Sent out on Sunday to the Linux kernel mailing list was a proposal for a new Direct rendering Manager (DRM) client for providing "splash screen" type functionality such as for embedded systems and more. But with Plymouth in user-space already being the dominant solution here and upstream developers tending to prefer such functionality in user-space instead, its future remains uncertain with some developers already questioning the value of this proposed solution.

In addition to the patches sent out this weekend by Intel for Xe driver preparations for multi-device Shared Virtual Machine (multi-device SVM), another notable patch series making it out this weekend for the Intel Xe open-source kernel graphics driver is support for mapping DMA-BUFs via IOV interconnects.

The Linux 6.18-rc3 kernel is now available for testing in working toward the Linux 6.18 stable kernel release in just about one month. Linux 6.18 is expected to become this year's Long Term Support "LTS" kernel.

Debian Project Leader Andreas Tille announced today that their "FTP Master" team is being disbanded and instead establishing the Debian Archive Operations Team "Archive Team" and DFSG, Licensing and New Packages Team "DFSG Team" in its place.

The talented FFmpeg developers continue to be quite innovative with their performance optimizations and other features for this widely-used, open-source multimedia library. The latest addition to FFmpeg this weekend is introducing Vulkan accelerated video decoding for Apple ProRes content.

Following the initial VFS changes last year for supporting block sizes larger than the kernel's page size along with the initial XFS file-system patches, Btrfs recently landed its support for block sizes greater than the page size. Now EXT4 is preparing to join the party too for allowing larger block sizes.

As part of their Project Battlematrix effort, Intel has been working on enhancing their Linux graphics driver support for multi-device usage scenarios with wanting to support up to eight Intel Arc Pro graphics cards per system to help with AI LLMs and other larger use-cases. The latest code posted from Intel engineers is their initial implementation of multi-device Shared Virtual Memory (SVM) support.

Derek Clark who has been leading the efforts around Lenovo Legion gaming drivers for Linux and ensuring good support for the Lenovo Legion Go handheld on Linux sent out a new Linux patch series this weekend.

AMD on Friday sent in their first patch of AMDGPU kernel graphics driver changes they are ready to begin queuing in the DRM-Next tree until the Linux 6.19 merge window kicks off in December and leading to a stable release around February.

Resources is the open-source app aligned with GNOME/GTK for system resource monitoring. Resources has proven to be quite versatile with a nice UI and able to display CPU, GPU, NPU, disk, and other metrics. Out today is Resources 1.9 with the latest capabilities for this app.

NVIDIA is taking the open-source and upstream "Nova" kernel graphics driver quite seriously for their hardware. Hitting the mailing lists on Friday night were initial patches in beginning to make preparations toward "next-gen GPU" support. Digging into the comments, it's indeed for post-Blackwell GPUs.

The Servo open-source browser engine is out with their September 2025 development highlights. This Rust-based browser engine originally started by Mozilla continues making steady progress as well as to the "servoshell" demo/example browser implementation.

Plasma 6.5 debuted this week that KDE developers and users have been celebrating. But it's already on to working out fixes for Plasma 6.5.1 as well as new feature activity toward Plasma 6.6.

The newest weekly test release of the FreeBSD 15.0 is now available for evaluation ahead of the planned December official release.

The uutils project announced tonight the release of Rust Coreutils 0.3, another step forward for this Rust version alternative to GNU Coreutils that has been attracting a lot of interest lately due to Ubuntu 25.10 now using it by default.

It's been rare in recent years seeing any new OpenGL extensions given the wild success these days of the Vulkan API with its vast hardware adoption and increasing software support around that modern graphics and compute API. Yet this October has been unusual with now seeing multiple new OpenGL extensions merged to the OpenGL registry.

Merged for Linux 6.18 was a new feature called Sheaves as an opt-in, per-CPU array-based caching layer. Plus there is a per-NUMA-node cache of Sheaves called a "Barn". In continuing to build out the Linux kernel usage of Sheaves, a set of initial patches were posted this week to replace the CPU slabs with Sheaves within the slub allocator code.

Merged this week to Linux Git ahead of Linux 6.18-rc3 this Sunday were the latest power management fixes for the kernel. Standing out in the power management code is a fix for a "serious performance regression" affecting some Intel-powered Chromebooks.

With Amazon recently launching their M8a AWS instances powered by 5th Gen AMD EPYC "Turin", for their M8 class instance types there now are all the latest-generation CPU options with AMD EPYC Turin (M8a), Intel Xeon 6 Granite Rapids (M8i), and their in-house Graviton4 processors (M8g). After recently looking at the M7a vs. M8a performance with Amazon EC2, many Phoronix readers expressed interest in seeing an M8a vs. M8i vs. M8g performance showdown so here are those benchmarks.

AMD's ISP4 image signal processing IP is so far just used by the HP ZBook Ultra G1a laptop but will presumably be used by more of the higher-end AMD Ryzen next-gen laptops. AMD engineers today posted their fifth iteration of their open-source Linux driver for enabling the ISP4 use.