The upcoming Linux 6.18 kernel cycle will present better support for Xiaomi Redmibook laptops thanks to a WMI driver being queued into the x86 platform drivers "-next" branch for providing better handling of the keyboards found with these laptops.

The "redmi-wmi" driver is set to premiere in Linux 6.18 behind the REDMI_WMI build option as a new WMI driver for Redmibook keyboards.

This driver enables WMI-based hotkey events to properly trigger under Linux with the Xiaomi Redmibook laptops.

Back in May was the surprise but welcoming decision out of AMD that they would begin officially supporting the Mesa Vulkan driver (RADV) and that their proprietary OpenGL and Vulkan drivers would no longer be included in their Radeon Software for Linux releases. This indeed appears to have effectively spelled the end to their AMDVLK driver with Mesa's RADV taking the cake.

Last month's Radeon Software for Linux 25.10.2.1 further reinforced that the Radeon driver's future is with Mesa Vulkan and OpenGL

Linux Kernel Runtime Guard 1.0 has been released. LKRG is a project providing runtime integrity checking of the Linux kernel and is able to detect security vulnerability exploits against the running kernel.

After seven years in development, the developers behind the Linux Kernel Runtime Guard were finally comfortable declaring their "1.0" release this week. It's been several years since we last covered this open-source project working to provide better runtime security for Linux and in the past also benchmarked the overhead of LKRG . As a

As of today in Mesa 25.3-devel Git, the Intel "ANV" open-source Vulkan driver for Linux systems is finally exposing the VK_EXT_shader_object extension.

VK_EXT_shader_object was introduced in March 2023 with Vulkan 1.3.246 after being worked on by a variety of companies. VK_EXT_shader_object adds a new shader object type to represent a single compiled shader stage. The Vulkan shader objects are intended

As part of the Rust DRM drivers now having their own development tree , sent out today was the first pull request from the drm-rust-fixes branch.

The first batch of changes from the drm-rust-fixes branch for the Linux 6.17 kernel include one item worth highlighting: the open-source NVIDIA "Nova" driver now is explicitly requiring 64-bit kernels for building and using the driver. In reality this shouldn't impact any users with real-world workflows. The Nova

Linux kernel patches for supporting RISC-V's Zalasr ISA extension are now under review. This extension provides "real" load acquire/store release instructions for RISC-V processors.

Zalasr provides atomic Load-Acquire Store-Release support. Its v0.9 ISA spec was finalized two months ago and its public review period wrapped up in August.

Given the freshness of the Zalasr ISA exntesion, the Linux kernel support patches have so far only been tested with a patched version of QEMU providing its emulated Zalasr support

GCC's --param lto-partitions= compiler flag is used for controlling the number of partitions used during Link Time Optimization (LTO). It had defaulted to 128 for a number of years but given today's rising core counts especially for servers and HEDT/workstation processors, that default partition count is being quadrupled.

GNU Compiler Collection developer Jan Hubicka has raised the default LTO partition size for next year's GCC 16 compiler release. Users can easily override the value via the --

In addition to the SR-IOV work for the Intel Xe driver that landed in Linux 6.17 with a focus on Battlemage, additional SR-IOV work is coming for the Linux 6.18 cycle. Plus a variety of other Intel Xe kernel graphics driver changes too.

Sent out a few days ago was the initial batch of Intel Xe kernel graphics driver changes intended for Linux 6.18. The v6.18 merge window should be open by early October and the stable release then