Germany's Sovereign Tech Agency (nee Sovereign Tech Fund) is out with their latest newsletter where they outlined some new investments in various key open-source projects.

Merged today to the LLVM/Clang compiler codebase are some long overdue adjustments to the AMD Zen 4 "znver4" CPU model for more accurately assessing various latency timings and micro-ops. These values were initially copied over from the Zen 3 (znver3) target but never adjusted properly for Zen 4 until now when an independent contributor took to sorting it out.

For those that happen to have the Dell G15 5530 laptop or considering this Intel Core i7 13650HX + NVIDIA GeForce RTX high-end laptop, the upcoming Linux 6.18 kernel is set to have AWCC platform profile support for this model as a nice enhancement. In turn this patch should also be back-ported to future stable Linux kernel point releases.

Earlier this month Intel Linux software engineers began posting patches for enabling Xe3P kernel graphics driver support with initial usage by Nova Lake processors and later the expected Celestial discrete GPUs. That initial Xe3P iGPU support is going into Linux 6.19 but expect more feature additions and optimizations in follow-on kernel cycles in 2026. Similarly the patches have now begun coming out for enabling the display engine capabilities for "Xe3P_LPD" for actually being able to drive displays (monitors) with Xe3P on Nova Lake.

Following last week LLVM/Clang 22 adding Intel Nova Lake with "-march=novalake" support, the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) has now received similar treatment for the promising next-generation desktop processors.

For those that have been considering the ASUS ROG STRIX X870E-H GAMING WIFI7 motherboard for a high-end AMD Ryzen 9000 series desktop, sensor monitoring support will soon be working under Linux.

Theo de Raadt released OpenBSD 7.8 today as the newest feature release to this popular BSD operating system.

Earlier today the AlmaLinux project announced their plans for supporting the Btrfs file-system contrary to the stance by Red Hat with upstream Red Hat Enterprise Linux. They have capped off the day now by releasing the AlmaLinux 10.1 beta complete with this new Btrfs support.

Upstreamed for the current Linux 6.18 cycle was finally having mainline support for the ESWIN EIC770 SoC with its four SiFive P550 cores plus having the DeviceTree support for the SiFive HiFive Premier P550 RISC-V development board using that SoC. Sadly not making it though for Linux 6.18 was the Ethernet controller support for the EIC7700 SoC but that is now destined to arrive in Linux 6.19.

It's been nearly a decade since Red Hat notably deprecated Btrfs back in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.8 after it being a tech preview in earlier versions of RHEL. While upstream Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 remains on XFS and supporting the likes of Stratis Storage with LVM, AlmaLinux today announced that their AlmaLinux 10.1 release will support Btrfs.

Valkey as the popular, Linux Foundation backed fork of the Redis key-value database is out today with its big v9.0 release.

Following the recent Xe3P graphics enablement for Nova Lake as well as Nova Lake compiler target enablement and other early hardware enablement for Intel's Nova Lake processors, today has brought initial enablement for Nova Lake's NPU.

Last year following the launch of the Intel Xeon 6900P Granite Rapids processors I ran some benchmarks looking at the SNC3 vs. HEX clustering mode performance. With having an Intel Xeon 6980P server back up and running on a Giga Computing R284-A92-AAL server after my AvenueCity reference server failed nearly one year ago, I revisited the SNC3 vs. HEX clustering performance for those curious how it's looking on a modern software stack and with new/updated benchmarks.

Going public today is CVE-2025-62518, or better known by the name given by the security researchers involved: TARmageddon. The TARmageddon vulnerability affects the popular async-tar Rust library and its various forks like tokio-tar. In turn TARmageddon impacts the uv Python package manager and other users of this library.

Following the initial set of drm-misc-next updates for Linux 6.19, another round of drm-misc-next updates were sent out today in queuing ahead of that next kernel cycle. There are a number of updates to the smaller DRM graphics/display drivers as well as growing activity around the accelerator "accel" open-source drivers for different NPUs / AI accelerators.

The AMD Platform Management Framework "PMF" Linux driver is being extended to enable better integration with user-space tooling. AMD SystemDeck is the initial beneficiary of the integration improvements to this AMD platform Linux driver.

The Linux 6.19 kernel coming out in early 2026 will add full support for the Logitech G13 gaming keypad, a device first launched back in 2009. Some functionality has worked in Linux over the past 17 years while full support is only coming to this next version of the Linux kernel.

While the Blender 5.0 3D modeling software is being released next month, there is already exciting changes to look forward to with Blender 5.1 in the new year. Beyond AMD HIP-RT ray-tracing by default in Blender 5.1, this follow-on Blender release is also planning on enabling Vulkan API support by default.

KDE Plasma 6.5 is out today as the newest major feature release for the Plasma 6 desktop. Plasma 6.5 brings many great improvements and continues further evolving this modern, Wayland-focused open-source desktop.

The most unexpected surprise today was AMD releasing ROCm 7.9 as a new technology preview / development branch for the open-source ROCm GPU compute stack just one month after formally releasing ROCm 7.0. While not a fan of how they handled the version discontinuity, ROCm 7.9 has been working out well in my very initial tests on AMD Ryzen AI Max "Strix Halo".