Linux 7.2-rc3 is now available for testing in working toward the stable Linux 7.2 kernel version coming up in August.

Linux 7.2-rc3 changes this week include adding Ultra RISC-V support to the RISC-V default kernel configuration , SEGA Dreamcast driver fixes , display detection improvements to help out some multi-GPU systems , and marking Nick Desaulniers' return to LLVM Linux development . Plus the wide assortment of various bug/regression fixes -- including various AI-assisted patches

Similar to Linux 7.2 enabling Eswin SoC support by default in the RISC-V "defconfig" kernel build, UltraRISC RISC-V coverage is also now being enabled by default for RISC-V kernel builds in Linux 7.2.

Merged today ahead of the imminent Linux 7.2-rc3 weekly test release are the RISC-V fixes, which include adding the ARCH_ULTRARISC Kconfig support for enablign the UltraRISC RISC-V hardware support, which in the mainline kernel currently means the UR-DP

The Harmonic Firmware Initiative "HFI" is trying to provide a generic, standardized power-on firmware experience for RISC-V boards. Akin to the x86 world with having immediate graphics card initialization to provide a display while the system is booting and also having a BIOS setup utility for system configuration, HFI is trying to do the same for the RISC-V world.

Developers behind the recently covered QSOE QNX-inpsired RISC-V operating system are leading the charge for HFI to improve the initial boot/power

It wasn't on my bingo card for the week but merged to Git ahead of today's Linux 7.2-rc3 kernel release are a number of fixes for the SEGA Dreamcast drivers.

Even with the mainline Linux kernel beginning to drop support for a number of aging hardware platforms, Linux on the SEGA Dreamcast remains a possibility when crafting a specialized Linux build on CD-R and using a Dreamcast keyboard and mouse for interaction. It's for those Dreamcast keyboard and mouse drivers seeing unexpected fixes in

The staging driver fixes that were sent out this week ahead of the Linux 7.2-rc3 release is predominantly made up of hardening the Realtek RTL8723BS WiFi driver. In particular, a number of fixes for addressing out-of-bounds behavior when connecting to "bad" WiFi hosts.

Alexandru Hossu has been working on addressing a number of out-of-bounds "OOB" memory access conditions that could occur when the driver is iterating on attacker-controlled data provided from over-

Debian 13.6 is out today as the newest point release of Debian Trixie to ship the latest security fixes and other maintenance updates.

Debian 13.6 ships the latest batch of security fixes, including a number of security advisories pertaining to the Linux kernel as well as other packages like Nginx, Redis, FFmpeg, Thunderbird, Chromium, PHP, and many more. Debian 13.6 also ships a number of bug fixes and other updates. Debian also ended up reverting their geoip-database package for

Sent out today was this week's round of x86 (x86_64) fixes ahead of the Linux 7.2-rc3 kernel test candidate due out on Sunday.

The x86 fixes for Linux 7.2-rc3 are mostly some minor fixes but one that does stand out is fixing the x86 VGA display fallback logic during the Linux boot process on some multi-GPU systems.

Canonical engineer Aaron Ma originally raised the issue of improper default VGA selection on

Stanford researchers have been developing Lightweight Fault Isolation "LFI" compiler passes and targets for LLVM as a means of efficient, native code sandboxing. The AArch64 LFI target was previously upstreamed while this week the x86/x86_64 LFI target was also upstreamed for this means of in-process sandboxing.

Lightweight Fault Isolation is a compiler-based approach for efficient, in-process sandboxing to help provide performance and compatibility of existing code while helping to fend off memory safety bugs and the like

KDE developers continue to be very busy this summer landing more features for the upcoming Plasma 6.8 desktop.

This Week in Plasma is out with its latest issue to highlight all of the interesting Plasma desktop developments for the past week. This week some of the Plasma 6.8 feature activity highlights include:

Spectacle now supports recording audio during screen recording -- the system audio and/or microphone audio. Separately for Spectacle, it no longer requires the OpenCV library after the developers found a way to implement the blur effect