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Greg Kroah-Hartman on Friday sent out all of the USB/Thunderbolt subsystem feature updates destined for the Linux 6.11 kernel of which there are many different patches across the board.

The USB subsystem pull has the usual wide variety of changes from new hardware support to other clean-ups and fixes/features.

• Enabling Cache-Coherent Interconnect (CCI) support for the AMD-Xilinx DWC3 controller.

• Thunderbolt now has sideband register access via DebugFS for debugging.

• Lenovo Yoga C630 driver and DeviceTree bindings for the embedded controller (EC).

• The USB gadget driver for MINI 2.0 support has fixed the incorrect default MIDI2 protocol setup.

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With Linux 6.11 support for the Lenovo Yoga Slim7x and ASUS Vivobook S15 are upstreamed for some of the first Qualcomm Snapdragon X1 Elite powered laptops.

But for follow-on kernel cycles you can expect yet more Snapdragon X1 Elite/Plus powered laptop support to appear with new DeviceTree additions.

On Friday, Linaro engineer Konrad Dybcio sent out the patches for enabling the X1 Elite powered Lenovo ThinkPad T14s Gen 6 laptop.

Friday saw the initial DeviceTree patches posted for enabling the Lenovo ThinkPad T14s Gen 6 to let it boot up under Linux rather than Microsoft Windows.

The three patches getting the ThinkPad T14s Gen 6 running under Linux have been successfully tested for input, NVMe, WiFi, USB-C ports, GPU, display, and DSPs.

The ThinkPad T14s Gen 6 is priced at around ~$1754 USD for boasting a 14-inch 1920 x 1200 display, X Elite X1E-78-100 SoC, 32GB of LPDDR5X memory, 1TB SSD, 1080p web camera, and a three year warranty.

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The SLAB pull request landed in Linux 6.11 Git on Thursday with kmem_buckets-based hardening of kernel memory allocations.

This hardening is the latest Linux security improvement addressed by Google’s Kees Cook.

This may very slightly increase memory fragmentation, though in practice it’s only a handful of extra pages since the bulk of user-controlled allocations are relatively long-lived."

Addressing these cases is limited in scope, so isolating these kinds of interfaces will not become an unbounded game of whack-a-mole.

Note that these caches are specifically flagged with SLAB_NO_MERGE, since merging would defeat the entire purpose of the mitigation.

This dedicated bucket allocator landed in the Linux 6.11 kernel yesterday via the SLAB pull request.

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With the maturity of the EXT4 file-system it’s not too often seeing any huge feature additions for this commonly used Linux file-system but there’s still the occasional wild performance optimization to uncover… With Linux 6.11 the EXT4 file-system can see upwards of a 20% performance boost in some scenarios.

Ted Ts’o sent out the EXT4 updates today for Linux 6.11.

He explained in that pull request: "Many cleanups and bug fixes in ext4, especially for the fast commit feature.

Up to 20% faster for fast devices using async direct I/O thanks to JBD2 optimizations.

Indeed the patch from Huawei’s Zhang Yi to speed up jbd2_transaction_committed() shows off some great improvements:

It’s great continuing to see EXT4 uncover new performance optimizations.

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Wlroots 0.18 recently debuted as the newest version of this Wayland library born out of the Sway compositor project.

With wlroots 0.18 is support for new Wayland protocols and other exciting features.

New protocols enabled by wlroots 0.18 include linux-drm-syncobj-v1 for explicit synchronization, alpha-modifier-v1 for alpha channel support on surfaces, ext-foreign-toplevel-list-v1 as a protocol for taskbars and app switchers, and ext-transient-seat-v1 for better handling VNC/remote use-cases.

There is also a new stateless render API for reading back pixel buffers from the GPU.

Overall the wlroots 0.18 feature update is a very exciting release with all the new functionality included for Wayland compositors leveraging this open-source library.

Downloads and more details on the wlroots 0.18 release via FreeDesktop.org GitLab.

