The Servo open-source and Rust-based web browser engine made a lot of progress during the month of October. The project has issued its monthly status report to outline all of the exciting new features made on the engine itself as well as its "servoshell" example web browser application.

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.

MLPerf Client as MLCommons' machine language inferencing benchmark for client form factors / PCs now has a Linux build. MLPerf Client 1.5 was released yesterday with an experimental Linux build but for now at least is not nearly as full-featured as this AI benchmark on Windows and macOS.

Following OpenZFS 2.4-rc3 from nearly one month ago is now a fourth release candidate for the upcoming OpenZFS 2.4. A few more features and improvements have been squeezed into this release in nearing the stable milestone.

Last year GIMP developers expressed a goal of releasing GIMP 3.2 within one year of GIMP 3.0. With GIMP 3.0 having released in March, it looks like their GIMP 3.2 release goal will become a reality with the GIMP 3.2-RC1 debuting today.

FreeBSD 15.0-RC1 is available today for testing as this leading BSD operating system works toward the stable release in early December.

At the start of the year developers behind the Budgie desktop environment hoped for shipping Budgie 10.10 in Q1-2025. We are now in Q4 without a stable release but at long last a preview version is at least available. Budgie 10.10 is the point at which Budgie is going all-in on Wayland in leaving behind the X11 desktop session support.

Released a short time ago was systemd 259-rc1 as the first test release toward this next version of this dominant Linux init system and service manager.

Git 2.52 is out today as the newest feature release of this distributed revision control system and in working toward Git 3.0 that will hopefully release by the end of 2026.

SUSE engineer Lucas Mülling is leading an effort to work on implementing SSH within the Zig programming language, a popular language for robust, optimal, and reusable software.

Hans-Kristian Arntzen of Valve just announced VKD3D-Proton 3.0 as a major update to this Direct3D 12 implementation atop the Vulkan API that is used by Valve's Steam Play (Proton).

Last month when the LLVM/Clang 22 compiler merged support for Intel Nova Lake with the "-march=novalake" target there was no mentions of AVX10 or Advanced Performance Extensions (APX) support. But last week Intel published a new programming reference manual where they confirmed AVX 10.2 and APX for Nova Lake. Now that it's official, Intel compiler engineers are updating the LLVM/Clang (and GCC) compiler support to reflect these ISA additions.

The AMD ROCm blog just announced a new open-source AMD AI software project: the AMD Enterprise AI Suite as well as AMD Inference Microservices (AIMs).

Systemd today finally merged support for building against and using the musl libc library. This is a win for Linux distributions like postmarketOS, Alpine Linux, and others that use musl by default as their standard C library or offer it as an option.

Intel engineers continue working on the Nova Lake next-gen processor enablement for the Linux kernel. In addition to the Intel Xe3P graphics and other early Nova Lake enablement work already queued in "-next" Git branches ahead of the Linux 6.19 merge window, the initial power management code is also ready for this next kernel cycle.

The Wild linker is a very speedy linker written in the Rust programming language that has become quite competitive with the likes of Mold. A patch sent out this weekend adds Wild support for use with the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC).

Following prominent Linux x86 platform enabler Hans de Goede leaving Red Hat (as recently noted, he recently joined Qualcomm), there is another prominent Linux kernel engineer that will be departing from Red Hat.

Karol Herbst at Red Hat who has been a longtime open-source NVIDIA driver contributor as well as Rusticl developer presented at XDC2025 on the NVK Vulkan driver's cooperatrive matrix extension support. It turns out this Vulkan extension for machine learning / AI is proving fairly competitive with the open-source NVK driver compared to NVIDIA's official driver stack.

Linus Torvalds is out today with the eighth weekly test release of the Linux 6.18 kernel in working toward the stable release at the end of the month.