Google Chrome/Chromium is preparing to ship with "--ozone-platform-hint=auto" functionality by default so the web browser will play nicer out-of-the-box with Wayland.

This change recently landed within the Chromium codebase for setting the "OverrideDefaultOzonePlatformHintToAuto" feature by default which sets the Ozone platform hint to auto "--ozone-platform-hint=auto" by default if not specified. This will allow Wayland by default in Chrome development builds as an experiment.

This change was tried

In addition to the many MM changes merged this weekend for Linux 6.17, Andrew Morton on Sunday also sent out his "non-MM" pull request for this new kernel. Notable there is improving the Kdump code to allow for crash kernel reservation made from the contiguous memory allocator to help yield less wasted RAM and greater reliability.

The patches merged for Linux 6.17 allow for the Kdump crashkernel reservation from CMA to be dynamically allocated rather than currently relying on static allocation. Jiri Bohac of SUSE explained

Along with the release of the Mutter 49 beta , GNOME Shell 49 beta was released on Sunday in preparation for the imminent GNOME 49 beta release. Notable here is long sought after support for having the ability to restart or shutdown the computer from GNOME's lock screen.

Since 2019 has been a bug report to allow for power controls from the GNOME lock screen to be able to shutdown or restart the computer if desired without needing to first log-in. Only now with GNOME 49

NetBSD 11.0 release preparations have begun. The NetBSD developers are hoping to officially release NetBSD 11.0 in October and for that to happen the release candidate would be out in September and daily beta builds can already be tested.

NetBSD 11.0 release work has started with this update bringing many enhancements to its Linux emulation support, a lot of enhancements to its RISC-V architecture port, up-to-date X.Org components, PVH boot on x86 is now supported with

The GNOME 49 Mutter beta release is now available for testing ahead of the stable release of GNOME 49 coming up In September.

The Mutter 49.beta compositor has re-introduced snippet caching support, fixes drag-n-drop for X11 clients using a tablet stylus, respects implicit grabs for pop-up surfaces, fixes a possible crash, and has several Wayland fixes.

Wayland changes in Mutter 49 beta include implementing the wl_fixes interface, creating a MetaWaylandClient for every Wayland client (

A few days ago the Intel QuickAssist "QAT" accelerators were demoted by FSCRYPT in the Linux 6.17 development code due to being slow and bug prone with AVX-512 showing to be much faster than leveraging the QAT accelerators in this file encryption framework. With the Linux 6.17 crypto subsystem is a second separate demotion to Intel's QAT support for kernel use.

The Intel QAT crypto driver has lowered the priority for QAT usage with the SKCIPHER and AEAD algorithms for lack of benefit with

Earlier this year there was talk of Linux potentially dropping its Apple HFS and HFS+ file-system drivers as they had been orphaned for a decade and proving to be a maintenance burden. Following that some developers stepped up to better maintain the code for HFS and HFS+ file-system support. In Linux 6.17 we are seeing some of the fruits of that work.

A handful of open-source developers have submitted HFS/HFS+ improvements/fixes that are now part of the Linux 6.1

For those shopping for a high-end desktop power supply for use under Linux and interested in being able to take advantage of sensor monitoring capabilities, the 2025 edition of the Corsair HX1200i PSU can now enjoy working sensor monitoring under Linux.

Developed back in 2020 was the corsair-psu open-source driver that allows for power supply monitoring under Linux for the company's higher-end PSUs sporting the "Corsair LINK" USB-based interface. That driver was

The Compute Express Link code changes landed this weekend for the Linux 6.17 kernel with development continuing to be quite active around this subsystem for supporting latest and next-generation servers.

The CXL code within the Linux kernel continues to be cleaned up and further extended for supporting the various features provided by the CXL specification. In the Linux 6.17 kernel the CXL code adds new ACQUIRE and ACQUIRE_ERR macros to help clean-up some of their conditional locking code and also easing some of the coding pain