Following the USB subsystem updates, Greg Kroah-Hartman sent in the kernel's staging area work for the Linux 4.19 merge window.

Having wrapped up his latest stable kernel wrangling and the fallout from L1TF/Foreshadow, Greg Kroah-Hartman got around today to sending out the feature pull requests for the kernel subsystems he oversees.

Greg Kroah-Hartman had a fun Friday night issuing new point releases to the Linux 3.18 / 4.4 / 4.9 / 4.14 / 4.17 / 4.18 kernels only to have to issue new point releases minutes later.

With the DRM feature work for Linux 4.19 now in the kernel, AMD's stellar open-source driver team has begun staging their work-in-progress changes for the AMDGPU Direct Rendering Manager driver for the next kernel cycle.

Last month I wrote about lazy TLB mode improvements on the way to the mainline kernel and this week the changes were indeed merged for the in-development Linux 4.19 kernel.

Linux stable maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman has released new updates across the Linux 4.18, 4.17, 4.14, 4.9, and 4.4 kernel channels to address the recently exposed L1 Terminal Fault "L1TF" / Foreshadow Meltdown-like CPU vulnerability affecting Intel processors.

In a controversial move, the Linux kernel will be pushing the question off to distribution vendors on whether to put trust in CPU hardware random number generators.

Here is a look at some of the smaller features landing in the Linux 4.19 kernel this week in a variety of different subsystems.

One of the student summer coding projects that ended up being a cross between Google Summer of Code (GSoC) and Outreachy was the VKMS driver to provide a virtual KMS implementation for headless systems and other interesting use-cases.

The Linux kernel's crypto subsystem updates were sent out today with its new feature work for the Linux 4.19 kernel. One change we were curious to see was whether they were going to nuke the Speck cipher code, but they did not.

David Airlie has submitted the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) updates for the Linux 4.19 kernel merge window with these various open-source graphics/display driver updates.

David Miller sent in the networking subsystem updates today for the Linux 4.19 kernel merge window.

Intel's Rafael Wysocki has submitted the ACPI and power management updates today for the Linux 4.19 kernel which were subsequently merged by Linus Torvalds.

"The Speck [Spectre slang, not to be confused with the controversial NSA algo] brigade sadly provides yet another large set of patches destroying the perfomance which we carefully built and preserved," began the latest x86/pti pull request by kernel maintainer Thomas Gleixner.

SUSE's Takashi Iwai sent in the pull request this morning of the sound subsystem updates for the Linux 4.19 kernel and it includes a lot of new hardware support and other improvements for Linux's audio capabilities.

Linus Torvalds has merged a rather significant set of patches for improving the CIFS/SMB3 support in the mainline kernel.

As expected, Linux 4.19 is getting STACKLEAK as a GCC plug-in for the Linux kernel that will fend off various form of stack attacks.

Matthew Wilcox who most recently has been employed by Microsoft is looking to get the new XArray data structure added to the Linux 4.19 kernel.

The IBM System/390 "s390" architecture code has seen a number of improvements for Linux 4.19.

Following the one week setback, the Linux 4.18 kernel is now officially available just a little more than two months since the cycle officially began.

Hardware support improvements coming for Linux 4.19 aren't limited to the x86 space but a lot of new ARM hardware support is also being introduced in this imminent kernel cycle.

While a bit late, Freedreno lead developer Rob Clark is hoping to see the Qualcomm Adreno 600 series bring-up happen for the Linux 4.19 kernel cycle.

While the Microsoft Xbox One S Controller has been supported under Linux for a while now, its rumble mode has not been supported by the mainline Linux kernel. That's now in the process of changing with the upstreaming of up until now out-of-tree patches.

It's been a while since having any advancements to report on the live kernel patching front for being able to deploy primarily Linux kernel security fixes without having to reboot the system. There is some new progress on that front to report on now and that is the 64-bit ARM (ARM64/AArch64) support getting squared away.

At the end of July I outlined some of the changes queued for Linux 4.19 while since then several more notable additions have become aligned for this next kernel cycle following the one week delay of Linux 4.18.

The x86 platform drivers area of the Linux kernel is ready for the 4.19 kernel cycle to get underway next week.

The latest high profile Linux kernel vulnerability has been dubbed "SegmentSmack" and could result in a remote denial of service attack.

Following a one week delay, the Linux 4.18 kernel is set to be released this coming weekend. In case you forgot about the new features and improvements since the Linux 4.18 cycle kicked off back in June, here's a look back at some of the most prominent additions for this latest kernel version.

Now that Google will not be using the Speck crypto code for disk encryption on low-end Android devices but instead developing "HPolyC" as outlined in the aforelinked article, a plea has already been submitted to remove the current Speck code from the mainline Linux kernel.

Another security hardening measure coming to the Linux kernel is STACKLEAK.