> If your Linux laptop doubles as a music player, another nice new feature is that you can now stream your audio over USB even while the rest of your system is asleep. That capability's been available in Android for a while, but now it's part of mainline Linux.
How does that work? You still need some program to actually play the music (mpv, Sotify, whatnot)? Or what am I misunderstanding? Unfortunately there are no details in the article, and an interwebz search doesn't really show anything.
> If your Linux laptop doubles as a music player, another nice new feature is that you can now stream your audio over USB even while the rest of your system is asleep. That capability's been available in Android for a while, but now it's part of mainline Linux.
I thought Android did that by just turning off all but one CPU core and suspend all processes not required for streaming + bluetooth?
I really can't imagine how else that would work, other than essentially giving the whole audio file to the Bluetooth chip and let it handle streaming on its own... but I've never heard of a Bluetooth chipset capable of that, much less bluez actually being usable enough.
The term "pull request" comes from "git request-pull" which is the tool used by kernel subsystem maintainers to send emails to Linus to request he git pull from their branches (and merge them). This usage long predates the somewhat unrelated "pull request" feature of source forges (like GitHub) and is not confusing to kernel developers (the target audience of Linus's email).
The analogy to GitHub-like "pull requests" in the kernel workflow is "git send-email" (or "b4 send" nowadays) which sends patch series as individual emails that can be reviewed inline as a plain-text email and are applied onto maintainers' trees (usually with something akin to "git cherry-pick"). I still find this system to be a superior method to GitHub's "pull requests" (you can send review comments to commit descriptions -- which I believe Gerrit supports, but GitHub definitely doesn't -- and everything is sanely threaded since it's all email).
Here's an example pull request email from the start of the week[1], containing some VFS changes to be included in 6.17-rc1.
Neat to see zero-copy networking get TX, after RX shipped a while ago. Good stuff. I wonder how it overlaps-with/interacts with the various kernel offloads? I forget if this is TCP only or UDP too: would be really nice with QUIC / HTTP3 to see more love for UDP. https://www.phoronix.com/news/Device-Memory-TCP-TX-Linux-6.1...
The filesystem Folio work has been yielding such amazing results. In general I'm just so impressed how much the storage subsystems keep improving! IO_Uring has totally changed the game in terms of iops delivered just on it's own. But then the various filesystems & upper level multi-queue support have also been consistently finding really nice wins. Folios have been incredible! https://lwn.net/Articles/1015320/
EROFS added compressed metadata support, which is showing a 2.5X win for readdir(3) (reading files from a directory). Given it's use in awesome works like composefs for next-gen & content-addressed based container overlay type systems, this is a nice win. https://github.com/composefs/composefs
> Perhaps the most popular Linux file system, Ext4, is also getting many improvements. These boosts include faster commit paths, large folio support, and atomic multi-fsblock writes for bigalloc filesystems. What these improvements mean, if you're not a file-system nerd, is that we should see speedups of up to 37% for sequential I/O workloads.
> For starters, Linux now supports Intel Advanced Performance Extensions (APX). [...] This improvement means you'll see increased performance from next-generation Intel CPUs, such as the Lunar Lake processors and the Granite Rapids Xeon processors.
This isn't actually right, is it? APX hasn't been released, to my knowledge.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 35.0 ms ] threadLooking forward to this release once it hits NixOS Unstable.
How does that work? You still need some program to actually play the music (mpv, Sotify, whatnot)? Or what am I misunderstanding? Unfortunately there are no details in the article, and an interwebz search doesn't really show anything.
I thought Android did that by just turning off all but one CPU core and suspend all processes not required for streaming + bluetooth?
I really can't imagine how else that would work, other than essentially giving the whole audio file to the Bluetooth chip and let it handle streaming on its own... but I've never heard of a Bluetooth chipset capable of that, much less bluez actually being usable enough.
If the latter, why would they say pull request?
The analogy to GitHub-like "pull requests" in the kernel workflow is "git send-email" (or "b4 send" nowadays) which sends patch series as individual emails that can be reviewed inline as a plain-text email and are applied onto maintainers' trees (usually with something akin to "git cherry-pick"). I still find this system to be a superior method to GitHub's "pull requests" (you can send review comments to commit descriptions -- which I believe Gerrit supports, but GitHub definitely doesn't -- and everything is sanely threaded since it's all email).
Here's an example pull request email from the start of the week[1], containing some VFS changes to be included in 6.17-rc1.
[1]: https://lore.kernel.org/all/20250725-vfs-misc-599b4aef8eaa@b...
The filesystem Folio work has been yielding such amazing results. In general I'm just so impressed how much the storage subsystems keep improving! IO_Uring has totally changed the game in terms of iops delivered just on it's own. But then the various filesystems & upper level multi-queue support have also been consistently finding really nice wins. Folios have been incredible! https://lwn.net/Articles/1015320/
EROFS added compressed metadata support, which is showing a 2.5X win for readdir(3) (reading files from a directory). Given it's use in awesome works like composefs for next-gen & content-addressed based container overlay type systems, this is a nice win. https://github.com/composefs/composefs
Probably my favorite new feature is AMDGPU user queue (userq) work. Rather than the driver having to build out all the future work, now userspace can directly build the work of stuff to be done, sprinkling in various fences and what not. Some very interesting potential for GPGPU & perhaps ML! https://www.phoronix.com/news/Mesa-25.2-High-Priority-USERQ https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.16-AMDGPU-User-Queues
The Kernel Newbies release log is one of my favorite things to read through. It wasn't bursting-at-the-seams with awesome as you sometimes get with releases, but 6.16 was still very fun. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44717122 https://kernelnewbies.org/Linux_6.16
nice to see ext4 still getting improvements
This isn't actually right, is it? APX hasn't been released, to my knowledge.