Here is open-source at its finest with a NVIDIA Linux kernel engineer ultimately making a fix to a performance regression that came up for AMD integrated and discrete graphics when running on the early Linux 6.15 kernel code.

The Chinese LoongArch CPU architecture will enjoy slightly better support with the upcoming Linux 6.15 kernel.

Sven Peter who remains one of the very active Asahi Linux developers and working on upstreaming various elements of Apple Silicon support for the Linux kernel has sent up warning flares around the eventual Apple M4 support.

In addition to all of the memory management "MM" changes merged for the Linux 6.15 kernel, a secondary round of MM updates was submitted and subsequently merged for this next kernel version. Interesting here is using the recent MSEAL system call for being able to now seal system mappings.

Yet another Qualcomm Snapdragon X1 Elite powered laptop seeing new DeviceTree patches for enabling Linux support is the HP EliteBook Ultra G1q.

For those looking to replace their proprietary BIOS with the open-source Coreboot on a supported platform or are already doing so, Coreboot 25.03 is out today to provide the newest capabilities for this open-source BIOS/firmware solution.

AMD software engineers today released AOMP 21.0-0 as the newest snapshot of their LLVM/Clang compiler downstream focused on providing the best OpenMP/OpenACC GPU offloading support to AMD GPUs and Instinct accelerators via the ROCm software stack.

The Khronos Group today published the OpenCL 3.0.18 specifications as the latest incremental update to OpenCL 3.0.

Last month I posted benchmarks showing the performance when using the new 3D V-Cache Optimizer driver on Linux using the flagship Ryzen 9 9950X3D. This optimizer driver allows tuning the "amd_x3d_mode" for indicating your preference for the CCD with the higher frequency or larger cache size. For some additional insight into the 3D V-Cache Optimizer driver performance impact on Linux, here are benchmarks looking at the difference while using the AMD Ryzen 9 9900X3D.

Two separate patch series updated this week for the open-source Intel Linux graphics driver stack is the still-ongoing work around the DRM sharpness property for the new adaptive sharpening filter with Xe2 Lunar Lake graphics and then separately is the work to bring VRAM Self Refresh (VRSR) over to the modern Xe kernel driver.

Among the changes that landed this week for the Linux 6.15 merge window were all of the memory management "MM" updates, of which there are several notable patch series included.

For those looking into some insight around the Intel neural processing unit (NPU) utilization with modern Core Ultra systems, pending Linux patches will finally introduce the ability for user-space to obtain the current NPU frequency.

Going back to 1972 is the General Purpose Interface Bus (GPIB, a.k.a. IEEE-488) as a parallel interface bus developed by HP. GPIB pre-dates the Linux kernel itself while it wasn't until last year that the GPIB driver subsystem was added to the Linux kernel's staging area with GPIB still seeing some use by scientific equipment and other devices. For Linux 6.15, the GPIB code has seen a thorough round of code clean-ups and improvements.

All of the Device Mapper "DM" changes have been merged to mainline for the in-development Linux 6.15 kernel.

Rust 1.86 is now available today as the latest version of this popular programming language.

Not to be confused with the modern Compute Express Link (CXL) standard, but IBM's Coherent Accelerator Interface "CXL" / Coherent Accelerator Processor Interface "CAPI" support was stripped away today from the mainline Linux kernel.

Linux power management and ACPI subsystems maintainer Rafael Wysocki last week sent out the assortment of ACPI/PM material for the new Linux 6.15 kernel cycle. The AMD P-State driver continues to be heavy with its code churn and there have been various other optimizations and code clean-ups. The CPUIdle Menu governor also received some performance tuning worth mentioning.

Back in late February when Framework announced a slew of new hardware products they will be launching next year, they also teased the Framework Laptop 12 as a new, smaller laptop while continuing to be modular/upgradeable. They announced today that Framework Laptop 12 pre-orders will begin next week.

Last week I posted some initial GNOME 48 and KDE Plasma 6.3 desktop gaming benchmarks on Ubuntu 25.04 beta for looking at the performance of those two leading desktop options for this upcoming Ubuntu Linux release. Both GNOME and KDE under Wayland were outperforming KDE on X11 (and GNOME on X11 wasn't even working due to bugs). Some Phoronix readers questioned though whether the Wayland advantage on GNOME/KDE was due to those desktops losing focus on X11 support or if they are just too bloated. So for adding some additional context, here are some graphics/gaming benchmarks on the same system hardware/software when adding in the Xfce 4.20 and LXQt 2.1 X11 desktops.

This morning's Intel TDX update reminded me that I still hadn't gotten around to digging into the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) changes merged last week for the ongoing Linux 6.15 kernel merge window. Here is a look at the KVM changes this cycle that continue to be particularly heavy on Intel and AMD virtualization improvements.