Building off the work in months prior around Device Mapper atomic write support and related infrastructure, the md-linear target for linear software RAID support will enable atomic write support with the upcoming Linux 6.18 merge window.

Queued in the md-6.18 Git branch of the MDRAID Git tree is enabling atomic writes for the md-linear target.

John Garry of Oracle explained in that commit:

"All the infrastructure has already been plumbed to support this for stacked devices, so just enable the request_

PostgreSQL 18.0 is out today as the annual major feature release for this widely-used SQL database server. PostgreSQL 18 is a big one with many exciting performance optimizations and other new features.

There is a heck of a lot to get excited about for PostgreSQL 18 if you are a database nerd and/or performance junkie. PostgreSQL 18 brings initial support for NUMA awareness , AVX-512 usage for CRC32C computations , asynchronous I/O support , initial support for IO

Queued this week into the BPF subsystem's "bpf-next" Git branch ahead of the Linux 6.18 merge window are some exciting feature additions.

First up, merged to bpf-next is initial support for signed BPF programs. Signed BPF programs can help ensure the BPF program comes from a trusted source for ensuring system integrity. BPF program signing is also part of the process toward allowing unprivileged users to load vetted BPF programs.

That merge explains:

"BPF Signing has gone over multiple discussions in various

Earlier this month the VMSCAPE CPU security vulnerability was made public and affecting both AMD and Intel processors. VMSCAPE can lead to leaking information from a user-space hypervisor via speculative side channels. An Intel engineer today posted a new set of patches for helping to reduce the mitigation costs of VMSCAPE protections on modern Intel processors.

Intel Linux engineer Pawan Gupta posted the set of two patches today for improving the performance on recent Core/Xeon processors following the recent VMSCAPE vulnerability mitigation.

Pawan Gupta explained with the patch series :

"These

While the Mold linker has been very impressive for its speed the past few years compared to the linkers out of the LLVM and GNU toolchain projects, there is a new high speed linker on the scene and it's written in Rust: meet Wild.

Wild is a new Rust-based linker in development that is led by David Lattimore. The goal of Wild is to be a very fast linker for Linux systems.

Wild aims to work out well for iterative development and ultimately wants to support incremental linking as one of

The Intel Media Driver 2025Q3 release is available today as the quarterly update to this open-source Video Acceleration API (VA-API) driver used by Intel hardware under Linux for video encode/decode.

While the Intel graphics drivers on Windows remain focused on the very latest products , the Intel Media Driver on Linux continues supporting back to Broadwell era processors with this unified Media Driver for VA-API support. Broadwell and newer remain supported by the Intel Media Driver up through the Battlemage discrete graphics and

Yesterday at the Snapdragon Summit in Hawaii Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon X2 Elite SoCs for upcoming laptops. In addition Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 mobile platform too. With those announcements out there, the Qualcomm open-source engineers have been busy in rolling out their latest patches for beginning to enable these new platforms with the Linux kernel.

Posted overnight was this 24 patch series for laying out the Device Tree bindings for the Snapdragon X2 Elite "Glymur" SoC as well as enabling the Compute Reference Design (

Overnight Intel released IGSC 1.0 as their library for handling graphics system firmware updates for rolling out firmware updates to Intel discrete graphics card devices.

The Intel IGSC is the library for interfacing with the GSC/MEI controller on discrete Intel graphics devices for facilitating firmware updates. This Apache 2.0 licensed library is used both on Windows and Linux for applying firmware updates as needed.