Fwupd 2.0.7 brings the newest plug-ins and expanded hardware support for being able to update a variety of system and device/peripheral firmware under Linux.

Earlier this month for launch-day there were NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 Linux GPU compute benchmarks. The graphics/gaming benchmarks of the GeForce RTX 5070 on Linux were held up by waiting for a new R570 Linux driver release with proper support for this new Blackwell graphics card. Last week that new Linux driver arrived in the form of the NVIDIA 570.133.07 Linux build. That new NVIDIA Linux driver is working out great with the GeForce RTX 5070 Founder's Edition and in this article are some initial Linux gaming/graphics performance benchmarks for that new graphics card competing with the AMD Radeon RX 9070 series.

Over the past week a lot of new Rust "gccrs" code was merged into the GCC 15 compiler code-base as a big step forward for this open-source Rust front-end. Another big batch of patches have been merged with for-loops now working among other functionality.

An exciting new Linux kernel patch series was posted today for testing... Introducing support for cache-aware load-balancing. The patch comes from a veteran Intel Linux engineer but this cache aware load balancing may also prove very applicable for AMD Linux users for EPYC and Ryzen processors.

In addition to the Btrfs updates with real-time Zstd compression support and Bcachefs stabilizing its on-disk format, the Flash Friendly File-System updates have also been submitted already for the newly-opened Linux 6.15 merge window. There are a few exciting improvements for F2FS with this next Linux kernel version.

The GCC and LLVM Clang open-source compilers have landed support for the NVIDIA Olympus cores for NVIDIA's Vera CPU that is part of their next-gen Rubin microarchitecture succeeding Blackwell.

The work carried out by a Meta engineer to make use of AMD's INVLPGB instruction within the Linux kernel for broadcast TLB flush handling has been merged for the in-development Linux 6.15! AMD INVLPGB has the possibility of helping with the performance in some areas and is found supported by recent generations of Zen CPU cores.

Flowblade 2.20 is out this morning as the newest feature update to this open-source, non-linear video editing system for Linux.

Building off yesterday's Linux 6.14 release, the GNU Linux-libre 6.14-gnu downstream is now available for this flavor of the Linux kernel that strips out support for hardware/drivers depending upon non-open-source firmware/microcode as well as the ability to load proprietary kernel modules and other tainted code.

The GRUB bootloader saw a set of 73 patches last month for addressing a variety of security flaws that were discovered.

GIMP 3.0 was 7+ years in development before releasing as stable last week for this much anticipated, GTK3-ported image manipulation program update. Thankfully we're not seeing any lengthy periods of time for new bug-fix releases with today already marking the release of GIMP 3.0.2.

Last month Bcachefs lead developer Kent Overstreet talked of Bcachefs getting to the point of freezing its on-disk format with future on-disk format updates slated to be optional. With today's Bcachefs pull request for Linux 6.15, it's now being treated as "soft frozen" and also landing other new features for this copy-on-write file-system. Among the new features is case insensitive file/folder support contributed by Valve.

David Sterba of SUSE sent in all of the Btrfs file-system updates today for the now-open Linux 6.15 kernel merge window. There are some new performance optimizations, new and faster Zstd compression level options, and other changes slated to be included for this CoW file-system in Linux 6.15.

Assuming no objections from Linus Torvalds, the now open Linux 6.15 merge window could introduce a brand new subsystem: fwctl.

An AMD engineer has landed experimental support within the LLVM codebase for building Flang-RT on GPUs. Flang-RT being the run-time for LLVM's modern Fortran "Flang" compiler and in turn this effort working to allow more Fortran code to easily run on GPUs with capable LLVM back-ends.

There was a hiccup yesterday with no Linux 6.14 release or 6.14-rc8 otherwise... Linus Torvalds has a very good track record of sticking to his Sunday release regiment. Yet yesterday was quiet. Today though Linus Torvalds released the Linux 6.14 kernel as the newest stable version. Linux 6.14 is what's set to go on and power Ubuntu 25.04, Fedora 42, and other spring 2025 Linux distribution releases.

What a week. Last week Intel published a new AVX10 whitepaper where they dropped the optional 512-bit support of AVX10.2 and confirmed future P and E cores will have AVX10.2-512 support unconditionally. A very welcome change by Intel albeit late in rushing to get patches out to change that behavior ahead of the GCC 15 stable compiler release as well as working similar changes into the LLVM Clang compiler. As of today those GNU Compiler Collection patches have been merged to prepare for AVX10.2 always having 512-bit support available.

Among the early pull requests submitted in advance of the Linux 6.14 stable release and in turn the Linux 6.15 merge window opening were the x86 FPU updates. Notable this round are faster x86/x86_64 encryption/decryption performance for both Intel and AMD processors as well as beginning to land the kernel-side changes needed to support Intel Advanced Performance Extensions (APX).

With the FreeDesktop.org GitLab infrastructure getting back up, Wayland Protocols 1.42 was released today as the newest version of this official set of protocols for Wayland compositors.

While we are still awaiting the Linux 6.14 release (or a 6.14-rc8 release) with no kernel drop having occurred on Sunday, early pull requests for the Linux 6.15 kernel cycle continue flowing in. Among the early pull requests over the weekend were the CRC code updates that include some nice optimizations for those running on AVX-512 processors.