With the Linux 6.17-rc1 release this past Sunday, the Linux 6.17 merge window is over. Here is a look back at the most exciting changes that made it for Linux 6.17.

One month has passed since the Wine 10.12 release. While typically new Wine development releases are on a bi-weekly release cycle, summer holidays typically interfere for one release per year with the Wine project. Thankfully Wine 10.13 is out today to start the cycle anew.

While the Raspberry Pi 5 is a great and popular Arm single board computer, some elements of getting the hardware support upstream have lagged behind just as was also the case with prior generations of the Raspberry Pi SBC. One of the enablement bits now inching its way toward the mainline kernel is Ethernet support on the Raspberry Pi 5.

The Ubuntu Release Management Team is pursuing a new concept called "Dangerous" Desktop Images that will ship leading-edge Snaps atop the latest Ubuntu daily development images.

Intel FRED has been seeing Linux software enablement going on for the past three years. FRED is the Flexible Return Event Delivery that overhauls CPU transitions between privilege levels with a goal of lower ring transition latency and more robust software support. Unfortunately it has a late breaking incompatible change to the architecture and the Linux kernel is now being patched for it.

Barring any issues from coming up in the near future, it looks like DM-PCACHE will be submitted for the Linux 6.18 cycle later in the year as a high throughput, low latency cache for DAX-capable persistent memory devices.

Some old and unmaintained drivers for Linux's Virtual Function I/O (VFIO) support are being marked as deprecated for eventual removal, including the generic VFIO platform driver.

One of the Linux Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) patch series that has long been in the works is on a standardized Color Pipeline API. This is for improving advanced color management handling on Linux and aligns with what Valve and Igalia engineers have been doing with AMD-specific color management implementation on the Steam Deck and their Gamescope compositor. Sent out today by AMD was the 11th iteration of these Color Pipeline API patches.

As of today the Ubuntu 25.10 "Questing Quokka" is now under a feature freeze ahead of the stable release due out in October.

The folks at iXsystems announced this afternoon that nightly builds of TrueNAS 25.10 are now available for testing of this Linux-based network attached storage (NAS) operating system. With TrueNAS 25.10 there are more performance improvements, improved installation process, initial support for 400GbE networking, and other enhancements to this ZFS-focused platform.

The open-source Valkey key-value database that is forked from Redis is preparing for the big Valkey 9.0 feature release. Valkey 9.0-rc1 was issued today and comes with some exciting performance optimizations and other enhancements for this in-memory KV database.

Canonical is pursuing a rather ambitious baseline of Ubuntu 25.10 RISC-V too require the RVA23 profile that will leave most existing RISC-V developer boards to using Ubuntu 24.04 LTS or Ubuntu 25.04. They continue to pursue this RISC-V baseline and with more of the necessary alterations for it being prepped for landing into the Ubuntu 25.10 archive.

Oracle today released VirtualBox 7.2 as the newest version of this cross-platform virtualization solution.

The newly-launched AMD Ryzen Threadripper 9000 series headlined by the 64-core Threadripper 9980X and 32-core Threadripper 9970X offer incredible performance and a wonderful addition to the Zen 5 family for the HEDT space. But there is also the Threadripper PRO 9000 series with the flagship Threadripper PRO 9995WX sporting 96 cores. In this article is a look at how that 96-core AMD Threadripper PRO 9995WX performs using a TRX50 platform with quad channel DDR5-6400 memory.

One of the latest departures from Intel amid their ongoing restructuring is the official maintainer of the "habanalabs" accelerator Linux kernel driver that provides support for their range of Gaudi AI accelerator products.

KDE Gear 25.08 is out this morning as the newest feature release to this collection of KDE applications.

Sent out today was the first DRM-Misc-Next pull request to DRM-Next for queuing ahead of the Linux 6.18 merge window opening around early October. There are a number of smaller DRM graphics driver improvements ready as well as continued work around the accelerator "accel" drivers for the increasing number of NPUs in devices.

Next year's LibreOffice 26.2 open-source office suite is set to better handle documents with restricted embedded fonts. This is for dealing with situations where fonts may have restricted licensing rights and where up to now LibreOffice Writer simply hasn't dealt with them correctly.

Tbe BeOS-inspired Haiku operating system has continued in advancing this open-source platform with more fixes and other enhancements. The project published its July recap to outline the interesting changes made.

A change queued in drm-misc-next for DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 6.18 kernel cycle later this year is promoting the Nouveau driver for open-source NVIDIA GPU support to be using the GSP firmware by default. This reflects the reality that using the NVIDIA GPU System Processor "GSP" firmware with Turing and Ampere GPUs should provide a better experience than the older firmware alternative with Nouveau.