Currently measuring in at 32 patches, SUSE engineer Juergen Gross has been leading the effort to end the Linux kernel's usage of their 32-bit model specific register (MSR) interfaces so the more modern 64-bit interfaces can be exclusively used. This allows for better code unification and cleaning up the MSR code.

Eliminating usage of the 32-bit MSR interfaces with the likes of rdmsr() and rdmsr_safe() is being done since the 64-bit interfaces like rdmsrq

The ReactOS project that is striving to be the "open-source Windows" with Windows driver and software binary compatibility hit another milestone today. ReactOS to date has primarily targeted Windows NT 5.2 as the architecture from Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 but with an eye toward Windows NT 6.0 for Windows Vista and later compatibility with software. ReactOS has now landed their first NT6 system call.

This merge request now in the ReactOS tree implements the new NT6 processor functions. In turn this

A change proposal under consideration for Fedora Linux 45 would enable x86_64 Shadow Stack usage by default in the name of better security on modern Intel and AMD systems.

The change proposal is to enable Shadow Stack protection for applications/libraries compiled with GCC, LLVM Clang, or Rustc by default on x86_64. The dynamic linker or startic startup routines will activate Shadow Stack for any process where the binary and shared library dependencies are all built with Shadow Stack support present. Shadow Stacks

The EFS file-system was used for non-ISO9660 CD-ROMs and disk partitions on SGI IRIX before IRIX 6.0 switched over to XFS. Inside the Linux kernel has been a read-only EFS file-system driver without a maintainer for 20+ years while for Linux 7.3 it's expected to be removed.

Last month I wrote about a situation of someone stepping up wanting to maintain the EFS file-system driver but had only contributed basic compiler/bug fixes

When AI/LLM agents are used in the creation of Linux kernel patches, the policy for a while now has been that it should be specified using an "Assisted-by" tag as part of the patches/commits. But Linux kernel developers this week have been discussing whether to revise that policy or to potentially eliminate it.

Prominent Linux kernel developer Christian Brauner kicked the hornet's nest yesterday in starting a Linux kernel mailing list thread seeking to simplify the attribution of AI/LLM agents. Current Linux kernel documentation

The x86 Ecosystem Advisory Group led by Intel and AMD recently firmed up the AI Compute Extensions (ACE) specification for optimizing x86 for AI computation tasks around matrix multiplication and the like for machine learning workloads. The cross-vendor ACE extension is ultimately a successor to Intel's Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX). Posted to the GCC mailing list today by Intel engineers are the initial patches in preparing the compiler support for ACE.

Back in mid-June the x86 Ecosystem Advisory Group published the

One month ago we reported on YSERVER as a modern X11 server written in Rust with the help of Claude Code . Since then YSERVER has continued to advance in supporting more X11 functionality thanks to the help of Claude Code (AI) and out today is version 1.3 o this display server.

YSERVER developer Jos Dehaes wrote into Phoronix to share some of the recent features that landed in recent weeks, including FreeBSD support, Xinerama extension support, direct mode VT switching, display hotplug support, and more

A security disclosure has been made public today for a yet-to-be-patched arbitrary code execution vulnerability with the KDE Plasma desktop.

Open-source developer Kimiblock discovered an arbitrary code execution exploit for Plasma that can break sandboxes. The issue was reported to upstream KDE developers via their security email address and reportedly ignored and unpatched in the latest Plasma 6.7 desktop. Following the typical 90 day embargo, the exploit including proof-of-concept code has been published.