With oneDNN 3.10 a big focus has remained on preparing for future Intel CPUs with AVX 10.2 as well as better enhancing the Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX)

The Qt toolkit has merged support for Wayland's color-management-v1 protocol to replace the former xx-color-management-v4 protocol shipped by this open-source toolkit. The change was merged for Qt 6.11 development but also back-ported for the Qt 6.10 series.

Qt 6.10 and Qt 6.11 development now support Wayland's color-management-v1 in place of their former usage of the experimental xx-color-management

On ACPI-enabled systems Linux users can enjoy PCIe M.2 connected peripherals that "just work" without any extra fuss. But for those relying on Device Tree (DT) handling by the kernel, new patches from Qualcomm are working on representing PCIe M.2 connectors within DT files.

Qualcomm engineer Manivannan Sadhasivam sent out the latest patches working to support the handling of PCIe M.2 connectors within Device Tree files. The continued headache of dealing with DTs as opposed to ACPI and other standards-based discovery.

KDE developers were off to a busy start for the month of November. A lot of feature activity continues happening for Plasma 6.6 while a lot of bug fixing is still going on for Plasma 6.5 and related KDE components.

KDE developer Nate Graham continues doing a great job with the weekly Plasma development summaries via This Week in Plasma. With that, Plasma 6.6 continues taking shape with some of the KDE changes for this week including:

- Plasma 6.6 is bringing the ability to limit virtual

FreeBSD 15.0-RC1 had been expected this weekend but instead a fifth beta release of FreeBSD 15.0 was deemed warranted.

FreeBSD !5.0-BETA5 is now available with the RC1 build sleeping to next week. The release management team is still hoping to have FreeBSD 15.0-RELEASE out at the beginning of December by hopefully removing the last two release candidates (RC3 and RC4).

FreeBSD 15.0 Beta 5 brings fixes to image building

In addition to GNOME's Mutter compositor removing its X11 back-end support to focus exclusively on Wayland while keeping around XWayland client support, another notable GNOME change this week was the GTK toolkit adding a "reduced motion" accessibility option.

GTK now has a "reduced motion" accessibility option to provide alternative animations where relevant to avoid inducing any extra discomfort or distractions. This will be found with the GTK 4.21 development releases and GTK 4.22 stable release in the new year.

It's been a while since having anything major to talk about with the NILFS2 file-system but it looks like that could be changing. NILFS2 as a reminder is a log-structured file-system with continuous snapshotting with its NILFS predecessor having been in the mainline kernel for two decades since the mid Linux 2.6 days.

There hasn't been too much churn around the NILFS2 file-system driver or user-space tools in recent years during a time at which the likes of Btrfs