In addition to the VFS changes merrged yesterday for allowing multi-device file-systems to better cope with losing a disk, another notable change as part of the VFS pull requests for Linux 6.17 allows more efficiently zeroing out a range on modern NVMe SSDs or SCSI drives.

The VFS changes were merged a short time ago to the in-development Linux 6.17 kernel. Among the notable changes there is a patch that will allow file-systems like Btrfs and Bcachefs to better handle losing a disk in their built-in RAID/multi-device capabilities.

Following yesterday's release of GNU Binutils 2.45, the GNU C Library 2.42 released today.

The Hyprland Wayland compositor that is popular with some Linux enthusiasts today formally announced Hyprperks, its new paid subscription service offering a "premium desktop experience" and other benefits.

Jakub Kicinski on Sunday sent out the big set of networking subsystem updates heading into the Linux 6.17 kernel. From high-end enterprise and data center hardware down to consumer Ethernet and WiFi devices, the Linux networking space continues to be as busy as ever.

With the Linux 6.17 merge window now open, Bcachefs file-system lead developer Kent Overstreet has submitted his planned changes for this next kernel version. But we await to see how Linus Torvalds will respond.

With the newly-released Linux 6.16 kernel there is the new X86_NATIVE_CPU build option if wanting to optimize your kernel build for your local CPU in use. Enabling CONFIG_X86_NATIVE_CPU is setting the "-march=native" compiler optimizations for the kernel build in an effort to ensure peak performance/optimizations for the local system. Here are some benchmarks looking at the impact of X86_NATIVE_CPU on Linux 6.16 while using the HP ZBook Ultra G1a laptop with AMD Strix Halo SoC as an interesting test target for squeezing additional performance.

Last year Canonical established a policy to always ship the latest Linux kernel version at Ubuntu release time which for the upcoming Ubuntu 25.10 will mean shipping with Linux v6.17. But during the Ubuntu development cycles they typically don't aggressively update to new interim versions tracking upstream, except that will now change to allow for better kernel test coverage.

While the Broadcom V3D driver has been part of the mainline kernel for supporting the graphics found on recent Raspberry Pi boards, currently it doesn't support run-time power management. The lack of runtime PM has meant the GPU clock remains at full-speed even while idle.

Intel's accelerator efforts in recent generations of Xeon processors have been challenging to say the least. From limited software support and configuration obstacles to some current-generation accelerators not being safe for VM use due to security issues to having to deal with higher latency and other nuances if wanting to achieve decent performance. One of the Linux kernel users of Intel's QuickAssist Technology "QAT" accelerators has been the FSCRYPT code for native file encryption support. But the Linux kernel with the FSCRYPT usage is now demoting the Intel QAT accelerator support along with other problem-causing accelerator drivers.

The open-source, reverse-engineered Rockchip NPU driver "Rocket" developed by Tomeu Vizoso will soon be in the mainline kernel. The Rocket Gallium3D driver was also merged today for Mesa 25.3 in the user-space code for their AI accelerator support.

Among the number of early pull requests submitted in advance for the Linux 6.17 merge window were all the power management updates as well as to related areas like ACPI and thermal control drivers.

For the past two years Ubuntu developers have been talking about adding TPM-based full disk encryption to the installer for those wanting to leverage their system's Trusted Platform Module 2.0 capabilities to enhance security. It looks like for Ubuntu 25.10 this October that support will finally be in good shape.

The Linux support for Intel's next-generation Panther Lake SoCs appears to be largely set with Linux 6.16 ahead of the Core Ultra Series 3 laptops debuting in the coming months. There are though a few stragglers of Panther Lake support such as the performance events code in Linux 6.17 only now landing the perf integration.

Following the Linux 6.16 kernel release from Sunday evening, GNU Linux-libre 6.16-gnu is now available for that kernel downstream that strips out driver/kernel code dependent upon non-free-software microcode/firmware, the ability to load proprietary kernel modules, and carving out other bits of the Linux kernel not meeting their stringent free software standards.

As anticipated the Linux 6.16 kernel was promoted to stable. Linux 6.16 now greets the world with various performance improvements, NVIDIA Hopper and Blackwell open-source GPU driver support in Nouveau, Intel Advanced Performance Extensions (APX) preparations, and many other exciting enhancements.

The modern AMD Kernel graphics driver consisting of AMDGPU, the AMDKFD compute code, and associated infrastructure continues to easily be the largest mainline open-source driver. With the Linux 6.16 kernel debuting as stable as soon as later today, the AMD kernel graphics driver cracks the 5.9 million line threshold. In comparison, the entire Linux kernel source tree comes in at

In advance of the Linux 6.17 merge window expected to open soon following the Linux 6.16 release, all of the SoC updates have been submitted to Linus Torvalds for this next kernel version.

A few days back I wrote about Canonical releasing new Ubuntu 25.04 "Concept" ISOs for the Snapdragon X laptops with the new install images being re-based to the Linux 6.16 kernel and expanding the device support. But as I found out from my own testing, depending upon the laptop the support was still less than ideal. Since then there have been two more ISO releases and addressing one of my show-stopping problems albeit encountering another.

GNU Binutils 2.45 was released on Sunday morning as the newest version of this set of open-source binary tools.