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True, the Linux Foundation events all now come with child support for young parents, but my expert guestimate is the average age is still well into the 30s.

More specifically, the Cloud Native Computing Foundations (CNCF)'s KubeCons have many tracks for people who want to learn the ins and outs of Kubernetes and other cloud-native programs.

The OSPO for Good conference proposed solutions that have been suggested before, such as hackathons, to engage young developers in open source coding.

As David Nalley, president of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) and director of open source strategy at Amazon Web Services (AWS), said at the conference: "Getting people to maintain old code isn’t easy.

… I thought if I could hold on just a bit longer, I could help maintain the focus on long term development to improve the user experience.

She also runs the LFX Mentorship program, which seeks to sponsor and train the next generation of open source developers and leaders.

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System76 continues working vigorously on COSMIC, their Rust-written Linux desktop environment being written for Pop!_OS and to see availability on other Linux distributions as well.

They are finishing up last minute changes before putting the flag on a COSMIC alpha release.

System76 began their latest status update by noting there are around 20 issues to be resolved before issuing the COSMIC alpha release.

The hope remains that the COSMIC alpha version will be out before the end of July.

• COSMIC’s Input Settings has seen completed support for customizable shortcuts.

• Compositor multi-threading by having cosmic-comp use multiple threads that can be particularly helpful for high refresh rate displays and multi-monitor setups.

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Due to the ARM64 maintainer for the Linux kernel going on holiday, the ARM64 port updates have been submitted ahead of the opening of the Linux 6.11 merge window that will likely be on Monday or otherwise the following week depending upon if a 6.10-rc8 is warranted.

When it comes to the ARM64 (AArch64) changes for this next kernel version, there’s been a lot of work on virtual CPU hotplug handling so that it should now be properly working on ARM64 ACPI-enabled systems.

Another change with Linux 6.11 ARM64 is expanding the speculative SSBS workaround to more CPU cores.

Arm’s Speculative Store Bypass handling is now being extended for additional affected CPU cores of he A710, A720, X2, X3, X925, N2, and V2.

There are also ARM64 ACPI updates, GICv3 optimizations, perf updates for more hardware, and other smaller changes.

See this merge request for all the ARM64 feature patches slated for Linux 6.11.

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Fedora Workstation 41 has been granted approval for its installation media (ISOs) to ship with only Wayland GNOME support with the X11 support removed.

First things first, the GNOME X11 support will remain available in the Fedora 41 package archive.

This newly-approved change proposal is around the (GNOME) Fedora Workstation installation media that the GNOME X11 packages will be removed to make it a Wayland-only desktop out-of-the-box.

All of the GNOME X11 packages will remain available in the repositories but not be pre-installed anymore.

This change will also not impact those upgrading from prior Fedora Linux releases where the X11 session support is available by default.

This Fedora 41 change proposal goes along with GNOME’s upstream focus to ultimately deprecate and eventually remove X11 session support.

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Going back to the original AMD Ryzen Threadripper processors, Linux has long possessed a performance lead over Microsoft Windows.

With Linux typically being the dominant OS of HPC systems and other large core count servers, the Linux kernel scheduler has coped better than various flavors of Windows when dealing with high core count processors.

Ubuntu 23.10 was run for providing a clean, out-of-the-box look at this common desktop/workstation Linux distribution.

The HP Z6 G5 A for all testing was configured with the Ryzen Threadripper PRO 7995WX at default frequencies, 8 x 16GB DDR5-5200 Hynix RDIMMs, Samsung MZVL21T0HCLR-00BH1 NVMe SSD, NVIDIA GeForce RTX A4000 16GB graphics.

A full review on the HP Z6 G5 A Threadripper workstation will be published in a separate article on Phoronix in early December.

From there the up-to-date Windows 11 Pro Build 22631 (H2’23) was tested against Ubuntu 23.10 with its stable release updates.

