Following last month's release of Debian Installer Trixie RC1 as the installer for the upcoming Debian 13.0 release, a second release candidate was issued today for testing.

The ZLUDA open-source effort that started off a half-decade ago as a drop-in CUDA implementation for Intel GPUs and then for several years was funded by AMD as a CUDA implementation for Radeon GPUs atop ROCm and then open-sourced but then reverted has been continuing to push along a new path since last year. The current take on ZLUDA is a multi-vendor CUDA implementation for non-NVIDIA GPUs for AI workloads and more. More progress was made during Q2 on this effort.

Not to be confused with the AMDXDNA accelerator driver for the Ryzen AI NPUs, AMD software engineers today posted patches for review on the "amd-ai-engine" accelerator driver. This new AMD AI Engine driver is for supporting the IP found on their Versal adaptive SoCs.

For those curious about the direction of Mozilla Firefox web browser performance over the past year and a half, here are web browser benchmarks for every Firefox release from Firefox 120 in November 2023 through the newest Firefox 140 stable and Firefox 140 beta releases from a few days ago. Every major Firefox release was benchmarked on the same Ubuntu Linux system with AMD Ryzen 9 9950X for evaluating the performance and memory usage of this open-source web browser.

A few days ago Wayback was announced as an X11 compatibility layer for X11 desktops environments leveraging a rootful XWayland server. While currently experimental, the hope is that it will be production-ready next year and Alpine Linux is looking at using it by default for its X11 environment.

Prior to the DG2/Alchemist discrete GPUs from Intel there was the DG1 graphics processor that served primarily as the initial developer vehicle for facilitating Intel's modern discrete GPU push. DG1 ended up being in the Intel Xe MAX GPU for a small number of laptops and then there's also been a select number of DG1 graphics cards surfacing on eBay in the years since. Only now in 2025 is the upstream Linux kernel driver set to enable Intel DG1 graphics out-of-the-box for modern Linux distributions.

GNOME Papers has been in development as a modern GTK4-based document viewer. There have been many improvements made to Papers and now ahead of the GNOME 49 release in September, it's been approved to replace Evince as the official document viewer of the GNOME desktop.

Mike Blumenkrantz with Valve's Linux graphics driver team continues working on enhancements to Mesa's Zink driver for OpenGL implemented over the Vulkan API. A new merge request is further enhancing OpenGL and Vulkan interoperability by supporting the GL_NV_timeline_semaphore extension.

The newest Arm SoC seeing Linux kernel patches working their way toward the mainline kernel is the Axiado AX3000 as a security processor designed for cloud data center, network gear, and more.

AMD today submitted their initial batch of "new stuff" for queuing into DRM-Next of their kernel graphics/compute driver changes they have prepared for the upcoming Linux 6.17 cycle opening in a few weeks.

For those on very long server upgrade cycles, typically just running the hardware until failure or consider buying second-hand servers that are generations old for lower up-front cost, today's unique article is for you with quantifying a first-generation EPYC server compared to today's entry-level EPYC processors in performance and power efficiency. With the fascinating AMD EPYC 4005 "Grado" budget-friendly server processors I was curious how well they would stack up against AMD's original flagship EPYC processor, the AMD EPYC 7601 "Naples" processor from the Zen 1 era. Can an entry-level brand new Grado server processor with dual channel DDR5 memory outpace an original EPYC server with twice the core/thread counts and eight channel DDR4 server memory? Yes, with huge gains in performance and power efficiency.

Ubuntu maker Canonical has decided to "double down" their investment in OpenJDK Java for Ubuntu Linux.

The Gentoo Linux project ended the month of June by releasing new install media.

The Mesa 25.2 release that will likely be out as stable in August should have nice initial support for the newest NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs, namely used by the GeForce RTX 50 series, with the NVK open-source driver for Vulkan usage.

NVIDIA previously warned CUDA users that CUDA 12.x is the last for Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta GPUs. NVIDIA overnight now officially confirmed that the Maxwell / Pascal / Volta GPU support is going to end in their Linux driver with the upcoming NVIDIA R580 Linux driver series.

Over the course of last month on Phoronix were 240 original news articles written by your's truly as well as another 24 Linux hardware reviews / multi-page featured benchmark articles. On top of that last month also marked the 21st birthday of Phoronix.com.

The digiKam 8.7 professional photo management software has been released for this KDE/Qt-aligned open-source solution for digital photography.

Coincidentally after writing this morning wondering about what's going on with AerynOS (formerly known as Serpent OS), contributors "NomadicCore" and "Ermo" have issued a new project update outlining what's been going on the past few months.

While Q2 is drawing to an end in the coming hours, Intel software engineers this evening just released the Intel FFmpeg Cartwheel 2025Q1 update that provides all of their latest patches around Intel GPU/video acceleration for this widely-used, open-source multimedia library that have yet to be upstreamed into FFmpeg proper.

Jon Seager as the VP of Engineering at Canonical today publicly announced the formation of their "Debcrafters" global team to help ensure the health of the Ubuntu Archive.