KDE Plasma 6.4.5 is out today as the newest monthly point release for the current Plasma 6.4 desktop series. Making this month's Plasma 6 point release notable are a number of KWin compositor fixes.

Making KDE Plasma 6.4.5 stand out is fixing lag and stuttering on Intel graphics when making use of Plasma's Night Light feature. For Intel Tiger Lake laptops and newer was what was described as extreme stuttering on brightness adjustments due to KWin's gamma LUT handling. The

The Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 (RHEL 10) downstream AlmaLinux 10 is further distinguishing itself from alternatives by enabling its CRB repository by default. This will be rolling out as an update to AlmaLinux 10.0 and as part of the upcoming AlmaLinux 10.1 point release.

The AlmaLinux CRB repository offers up various extra packages primarily of developer interests. The CRB repository is short for "CodeReady Builder" used by Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The CRB repository is also known as the "PowerTools"

A new set of Linux kernel patches posted today work to improve the nested VMX performance for benefiting Intel processors making use of KVM virtualization.

Amazon engineer Fred Griffoul posted a set of five patches aiming to address performance issues around nested VMX (Intel) when handling unmanaged guest memory. In particular, memory passed via the "mem=" parameter or guest_memfd for non-confidential computing virtual machines.

It was found that with the current Intel VMX code there is significant performance overhead due to expensive remapping operations. With nested

While the BSDs don't see nearly as much activity around Wayland as the desktop Linux distributions and they continue to predominantly rely on the X.Org Server by default, the modern KDE Plasma 6 desktop can in fact work fine on Wayland under FreeBSD 14 and the upcoming FreeBSD 15.0 release .

Adriaan de Groot who works on FreeBSD packaging, including the KDE-FreeBSD packages, wrote a blog post about the steps needed to get KDE Plasma 6 working on Wayland atop FreeBSD.

Notably now Adriaan has FreeBSD

Thanks to work by open-source Intel software engineers over the past few months, the upcoming Linux 6.18 kernel is expected to add support for Embedded USB2 Version 2.0 "eUSB2V2" for supporting next-generation, higher-resolution laptop web cameras.

Intel engineers have been leading the effort on plumbing Linux for eUSB2V2 support for that updated USB2 specification intended for delivering higher data rates over conventional USB 2.0 while also maintaining the low-voltage electrical interface.

The XFS file-system is ready to declare their online file-system checking "fsck" support in good enough shape for enabling by default in new kernel builds. Plus other XFS alterations ahead of Linux 6.18 that is expected to be this year's LTS kernel version.

With the Linux 6.18 merge window set to kickoff in just a few weeks and then debut as stable in December, this will more than likely be the 2025 LTS kernel version. Typically it's

A patch series that has been in development for a while now introduces the concept of "sheaves" for an opt-in, per-CPU and array-based caching layer for the SLUB kernel allocator. It looks like the sheaves patches are likely to be introduced for the Linux 6.18 kernel if no objections are raised.

SUSE engineer Vlastimil Babka has been leading the effort on "Sheaves" for the SLUB allocator code. He explained on the LKML mailing list patch series:

"This series adds an opt

A new AMD driver set to be introduced in the upcoming Linux 6.18 kernel cycle barring any last minute problems is a TRNG driver for Versal SoCs.

The AMD Versal Adaptive SoCs that serve a variety of use-cases and stem from their Xilinx acquisition will now have a true random number generator (TRNG) driver for the mainline kernel. The 400 some lines of C code provide a true RNG driver for AMD-Xilinx Versal SoCs with both true RNG and pseudo RNG capabilities.