Linux 6.18 Updating The Baseline For Marking Intel CPU Microcode As Outdated

Introduced this year with the Linux 6.16 kernel was the new functionality for reporting to users when running on outdated Intel CPU microcode since it can pose security vulnerability issues and/or functionality problems. The Linux kernel support for propagating this "old_microcode" reporting via sysfs relies on a static list of microcode versions corresponding to different Intel CPU generations. For the Linux 6.18 kernel this list is being updated to reflect modern baselines for Intel recommendations on CPU microcode.

Sent in via the x86
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Wine 11.0 On Track For January Release With NTSYNC & New WoW64 Mode

WineConf as the annual Wine developer conference, for this open-source software allowing Windows games and applications to run on Linux, took place this weekend in The Hague. Several interesting talks took place including the usual keynote by Wine project leader Alexandre Julliard.

Alexandre Julliard's keynote at WineConf 2025 featured the recent highlights on the Wayland and Bluetooth drivers for Wine, WinRT support, the new PDB back-end, and other enhancements. Plus Wine's growing codebase at large and other development trends for this
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Linux 6.18 Power Management Brings Panther Lake Power Slider & New Drivers

Linux ACPI and power management maintainer Rafael Wysocki today sent out all of the feature updates and changes intended for the now-started Linux 6.18 merge window. There are some new Intel additions as well as for the growing range of different ARM-based SoCs and other hardware.

The power management pull request for Linux 6.18 includes:

- Updating the Intel P-State driver to allow it to enable Hardware P-States (HWP) without Energy Performance Preference (EPP) when the new Dynamic Efficiency
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NVIDIA, Disney & Google Contribute Open-Source Newton Engine To The Linux Foundation

Earlier this year NVIDIA announced Newton as an open-source physics engine focused on robotic simulations. This physics engine was developed by NVIDIA in cooperation with Google DeepMind and Disney Research. Today it's been contributed to the Linux Foundation.

The open-source Newton engine builds atop NVIDIA Warp as a developer framework for building and accelerating data generation and spatial computing in the Python programming language. Warp in turn is accelerated when making use of NVIDIA CUDA-X. Netwon also builds on other software such as the OpenUSD framework and
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Open Source LLM

Intel Releases New LLM Scaler Betas For GenAI On Battlemage GPUs

Back in August Intel released LLM-Scaler 1.0 as part of Project Battlematrix for help getting generative AI "GenAI" workloads running on Arc (Pro) B-Series graphics cards. Out today are two new LLM Scaler beta releases for further enhancing the AI capabilities on Intel Battlemage GPUs.

First up is the LLM-Scaler vLLM 1.1 preview as the latest for running vLLM on Intel Battlemage GPUs. The only listed change with this beta though is a bug fix for sym_int4 online quantization with
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Blender 5.0 Vulkan Render Tests Passing On AMD & NVIDIA But Failing For Intel

Blender 5.0 is working its way toward an official release in mid-November and is soon transitioning from its alpha to beta stage. Among the key changes with Blender 5.0 are its Vulkan renderer being in good shape overall , HDR support when using Vulkan and Wayland on Linux , and other enhancements. Today some brief details were shared around the current state of the Vulkan support for Blender 5.0.

While the Vulkan back-end is very promising for Blender, for the upcoming Blender 5.0 release
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RISC-V With Linux 6.18 Brings Support For MIPS Vendor Extensions

Back during the Linux 6.17 merge window the RISC-V changes were rejected as "garbage" for being submitted too late in the merge window and with some code choices that upset Linus Torvalds. With lessons learned, the RISC-V changes for Linux 6.18 were submitted today during the first official day of this new kernel cycle.

The first batch of RISC-V feature updates were submitted for Linux 6.18. Standing out is support for detecting and utilizing MIPS vendor extensions for RISC
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GNU Linux-libre 6.17 Deblobs The New Intel IPU7 Driver, Adjusts Existing Drivers

Building off yesterday's release of Linux 6.17 , the GNU Linux-libre 6.17-gnu kernel is now available for this downstream kernel variant that strips away support for loading non-free microcode and other elements not aligned with the Free Software Foundation principles. This ultimately ends up limiting the hardware support available with most of today's modern hardware requiring microcode/firmware but alas here is the latest release with a fresh round of de-blobbing.

New to Linux 6.17 is
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Ryzen AI Max+ With Framework Desktop, File-System Tests & EPYC 4005 Dominated Q3

With Q3 coming to an end this week, here is a look back at the most popular Linux hardware reviews and featured multi-page benchmark articles during the third quarter of this year on Phoronix.

There was a lot of exciting Linux hardware reviews and dozens of benchmark articles during Q3'2025. Standing out with dominating multiple most viewed articles for the quarter included the Framework Desktop with AMD Ryzen AI Max+, more AMD EPYC 4005 series benchmarking, various Linux file-system tests

A Lot Of Rust Code Lining Up For The Linux 6.18 Kernel

While the Linux 6.18 kernel merge window is just getting formally started following yesterday's Linux 6.17 release , one thing is already quite clear: there is a a lot of new Rust programming language code set to head into Linux 6.18.

A number of early pull requests were submitted in advance of the Linux 6.18 merge window formally opening, including several specifically enhancing the kernel's Rust programming language opportunities.

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