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

As has been the trend with recent Linux kernel releases, a lot of Rust programming language abstractions and other additions are coming for the in-development Linux 6.17 kernel.

Miguel Ojeda sent out the main set of Rust changes today for Linux 6.17 and beyond that other Rust changes have been trickling in via the driver core area and various other subsystems seeing increasing work around allowing kernel drivers to be written in the Rust programming language as an alternative to C.

Rust changes for Linux 6.17

All of the memory management "MM" changes were merged this week for the ongoing Linux 6.17 merge window.

Among the memory management feature highlights for Linux 6.17 include:

- DAMON_STAT is merged as a new DAMON offering for simple and practical access monitoring designed for simpler setup and use within production environments.

- Optimizing mremap() for large folios yielded a 37% reduction in execution time for a memset+mremap+munmap benchmark.

- A new standalone notifier for NUMA node memory

Newelle is a virtual AI assistant developed for the GNOME desktop that supports voice chat and can handle carrying out web searches, terminal command execution, website reading, file management, document editing, and more. Newell v1.0 was released this week for advancing this GNOME AI virtual assistant.

Newelle supports interfacing with the Google Gemini API, the OpenAI API, Groq, and also local large language models (LLMs) or ollama instances for powering this AI assistant. There are a variety of settings too such as whether the

All of the HID subsystem device driver updates have been merged for the Linux 6.17 merge window.

First up, the HID updates for Linux 6.17 include enabling support for the Touch Bars on x86-based Apple MacBook Pros. In prior kernels there have been a lot of recent work around Touch Bar support under Linux for input and display, including for the newer Apple Silicon MacBooks while now for Linux 6.17 the HID input support for the aging x86 MacBook Pro laptops

FEX 2508 as the open-source emulator that allows running x86_64 Linux binaries on AArch64, including the likes of Wine and Valve's Steam Play, is boasting some "big juicy" optimizations with its new release. Many games are now significantly faster atop FEX.

FEX 2508 is much faster than prior releases thanks to just-in-time (JIT) optimizations. Cyberpunk 2077 is around 38% faster for its average FPS while

While Apple removed FireWire support from the upcoming macOS 26 "Tahoe" release, Linux support for the IEEE-1394 standard continues. With the in-development Linux 6.17 there is some modernization work on the FireWire subsystem code with plan still being to maintain FireWire support on Linux until at least 2029 .

Takashi Sakamoto as the developer who stepped up to maintain the FireWire subsystem for Linux two years ago has prepared a fresh round of patches for the next version of the Linux kernel

KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his weekly report on the interesting Plasma desktop changes for the week. This week a long-sought feature for the Plasma desktop was finally merged.

KDE Plasma 6.5 is able to automatically switch to a different Global Theme at night. There is now the ability with Plasma to automatically switch the desktop theme during day/night-time hours!

Back in February Steam on Linux was at a 1.45% marketshare , then was corrected to 2.33% for Linux gaming in March , 2.27% for April , a nice jump to 2.69% for Linux gaming in May , and June came in at 2.57% for the Linux gaming population as a percent of Steam users. The July numbers were published this evening and show a new recent high for Linux gamers.

The July 2025 results