Longtime Linux Kernel Engineer With 14 Years At Intel Is Now At Meta
29 July 2025 - Meta

Facebook's Meta already employs an all-star team of Linux kernel engineers and it doesn't appear that they are over in recruiting top-tier Linux kernel talent. One of Intel's senior Linux software engineers is now the latest high profile kernel developer onboard at Meta.

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Linux 6.17 Improves NUMA Locality For SMP Call Rather Than Deferring To Random CPU Core
29 July 2025 - smp_call_function_any

After all of these years of Linux dominating the high performance computing (HPC) space and other industries, one might think (most) all the interesting performance nuggets have been uncovered and well thought out and robust fallbacks in place across all important code paths. As we showcase almost each cycle, interesting new performance bits to be uncovered within the Linux kernel. For Linux 6.17 thanks to a NVIDIA engineer is applying a better fallback for NUMA locality rather than simply picking a random CPU core.

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Linux 6.17 Now Makes Multi-Core/SMP Support Unconditional
30 July 2025 - Always SMP

Earlier this year Linux kernel patches were posted for making SMP support unconditional so the kernel is always built for multi-core capabilities. With uniprocessor core environments being extremely rare especially for those that would be using an up-to-date, upstream Linux kernel, dropping non-SMP support would allow simplifying code paths within the kernel. Well, for Linux 6.17 it's finally happening.

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Linux's Lockdown LSM Back To Being Maintained For Restricted Computing
31 July 2025 - Linux Lockdown

Upstreamed to the Linux kernel back in 2019 was the Lockdown security module for opt-in hardware/kernel security restrictions. It was a difficult and contentious process getting to the Linux kernel but then was left without any formal maintainer shortly after being mainlined. Now for helping to renew this Linux security module, two developers have stepped up to takeover maintainership of Lockdown.

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Deferred Unwinder Code Upstreamed For Linux 6.17 On Road To SFrame Support
1 August 2025 - Deferred Unwinder

Linus Torvalds today merged the initial deferred unwinder infrastructure into the Linux 6.17 kernel on the path toward enabling SFrame stack trace format support.

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Linux 6.17 Memory Management Optimizations, DAMON_STAT & Other Improvements
2 August 2025 - Linux 6.17

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

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Intel QuickAssist Hit By Second Demotion In Linux 6.17 Due To Lack Of Kernel Benefit
3 August 2025 - Intel QuickAssist

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.

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Linux 6.17 Making Kdump Crash Kernel More Reliable, Less Wasted Memory
4 August 2025 - Linux 6.17 Kdump

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.

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Linux 6.17 Introduces hash_pointers= Boot Parameter
5 August 2025 - hash_pointers

Linus Torvalds yesterday merged a patch from SUSE's Petr Mladek introducing a new boot parameter option for the kernel to provide greater control over the behavior of hashing pointer values.

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GTK3 Version Of gconfig Merged For Linux 6.17
6 August 2025 - Linux 6.17 Kbuild

All of the Kbuild changes were merged today for the Linux 6.17 kernel. Most notable with the Kbuild changes is the gconfig graphical utility for configuring the Linux kernel configuration now being ported from GTK2 to GTK3.

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