A nearly five year old merge request was merged today to Mesa Git for Q4's Mesa 25.3 release. This merge transitions the Vulkan windowing system integration (WSI) from using the DRM "legacy" kernel mode-setting APIs over to the modern atomic mode-setting interfaces.

Intel Linux software engineers have recently been busy working on Wildcat Lake support primarily for the kernel drivers while now that work has been extended to Mesa for the Intel Iris Gallium3D (OpenGL) and ANV Vulkan drivers.

While we await AMD to officially release ROCm 7.0 as the next major release of their open-source GPU compute stack, out this afternoon is ROCm 6.4.2 as the newest stable point release. ROCm 6.4.2 expands the officially supported Radeon consumer GPUs as well as bringing various fixes and enhancements to the various libraries and components making up this AMD GPU compute ecosystem stack.

Last week NVIDIA open-sourced 12k lines of C header files for Blackwell GPUs to help in the open-source driver efforts, namely for Nouveau / NVK and the in-development NOVA Rust driver. On Friday they made public some additional header files for helping in the Blackwell and Hopper open-source driver enablement.

With the Mesa 25.2 open-source OpenGL and Vulkan graphics driver code having been branched last week ahead of its stable release in August, I carried out some fresh benchmarks on AMD's exciting Strix Halo platform using the Ryzen AI Max+ PRO 395 with Radeon 8060S Graphics to see where the Linux performance is now at for the RDNA 3.5 integrated graphics.

The EROFS read-only file-system ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.17 merge window has been working on metadata compression support to allow for even smaller container image sizes but at the cost of higher I/O latency.

Breaking on Friday afternoon was word that Intel is shutting down its Clear Linux project effective immediately after ten years of maintaining this high performance Linux distribution that relentlessly optimized for the best Linux x86_64 performance -- even when it benefited AMD x86_64 processors too. Here is a look back at the most popular of our Clear Linux testing over its decade in existence as a high performance Intel Linux OS.

The LLVM compiler toolchain has begun upstreaming support for Distributed ThinLTO "DTLTO" as a new means of handling ThinLTO compilations for leveraging link-time optimizations.

At last week's DebConf25 Debian developer conference in France, Rust packaging within Debian Linux was talked about by Fabian Grünbichler. There an interesting statistic was shared around the growing expanse of Rust usage within Debian and the open-source ecosystem at large.

HarfBuzz 11.3 released on Sunday as the newest release of this open-source text shaping engine. HarfBuzz 11.3 brings some nice performance improvements for this text shaping engine that is used by many prominent software programs and toolkits like Google Chrome, Firefox, GNOME / GTK, KDE / Qt, LibreOffice, OpenJDK, Godot, and many closed-source programs too like Adobe Photoshop and others.

The Mozilla Firefox 141.0 release binaries are out today for this monthly update to this cross-platform, open-source web browser.

The seventh weekly release candidate of Linux 6.16 is now available for testing with the stable release debuting hopefully next Sunday otherwise the following week.

Among the fixes merged today ahead of Linus Torvalds releasing the Linux 6.16-rc7 test kernel release is a lone patch on the "sched/urgent" side to fix possible bogus load average values. Reported system load averages within the kernel's scheduler code could potentially be off going back to May of 2021.

NVIDIA announced this week that they are bringing their CUDA software to RISC-V processors.

Google engineer Eric Biggers who has been responsible for many great Linux cryptography subsystem performance optimizations in recent years has another exciting patch series. Biggers has done some great work for optimizing various functions for modern Intel/AMD CPUs especially around AVX-512 implementations and now he has another big optimization coming for the CRC32 checksum performance.

With the Debian 13.0 release planned for 9 August, one of the notable fundamental features with this Debian "Trixie" release is now supporting RISC-V as an official CPU architecture. This is the first release where RISC-V 64-bit is officially supported by Debian Linux albeit with limited board support and the Debian RISC-V build process is handicapped by slow hardware.

SFrame is the lightweight stack trace format that can overcome some of the performance obstacles for tracing ELF files compared to frame pointers. In addition to the SFrame support coming together in the GNU toolchain, the SFrame support for LLVM/Clang is beginning to reach upstream.

In addition to Mesa's open-source Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" making some nice performance improvements for modern AMD GPUs with hardware ray-tracing, the emulated ray-tracing code path in RADV for primarily older GPUs has seen some improvements merged this weekend. In fact, so significant that from one merge request is around 40% faster performance for the Quake II RTX game with the emulated RT handling.

The Debian release team today shared their final release plans for Debian 13 "Trixie" that aims to be out as stable in less than one month's time.

For Linux 6.17 in addition to Intel enabling SR-IOV for Battlemage graphics cards and many other big Intel Xe kernel graphics cards and then more AMD graphics driver features too, the NOVA driver for modern open-source NVIDIA driver support is continuing to be further built out in this next kernel version.