The latest round of cost-cutting at Intel seems to be having a larger impact on their software engineering efforts than some of their previous rounds of layoffs. In addition to a prominent Linux kernel developer veteran leaving Intel last week where he worked for the past 14 years and responsible for many great upstream improvements, other Intel software engineers working on their Linux/open-source affairs have also been departing. In just the latest instance, one of the upstream Intel Linux kernel drivers is now "orphaned" due to the developer departing and no one experienced left to maintain the code.

As part of work going back to 2019, an engineer on Google's Chromium OS team submitted an updated proposal on Monday for seeking to standardize the haptic touchpad support within the Linux kernel.

Making it into the RADV Vulkan driver ahead of this week's Mesa 25.2 feature freeze is experimental support for the VK_EXT_host_image_copy extension. The Vulkan host image copy extension was worked on by Valve and others for letting applications/games copy data between the host memory and images on the host processor without having to first stage via a GPU-accessible buffer.

The LTTng tracing toolkit is twenty years old this year and it's seen significant adoption by different hyperscalers and other notable organizations like IBM and Sony and Siemens beyond basic end-users and administrators for system tracing/debugging. While having many successes over the past two decades, the kernel modules remain outside of the kernel tree. Even with around four different upstreaming attempts to get the LTTng code into the mainline kernel, it still has not happened. A fifth attempt began today but still looks like it could be an uphill battle.

With the upcoming Linux 6.17 kernel the Intel Xe kernel graphics driver is enabling Panther Lake graphics out-of-the-box. Now going along with that Linux 6.17+ support out-of-the-box, the Mesa OpenGL and Vulkan user-space drivers are also ready to declare their Xe3 Panther Lake graphics support by default.

Posted today to the Linux kernel mailing list are a set of nine patches for bringing up support for the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite/Plus powered Microsoft Surface Pro 11 2-in-1 laptop.

A number of Phoronix readers have been interested in seeing some fresh benchmarks of Mesa's NVK Vulkan driver in providing open-source Vulkan API support on NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards as well as the modern OpenGL approach of using Zink for layering OpenGL atop Vulkan. Here are some fresh benchmarks using the very latest Mesa 25.2 code for NVK on the latest upstream stable Linux kernel compared to the NVIDIA R575 official Linux graphics driver stack.

Merged today into the upstream GNU C Library code ahead of next month's Glibc 2.42 release is support for SFrame stack tracing with ELF binaries on x86 and AArch64 architectures.

New feature patches posted for review today on the Linux kernel mailing list are working to implement the NVMe specification's Controller Data Queue (CDQ) functionality within the NVMe storage driver.

In addition to last minute feature work on the latest AMD RDNA4 graphics cards ahead of the Mesa 25.2 code branching, there's also some new fixes going into Mesa for the open-source Radeon driver code... Coming in this Monday morning by surprise are some fixes for the Radeon HD 2000/3000 series approaching two decades old as well as a fix for the Radeon HD 4000 graphics processors.

Ahead of the Mesa 25.2 code branching / feature freeze expected later this week, last minute feature additions and other changes continue landing in the codebase for these open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers. One of the additions today worth mentioning are continued Vulkan Video improvements for AMD Radeon graphics.

One of the interesting new additions with the upcoming Intel Xe3 integrated and discrete graphics is the Variable Register Thread "VRT" feature. Making use of Variable Register Thread can reduce register splitting, reduce bandwidth consumption, and improve overall performance. More background information on Intel VRT can be found in that aforelinked Phoronix article. But now the ability is coming to optionally disable VRT.

The Linux Mint developers have put out their monthly status update to outline their work in recent weeks. Over the course of June, Linux Mint developers were primarily focused on Linux Mint 22.2 with the beta release expected soon.

Debian's annual Debian Conference "DebConf" started this morning and runs all week in Brest, France.

As we approach the stable Linux 6.16 kernel release later this month, Linux 6.16-rc6 is out today as the newest weekly test candidate.

The popular Arch Linux based CachyOS operating system is out with its "July 2025" update for providing the latest innovations for this performance-optimized, feature-rich Linux distribution.

Ahead of the Linux 6.16-rc6 kernel release due out later today, an x86/urgent pull request was sent out today that includes some fixes for old AMD Zen 2 hardware.

Last week I wrote about a number of patches coming out of AMD for Next-Gen Geometry "NGG" improvements to the AMD OpenGL and Vulkan drivers for Linux. Some of that code hadn't been merged as of writing but fortunately this week the remainder of the NGG improvements were successfully merged to Mesa Git for this quarter's Mesa 25.2 release.

Amid Intel's ongoing financial difficulties and multiple rounds of layoffs some Linux engineers at Intel left last year and there's been at least one prominent departure this week amid the latest round of challenges at the company.

Last month when the Fairphone 6 smartphone was announced, same-day Linux support patches were posted for this modular and repair-friendly smartphone. That Linux support code with the Device Tree (DT) files have been under review and out today is the second iteration of those enablement patches.