All of the crypto subsystem changes have been merged for the in-development Linux 6.18 kernel.

A new driver in the cryptographic subsystem is the AMD Versal TRNG driver . This provides trune random number generator support with the AMD Versal Adaptive SoCs.

The Compute Express Link ( CXL ) changes have been merged for the in-development Linux 6.18 kernel.

The headline feature of the CXL subsystem update for Linux 6.18 is mainlining Poison Injection support. CXL Poison Injection is used for testing the error handling and reliability of CXL memory devices. Via a DebugFS interface, user-space can submit physical address(es) to "poison" for checking the hardware response and software-handled errors. This is primarily useful for testing both of the CXL

While Intel FRED was merged back in Linux 6.9 in advance of Intel processors shipping with this Flexible Return Event Delivery functionality, there ended up being a late, incompatible change to the specification as a result of security research into it. For Linux 6.18 those FRED changes have been merged,

Updating to the latest Intel FRED specification handling will prevent early pre-production Intel hardware from booting Linux 6.18+ unless either FRED or CET kernel support is disabled. Arizona State University researchers uncovered an issue

In addition to some Intel Linux kernel drivers being "orphaned" following the corporate restructuring at Intel between developers being laid off and others deciding to pursue opportunities elsewhere, these changes have also led to a number of Intel-related software packages within Debian being orphaned. In turn these Intel packages are also relied on by Ubuntu and other downstream Debian Linux distributions.

Around one dozen Intel packages within the Debian archive were recently orphaned, a.k.a. now being unmaintained following developer departures from Intel with no one currently taking

The F2FS file-system enhancements have been merged for the Linux 6.18 kernel and include some new performance optimizations.

F2FS enables hash-based file-name lookups by default for improving performance. The second optimization focused on Android use is resolving a persistent issue with the checkpoint feature.

Cairo-Dock is back after a decade hiatus! From the early 2010's you may remember Cairo-Dock / GLX-Dock as a complementary dock for your Linux desktop. The last time writing about it was the Cairo-Dock 3.4 release in 2014 when it was working toward EGL/Wayland support. Since then it was rather inactive the past decade besides a small 3.5 update one year ago with a few fixes. But out this week is now Cairo-

The IOMMU driver changes were merged this week for Linux 6.18 with new material to benefit Intel, AMD, Apple, and RISC-V systems.

The Intel VT-d IOMMU driver has been updated against the latest upstream VT-d specification and brings several fixes and code clean-ups.

ISD is an independent interactive systemd management tool with a nice text user interface "TUI" for dealing with systemd units and other systemd functionality. Out today is isd 0.6 with many fixes and other refinements to this helper for administering systemd-backed Linux systems.

The isd 0.6 release is predominantly driven by accumulated bug fixes as well as some minor features. Today's release announcement proclaims, " If isd has been buggy for you this release should greatly improve your experience. "

For those making use of Server Message Block (SMB) protocol support on Linux, the SMB3 client code and KSMBD server code has landed some performance work and other fixes for the in-development Linux 6.18 kernel.

On the SMB3 client side there are three performance improvements merged as part of the changes. There are some minor optimizations by Henrique Carvalho of SUSE for different conditions. There are also two important directory leases fixes. Plus the SMB3 client code is now using common arc4 library code