Following yesterday's initial tuning of the "znver5" target for the AMD Zen 5 CPUs with the GCC 15 compiler, several more rounds of compiler tuning/optimizations were merged for benefiting the Ryzen AI 300 series, Ryzen 9000 series desktops, and upcoming EPYC Turin processors.

While using the older Qualcomm Snapdragon 8xc Gen 3 (SC8280XP) SoC and not the exciting Snapdragon X1 Elite, Linux kernel patches were posted this week for enabling the Microsoft Surface Pro 9 5G to boot with the mainline kernel.

Linux 6.11 introduces block atomic write support including for NVMe and SCSI devices. With a new set of patches posted this week, atomic write support is wired up for the RAID0 MD code.

Mozilla is interested in a Rust-written JPEG-XL image decoder for its memory safety characteristics compared to the existing C++ code they rely on for JPEG-XL image support in Firefox. While Google previously removed JPEG-XL support from Chrome/Chromium, it may be Google that comes to the rescue and writes a Rust-based JPEG-XL image decoder that can then be shipped by Firefox.

There are six accepted blocker bugs so far for the Fedora 41 Beta and three of them all pertain to Raspberry Pi issues.

Weston 14.0 was released today as the newest feature release for this reference Wayland compositor.

When it comes to the Rust programming language support within the Linux kernel one of the limitations is that the CPU architecture support isn't as widespread. Currently Rust for Linux supports x86_64, AArch64 (ARM64) little-endian, LoongArch, and RISC-V. While those cover the main targets, POWER is notably missing and many other niche CPU architectures supported by the Linux kernel especially for aging platforms. Patches posted today to the Linux kernel mailing list would extend the Rust support to MIPS.

Google announced today that the Android 15 source code has been released to the Android Open-Source Project (AOSP).

While there are more than 74k packages available within Debian's package management system for x86_64 systems, not all of the packages are well maintained and a portion of them haven't seen any maintenance/updates in ages. Debian developers have recently begun discussing how to begin removing more of those long unmaintained packages from the archive.

Intel formally announced their Core Ultra 200V series "Lunar Lake" laptop processors today in Berlin.

Merged today for the GCC 15 compiler in development and potentially for back-porting to the next GCC 14 point release is a second round of AMD Zen 5 "znver5" tuning.

Now that Linux 6.12 will enable Intel Battlemage and Lunar Lake graphics by default for the out-of-the-box kernel graphics driver support, the user-space Intel Mesa drivers with Iris Gallium3D (OpenGL) and ANV Vulkan are moving ahead to enable their support out-of-the-box too. This has been merged for Mesa 24.3-devel to have Battlemage discrete GPUs enjoying OpenGL and Vulkan support while it's also marked for back-porting to the Mesa 24.2 stable series.

Samba 4.21 is out as the newest version of this SMB networking protocol implementation commonly used on Linux systems for file and print services interaction with Windows systems.

Posted today as a "request for comments" by longtime Linux developer Josh Poimboeuf of Red Hat is klp-build. The klp-build proposal is a new means of building livepatch modules for live-patching the Linux kernel to address bugs and security issues with the running kernel image.

Patches posted to the Linux kernel mailing list today allow for inline tail support within the Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS). This inline tail support allows for saving space when storing many small files and with reduced I/O can lead to faster data copy times.

Power Profiles Daemon as the UPower project to make Linux laptop/system power profile handling via D-Bus is out with a new release. This is the Linux/open-source solution for exposing of power profiles to the Linux desktop and better managing the system state between power-saver / balanced / performance modes and other options.

Coreboot 24.08 debuted on Monday night as the newest feature release for this open-source system firmware project that allows replacing the proprietary BIOS/firmware on many different platforms. With Coreboot 24.08 comes more than 900 patches from 130+ developers in continuing to support new motherboards and making other improvements.

While two years ago Google notably axed support for JPEG-XL within the Chrome web browser, they remain bullish on WebP and AVIF for imaging needs. This past week they finally announced Google Search is now supporting AVIF images.

Firefox 130 web browser binaries were published today ahead of the official release announcement going out on Tuesday. Firefox 130 isn't too particularly exciting but there are a few changes worth mentioning.

The AMD GCN3 (GFX8) support and in particular the Fiji GPU support is being retired from the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC). The Fiji GPU support in the GCC compiler was already deprecated in part due to the LLVM compiler having already removed Fiji support months ago and the AMD ROCm compute driver having broken GCN3 / Fiji support for years.