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When the New England Patriots traded defensive lineman Keion White to the San Francisco 49ers in late October, a pair of 2026 draft picks was involved: a sixth-rounder going back to the Patriots, and a seventh-rounder moving west alongside White.

That seventh-round choice was conditional, though, and has now transferred back to New England.

Lua, a lightweight, high-level scripting language designed for embedding into other applications, has just rolled out version 5.5.

One of the key additions is explicit global variable declarations, enabling developers to define globals more clearly and avoid common errors associated with implicit globals. In addition, variables in for-loops are now read-only, reducing unintended side effects in loop constructs.

Memory usage for arrays has been significantly optimized in Lua 5.5. According to devs, implementing more compact arrays reduces the memory footprint of large tables by approximately 60 percent, improving performance for data-intensive applications

Last week a request for comments (RFC) was issued around establishing an LLVM AI Tool Use Policy. The proposed policy would allow AI-assisted contributions to be made to this open-source compiler codebase but that there would need to be a "human in the loop" and the contributor versed enough to be able to answer questions during code review. Separately, yesterday a proposal was sent out for creating an AI-assisted fixer bot to help with Bazel build system breakage.

Last week's LLVM AI tool policy was brought up for discussion. AI-assisted contributions would be welcome as long as there is a human in the loop that understands the code and competent enough for answering any questions during the code review. Contributors should also be transparent if there are "substantial amounts" of tool-generated content. This pull request in turn is open on GitHub for adding their AI contribution policy to the LLVM documentation. That LLVM Ai tool policy remains under discussion.

As an end-of-year tradition at Phoronix for running a lot of year-over-year comparison performance benchmarks and other long-term performance evaluations, it's typically done on the higher-end hardware. That's done for a matter of time savings with maximum performance when running often 100~200+ benchmarks per article, the highest-end hardware typically being the most interesting in terms of features and capabilities, and more often than not getting flagship hardware review samples as opposed to the lower-end hardware. There have been benchmarks recently showing the big gains for AMD EPYC from a one year Linux LTS kernel upgrade, Intel Granite Rapids over the past year, and even the AMD Milan-X performance over the last four years, among other end-of-year 2025 articles. Today is a look at how the AMD Ryzen AI 5 "Krackan Point" CPU/iGPU performance has evolved simply over the last six months. It was a rather surprising twist how much better the Linux performance is over simply the past six months.

Arnd Bergmann began his 2025 Linux Plumbers Conference session on the future of 32-bit support in the Linux kernel by saying that it was to be a followup to his September talk on the same topic. The focus this time, though, was on the kernel's "high memory" abstraction, and when it could be removed. It seems that the kernel community will need to support 32-bit systems for some time yet, even if it might be possible to remove some functionality, including support for large amounts of memory on those systems, more quickly.

The high-memory problem

High memory, he began, is needed to support 32-bit systems with more than 768MB of installed physical memory with the default kernel configuration; it can enable the use of up to 16GB of physical memory. The high-memory abstraction, though, is a maintenance burden and "needs to die". Interested readers can learn more about high memory, why it is necessary, and how it works in this article.

For those currently owning an ASUS ROG MAXIMUS X HERO or ASUS Pro WS TRX50-SAGE WIFI A motherboard, Linux sensor monitoring support will be in place for the next kernel release.

The ROG MAXIMUS X HERO and Pro WS TRX50-SAGE WIFI A are the latest ASUS motherboards seeing hardware monitoring "HWMON" support exposed under Linux. The motherboard support is being added to the ASUS-EC-Sensors upstream open-source driver. Patches for the support have been queued to "hwmon-next" and thus these motherboards will be supported with the next kernel cycle, which depending upon how it plays out will either be called Linux 6.20 or Linux 7.0. As with other ASUS-EC-Sensors driver work, the new product support wasn't sadly carried out by ASUS engineers but rather the open-source community.

QEMU, a popular open-source machine emulator and virtualizer, has officially released version 10.2 (following a four-release candidate cycle) as the second point update to the 10.x series.

A notable change is a clarification of QEMU’s security policy. The project now explicitly defines which machine types fall under the “virtualization use case” when determining what qualifies as a security bug.

Several legacy components have been removed. The long-deprecated -old-param option is gone, and the Arm PXA CPU family has been fully removed.

QEMU, a popular open-source machine emulator and virtualizer, has officially released version 10.2 (following a four-release candidate cycle) as the second point update to the 10.x series.

A notable change is a clarification of QEMU’s security policy. The project now explicitly defines which machine types fall under the “virtualization use case” when determining what qualifies as a security bug.

Several legacy components have been removed. The long-deprecated -old-param option is gone, and the Arm PXA CPU family has been fully removed.

An interesting anecdote from this month's Linux Plumbers Conference in Tokyo is that Meta (Facebook) is using the Linux scheduler originally designed for the needs of Valve's Steam Deck... On Meta Servers. Meta has found that the scheduler can actually adapt and work very well on the hyperscaler's large servers.

SCX-LAVD as the Latency-criticality Aware Virtual Deadline scheduler has worked out very well for the needs of Valve's Steam Deck with similar or better performance than EEVDF. SCX-LAVD has been worked on by Linux consulting firm Igalia under contract for Valve. SCX-LAVD has also seen varying use by the CachyOS Handheld Edition, Bazzite, and other Linux gaming software initiatives.