This week I tried out the current Ubuntu 26.04 development state on the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite with the Acer Swift 14 AI laptop I have been using for my X Elite benchmarks over the past year. Unfortunately, it wasn't a smooth experience with new issues encountered for this Windows On ARM laptop.

This week's round of drm-misc-next patches bring a few improvements to the AMDXDNA accelerator driver used for supporting the Ryzen AI NPUs. Plus some new panel additions and various other minor Direct Rendering Manager driver changes.

Google's Android LLVM toolchain team shared publicly this week that they have begun making use of AutoFDO for automatic feedback directed optimizations of their Linux kernel build used by Android.

Mike Blumenkrantz of Valve's Linux graphics driver team has landed support for mesh shaders within Mesa's LLVMpipe software driver.

KDE developers continue being very busy working on Plasma 6.7 feature development as well as continuing to drive new fixes and refinements to the current Plasma 6.6 stable series.

GNOME OS as the Linux-based distribution that serves as the leading-edge, reference platform of GNOME desktop development is now using KMSCON by default.

Announced today was debaudit, a new set of tools and services designed to verify the integrity and reproducibility of Debian source packages.

Less than a week after their prior NVIDIA Vulkan beta driver in the R595 driver series, today NVIDIA released another new Vulkan beta driver for Linux and Windows systems.

While the Linux support for Intel Core Ultra Series 3 Panther Lake is largely in good shape as shown in my numerous articles over the past month and a half, there are occasional missing remnants landing in the kernel. As the latest example, or the upcoming Linux 7.1 kernel, the unified Panther Lake C-States table is being added for the Intel Idle driver.

After going through five rounds of review under a Request For Comments (RFC) flag, today the latest round of Kernel API Specification Framework patches were sent out with the RFC flag removed.

Earlier this month were various Linux 7.0 file-system benchmarks showing how XFS is leading the race in the overall upstream Linux file-system performance on this forthcoming kernel. Stemming from that testing some premium supporters requested a fresh look at the historical performance of XFS as well as EXT4. So today's article is a look at how XFS and EXT4 have performed on every kernel release going back to Linux 6.12 LTS.

Sent out this week were more Intel Xe driver feature patches to DRM-Next for queuing ahead of next month's Linux 7.1 merge window.

Vulkan 1.4.346 was published today with one big new extension in tow: VK_KHR_device_address_commands.

FreeRDP as this open-source and cross-platform Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) implementation is out with FreeRDP 3.24 to ship new security fixes as well as other improvements.

A fix is on the way to the Linux 7.0 kernel today for addressing an idle power issue with AMD RDNA4 GPUs reporting high power consumption and full utilization even after being "idle" following compute workloads like Llama.cpp.

For going along with the Intel IVPU kernel accelerator driver in the mainline Linux kernel is the Intel NPU driver support in user-space. Released yesterday was the Intel NPU Driver 1.30 milestone for advancing the Intel NPU user-space support on Linux with this open-source support for Core Ultra SoCs.

GNOME's GitLab infrastructure has already been using Anubis for a while to help fend off bots and AI scraper traffic from wreacking havoc on their server resources and also their hosting budget. GNOME recently began redirecting some GitLab traffic to their GitHub repositories as another step in dealing with bots/scrapers. Now they have taken an added step of using the commercial, closed-source Fastly in their battle with bots.

Intel's LLM-Scaler project that makes it easy to deploy various large language models on modern Arc Graphics hardware is out with a new test release to expand its LLM coverage.

Last year TrueNAS unified their SCALE and CORE offerings as part of solidifying their enterprise storage efforts around Linux from their prior FreeBSD base. This year the developers at iXsystems have another change in store with announcing TrueNAS Connect as a new bridge for accessing TrueNAS enterprise storage features without having to invest in their hardware.

The AppArmor Linux kernel security module used notably by Ubuntu Linux and currently maintained by Canonical has been affected by several vulnerabilities made public today.