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As part of the memory management changes expected to be merged for the upcoming Linux 6.11 cycle is allowing more fine-tuned control over the swappiness setting used to determine how aggressively pages are swapped out of physical system memory and into the on-disk swap space.

This effectively allows more finer-grained control over the swapiness behavior without overriding the global swappiness setting.

Dan Schatzberg of Meta explains in the patch adding swappiness= support to memory.reclaim: Allow proactive reclaimers to submit an additional swappiness=[val] argument to memory.reclaim.

However, proactive reclaim runs continuously and so its impact on SSD write endurance is more significant.

Therefore, it’s desireable to have proactive reclaim reduce or stop swap-out before the threshold at which OOM killing occurs.

This has been in production for nearly two years and has addressed our needs to control proactive vs reactive reclaim behavior but is still not ideal for a number of reasons:

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This is the best summary I could come up with:

As part of the memory management changes expected to be merged for the upcoming Linux 6.11 cycle is allowing more fine-tuned control over the swappiness setting used to determine how aggressively pages are swapped out of physical system memory and into the on-disk swap space.

This effectively allows more finer-grained control over the swapiness behavior without overriding the global swappiness setting.

Dan Schatzberg of Meta explains in the patch adding swappiness= support to memory.reclaim: Allow proactive reclaimers to submit an additional swappiness=[val] argument to memory.reclaim.

However, proactive reclaim runs continuously and so its impact on SSD write endurance is more significant.

Therefore, it’s desireable to have proactive reclaim reduce or stop swap-out before the threshold at which OOM killing occurs.

This has been in production for nearly two years and has addressed our needs to control proactive vs reactive reclaim behavior but is still not ideal for a number of reasons:

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A change proposal has been filed by Red Hat engineer Miro Hrončok for retiring Python 2.7 within Fedora 41 and to drop packages still depending upon Python 2.

We do not wish to simply orphan the package, as we are afraid it would not receive proper care if taken by somebody else.

If there are potential maintainers interested in maintaining Python 2 in Fedora beyond Fedora 41, they can talk to us and demonstrate their ability and will to take care of Python 2 by joining the maintenance early.

Users who need to run their application in Python 2 should do so on a platform that offers support for it.

Developers who still need to test their software on Python 2 can use containers with older Fedora releases or unsupported CentOS/RHEL versions."

The F41 change proposal still needs the approval of the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo), but it will presumably proceed – well, assuming GIMP 3.0 finally releases this summer so as to not block the Python 2.7 removal.

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PipeWire 1.2 was christened today as the latest major feature update to this solution common to the modern Linux desktop for managing audio/video streams.

The just-released PipeWire 1.2 announcement sums up the major changes in this new version as: - Support for asynchronous processing has been implemented.

This adds one cycle of latency but it can avoid having some nodes blocking the processing graph.

Non realtime streams and filters now also use this asynchronous processing instead of their own slightly broken version.

One use case is the explicit sync support that requires 2 extra fds for the timelines.

• The log levels in the pulse server can be dynamically changed with a /core message.

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The DRM Panic handler in Linux 6.10 that is used for presenting a visual error message in case of kernel panics and similar when CONFIG_VT is disabled continues seeing new features.

With Linux 6.11, the DRM Panic display can now handle monochrome logos.

With the code in Linux 6.10 when DRM Panic is triggered, an ASCII art version of Linux’s mascot, Tux the penguin, is rendered as part of the display.

If ASCII art on error messages doesn’t satisfy your tastes in 2024+, the DRM Panic code will be able to support a monochrome graphical logo that leverages the Linux kernel’s boot-up logo support.

This monochrome logo support in the DRM Panic handler was sent out as part of this week’s drm-misc-next pull request ahead of the Linux 6.11 merge window in July.

This week’s drm-misc-next material also includes TTM memory management improvements, various fixes to the smaller Direct Rendering Manager drivers, and also the previously talked about monochrome TV support for the Raspberry Pi.

