One week ago in the KDE Plasma land it was talking about rounded bottom corners for windows by default while this week in the KDE Plasma space is another long overdue feature: notifications for Plasma around low printer ink cartridge levels. The upcoming KDE Plasma 6.5 will finally feature built-in notifications on printer ink levels running low.

One week ago FFmpeg merged decode support for Samsung's Advanced Professional Video "APV" codec. APV is designed for professional-grade video recording purposes and is a royalty-free video codec geared for prosumers. Now arriving within FFmpeg Git is APV video encode support.

Last week I published some initial benchmarks of the Amazon/AWS Graviton4 processors now available within the EC2 cloud using the new "R8g" instances. That initial comparison was a 64 vCPU comparison of Graviton4 against AMD EPYC and Intel Xeon 64 vCPU AWS instances. In today's article is a look at the 96-core Graviton4 bare metal performance using the "r8g.metal-24xl" AWS instance type. The Graviton4 r8g.metal-24xl performance was then compared in today's article against various bare metal AMD EPYC, Ampere Altra Max, and Intel Xeon processors in the lab at Phoronix.

Ahead of the Threadripper 9000 series hitting store shelves tomorrow, today the review embargo lifts on these new high-end desktop/workstation Zen 5 processors. I have been testing out the Threadripper 9970X and 9980X this month and have been extremely excited about the generational uplift and all-around performance of these new AMD Ryzen Threadripper 9970X/9980X processors on Linux for delivering the best possible workstation performance in 2025.

Merged already for the in-development Linux 6.17 kernel were the many block subsystem and IO_uring changes for enhancing I/O on Linux as we roll toward the H2'2025 Linux distribution releases.

Two notable AMD CPU feature additions were merged overnight for the in-development Linux 6.17 kernel.

AMD yesterday upstreamed a batch of new CPU microcode files to linux-firmware.git as the de facto repository where component firmware/microcode is easily distributed to Linux distributions. This also marks the first time that Family 1Ah (Family 26) CPU microcode is updated there for the latest Zen 5 processors.

Earlier this year Linux kernel patches were posted for making SMP support unconditional so the kernel is always built for multi-core capabilities. With uniprocessor core environments being extremely rare especially for those that would be using an up-to-date, upstream Linux kernel, dropping non-SMP support would allow simplifying code paths within the kernel. Well, for Linux 6.17 it's finally happening.

Archinstall 3.0.9 released today as the newest iteration of this text-based Arch Linux operating system installer.

After all of these years of Linux dominating the high performance computing (HPC) space and other industries, one might think (most) all the interesting performance nuggets have been uncovered and well thought out and robust fallbacks in place across all important code paths. As we showcase almost each cycle, interesting new performance bits to be uncovered within the Linux kernel. For Linux 6.17 thanks to a NVIDIA engineer is applying a better fallback for NUMA locality rather than simply picking a random CPU core.

Facebook's Meta already employs an all-star team of Linux kernel engineers and it doesn't appear that they are over in recruiting top-tier Linux kernel talent. One of Intel's senior Linux software engineers is now the latest high profile kernel developer onboard at Meta.

Proton 10.0-2 beta was released today by Valve and CodeWeavers for furthering this Wine-derived software powering Steam Play for running Windows games on Linux with great success.

The staging area of the Linux kernel, where preliminary code initially appears to mature until being promoted out, continues seeing a lot of code churn. With Linux 6.17 the staging updates were submitted and now merged with one driver in particular standing out.

Christian Schaller, a Fedora developer and Director of Software Engineering at Red Hat, recently began exploring the potential of AI usage more from the open-source/Linux perspective. He was left impressed from his ability to easily generate a Python application for internal Red Hat use to porting the venerable Xtraceroute program to GTK4 and Vulkan.

It had been two years since the last update to the AMDGPU X.Org DDX driver but now xf86-video-amdgpu 25.0.0 is now available for those relying on this driver/hardware-specific driver for X.Org enabled Linux systems rather than the xf86-video-modesetting generic driver or a Wayland-based desktop.

AMD's GPUOpen group today released the AMD Interactive Streaming SDK 1.1 release that now delivers Linux support alongside the existing Microsoft Windows support. The AMD Interactive Streaming SDK is designed to provide pieces for developers to build-out low-latency streaming solutions for cloud gaming, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), and embedded applications. This MIT-licensed streaming SDK was originally launched by AMD back in March as Windows-only while now is thankfully also native to Linux.

Last week I ran the last planned benchmarks of Intel CPU performance on Clear Linux vs. Ubuntu with Intel having ceased development of Clear Linux following the restructuring at the company. In today's article is a final look at how the AMD EPYC performance compares on Clear Linux relative to Ubuntu Linux and AlmaLinux. An AMD EPYC 9965 "Turin" dual socket server was used for showing the strong out-of-the-box performance on Intel's Clear Linux even for this competing server processor.

Along with the better handling of multi-device file-systems such as Btrfs' native RAID capabilities and now allowing more efficient writing of zeroes to modern storage devices, the number of VFS pull requests for Linux 6.17 also added some other extra goodies.

The kernel locking changes submitted today for Linux 6.17 contain a temporary change worth discussion for yielding a 10x speed-up of a particular function call and as part of that yielding less network egress downtime until a better solution is developed.

Merged on Monday were the EROFS file-system updates for Linux 6.17. EROFS continues to be a common read-only file-system choice for some mobile/embedded devices as well as container use-cases.