Qualcomm announced today that they are acquiring Arduino, the popular open-source hardware/electronics prototyping platform for single-board micro-controllers.

Qualcomm is acquiring Arduino to pair Qualcomm's products and technologies with the open-source Arduino ecosystem. Qualcomm says they will maintain Arduino's open-source software and hardware ethos.

Being worked on for the past roughly three years has been Linear Address Space Separation "LASS" for the Linux kernel as a security improvement in light of Spectre/Meltdown.

LASS suffered a setback this summer when Kirill Shutemov as a 14 year Intel Linux engineer left the company who had been spearheading the effort. The patch series now though has been taken over by Intel software engineer Sohil Mehta as LASS works its way toward the mainline kernel.

The Memory Technology Device "MTD" subsystem updates are merged for the in-development Linux 6.18 kernel.

Notable with the MTD updates for the Linux 6.18 kernel is the introduction of the "ecc-realtek" driver for supporting the hardware ECC error correction engine from Realtek. This ECC hardware engine is found on Realtek's RTL93xx switch SoCs.

The patch message describes the Realtek ECC engine's capabilities as:

"The Realtek RTL93xx switch SoC series has a

Initially released two years ago was an Intel QuickAssist/QAT adaptation for Zstd compression . The v0.1 release happened just over two years ago followed by a v0.2 release one year later... Since then, it had been all quiet. Arriving today to surprise is the QAT Zstd 1.0 plug-in release.

QAT Zstd 1.0 is now available for those interested in Zstd compression offloading to QuickAssist Technology accelerators. At least going off the data shared by Intel back in 20

For any Amiga 4000 hobbyists running a Linux m68k operating system, a PCI driver was finally published three decades later for Linux. Patches posted for mainline Linux kernel review today enable the Mediator 4000 PCI bridge available for the Amiga 4000 computer from the early 90's.

Commodore's Amiga 4000 computer powered by a Motorola CPU, PATA-based storage, up to 18MB of RAM, and later on came the ability to have

Upstreamed for the Linux 6.18 kernel is supporting the Loongson Security Engine chip found on modern versions of these Chinese computing platforms.

The Loongson Security Engine is a chip that allows offloading random number generation (RNG), trusted platform module (TPM2), SM2, SM3 and SM4 acceleration.

Qt 6.10 is now available as the latest feature update to this open-source and cross-platform toolkit.

Qt 6.10 adds a native PipeWire audio backend, Chromium extensions support in the Qt WebEngine, and a variety of other enhancements:

- A native PipeWire audio back-end is added to the Qt Multimedia module.

- The Qt WebEngine module added support for Chromium extensions.

- Qt Graphs received a number of improvements for its 2D graphs capabilities, such as for hover support and multi

The LED subsystem updates don't tend to be too exciting each kernel cycle but for those with QNAP network attached storage (NAS) devices and wanting to run the mainline kernel, now you can have working red and green status LEDs.

For those with QNAP NAS hardware, the Linux 6.18 kernel will enable the red/green status LEDs to be correctly operated. The status LEDs are connected to QNAP's Microcontroller Unit (MCU) that can now be controlled from the mainline Linux kernel using the leds

Fedora 43 is working its way toward release in the coming weeks and is now going through a very late change. A change was announced and accepted today for increasing the size of the /boot partition. This is driven by the ever-increasing number of firmware files needed for different devices to function under Linux with open-source drivers. A large motivator to this change was the very large and growing NVIDIA GPU firmware file sizes for Nouveau and the future Nova driver.

The "emergency" change proposal was filed and