The FreeBSD Foundation paired with resources committed by AMD, Dell, and Framework are working to improve FreeBSD laptop support. In recent months there have been FreeBSD development efforts to improve the power management support with modern laptops as well as a strong focus on enhancing the WiFi driver support. A status update was issued yesterday for highlighting the latest FreeBSD laptops efforts.

With the release of Blender 4.3 last November an experimental Vulkan back-end was added and it continues to be improved upon for modernizing this 3D creation suite for digital artists and serving a variety of other purposes. The upcoming Blender 4.4 release will further refine the Vulkan support while later in the year it should be reaching production readiness.

FEX 2503 is out as the newest monthly update to this open-source emulator that enables the ability to run Linux x86_64 binaries on Linux ARM64 (AArch64) hosts.

Rui Ueyama released Mold 2.37 today as the newest feature update to this high performance linker as an alternative to GNU Gold and LLVM LLD.

Another announcement at AMD today beyond the open-source Linux driver fun for the Radeon RX 9070 series is announcing the open-sourcing of Instella as their new fully open 3B parameter language models.

After a few Habana Labs driver maintainers left Intel last year and the upstream open-source Habana Labs driver going on rather a hiatus, it looks like Intel software engineers will be returning to work on this upstream Linux kernel driver for supporting the Gaudi AI accelerators.

The Xen Project announced the availability today of the Xen 4.20 virtualization hypervisor.

Last week AMD formally announced the Radeon RX 9070 series graphics cards that will begin shipping tomorrow at $549 for the Radeon RX 9070 and $599 for the RX 9070 XT. Today the review embargo is lifted so we can now share Linux performance benchmarks and more details on the open-source Linux driver support for these first AMD RDNA4 graphics cards.

In addition to the Radeon RX 9070 series Linux gaming/graphics benchmarks with today's embargo lift, I've also spent some time working on some GPU compute benchmarks for these first RDNA4 graphics cards. Here is a look at some initial GPU compute benchmarks of the Radeon RX 9070 and Radeon RX 9070 XT graphics cards, mostly on cross-vendor OpenCL benchmarks, and a few words on the GPU compute stack support for the Radeon RX 9070.

In addition to Vulkan-powered AI / machine learning talks at last month's Vulkanised 2025 conference, another interesting topic at this annual Vulkan developer conference was around improving the Vulkan API and making it easier for new developers and maximizing the potential with new GPU hardware.

The FreeDesktop.org GitLab instance that is heavily relied upon for the development of the Mesa graphics drivers, Wayland, and many other Linux desktop projects will be down for up to one week later this month due to its cloud migration.

Linux already supports a number of XP-Pen drawing tablets while the upcoming Linux 6.15 kernel is set to include support for another one: the XP-Pen Artist Pro 19. This XP-Pen Artist Pro 19 is a big, 4K resolution display drawing tablet that retails for nearly $800 USD and features dual stylus, 16K pressure levels, and a nice display for this 19-inch drawing surface.

Sven Peter continues work on upstreaming more of the Apple SoC support to the mainline Linux kernel. On the DeviceTree side following the DT support for Apple T2 SoCs sent out last month, another set of updates were submitted this week ahead of the Linux 6.15 merge window.

Released last year shortly after the EPYC 9005 "Turin" processor launch was ZenDNN 5.0 for Zen 5 optimized CPU inferencing with the likes of PyTorch and TensorFlow. ZenDNN 5.0 delivers up to a 400% performance uplift according to AMD engineers. Out today is ZenDNN 5.0.1 with further optimizations, particularly around recommendation engines and large language models (LLMs).

LLVM 20.1 was just tagged in Git as the first stable version of the LLVM 20 compiler stack including sub-projects like the Clang 20 C/C++ Compiler.

With Firefox 136 released, Mozilla has promoted Firefox 137 to its beta phase.

Intel has been running an annual open-source developer survey and they recently wrapped up their survey for 2024 and today published the results to provide various insight into the health of open-source development.

There are a number of NetworkManager VPN plug-ins for different virtual private networking providers as a great way for setting up VPN access from the Linux desktop. But for those interested in using ExpressVPN with their official Linux client, they now offer a GUI to ease the setup process for using their commercial VPN service and proprietary software package.

Ahead of NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 graphics cards seeing retail availability tomorrow, today the review embargo expires on the GeForce RTX 5070 Founders Edition graphics cards. I've been testing out the GeForce RTX 5070 under Linux and today have a number of GPU compute benchmarks to share.

Open-sourced back in January was the Yandex Perforator as a new software project for uncovering code inefficiencies and potentially "save billions of dollars" in expenses. Perforator has continued evolving since its open-source announcement and out today is Perforator 0.0.5 as the latest milestone.