KDE Gear 25.12 is out today as the collection of the latest KDE desktop/mobile applications for running nicely on the Plasma 6 desktop.

Earlier in the year Microsoft proposed the "Hornet" Linux security module to provide signature verification capabilities for eBPF programs to provide for better system security. It's been months since hearing anything more about it and not being merged, but yesterday they "reintroduced" it to the Linux kernel community.

Last month the Vulkan VK_EXT_present_timing extension was merged after 5+ years in development. VK_EXT_present_timing ended up debuting at the end of November within the Vulkan 1.4.335 spec update to much excitement for providing functionality to obtain information on the presentation engine's display for accurate timing information and to assist in scheduling a present to happen no earlier than a desired time. This is a big win for helping avoid game stuttering and more while now the Mesa support for it is nearly complete and could be merged soon.

Linus Torvalds merged the Device Mapper "DM" changes overnight that include one stand-out change for Linux 6.19.

Following yesterday's release of a new llm-scaler-omni beta there is now a new beta feature release of llm-scaler-vllm that provides the Intel-optimized version of vLLM within a Docker container that is set and ready to go for AI on modern Arc Graphics hardware. With today's llm-scaler-vllm 1.2 beta release there is support for a variety of additional large language models (LLMs) and other improvements.

The big set of networking subsystem updates was recently merged for the ongoing Linux 6.19 merge window. There are some enticing core networking improvements like a big performance improvement for heavy transfer workloads, Bluetooth PAST enablement, and more. Plus a lot of wired and wireless networking driver activity and new hardware enablement.

Merged today to the Intel open-source "ANV" Vulkan driver in Mesa 26.0 is introducing a shader VMA allocator. Long story short this new allocator steps toward enabling Vulkan ray-tracing capture/replay support, which can come in hand for debugging issues with Vulkan ray-tracing on Intel graphics hardware under Linux and similarly to assist in optimizing for better performance.

The GNU C Library's malloc implementation is now enabling 2MB Transparent Huge Pages (THP) by default for AArch64 Linux. This is being done in the name of better performance -- a healthy 6.25% performance improvement is noted for SPEC with this change.

The newest feature to land in the cross-platform Qt toolkit is QIORing as an abstraction for Linux's IO_uring interface. This QIORing may also end up supporting Microsoft's Windows IORing implementation as well.

Given the recent release of FreeBSD 15, I started off my testing in looking at how FreeBSD 15.0 improves performance versus FreeBSD 14.3. Now it's onto the next important question: how is FreeBSD 15.0 performing relative to Linux on servers? Here are some benchmarks exploring that topic today.

AMD FSR SDK 2.1 is now available that includes their "FSR Redstone" machine learning based upscaling tech for gaming

Turbostat is the Linux command-line utility for reporting CPU frequency / power / C-states and related performance / power management items namely for modern AMD and Intel processors. This CLI utility lives within the Linux kernel source tree and for Linux 6.19 has picked up a few new features.

In addition to approving Fedora Cloud switching /boot to a Btrfs subvolume, another change approved this week by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) is for shipping the Budgie 10.10 desktop packages in Fedora 44.

The past several months Intel software engineers have been quite busy with LLM-Scaler as part of Project Battlematrix. LLM-Scaler is a Docker-based solution for AI workloads on Intel graphics hardware to ship an optimized vLLM stack and other AI frameworks. Out today is a new LLM-Scaler-Omni release to help enhance ComfyUI performance on Intel hardware.

A performance fix has been submitted to the Linux kernel for dealing with a regression in the Slab memory allocation code.

While the Linux kernel has inclusive terminology guidelines for the past five years to replace phrases like master/slave and blacklist/whitelist, there has surprisingly been a "genocide" function within the kernel that was questioned when it was first submitted for inclusion but now removed in Linux 6.19.

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee "FESCo" today signed off on a new feature for Fedora Cloud 44 to switch /boot to being as a Btrfs sub-volume rather than a separate partition.

The RISC-V CPU architecture changes have been merged for the in-development Linux 6.19 kernel.

AerynOS 2025.12 is available today as the latest installment of this from-scratch Linux distribution originally known as Serpent OS.

AMD previously talked of simplifying the in-box Linux support for ROCm during the second half of 2025. So far we haven't seen any groundbreaking changes from that initiative besides AMD working on various package archives/repositories to make it easier to install the latest ROCm on different Linux distributions. But today a big announcement is now public that Canonical with next year's Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release will provide official ROCm packages along with other libraries.