Well, here's an unexpected combination... Toyota's Toyota Connected North America unit is developing a console-grade open-source game engine. Making it even more unusual is their engineering choices of building around the Flutter toolkit and in turn the Dart programming language. This new game engine creation is called Fluorite.

While just missing out on the recent Mutter 50 beta release, merged today to Mutter Git ahead of next month's GNOME 50 desktop release are some improvements to the Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) support.

Earlier this week I published the first Linux benchmarks of Intel's much anticipated Panther Lake with the Core Ultra X7 358H 16-core 18A processor. The Panther Lake SoC showed very nice generational gains especially with much better performance-per-Watt and the Intel Arc B390 graphics are also fascinatingly fast while continuing to be backed by open-source drivers. In today's article are more Panther Lake Linux benchmarks on the CPU side in looking at the performance potential when pushing the Core Ultra X7 358H with a higher power budget.

In addition to their ongoing AMDGPU LLVM compiler back-end work for upcoming GFX1250 and recently the GFX13 target for their graphics IP, today AMD compiler engineers introduced a new "GFX1170" target to the LLVM codebase that is also called RDNA 4m.

A nice, overdue usability improvement is on the way for those using Apple Macs under Linux. Finally there will be the ability to preserve the same backlight brightness across reboots under Linux.

Sent out today as a request for comments is a new patch series for Dynamic Housekeeping and Enhanced Isolation (DHEI). DHEI aims to provide run-time adjustments to kernel behavior around CPU isolation for helping with latency-sensitive tasks. The expressed goal is for helping cloud-native orchestrators and high frequency trading platforms dynamically re-partition CPU resources without downtime.

As of this week Oracle's latest VirtualBox development code begins to work with Linux's native KVM back-end. Support for KVM or other native OS hypervisors in conjunction with VirtualBox has long been sought and it's finally becoming a reality.

GTK toolkit developers met in Brussels once again for their annual hackfest during FOSDEM week.

One of the headaches right now when dealing with the Snapdragon X Elite on Linux is that for a majority of the devices you need to fetch firmware files from the Windows 11 on ARM partition as the necessary firmware bits for Linux use aren't upstreamed to linux-firmware.git. That has gradually improved over time from the qcom-firmware-extract making the process easier to more firmware bits eventually being added to linux-firmware.git.

Engineers Michał Żygowski and Piotr Król of open-source firmware consulting firm 3mdeb presented at FOSDEM in Brussels on open-source for confidential compute infrastructure. With Intel not making strides to fully open-up their FSP package, the talk was centered around the modern AMD open-source firmware efforts led by their openSIL initiative for open-source CPU silicon initialization to replace AGESA in the Zen 6 timeframe.

The GNU Nettle cryptographic library is out with a major new update that introduces support for SLH-DSA, the post-quantum signature scheme selected by NIST for the FIPS 205 standard.

Ardour 9.0 is out today as the latest major feature release to this leading open-source digital audio workstation (DAW) software for musicians, recording engineers, and other audio editing needs.

Merged a year ago to the Linux kernel's Xe graphics driver was a change to disable D3Cold across all Battlemage GPUs. This was done due instability issues around the D3cold to D0 power state transition. Finally with the upcoming Linux 7.0 kernel cycle that restriction is being loosened with restoring D3cold support with Battlemage GPUs aside from a specific NUC.

LLM scrapers for AI are even hungry for Debian's continuous integration "CI" data. Due to the ongoing abuse of the open web by LLM scrapers, the Debian CI infrastructure is restricting the publicly accessible data with their web server resources being hammered by bots/scrapers.

Yesterday was our first look at the Intel Panther Lake Linux performance with the Core Ultra X7 358H and focused on the CPU performance. In today's benchmarking is a look at the very exciting Xe3 graphics found with the top-tier Panther Lake models: the Arc B390 Graphics with 12 Xe cores.

Following the release of TrueNAS 25.10 for this Linux-based, OpenZFS-running operating system focused on network appliances / storage devices, iX systems has shared some of their plans for TrueNAS 26 this year.

Canonical and SpacemiT announced today that Ubuntu Linux will be officially supported on SpacemiT's new K3 RISC-V SoC. What makes the K3 interesting is being one of the first available RISC-V RVA23 designs.

The first beta release of Krita 6.0 is now available for this featureful digital painting program. Krita 6.0 is re-based against the Qt6 toolkit while Krita 5.3 Beta is also being released at the same time for those sticking to Qt5.

For those not fond of the increasing use of the Rust programming language within the Linux kernel or FreeBSD's considerations for Rust in its kernel, you can perhaps find refuge within NetBSD. One of the NetBSD developers has explained why you likely won't be finding Rust code within the NetBSD kernel anytime soon.

Intel ISPC 1.30 is now available as the latest feature update to their Implicit SPMD Program Compiler as a variant of the C programming language to easily target their array of CPUs and GPUs.