With Linux 7.3-rc1 released to cap off the two week merge window, here is a look at the many exciting changes merged for the Linux 7.3 kernel that is working its way toward release in the second half of October.

There is a set of 19 patches out for review on the Linux kernel mailing list that would finally allow the mainline kernel running on Apple Silicon M1 / M2 / M3 SoCs to enjoy USB4/Thunderbolt support.

Servo 0.5 is out today as the newest monthly update to this open-source, Rust-based browser engine. Servo 0.5 ships many notable enhancements for benefiting those running the Servoshell example browser or looking at Servo as an opportunity for embedded use.

Ahead of the next-generation AMD Ryzen Zen 6 client processors debuting, an important patch series was posted overnight to the Linux kernel mailing list. These patches provide new Zen 6 client Energy Performance Preference "EPP" tunings that are important for optimizing performance and power consumption for these upcoming AMD Zen 6 desktop and laptop processors.

One of the latest optimizations to the Mesa Vulkan drivers by Natalie Vock of Valve's Linux graphics team is faster and more vRAM efficient sorting for Morton code keys that are important for fast BVH construction and greater GPU parallelism.

Firefox has finally begun supporting Vulkan Video decoding to complement their long-used VA-API support on Linux. This is good news for the official NVIDIA Linux graphics driver stack as it's been the notable vendor not supporting the Video Acceleration API. But prior to Firefox rolling out its experimental Vulkan Video support, an independent implementation of VA-API built atop NVIDIA's NVDEC interface has been available for supporting GPU video acceleration in Firefox. That project is out today with its newest release.

With Linus Torvalds remarking in the Linux 7.3-rc1 release announcement of the AMD kernel graphics driver changes for amounting around a third of the -rc1 changes due to the big AMD GPU register files for DCN 6.0 and other new IP additions, here are some fresh code stats at large.

Like clockwork, the Linux 7.3 merge window has concluded after two weeks and the Linux 7.3-rc1 kernel now available for testing.

OpenShot 4.0 was tagged this afternoon on GitHub as the newest major feature release to this open-source non-linear video editing application.

Following last week's main set of sound subsystem updates for Linux 7.3 that brought a lot of new audio hardware support, a second round of sound updates were merged this weekend ahead of today's Linux 7.3-rc1 release.

This summer an intern with the FreeBSD Foundation worked on porting AMD ROCm to FreeBSD. The internship is concluding while the FreeBSD ROCm code is almost to the stage of being able to perform simple vector addition workloads.

The x86 platform driver changes are now in place for the Linux 7.3 kernel with additions for upcoming AMD Zen 6 hardware, the RGB LED driver controls for the Ryzen AI Halo PC, and a lot of laptop support additions and improvements for a variety of devices from different hardware vendors. Plus some handheld gaming device updates too.

Upstreamed to the FFmpeg multimedia driver code this weekend is support for Frame Rate Up-Conversion "FRUC" making use of the NVIDIA Vulkan Optical Flow extension.

The Kernel-based Virtual Machine "KVM" changes have landed for the Linux 7.3 merge window that is wrapping up later today.

The TTY/Serial code changes for Linux 7.3 were merged this week and include dropping the dated IPWireless driver while introducing the new 8250_mxpcie driver.

Upstreamed back in 2017 for Linux 4.12 was the RTL8723BS driver in the kernel's staging area. Nine years later it remains in staging and remains a frequent target for clean-ups and code improvements as it tries to work its way out.

Ahead of FreeBSD 14.5-RELEASE hopefully debuting on 8 September, FreeBSD 14.5-RC1 is out today as the final scheduled development release.

Last October I highlighted an interesting post on the Linux kernel mailing list around an x86 corporate entity other than Intel or AMD that left mysterious intrigue. The developer that detailed those x86 opcode/CPUID/MSR allocations back in July then detailed 16-tile and 32-tile AMX implementations again for something outside the current scope of Intel/AMD processors. Today another message is being relayed from that "corporate entity other than Intel/AMD."

In addition to the Union QtWidgets initial release happening this week, a number of other improvements also landed in the past few days in making Plasma 6.8 all the more exciting.

ReactOS 0.4.16 released today as the newest major update to this "open-source Windows" project providing an open-source OS with Windows driver and application compatibility.