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.

While AMD hasn't released an updated Windows driver for the Radeon R9 290 "Hawaii" GPUs since 2022 for Windows 10, over in the Linux/open-source space the driver support continues. It will hopefully continue reliably too now that the Mesa RADV continuous integration (CI) has added driver testing with an old Hawaii GPU.

The AMD BC-250 is a crypto mining GPU launched by AMD back during the Bitcoin mining craze when it was profitable using GPUs for mining. At its heart is a Navi "RDNA1" GPU similar to the APU found within the Sony PlayStation 5. The AMD BC-250 can be found used these days for $50~100 USD and with the latest open-source Mesa graphics driver code for Linux systems can now be used with the Vulkan API for graphics/gaming.

In addition to mapping the Direct3D graphics API to Vulkan, Wine developers are working on mapping the Direct3D video acceleration APIs to work atop the Vulkan Video API.

Going back nearly one year Intel has been working on Linux driver support for a new adaptive sharpening filter with Lunar Lake graphics. That's culminated into working on a common DRM sharpness property for communicating sharpness preferences and this week the latest patch series for that property was posted.

The Redox OS open-source operating system written from scratch in the Rust programming language is continuing to enjoy nice progress in 2025 on its goals. The Redox OS project has published their February 2025 status update that highlights achievements made over the past month.

Godot 4.4 is out as stable today for serving as the newest feature release to this leading open-source, cross-platform 2D/3D game engine.

Ahead of the GNOME 48 stable release due out later this month, tagged now is the Mutter "48.rc" release candidate milestone. While the feature freeze passed last month, there has been a lot of last minute improvements merged for Mutter to squeeze into this GNOME 48 release.

Mozilla Firefox 136.0 release binaries are now available online ahead of tomorrow's official release announcement. Particularly on the Linux side, Firefox 136 is one of the more exciting updates in recent times.

SiFive recently sent over their new HiFive Premier P550 developer board and as part of that fresh RISC-V CPU testing I've also been re-testing the prior SiFive HiFive Unmatched developer board from 2020~2021 for reference. Out of curiosity, I've carried out some tests using the HiFive Unmatched to look at how the Ubuntu Linus RISC-V performance has evolved from Ubuntu 21.04 when I first tested that RISC-V quad-core developer board, Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, and now the latest Ubuntu 24.04 LTS packages.

Back in December Linux kernel patches were posted by a Meta engineer for making use of the AMD INVLPGB instruction found with Zen 3 and newer processors. The Linux kernel would use INVLPGB for invalidating TLB entries for a range of pages with broadcast. After these patches went through 14 rounds of review since December, it looks like this AMD broadcast TLB invalidation support is now ready for the mainline Linux kernel!

Raspberry Pi has been on a spree lately with many new product launches such as the Raspberry Pi 500, Raspberry Pi Monitor, Raspberry Pi 5 16GB, and Compute Module 5 in the past few months. Today the company announced an expansion of their offerings in the Compute Module 4 line-up.

Rustup 1.28 is out today as the newest version of this official tool that is the Rust project's recommended means of installing the Rust programming language support.

Last September the USB Implementers Forum quietly published an update to the USB 2.0 specification... The Embedded USB2 Version 2.0 "eUSB2V2" supplement to provide for better performance with significantly higher data rates to USB 2.0 while maintaining the low-voltage electrical interface.

Open-sourced back in 2019 was the OpenPOWER Microwatt as an open-source, soft processor core of Power ISA 3.0 and intended for use on FPGA boards and then there was seemingly short-lived work to fabricate a Microwatt chip and Microwatt also found its way for use within a BMC implementation. Linux 5.14 added support for this soft CPU core while the upcoming Linux 6.15 cycle is set to introduce SMP support for Microwatt.

The newest upstream-focused work around AMD SEV for Secure Encrypted Virtualization with EPYC server processors is a set of patches to better optimize cache flushing.

Linus Torvalds just released the Linux 6.14-rc5 kernel as the Linux 6.14 stable kernel approaches toward release later in March.

It's not only AMD that is working on Vulkan/SPIR-V support for machine learning / AI software but NVIDIA has been working on improvements too for enhancing Vulkan-powered machine learning software. The outlook for using Vulkan within machine learning software is quite positive and even able to offer similar performance to NVIDIA's prized CUDA.