In addition to announcing Clearwater Forest as Xeon 6+, Intel also used their Tech Tour 2025 Arizona event for predominantly focusing on upcoming Panther Lake SoCs for laptops shipping in 2026.

Details during the Clearwater Forest briefing at Intel Tech Tour Arizona were rather light... Especially as for what's known about the cores already from prior events like Hot Chips and other Intel disclosures around the Darkmont E-core. But we do now know the branding: Xeon 6+ for Clearwater Forest.

For the past 21+ years of running Phoronix and even longer than that being a Linux user, I have loved and consistently promoted Intel's open-source efforts and leading Linux support. Even through Intel's difficult periods of delayed and stagnate hardware launches, what had remained consistent at the company and rather legendary had been their open-source contributions. From the Linux kernel to compiler toolchains and hundreds -- if not thousands -- of different open-source projects over the past two decades have been advanced thanks to Intel's open-source leadership. It is with much sadness that my faith and confidence in Intel's open-source leadership position is being questioned and questioning the direction they are now apparently steering their open-source focus/philosophy moving forward.

Proposed last year was GL_EXT_mesh_shader as a cross-vendor mesh shading extension. That OpenGL mesh shader work led by an AMD engineer was merged today into the OpenGL Registry.

Merged overnight to the Linux 6.18 kernel were all of the perf subsystem tool updates. Notable with the perf tooling updates is a new Python application living within the kernel source tree.

PoCL 7.1 is now available for this "Portable Computing Language" implementation that brings OpenCL to CPUs and other devices/accelerators via support for the various LLVM back-ends such as NVIDIA PTX, Intel GPUs via Level Zero, etc.

FEX 2510 is out as the newest release of this open-source emulator for running x86/x86_64 applications on ARM64 (AArch64) Linux devices. Making FEX all the more popular is its continued ability for running Wine/Proton for handling Windows games on ARM64 Linux.

Canonical just officially announced the release of Ubuntu 25.10 as the newest non-LTS release of Ubuntu Linux.

So far the upstream GCC compiler hasn't seen any target enablement for Intel's future Nova Lake processors (a.k.a. -march=novalake support) but merged yesterday for the GNU C Library was initial targeting for Nova Lake as well as Wildcat Lake.

Last month the Alliance for Open Media "AOMedia" began teasing that the AV2 video codec will release later this year. They have now sent us word that later this month will be a virtual event talking more about this successor to AV1.

Last week the block subsystem and IO_uring updates were merged for the Linux 6.18 kernel with a few items to draw attention to.

In addition to the Linux 6.18 kernel bringing initial bindings for writing Rust USB drivers, the main USB/Thunderbolt subsystem updates for Linux 6.18 brought a variety of other enhancements.

Last week System76 released the Pop!_OS 24.04 beta along with the beta COSMIC desktop. This long overdue update to Pop!_OS re-bases against the Ubuntu 24.04 LTS base while featuring their modern, Rust-based desktop environment. For those curious I ran some benchmarks of Pop!_OS 24.04 beta compared to the current Pop!_OS 22.04 stable release.

Following last week's RISC-V pull request that brought support for the MIPS Vendor Extensions and other changes plus separately the SoC pull that added mainline ESWIN EIC7700 SoC support and the HiFive Premier P550, a secondary round of RISC-V architecture updates was submitted for the Linux 6.18 merge window.

Beta builds of the Blender 5.0 3D modeling software are now available ahead of the planned stable release in mid-November.

Tvrtko Ursulin of Igalia has been leading the work on developing a "fair" DRM scheduler for Linux kernel graphics drivers. This scheduling algorithm is inspired by CFS and aims to improve the experience of running interactive graphical clients in parallel with heavy GPU workloads. This scheduler is inching closer to being ready for the mainline Linux kernel.

The GNU Compiler Collection will be shifting to its "stage three" development in November as focusing more on bug fixing now and new ports and less on existing compiler functionality/features.

In recent days there have been two rounds of Kernel-based Virtual Machine "KVM" feature updates to be merged for Linux 6.18 in enhancing the open-source virtualization stack.

In addition to the NTFS3 driver changes to land last week for the Linux 6.18 kernel, the exFAT file-system driver for that other Microsoft file-system has also seen some notable updates this cycle.

Meta already has Zstd (Zstandard) compression while this week they announced the release of OpenZL as a new open-source, format-aware compression framework.