Merged on Friday to the Linux 6.16 kernel by way of the USB/Thunderbolt branch was the massive set of patches (12k+ lines of code) for USB offload support for audio devices.

KDE developers are on the final stretch of fixes and polishing ahead of the Plasma 6.4 release next Thursday. Plus there has been plenty of early work building toward Plasma 6.5.

New AMD code merged today to the mainline Linux 6.16 kernel that's in-development is the introduction of the AMD-SBI driver/subsystem for primarily benefiting EPYC server platforms. AMD-SBI is for their Side-Band Interface also known as the Advanced Platform Management Link (APML).

Merged today to Mesa 25.2 is an adjustment for the Intel "ANV" open-source Vulkan driver to help with Direct3D games running under Linux with Valve's Steam Play via Proton + VKD3D.

Last month Intel software engineers began posting Linux enablement patches for Wildcat Lake. Some of those first patches were merged for Linux 6.16 while more work is forthcoming. Posted yesterday for the first time on the Linux kernel mailing list was enabling the NPU accelerator support for Wildcat Lake.

Since recently picking up a Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite laptop for Linux testing now that the Linux support is starting to evolve into better shape (albeit still with many rough corners limiting the daily usability of such devices with Linux), one of the areas I was curious about was looking at the performance of Linux binaries with GCC vs. LLVM Clang. Here are some benchmarks for those wondering how the GCC and Clang compilers are competing on the Snapdragon X Elite with the Oryon CPU cores.

Just a few days after the FEX 2506 release for that open-source emulator enabling x86_64 binaries to run on ARM64 (AArch64) hosts, Box64 is out with its newest feature update for this open-source project with similar goals.

While the AMD Ryzen AI Max+ Strix Halo SoCs have a nice out-of-the-box experience with modern Linux distributions for the Radeon 8050S and Radeon 8060S graphics, if going for the recently-released Linux 6.15 kernel there are some performance gains to enjoy as well as if opting for the latest Mesa 25.2 development code for the latest RadeonSI OpenGL and RADV Vulkan driver support.

The many PCI subsystem changes have been merged for the in-development Linux 6.16 merge window.

Following all of the Linux kernel graphics driver features merged last week for the Linux 6.16 kernel, sent out this morning were the initial batch of fixes to the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) code. Besides fixes to these graphics / display / accelerator drivers, there is one new feature: the AMDKFD kernel compute driver can now be enabled on RISC-V systems.

In addition to the NFS server changes for Linux 6.16 with now supporting larger I/O block sizes, the Network File-System (NFS) client changes were merged this week for this next kernel version.

Following the Intel TDX host support for KVM being merged for the Linux 6.16 merge window, another batch of Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) changes were merged for the ongoing Linux 6.16 merge window.

Mesa's modern Rust-written OpenCL driver for Gallium3D "Rusticl" has closed one of the few remaining gaps with the former Clover OpenCL state tracker. Merged today for Mesa 25.2 is native FP16 support.

As some extra benchmarks to put out today for the Phoronix.com 21st birthday, there is some additional data points to share on AMD Strix Halo when using Linux 6.15 stable and the early development state of Linux 6.16 Git ahead of its v6.16-rc1 tagging this weekend. The Linux kernel performance is moving in the right direction at least with this round of testing using the HP ZBook Ultra G1a with Ryzen AI Max+ PRO SoC.

An initial patch series sent back out in April proposed PCACHE as a persistent memory cache for block devices. PCACHE was born out of the CXL block device driver and brings some benefits over the likes of BCache and dm-writecache.

FreeBSD developers have been working a lot on their wireless/WiFi driver support in recent months as part of their broader initiative for improving their operating system support for laptops. While a lot of progress has been made on seeing more modern WiFi support and recent WiFi chipsets being enabled, it's still not complete and that puts FreeBSD 15 in a tough position. FreeBSD 15 is set to be released later this year and will likely declare their wireless support as "unstable" to allow time for making future breaking modifications.

Ubuntu Linux maker Canonical announced they will be sunsetting their Bazaar distributed revision control system code hosting with Launchpad. Git wins.

Last month I began the much anticipated AMD Strix Halo Linux benchmarking at Phoronix by testing the top-end Ryzen AI Max+ PRO 395 that features 16 cores / 32 threads and the very impressive Radeon 8060S integrated graphics. Coming in one step below that flagship Strix Halo SoC is the Ryzen AI Max (PRO) 390 with Radeon 8050S graphics. Coming out today on Phoronix - coincidentally timed for the 21st birthday of Phoronix.com - is the first benchmarks of the Ryzen AI Max PRO 390 along with the Radeon 8050S graphics.

For some very fun Linux benchmarking on this 21st anniversary of starting Phoronix is looking at the Ryzen AI Max (PRO) 390 Linux performance, the 12-core Strix Halo SoC with Radeon 8050S Graphics. While there have been various benchmarks of the AMD Ryzen AI Max+ (PRO) 395 in recent weeks on Phoronix and other publications, the other Ryzen AI Max "Strix Halo" SoCs haven't been as widely seen in the industry yet. The 12-core Ryzen AI Max PRO 390 was tested within another HP ZBook Ultra G1a for a very interesting look at the high-end/premium Linux laptop/workstation performance.

In addition to a number of new Rust abstractions in different Linux kernel subsystems, the main Rust infrastructure pull request was submitted and merged yesterday as we approach the end of the Linux 6.16 merge window.