Merged this week to Linux Git ahead of Linux 6.18-rc3 this Sunday were the latest power management fixes for the kernel. Standing out in the power management code is a fix for a "serious performance regression" affecting some Intel-powered Chromebooks.

Reported by Google Chrome/Chromium OS engineers a few weeks ago wereperformance regressions affecting CPU usage, power consumption, dropped frames in video playback tests, and other related performance issues. They tracked it down to a CPU idle change that was back-ported

AMD's ISP4 image signal processing IP is so far just used by the HP ZBook Ultra G1a laptop but will presumably be used by more of the higher-end AMD Ryzen next-gen laptops. AMD engineers today posted their fifth iteration of their open-source Linux driver for enabling the ISP4 use.

This AMD ISP4 driver is the last remaining component needed for the web camera of the HP ZBook Ultra G1a to play nicely on Linux with an open-source driver stack --

Vulkan 1.4.330 is out today with a few specification corrections/clarifications plus five new extensions.

Beyond the usual churn to the Vulkan API specification, the five new extensions making Vulkan 1.4.330 notable include:

VK_KHR_maintenance10 : The latest maintenance spec update of various minor features. This includes new image format feature bits, adding input attachment information to dynamic rendering, an optional feature to let applications override the default sRGB resolve behavior, and other minor changes

The Asahi Linux developers involved with working on Linux support for Apple Silicon M-Series devices have put out a new progress report on their development efforts.

Asahi Linux developers have kept working on new kernel patches and some being upstreamed for Linux 6.17 and 6.18 cycles, as previously covered on Phoronix. Notably with Linux 6.18 is the Device Trees for the Apple M2 Pro / Max / Ultra devices albeit more driver code is still working its way upstream.

Asahi Linux developers are also

Valve contractor Timur Kristóf for their Linux graphics driver team has been working on improving Linux driver support for old AMD Radeon GCN 1.0 and GCN 1.1 generation GPUs . This has been about improving the AMDGPU driver to fill remaining gaps in GCN 1.0/1.1 support with those graphics cards by default relying on the older "Radeon" DRM kernel graphics driver compared to the AMDGPU driver used by default with GCN 1.2 and later. Another feature gap for AMDGPU is now being addressed

Pantina 13.0 is now available as this Rust implementation of UEFI firmware. Pantina has been working to replace the core UEFI firmware components in a pure Rust implementation to avoid the use of C code.

Pantina's effort has been around evolving and modernizing UEFI Firmware via the Rust programming language for better security, performance, and reliability. It's been an evolving effort with incrementally replacing C code with Rust. Those wanting to learn more about the project at large can do so via the OpenDevicePartnership web page .

Back in August, open-source developer Masahiro Yamada stepped down from maintaining the Kconfig and Kbuild areas of the Linux kernel. While Kbuild maintainership was quickly passed on , no one immediately stepped up to maintain Kconfig as the infrastructure code for configuring the Linux kernel builds. That led to Kconfig officially being orphaned code within the kernel but now that situation has been addressed.

Nathan Chancellor and Nicolas Schier have volunteered to serve as the maintainers of the Kconfig code moving forward. It's no longer being considered an "orphan"

Intel recently began sending out Xe3P kernel graphics driver patches for Nova Lake that will begin landing in the upcoming Linux 6.19 kernel cycle . Now on the user-space side, merged today for Mesa 26.0 were the first enablement patches for Xe3P Nova Lake for their open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers on Linux.

The patches merged today add initial Nova Lake S, Nova Lake U, Nova Lake H, Nova Lake HX, and Nova Lake UL entires to the Mesa common