Wayland developers have prepared the release of Weston 16.0 Alpha 1 for this reference Wayland compositor with new features.

Weston 16.0 has been making more progress on its high dynamic range (HDR) display support and color management handling. Weston's DRM back-end now supports the "color format" DRM connector property, there is a grayscale output color effect added to Weston, color pipelines support is added to the DRM back-end, various color transform additions, and a number of other color

Yet another performance optimization merged for the in-development Linux 7.2 kernel is improving the speed of anon_pipe_write, the kernel function used for writing data into anonymous/unnamed pipes such as when using shell pipelines or standard streams from applications.

Breno Leitao of Meta was profiling some of their caching code and found pipe to mutex contention in a hot path, which is now resolved by the newly-merged code to pre-allocate outside the lock for avoiding contention.

In the VFS misc pull request that

Intel's open-source Compute Runtime stack for OpenCL and oneAPI Level Zero on their graphics processors has been bringing up Nova Lake support since January . With today's release of the Intel Compute Runtime 26.22.38646.4, the Nova Lake Xe3P support has matured to the state of it being advertised now as under an "early support" status.

The Intel Compute Runtime 26.22.38646.4 release today adds Nova

A patch series merged for the Linux 7.2 kernel addresses a race condition that can occur when a container is exiting yielding " VFS: Busy inodes after unmount " messages and a possible user-after-free condition. But the patch series also goes further and delivers a very nice optimization to lower the container unmounting latency for environments with heavy I/O load.

Alibaba engineer Baokun Li tracked down the possible race condition when a container exits and addressed it with the now-merged patch. That portion of the work

Merged as part of the many VFS changes for Linux 7.2 is the new OPENAT2_REGULAR flag for the openat2 system call . This can be used to limit programs to only open regular file-systems and avoid accidentally or intentionally opening up device files or other non-conventional data files on the file-system.

OPENAT2_REGULAR can be used with Linux 7.2+ for user-space programs wanting to only interact with regular files on the file-system and avoid opening up device nodes

Following last week's Wine 11.11 release that brought alpha modifier support for opacity handling with the Wine Wayland driver, merged this week to Wine is support for fractional scaling with the Wine Wayland driver.

Wine's native Wayland driver now supports fractional scaling! Now for those using this is a nicer UI scaling experience than going through XWayland with today's high resolution displays. The fractional scaling support for winewayland.drv was implemented by Etaash Mathamsetty and is now merged ahead of next week's Wine

The x86/cpu changes have been merged for the Linux 7.2 kernel with an interesting span of changes covering 36 years from the Intel 486 days up to adding the new "rugged" Panther Lake variant.

In Linux 7.1 the Intel 486 CPU support was retired and began to see the code removed. That removal process is continuing for Linux 7.2 with AMD Elan drivers being removed alongside various other Intel/AMD i486 code remnants in the kernel.

The XFS file-system updates for the Linux 7.2 kernel aren't too notable with the exception of its zone allocator being promoted from behind its previously-experimental flag.

The XFS zone allocator is used for supporting zoned storage devices like shingled magnetic recording (SMR) and zoned namespace (ZNS) SSDs where writes must be done sequentially from start to finish. The XFS zone allocator has been part of the kernel for a while to comply with the zoned device constraints while now for Linux 7.2 it'