With the Linux 6.19 stable kernel expected to be released tomorrow (8 February), here is a reminder about the top features to expect from this next version of the Linux kernel.

The first release candidate of the big NetBSD 11.0 release is now available for testing.

Merged overnight to the LLVM/Clang compiler's codebase was initial targeting for next-generation AMD Zen 6 processors using the znver6 target.

Following the September release of the KDE LInux reference distribution for the KDE desktop in alpha form, KDE Linux developers have been working toward the beta release with more improvements to this open-source desktop distro.

A Linux kernel engineer at Microsoft is working on a useful Linux desktop improvement. Hamza Mahfooz who previously worked for AMD on their AMDGPU Linux display driver code has been spearheading work on a KMS recovery mechanism to help kernel mode-setting display drivers recover in case of problems.

GNOME's Rust-based and sandboxed Glycin image loading library focused on safety now supports JPEG 2000 images by default.

Ahead of the planned Linux 6.19 stable kernel release tomorrow, there have been some last-minute fixes submitted for the scheduler code, including for performance regressions.

While Mesa 26.0 stable will be out soon, the belated Mesa 25.3.5 point release is now available for serving as the current latest stable point release.

There is less than two weeks to go until the official KDE Plasma 6.6 desktop release. Plasma 6.6 is still seeing bug fixes in this final stretch of development while KDE developers are also busy already on Plasma 6.7 feature work.

Wine 11.2 is out as the latest bi-weekly development release in the road toward the Wine 12.0 stable release next January.

Sent out today as a request for comments (RFC) by a Linux kernel engineer employed by IBM is a machine learning library for the Linux kernel. The intent is on plugging in running ML models to the Linux kernel that could be used for system performance optimizations and various other purposes.

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.