Merged overnight to the Linux 6.18 kernel were all of the perf subsystem tool updates. Notable with the perf tooling updates is a new Python application living within the kernel source tree.

The perf tools merge for Linux 6.18 included a number of perf tool updates, better support for LLVM Clang cross-compilation, updating against the latest Intel PMU events and metrics, and also some additions to the Python perf code.

The Python bindings have been improved as well as introducing a new "ilist" utility

PoCL 7.1 is now available for this "Portable Computing Language" implementation that brings OpenCL to CPUs and other devices/accelerators via support for the various LLVM back-ends such as NVIDIA PTX, Intel GPUs via Level Zero, etc.

PoCL 7.0 released back in May with OpenCL 3.0 conformance on x86_64 CPUs as the headline feature. With yesterday's PoCL 7.1 release there is now support for the newer LLVM 21 toolchain for CPU targets as well as

FEX 2510 is out as the newest release of this open-source emulator for running x86/x86_64 applications on ARM64 (AArch64) Linux devices. Making FEX all the more popular is its continued ability for running Wine/Proton for handling Windows games on ARM64 Linux.

FEX 2510 ships with a number of just-in-time (JIT) improvements to address potential crashes, SSE4a support, and other improvements.

Canonical just officially announced the release of Ubuntu 25.10 as the newest non-LTS release of Ubuntu Linux.

Ubuntu 25.10 "Questing Quokka" is powered by the very new Linux 6.17 kernel, features the GNOME 49 desktop by default, features the GCC 15 compiler toolchain, and brings a variety of other updates such as Python 3.13.7, OpenJDK Java 25, Rust 1.85, and a plethora of other updates.

So far the upstream GCC compiler hasn't seen any target enablement for Intel's future Nova Lake processors (a.k.a. -march=novalake support) but merged yesterday for the GNU C Library was initial targeting for Nova Lake as well as Wildcat Lake.

With Intel recently having published a new ISA extensions and future features programming reference guide , it looks like their compiler engineers are ready to move forward on enabling Nova Lake. As it stands right now in upstream GCC Git, Panther Lake and Xeon

Last month the Alliance for Open Media "AOMedia" began teasing that the AV2 video codec will release later this year . They have now sent us word that later this month will be a virtual event talking more about this successor to AV1.

On 20 October will be a virtual event/webinar focused on AV2. The talk will provide a first-look at the AV2 codec, AOMedia's open approach to its efforts, and their other related efforts. This AV2 talk will feature representatives

Last week the block subsystem and IO_uring updates were merged for the Linux 6.18 kernel with a few items to draw attention to.

Via the Multiple Device "MD" software RAID support is now a new lockless bitmap option in Linux 6.18. Huawei engineer Yu Kuai led the work on this MD lockless bitmap code and explained with the patch series :

"Redundant data is used to enhance data fault tolerance, and the storage method for redundant data vary depending on the RAID levels. And it

In addition to the Linux 6.18 kernel bringing initial bindings for writing Rust USB drivers , the main USB/Thunderbolt subsystem updates for Linux 6.18 brought a variety of other enhancements.

As covered last month on Phoronix, the USB subsystem in Linux 6.18 is receiving the Intel "USBIO" USB IO expander drivers for supporting the web cameras on newer Intel laptop models. The USB IO expander drivers are used by MIPI cameras on various Intel Meteor Lake and newer Core Ultra powered laptops.

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