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Last week the GNOME 47 development code saw Wayland DRM lease protocol support for enhancing VR headset handling and separately was also accent color support for GNOME Shell.

Adding to the recent slew of changes landing for GNOME 47, the GNOME Shell and Mutter code can now be successfully compiled – optionally – without any X11 support or requiring any X11 build dependencies.

For those wanting to build a Wayland-only Linux desktop experience without carrying any aging X11 baggage, GNOME 47 will be able to optionally offer Wayland-only support without carrying X11/X.Org support.

That landed today along with this GNOME Shell merge request for being able to disable X11 support too.

In turn this closes a two year old issue tracker over making X11 dependencies optional on GNOME.

GNOME 47 is shaping up to be a very exciting desktop update due for release in September and will be found with the likes of Fedora 41 and Ubuntu 24.10.

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The next big stable update to the NVIDIA proprietary driver for Linux with version 555.58 bringing Wayland Explicit Sync.

Fixed a bug that could cause the X server to crash when graphics applications requested single-buffered drawables while certain features (such as Vulkan sharpening) are enabled.

Removed support for Base Mosaic on GeForce, which was previously available only on select GPU boards with some motherboards, and limited to five display devices.

Fixed a bug that caused “Failed to apply atomic modeset” and “Flip event timeout” messages to be printed to the system log when a DRM client such as ddcutil drops “master” permissions while a framebuffer console is being initialized.

This presentation mode instructs the compositors not to wait for a vertical blanking period to update the application’s surface content, which may result in tearing.

Fixed a regression that led to Xid errors when loading the NVIDIA driver on some notebook systems with RTX 4xxx series GPUs.

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At any good conference, the “corridor track” is always a highlight and one of the experiences that virtual events so far haven’t managed to reproduce.

At this year’s DevConf.cz, the undoubted highlight of the corridor track for The Reg FOSS desk was meeting the Furi Labs team on its conference stand for its new Debian-based handset.

Mainstream phones are of course much more capable, faster, and far cheaper, but there are penalties in terms of privacy, control, ownership of your data, and so on.

It’s not the only such effort, and Furi Labs started out as an offshoot of the Droidian project to create a version of Debian for mobiles.

The Hong Kong-based company is working with a Chinese OEM to make sure that there are native Linux drivers for all the device’s hardware.

CEO Bardia Moshiri proudly told us that the FLX1 we tried has Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth, all cameras, GPS and so on, all working.

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System76 are making a bit of a splash today, ahead of the Alpha release of their new desktop environment named COSMIC.

They told me that COSMIC is still planned to have an Alpha release in late July, although that’s still just an estimate it could be pushed back if there’s issues.

The open-ended ‘O’ logo mark not only represents a display, but also signifies an unwavering commitment to open source, an invitation for community, and vast possibility through customization.

Beneath it, the System76 blip in an orange-red gradient resembles a keyboard with customized LEDs, representing what’s possible with COSMIC.

COSMIC offers the freedom to put your best foot forward across workflow, navigation, theming, updates, security — and stability, thanks to its memory-safe Rust code.

On top of that, they’ve revealed the COSMIC Freedom Sale where you can get some big discounts on Desktops, Laptops, and Keyboards.

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With the recently released KDE Plasma 6.1 desktop environment, those still relying on old Intel integrated graphics should have a much more pleasant experience thanks to improvements made to the KWin compositor.

For very old Intel integrated graphics, it can effectively be a night and day difference upgrading to the new Plasma 6.1 desktop.

The biggest improvement to bettering the KDE Plasma desktop graphics performance is thanks to dynamic triple buffering support.

It’s not just old or slow processors that benefit though, I also tested this on a laptop with an integrated Intel and a dedicated NVidia GPU.

Triple buffering can’t do magic, but KWin now at least reaches around 100-120fps on that setup, which is likely the best that can be done until the driver issue is resolved and feels a lot smoother already."

Those wanting to learn more about this improvement to KDE Plasma on old graphics hardware can visit Xaver’s blog for all the details.

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