With Debian 13 freeze dates announced and that Debian 13.0 "Trixie" release working its way toward release likely around August, it's then to be followed by beginning development on Debian 14 codenamed as "Forky". Yesterday when announcing the Debian Trixie freeze dates, the Debian 15 codename was also announced.

Following the unboxing embargo earlier this week for the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090, today the review embargo lifts for the GeForce RTX 5090 Founders Edition.

The crypto subsystem updates were sent out today for the Linux 6.14 kernel. Notable this time are new x86_64-specific optimizations for the AES-GCM and AES-XTS algorithms. Benefiting the most from these new x86_64 optimizations are recent AMD processors.

The Tuned software from Red Hat is a daemon for Linux monitoring and adaptive performance tuning as an alternative to the likes of power-profiles-daemon. Tuned ships with various profiles and allows different features for tuning the Linux system performance for HPC compute, enterprise storage, balanced battery for laptops, and dozens of other scenarios. Red Hat this week debuted the first release candidate of the upcoming Tuned 2.25.

Along with other VFS pull requests for Linux 6.14 to introduce STATX_DIO_READ_ALIGN, adding a new mountinfo program, VirtualBox guest support for ARM64 VMs, and faster /proc/kcore reading, another VFS pull for this new kernel brings a minor performance optimization.

Newer laptops pre-loaded with Microsoft Windows have begun adding a "Copilot" key for launching Microsoft's Copilot AI assistant or other "chatbot" software. With the upcoming Linux 6.14 kernel, that key will be mapped out correctly so that user-space software can determine the behavior for handling that key's action on the Linux desktop.

With the newest code merged for Mesa 25.0, the Panfrost PanVK driver is exposing Vulkan 1.1 support on Arm Valhall "v10" graphics processors.

The Landlock Linux security module that was added to the mainline Linux kernel four years ago for unprivileged application sandboxing and similar access controls has a rather weird update for the in-development Linux 6.14 kernel: Land lock can now deal with "weird files".

With Debian 13 due out in the coming months, the Debian 13 artwork/theme was recently announced as well as the Debian Installer Trixie Alpha 1 release. The latest is the freeze dates for Debian 13.0 being announced today.

In an Intel blog post today they outlined their desire for a more modular PC design to enhance repairability and reduce e-waste. It's very much along similar lines of the Framework Computer upgradeable and easily serviceable laptops. With some luck hopefully we will be seeing more modular PC designs moving forward.

Archinstall 3.0.2 was just tagged as the newest version of this quick and easy, text-based installer for the Arch Linux operating system.

In October it will mark 40 years since the Free Software Foundation (FSF) was founded by Richard Stallman. In marking forty years of supporting the free software movement, they have been running a logo contest to memorialize the milestone. Today that new logo was unveiled.

Ahead of the upcoming NVIDIA GeForce RTX 50 series graphics "Blackwell" and the AMD Radeon RX 9070 series "RDNA4" later in the quarter, I figured it would be worthwhile having a dedicated article looking at the latest upstream Linux graphics/gaming performance for current generation NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40 and AMD Radeon RX 7000 series graphics cards. On the AMD side was the near-final Linux 6.13 kernel along with Mesa 25.0-devel for the latest RADV Vulkan and RadeonSI OpenGL driver support while on the NVIDIA side was their current 565 driver release branch.

Google engineer Vinay Banakar sent out a patch this week for the Linux kernel's memory management code to optimize TLB flushes during page reclaim and are showing very promising results.

An unexpected surprise today are AMD Linux software engineers announcing a new project a bit further outside the scope of their open-source graphics drivers... The AMDGPU Composition Stack "ACS" is for delivering new advanced features atop Wayland for bettering the Linux desktop display capabilities.

Surprisingly a change not made years ago, the Linux Kernel Unit Testing "KUnit" framework with the Linux 6.14 kernel is set to use hardware acceleration by default for faster testing where available.

Linux kernel developers are working to make it easier to debug early boot issues such as Kexec failures as currently dealing with such situations can be a frustrating and time consuming headache for figuring out the problems prior to the kernel being fully brought online.

Merged this week into the LLVM compiler codebase is initial support for "arch15" within the SystemZ back-end. Arch15 likely correlates to the IBM z17 mainframes with Telum II processors.

Back in April 2022 was the announcement by AMD's GPUOpen team of Orochi as a library for HIP/CUDA API run-time switching. Making use of Orochi allows for dynamically targeting either AMD HIP or NVIDIA CUDA at run-time to ease the distribution/usage of apps wanting to target both AMD and NVIDIA GPUs from the same software build. Today Orochi 3.0 was released.

Important code restructuring to the Intel Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) code is landing for the Linux 6.14 kernel to make it more robust moving forward and preparing for future features around this confidential computing / trusted execution environment (TEE) functionality built into the newest Xeon processors.