Building off last Sunday's inaugural release candidate of Linux 6.12, Linus Torvalds tagged the Linux 6.12-rc2 kernel a few minutes ago.

In addition to Intel's Linux engineers being busy preparing hardware enablement support for next-gen Panther Lake client processors, they are also busy beginning to plumb Linux driver support for next-generation Xeon "Diamond Rapids" support as the successor to Xeon 6 Granite Rapids. With Linux 6.12 some new bits are now set to land for Diamond Rapids.

Prominent Wayland developer Simon Ser has released Cage v0.2, a Wayland kiosk compositor that runs single, maximized applications.

Red Hat engineer Karol Herbst continues enhancing Mesa's Rusticl driver that allows for a Rust-based OpenCL driver implementation for use by Gallium3D drivers. The newest addition is a build-time option for controlling devices to be enabled by default.

Wasmer 4.4 is out as the newest version to this prominent WebAssembly (WASM) runtime that supports WASIX / WASI / EmScripten to "run software anywhere" by effectively serving as lightweight containers and being able to scale from the edge to the cloud.

HoneyKrisp as the open-source Mesa Vulkan driver for Apple Silicon graphics and developed as part of the Asahi Linux project has landed a number of enhancements into the mainline Mesa code.

OpenRazer 3.9 is out today as the newest version of this community project providing open-source driver support for Razer peripherals on Linux. This out-of-tree set of Linux kernel drivers allows for various Razer devices to be configured and fully leveraged under Linux.

Linus Torvalds merged the newest round of fixes to the experimental Bcachefs file-system, but it's left Linux creator Linus Torvalds frustrated and he's presented two choices for the file-system moving forward due to the continued LKML drama.

The long-in-development GIMP 3.0 open-source alternative to Adobe Photoshop hopes to ship its release candidate in the near future.

It's been a long journey to see good web camera support for Intel Alder Lake and newer designs making use of the IPU6 imaging IP. But with Fedora 41 due for release in the coming weeks, there will finally be good out-of-the-box, open-source support for the IPU6-based web cameras in modern Intel Core laptops across Tigerlake / Alder Lake / Raptor Lake laptops.

We are not done yet seeing new Arm cores still impacted by the Speculative Store Bypass handling errata. Merged to Linux 6.12 on Friday was adding the speculative SSBS workaround for the Cortex-A715, Neoverse-N3, and Microsoft Azure Cobalt 100 cores.

OpenZFS 2.3-rc1 is now available for testing as the next major feature release to this open-source ZFS file-system implementation for Linux and FreeBSD systems.

Sam Lantinga released SDL 3.1.3 on Friday as their "stable ABI preview" version ahead of the SDL 3.2.0 stable release. The developer at Valve notes that SDL3 has already been "battle tested by millions of people in DOTA, CS2 and Steam" and they are now gearing up for the SDL 3.2 stable release to get SDL3 out to the masses.

KDE developers have been putting the finishing touches on the Plasma 6.2 desktop as it prepares to release next week. Plasma 6.2 will be out on Tuesday barring any last minute issues.

We are quickly working our way to the end of the calendar year where Wine 9.xx bi-weekly development releases will focus on a shift to stability for releasing Wine 10.0 in early 2025. But we're not there yet and Wine 9.19 is out today to deliver the newest batch of features and fixes for this open-source software to enjoy Windows games and apps on Linux.

The Qualcomm Cloud AI 100 accelerator caters to a variety of edge-to-cloud industries. While the Qualcomm Cloud AI hardware isn't talked about as much as the AI accelerators from other vendors, there is the QAIC driver within the mainline Linux kernel for supporting the Cloud AI 100 along with associated open-source compiler and user-space stack. It turns out the Qualcomm Cloud AI family is growing with a Cloud AI 80 "AIC080" accelerator coming to market at a lower-cost.

Intel's Linux engineers continue working on preparing for next-generation hardware support within the kernel well ahead of launch. The latest on the recent enablement around next-gen Panther Lake processors is enabling a new "5th Gen" neural processing unit (NPU) to be found with Panther Lake P.

Earlier this week I delivered initial Intel Xe2 Lunar Lake graphics benchmarks on Linux while today the focus is on Lunar Lake's CPU performance. The Xe2 graphics performance under Linux was disappointingly slow with it performing even worse than Meteor Lake while RDNA3.5 graphics led. Intel has been investigating the Xe2 Linux graphics performance but I haven't heard any updates yet. Today the attention is on the Lunar Lake CPU side under Linux and it too isn't looking too good. The performance of this 8-core Core Ultra 7 256V SoC is poor in real-world multi-threaded scenarios and the performance-per-Watt is only compelling in a subset of workloads. The AMD Ryzen AI 9 365 and AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 Zen 5 SoCs tended to deliver the superior performance and power efficiency under Linux.

The open-source ZLUDA project began life as a drop-in CUDA replacement that ran atop Intel GPUs using the Level Zero API. Then AMD quietly began funding it for several years as a viable CUDA implementation running atop AMD GPUs until discontinued funding earlier this year. ZLUDA for AMD GPUs was then made open-source but then in August the ZLUDA code was removed at AMD's request. Today it's taking on its third incarnation.

Richard Hughes of Red Hat just announced Fwupd 2.0 as a major release to this open-source firmware updating utility for Linux systems. Fwupd 2.0 clears out a lot of long deprecated and legacy bits while adding new features and shipping many fixes.