The many SoC and platform/machine DeviceTree additions have been merged for the Linux 6.18 kernel! This includes finally having mainline support for the SiFive HiFive Premier P550 RISC-V development board and its EIC7700 SoC, Apple M2 Pro / Max / Ultra DeviceTrees added and associated Apple Mac system support, various new Snapdragon X1 laptops now being supported by the mainline kernel and much more.

As usual there are a lot of SoC changes coming for this next version of the

The Kbuild changes have been merged for the in-development Linux 6.18 kernel.

The Kbuild pull for Linux 6.18 is the first under new maintainership and brings a few changes worth calling out.

First up, the minimum supported LLVM/Clang compiler version to build the Linux kernel has been increased to LLVM 15.0. This is a reasonable new minimum version with LLVM/Clang 15 having come out in September 2022 and most using Clang to build the Linux kernel tend

Following last month's release of the first KDE Plasma 6.5 Beta , a second beta milestone was released today ahead of the stable release coming later in October.

KDE Plasma 6.5.0 is due for release on 21 October while out today is the Plasma 6.4.91 "Beta 2" release. As a reminder, new to Plasma 6.5 is support for GPU underlays, addressing a 22 year old feature request around its clipboard, rounded bottom corners for windows by

So far Intel has posted very few Linux kernel driver enablement patches around Nova Lake but it looks like that is about to change.

Now that the Intel Panther Lake Linux support appears largely in order, it looks like Intel Linux developers are beginning to shift their attention to Nova Lake. As a reminder, Nova Lake is expected to be the next-gen desktop and mobile platform and rumored to go up to 52 cores and a host of other improvements over existing Intel CPUs.

Sent out to the Linux kernel mailing list

Following the recent Raspberry Pi 500+ launch , the latest Raspberry Pi news is the release of Raspberry Pi OS now re-based against Debian 13 "Trixie" along with some additional changes.

Today's Raspberry Pi OS has been re-based against Debian 13 upstream packages. This brings Y2038 support, various performance improvements, and a range of new features. Plus it's complemented by a new theme for Raspberry Pi OS, a new control center application, and a

The BPF changes have been merged for the in-development Linux 6.18 kernel.

The notable changes for BPF in Linux 6.18 is support for signed programs and deferred task execution . With the optional signed BPF program support it can be used for ensuring the program comes from a trusted source as part of system integrity measures. Signed BPF programs is also a step toward allowing unprivileged users to load such signed BPF programs from validated sources. The signed BPF programs has been a long time coming.

Also new

Valve just published the Steam Survey results for September with a slight increase to the Linux gaming userbase.

In July Steam on Linux was at 2.89% but then for August it fell to 2.64% . Now for September it crept up to 2.68%.

TrueNAS 25.10-RC1 is out today as the newest test release of this OpenZFS+Linux-based operating system for network attached storage (NAS) hardware and other storage devices.

TrueNAS 25.10 this cycle has been working on installation improvements , NVIDIA Blackwell support, 400 GbE networking , performance improvements, and a variety of other improvements.

Sent out today was the x86/mm pull request of the x86/x86_64 memory management changes destined for this next version of the Linux kernel. This pull has just one new patch but is worth mentioning.

The patch from Intel engineer Yu-cheng Yu is changing the cpa_flush() call to call the flush_kernel_range() function directly. The CPA flushing code is for flushing the translation lookaside buffer (TLB) as part of the Change Page