Plasma Wayland Protocols 1.14 is out today for providing the set of Wayland protocol XML files for currently non-standard protocols that are relied upon by the Plasma desktop with KWin compositor.

AMD engineers continue work toward upstreaming their XDNA kernel driver for Linux in enabling the Ryzen AI NPU on open-source. The "v3" patches were posted on Wednesday but given the timing it looks like it will be missing out still on merging for the upcoming Linux 6.12 LTS cycle.

Ojaswin Mujoo with IBM has posted an initial set of "request for comments" patches implementing extsize hints for EXT4, similar to the hints being worked on for the XFS file-system. This is important work in ultimately striving toward handling non-torn / atomic writes within the EXT4 file-system.

The Linux Mint project has at times forked various open-source projects to evolve them on their own such as the Cinnamon desktop starting out as forks of several GNOME 3 components. While their software forks and focus has mostly been at the desktop-level, they are going a bit further down the stack now to develop forks of several APT components that power package management on Debian/Ubuntu systems.

Last month Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund announced they would be opening a fellowship program for open-source maintainers. The Sovereign Tech Fund (STF) has been providing great investments into open-source projects while this fellowship is around investing in open-source maintainers that may be working on multiple open-source projects. The application process is now open for those interested open-source maintainers.

With the upcoming PostgreSQL 17 database server release there is some initial AVX-512 optimizations that are looking quite nice according to Intel's findings.

Merged yesterday into the code for Mesa 24.3 is initial support within the PanVK Vulkan driver for Arm Mali v10 graphics hardware. The v10 architecture is for second-gen Valhall GPUs and goes along with the ongoing Linux kernel driver work for the Panthor CSF-based driver support.

For those continuing to make use of the open-source Redis in-memory, key-value database rather than some of the new open-source forks such as Valkey, the first milestone release of Redis 8.0 Community Edition is now available for testing.

Wine project leader Alexandre Julliard has recently been devoting some time to enhancing their GitLab deployment with new features and also in welcoming the Mono project to their GitLab instance. In case you missed it, Microsoft recently shifted stewardship of Mono over to Wine.

While Gentoo Linux recently ended their support for Itanium (IA-64) hardware, this popular source-based Linux distribution continues to support other aging platforms... Today they sent out an announcement highlighting their improved support for MIPS and Alpha based hardware.

Oracle today released version 7.1 of their VirtualBox virtualization software with an improved GUI, Wayland clipboard sharing support, OCI integration improvements, and other enhancements.

Early in the year we enjoyed seeing AMD Zen 5 "znver5" support upstreamed for the GCC 14 compiler in making it into that annual GNU Compiler Collection feature release. It was great seeing AMD Zen 5 support make it into this open-source compiler well ahead of any Zen 5 products being announced. Since then the GCC support for the new Znver5 target has continued to be improve upon meanwhile we've been waiting to see similar treatment for the LLVM/Clang compiler stack. Finally this week that AMD Zen 5 (znver5) support has been submitted for review in upstreaming it for LLVM.

With the upcoming Ubuntu 24.10 release, Canonical is introducing permission prompting for more control over Snap access to systems to enhance security.

Motherboard vendors have begun rolling out updated BIOS versions for AMD AM5 platforms that allow a configurable TDP on the Ryzen 5 9600X and Ryzen 7 9700X processors to allow a 105 Watt cTDP compared to the base 65 Watt TDP. For those wondering about the Linux performance and power efficiency impact from running these mid-tier Zen 5 desktop processors at the higher cTDP value, here is the full set of benchmarks compared to my original review data on Linux.

With Linux 6.11 expected for release on Sunday that in turn will mark the start of the two-week merge window for Linux 6.12. The Linux 6.12 cycle will get underway and work towards its stable release in mid to late November. Ahead of the Linux 6.12 merge window here is a look at some of the material anticipated for merging during this next cycle.

Device Tree patches have been posted to the Linux kernel mailing list for review and possible upstreaming to the mainline Linux kernel for booting Apple iPhones, iPads, and iPods that use the A7 to A11 SoCs.

With Mozilla having backed away from the Servo web engine years ago and recent open-source development on Servo focused on making it suitable for embed purposes into other applications/software, it's remained to be picked up by any standalone web browser project. But taking shape over the past few months has been Verso as a ground-up build of a new Rust-based web browser making use of Servo.

ClangIR is a new IR for LLVM's Clang compiler built atop MLIR. Thanks to this year's Google Summer of Code, there has been progress on being able to compile GPU kernels using ClangIR as another improvement for heterogeneous programming with this open-source compiler stack.

With this past weekend's release of Linux 6.11-rc7, the kernel changes for the week were larger than prior RCs and Torvalds was a bit hesitant on releasing v6.11 this coming Sunday due to the upcoming that takes place next week in Vienna, Austria. But after a bit of time and feedback from other kernel developers, Torvalds is now more inclined to release Linux 6.11 this coming Sunday rather than dragging it out for an extra week.

The latest Rust-written OpenCL driver "Rusticl" work by Red Hat engineer Karol Herbst is support for shader variants and introducing an optimized kernel variant.