For the past number of months there has been talk in the Ubuntu developer space around replacing initramfs-tools with Dracut for handling initrd generation. While there has been progress in switching to Dracut, they aren't over the finish line yet and not until Ubuntu 25.10 are they planning to use Dracut by default.

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.

Additional AMDGPU and AMDKFD kernel driver updates were sent out today for collecting ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.15 merge window. As we are late in the cycle, most of the new AMDGPU kernel graphics driver and AMDKFD compute driver changes are fixes, but there are some minor feature changes particularly for the new RDNA4 GPUs.

Git 2.49 is out today as the latest feature update for this widely-used distributed version control system.

On top of the big features for the Intel graphics driver code and new AMD hardware support coming for Linux 6.15 along with the initial NOVA driver stub, the smaller Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) drivers have also been lining up their changes for this next kernel version. With the Mediatek DRM driver for Linux 6.15 it's set to add MT8365 SoC support, perhaps better known as the Genio 350.

In addition to the COBOL language front-end being merged this week for the upcoming GCC 15 compiler release, another notable change also landed this week... Deprecating ESA/390 architecture support in preparation for its eventual removal.

Arm software engineer Peter Waller has shared some insightful benchmarks of the impact of PGO, Context Sensitive PGO (CSPGO), and BOLT optimizations across various classes of Neoverse processor designs.

The GNU C Library's tanh and other hyperbolic functions are now as much as 14~17% faster on modern Intel and AMD CPUs with the FMA instruction support for fused multiply-add operations.

Landing in Mesa 25.1 today for the RADV Vulkan and RadeonSI OpenGL drivers is Radeon GPU Profiler "RGP" integration for RDNA4/GFX12 GPUs with the newly-launched Radeon RX 9070 series.

IGT GPU Tools began as a set of tools by Intel for working on their Linux Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) kernel driver but with time has been broadened by the open-source community to support non-Intel drivers/hardware. IGT GPU Tools 2.0 was released on Thursday with new enhancements for these tests and other tools incorporated into the project.

While ReactOS is widely known as the open-source operating system working on maintaining software and driver compatibility with Microsoft Windows, there's another new one in the field and it's Free95. The Free95 project is working to become an open-source, Windows-compatible operating system. Version 0.2 Alpha of Free95 was released today for testing.

The Zstandard (Zstd) compression code sadly hasn't been regularly synced with the latest upstream Linux kernel sources but a patch posted this evening goes ahead and syncs the in-kernel Zstd code against the Zstd 1.5.7 state.

Shotcut 25.03 Beta is out today as the newest test release for this open-source video editing solution.

Released today ahead of a potential Proton 10.0 release for re-basing Valve's Steam Play tech atop the recent Wine 10.0 release, DXVK 2.6 is out today as the newest iteration of this Direct3D 8 / 9 / 10 / 11 implementation atop the Vulkan API for enhancing the Linux gaming experience.

Microsoft is out today with their newest monthly update to their in-house Linux distribution, Azure Linux, with all available package and security updates through this month's Patch Tuesday.

With today's Mesa 25.1-devel Git code, the "Clover" OpenCL Gallium3D state tracker is officially deprecated. Clover will be eventually removed with the Rust-written Rusticl OpenCL driver being modern, much more actively maintained, and all-around a better option than the aging Clover code.

NVIDIA's RTX Remix software for remastering classic games with a variety of visual enhancements reached version 1.0 today with some additional big improvements.

AMD today released AMDVLK 2025.Q1.3 as their official open-source Vulkan API driver for Linux systems. With this update is support for the Navi48 GPU with the recently-launched Radeon RX 9070 RDNA4 graphics cards.

A lot of Linux 6.15 intended patches by Intel for their kernel graphics driver have accumulated like enabling Xe3 "dirty rect" mode, SVM for the Xe driver, EU stall sampling, GuC power profile tuning, and more. Yesterday another drm-intel-gt-next pull request was submitted to DRM-Next ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.15 merge window.