While the "core/entry" changes for the Linux kernel merge window aren't typically too exciting to write about, there is a new optimization for all CPU architectures worth mentioning for the Linux 6.16 cycle.

Several weeks into testing the AMD Ryzen AI MAX+ PRO 395 flagship "Strix Halo" SoC within the HP ZBook Ultra G1a, I continue to be very impressed with its performance capabilities for a wide range of workloads. While the Radeon 8060S integrated graphics easily turn heads and the 16-core / 32-thread Zen 5 cores deliver incredible performance in a laptop form factor, one feature not to be discounted that together really helps make this laptop/SFF SoC an excellent choice for AI use and other scientific computing purposes is the presence of AVX-512. While Intel's current laptop and desktop processors lack AVX-512, Zen 5's efficient AVX-512 implementation does wonders for the Strix Halo performance and power efficiency. Today's article is exploring the performance and power efficiency benefits of AVX-512 usage on the AMD Ryzen AI MAX+ PRO SoC.

All of the sound/audio driver changes have been merged for the Linux 6.16 kernel that include new AMD and Intel hardware support among other new audio hardware as well as various other improvements.

While there is nice out-of-the-box support for the new Intel Arc "Battlemage" graphics cards on the new Ubuntu 25.04 release, if you prefer running the Ubuntu 24.04 Long Term Support (LTS) release there isn't complete support until the next hardware enablement "HWE" update. But Intel in cooperation with Canonical has now published a new graphics driver preview stack for enabling better Intel Arc B-Series support for Ubuntu 24.04 LTS users.

Microsoft on Tuesday released a new version of Azure Linux, their in-house Linux distribution that is used for a variety of purposes from the Azure cloud to powering other Microsoft services.

Hobbyists continue to tinker around with the Motorola 68000 "m68k" support within the Linux kernel and even landing a fix now in 2025 for the vintage Macintosh II.

Archinstall 3.0.7 is out today as the newest feature update to this text-based Arch Linux installer that makes it quick and easy to deploy a new Arch Linux installation.

Ted Ts'o sent out the EXT4 file-system changes today for the Linux 6.16 kernel. While EXT4 may not see as much code churn these days given its mature state compared to say Btrfs and Bcachefs, with Linux 6.16 are some tantalizing performance improvements.

Merged today for Xfce's Xfwm4 window manager component is a built-in Wayland compositor using wlroots.

Google engineer Eric Biggers took time away from all his impressive crypto performance optimizations to the Linux kernel for modern Intel and AMD CPUs to spend time getting support for hardware-wrapped inline encryption keys into the mainline kernel. Google's Android kernel has been carrying this functionality for several years to help enhance security and will now be found in the mainline kernel too for capable platforms.

Merged for the Linux 6.16 kernel are all of the x86 core enhancements that provide a variety of benefits to Intel as well as AMD processors.

Building off the recent release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10.0, AlmaLinux 10.0 stable is now available as this RHEL-derived popular community Linux OS alternative.

After being under discussion since January of 2024, the ext-background-effect-v1 staging protocol proposal by KDE developer Xaver Hugl has finally been merged to the Wayland-Protocols repository. This new Wayland protocol is intended for handling effects like background blur on terminals.

This month I have been running many Linux benchmarks of the HP ZBook Ultra G1a with the very exciting Ryzen AI MAX+ PRO 395 Strix Halo SoC featuring the powerful Radeon 8060S graphics. While there were the very promising OpenGL and Vulkan benchmarks shown so far from AMD Strix Halo on Linux -- including the very compelling performance compared to Microsoft Windows 11 -- many are interested in the ROCm compute aspects for Strix Halo. Here are some of the first benchmarks of the GPU compute performance for the Ryzen AI MAX+ PRO with the new ROCm 6.4.1 release compared to Strix Point as well as Intel Xe2 Lunar Lake on their Compute Runtime stack.

Building off the atomic write preparations that landed in prior Linux kernel versions, merged for the Linux 6.16 cycle is atomic write support for the XFS file-system.

The X86_NATIVE_CPU Kconfig build time option has been merged for the Linux 6.16 merge window as an easy means of enforcing "-march=native" compiler behavior on AMD and Intel processors to optimize your kernel build for the local CPU architecture/family of your system.

Rav1e v0.8 was released on Monday for this self-proclaimed "fastest and safest AV1 encoder" that makes use of the Rust programming language.

The many scheduler updates have been merged for the Linux 6.16 kernel which include a wide assortment of different fixes and new improvements.

The open-source Qt toolkit is deeply rooted in C++ code but over the past decade also has enjoyed Python language bindings. Now thanks to new work by the Qt Group on what they are calling Qt Bridging Technology, the toolkit will be enjoying more robust support across different programming languages.

The Linux kernel Performance Events changes were merged for the newly-opened Linux 6.16 cycle. Most notable are some new additions on the Intel side while AMD also saw a few changes too.