Linux 6.1-rc1 was tagged on October 16th, 2022 and includes a bunch of nice things from my team that I want to highlight. Our goal is to make the Linux kernel running on IBM's Power CPUs more secure, and landed a few goodies upstream in 6.1 to that end.

Specifically, Linux 6.1 on Power will include a complete system call infrastructure rework with security and performance benefits, support for KFENCE (a low-overhead memory safety error detector), and execute-only memory (XOM) support on the Radix MMU.

Like many others in the open source community, I was very intrigued by the idea of the Framework laptop, a modular laptop designed to be repairable and upgradable. With a bunch of designs, schematics and documentation released as open source and a product that's legitimately competitive with the proprietary glue-filled bricks-to-be we've come to know and hate, there's a lot to love today and even more to be hopeful for tomorrow.

That said, this is the perfect laptop for desktop Linux users for more than just positive reasons, because we're used to a bunch of things randomly not working. My very first experience after installing my OS was having my desktop environment constantly freeze. Brightness keys don't work without disabling a kernel module. Power management remains problematic. I'm a professional Linux kernel developer and I still don't want to have to compile my own kernel to try and figure out why my computer is freezing.