A set of experimental patches were sent out on Wednesday for implementing a time namespace within the kernel, part of an effort that's been going on for more than a decade around time virtualization.

WireGuard lead developer Jason Donenfeld sent out the fifth revision of the WireGuard and Zinc crypto library patches this week. They've been coming in frequently with a lot of changes with it looking like this "secure VPN tunnel" could reach the Linux 4.20~5.0 kernel.

Prior to releasing Linux 4.19-rc4 and Linus Torvalds taking a temporary leave of absence to reflect on his behavior / colorful language, he did apply a Code of Conduct to the Linux kernel.

Linux 4.19-rc4 is out today as the very latest weekly development test kernel for Linux 4.19. It's another fairly routine kernel update at this stage, but more shocking is that Linus Torvalds will be taking a temporary leave from kernel maintainership and Greg Kroah-Hartman will take over the rest of the Linux 4.19 cycle.

After writing yesterday about kernel contributions of AMD vs. NVIDIA vs. Intel, I kicked off the hours-long process of gitstats analyzing the Linux kernel Git repository for some fresh numbers on the current kernel development trends.

The latest revised patches were sent out on Friday evening for WireGuard, the very promising secure VPN tunnel technology developed over the past few years by Jason Donenfeld.

One of the notable additions to the Linux 4.19 kernel is the initial VKMS driver for "virtual kernel mode-setting" that in the long run should be significant for headless Wayland/X.Org systems. The driver is still in its early stages but continuing to be improved.

Linus Torvalds has done his usual Sunday evening release dance in issuing the latest test release of the upcoming kernel, Linux 4.19.

On Intel systems affected by the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities, another minor optimization is on its way to the Linux kernel to ever so slightly lower the impact of the kernel-based page table isolation (PTI) mitigation.

An Amazon developer working on the Linux kernel has posted perhaps their largest feature patch-set for the kernel: implementing co-scheduling support for the Completely Fair Scheduler (CFS).

Another drm-misc-next pull request was sent in Wednesday with new feature material slated for the Linux 4.20~5.0 kernel release by way of DRM-Next.

Greg Kroah-Hartman has rolled out a batch of stable kernel updates today including Linux 3.18.121, 4.4.154, 4.9.125, 4.14.68, and 4.18.6.

While Google got the NSA-developed Speck into the Linux kernel on the basis of wanting to use Speck for file-system encryption on very low-end Android (Go) devices, last month they decided to abandon those plans and instead work out a new "HPolyC" algorithm for use on these bottom-tier devices due to all the concerns over Speck potentially being back-doored by the US National Security Agency.

Patches currently under review for the Linux kernel's "Sun4i" Direct Rendering Manager driver provide support for the Display Engine 3.0 hardware found on newer Allwinner SoCs and most notably HDMI 2.0a support.

One week past the merge window of Linux 4.19 and the 4.19-rc1 release to close that off, Linux 4.19-rc2 is now available for testing.

Thomas Gleixner has submitted a batch of x86 fixes today to the Linux 4.19 kernel, which include several changes around the speculative execution vulnerability mitigations.

Sean Paul of Google who herds the drm-misc-next code into DRM-Next sent the first pull request of new material targeting the next kernel cycle, Linux 4.20 but more likely to be known as Linux 5.0.

If you tend to routinely ride the latest Linux Git code and are still using 32-bit (x86) hardware, you may want to watch out for problems around the new Kernel Page Table Isolation (K/PTI) functionality.

In addition to the VKMS driver for virtual kernel mode-setting, the other successful Google Summer of Code (GSoC) project this summer under the X.Org umbrella was improving the DRM GPU scheduler.

Independent Linux kernel hacker Con Kolivas has announced his 4.18-ck1 kernel as well as the latest release of his MuQSS scheduler.

As expected, Linus Torvalds has closed the merge window for 4.19 and released Linux 4.19-rc1.

Jason Donenfeld who has now spent years working on WireGuard as an in-kernel, secure network tunnel sent out a second version of his kernel patches on Friday.

While FBDEV has been on its last leg for years with some calling for its deprecation and encouraging instead DRM/KMS drivers rather than (mostly embedded vendors) focusing on FBDEV frame-buffer drivers, with Linux 4.19 the FBDEV subsystem is bringing a useful addition to the kernel.

The x86 platform driver work was merged today for the Linux 4.19 kernel merge window.

While Linux 4.19 is slated to have a lot of new features as we have been covering now the past week and a half, Linus Torvalds is upset with these big pull requests and some of them being far from perfect -- to the extent of being rejected.

Daniel Vetter of Intel's Open-Source Technology Center team has written his first blog post in a while on Linux graphics. In this latest post he is answering why there isn't a 2D user-space API in the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) code.

Officially the Linux kernel listed GCC 3.2 as the minimum version of the GNU compiler needed. However, with Linux 4.19 that is being raised to GCC 4.6.

The Linux 4.19 kernel merge window opened one week ago and there's been a lot of new features and improvements to be merged during this front-half of the merge period. If you are behind on your Phoronix reading, here's a look at the highlights for week one.

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.