The x86 platform drivers area of the Linux kernel continues to see a lot of code churn for supporting new laptops and enhancing support for existing laptop models. Plus the likes of AMD PMF and Intel PMC continue to see ongoing improvements too.

The merged x86 platform driver changes for Linux 6.18 include the following highlights:

- The AMD Platform Management Framework (PMF) driver now supports adjusting PPT and PPT APU thresholds. This is part of new AMD PMF capabilities around custom BIOS input handling and the

The Intel Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) updates for the Linux 6.18 kernel allow it to work with Kexec for being able to load and boot into a new kernel from another currently running kernel.

Due to the TDX memory encryption hardware not respecting cache coherency, using Kexec in the presence of TDX could lead to writing back old cache lines on top of data in the kernel kernel. TDX and Kexec were thus an unsupported configuration until now in Linux 6.18 with those limitations being worked around.

Kexec

The VFIO subsystem updates were merged last week for the ongoing Linux 6.18 merge window.

While there was recently talk over marking the generic VFIO platform driver as deprecated with plans to eventually remove it from the mainline kernel, at least for now it's been saved. Some developers have stepped up to maintain the vfio-platform driver for now to avoid its deprecation/removal. Mostafa Saleh and Pranjal Shrivastava are the developers committing to maintaining the vfio-platform driver code.

FreeBSD 15.0 continues working its way toward a stable release in early December and out today is the fifth alpha release.

FreeBSD 15.0 Alpha 5 was necessitate and thus pushing back the 15.0 release branching and first beta release by one week. But the hope is still for releasing on schedule with an announcement on 2 December if they are able to cut-out the FreeBSD 15.0-RC4 milestone.

With FreeBSD 15.0 Alpha 5 there are some release image

Adding to the Linux storage/file-system excitement for Linux 6.18 is enhancements to some of the core FUSE code for supporting file-systems in user-space.

The FUSE subsystem with Linux 6.18 has extended the copy_file_range interface to be fully 64-bit capable, synchronous FUSE_INIT support, in select cases FUSE can enter a freezable state, optimizing VirtIO-FS request handling, the server can now request pruning of unused inodes, prep patches for block/

The past several months has seen AMD engineers working on a new RDMA driver for Ionic hardware through which they acquired Pensando a few years ago. That AMD-Pensando Ionic RDMA driver is now part of the upstream Linux 6.18 kernel.

The new "ionic" RDMA driver supports the AMD Pensando Ethernet device with Remote Direct Memory Access capabilities. Merged way back in 2019 was an original Pensando driver for Linux in supporting the company's original network hardware.

The Direct Rendering Manager "DRM" pull request ended up leading to Linus Torvalds complaining over text and Rust code formatting but in the end he pulled all of these kernel graphics driver updates and also the associated "accel" accelerator subsystem drivers too.

With the Linux 6.18 DRM pull there is a lot of kernel graphics driver improvements across the board, including the new drivers of Tyr and the Rocket accelerator driver. For enhancing existing driver support, the AMD and Intel graphics drivers continue seeing a bulk of the activity

Next year's GCC 16 compiler release is continuing the trend of enhancing the compiler diagnostics support, including new features like optionally outputting compiler error/warning diagnostics to HTML format for better analysis.

David Malcolm of Red Hat who has consistently delivered many of the diagnostic improvements to the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) presented on the enhancements coming for GCC 16. Malcolm was presenting at the GNU Tools Cauldron 2025 in Porto, Portugal.

This next annual GCC feature release is continuing to refine C++

The HID changes have been merged for Linux 6.18 and are headlined by initial support in the mainline kernel for haptic touchpad handling.

As written about last month, haptic touchpad support is ready for the Linux kernel. Haptic touchpads contain force sensors and haptic actuators in place of a traditional button. Haptic touchpads can eliminate mechanical parts and provide a nice clicking effect across the entire touchpad.