Following last year's launch of Qualcomm Snapdragon X1 powered laptops, Qualcomm is using CES 2025 this week in Las Vegas for promoting the Snapdragon X Series for mini desktop form factor PCs. But the Linux support and performance out of these forthcoming Snapdragon X Platform mini PCs remain to be seen.

Mozilla has published the Firefox 134.0 release binaries today ahead of their official release tomorrow. This first Firefox update of 2025 brings a few new features to Linux users and those on other platforms.

NVIDIA compiler engineers have spent the past several months working on a proposed GCC option -flto-partition=locality for having the compiler optimize the code layout for locality between callees and callers as part of the link-time optimization (LTO) process. For some workloads NVIDIA is finding this -flto-partition=locality compiler option being of significant help for bettering the CPU performance.

Intel used the start of CES 2025 for announcing the newest Arrow Lake processors for the Core Ultra 200H and Core Utra 200HX mobile processors.

Along with other recent Linux kernel patches around atomic write support, a set of Device Mapper (DM) patches were posted today for implementing said functionality.

For the past several months Intel Linux software engineers have been working on Intel Touch Host Controller drivers as an IP block on the PCH for handling touchscreen, touchpad, and related touch input devices. On Sunday the fourth iteration of these driver patches were sent out as these new Intel open-source drivers near the mainline Linux kernel.

Maxime Ripard of Red Hat today sent out the first set of "drm-misc-next" patches of 2025 for queuing into DRM-Next until the Linux 6.14 merge window opens in the coming weeks.

A discussion that originally started last summer has been reignited: whether it's time to retire GlusterFS within Fedora Linux. But following discussions in recent days, there may be a new packager willing to take over but it doesn't change the fact of declining upstream activity around GlusterFS.

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 6.13-rc6 as the newest weekly test release of the Linux 6.13 kernel that is working its way toward stable later in January.

With the upcoming Linux 6.14 cycle Google is poised to have its ChromeOS UCSI driver upstreamed.

For fans of the Xubuntu derivative of Ubuntu Linux, the upcoming Xubuntu 25.04 release will feature the Xfce 4.20 desktop.

This morning I rolled out upgraded forum software to improve the forum experience and also hopefully help the overall Phoronix.com site performance with the database server being hammered recently from the forums.

Loongson's LoongArch processors for the Chinese market have been primarily for desktop systems but it looks like their workstation/server ambitions may be growing with now contributing an Error Detection And Correction (EDAC) driver for Loongson SoCs with ECC memory.

Hot off the recent Serpent OS Alpha release and talking up new features for 2025, this original Linux distribution led by open-source developer Ikey Doherty is now demonstrating its offline rollback support with integration around its package management system.

For Marvell's line of Octeon line of data processing units (DPUs) and baseband processors, it looks like a new DPU is on the way with the CN20K silicon seeing work on enabling Linux support.

Red Hat engineer Karol Herbst who continues persevering with the Rusticl Rust-based OpenCL driver for Mesa has an exciting late Christmas present on the way... He's been hacking on Shared Virtual Memory (SVM) support for Rusticl that works across GPU vendor drivers/hardware.

There weren't too many changes this week for the GNOME project given the end of year holidays wrapping up and many taking time off. But This Week in GNOME is out with its newest issue to highlight the interesting desktop changes that did get made.

LLVM development has peaked in recent years at around 37k commits per year for this huge, innovative open-source compiler stack. It was another very exciting year for this leading open-source compiler stack.

After a short break over the holidays, KDE developer Nate Graham is back with his "This Week in Plasma" series to highlight the interesting KDE Plasma desktop changes made each week.

In gearing up for the Wine 10.0 stable release that is likely to take place later in January, Wine 10.0-rc4 is out today as the newest test release to deliver the latest bug fixes.