GNOME developer Jordan Petridis published a blog post today to introduce the world to the Toolpak plans for GNOME OS.

Queued this week into the slab/for-next Git branch ahead of next month's Linux 7.4 merge window is a memory management change for refilling pre-filled sheaves from the barn. In some cases this yields wild improvements to specific synthetic benchmarks.

The Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) subsystem fixes for the week are heavier on the side with many fixes to these kernel graphics/display drivers ahead of Sunday's Linux 7.3-rc5 release.

Wisp is a new GNOME Shell extension making it easier to graphically manage Btrfs file-system snapshots.

The AMDXDNA open-source Linux kernel accelerator driver is seeing a fair amount of work for better supporting current-generation NPU3 neural processing units. The AMD NPU3 is what's found in current AMD Ryzen AI 300 / Ryzen AI 300 PRO series SoCs.

Even with this week's KDE Akademy conference and releasing KDE Plasma 6.8 Beta 2, KDE developers still found time to land last minute changes for Plasma 6.8 plus ongoing early work toward Plasma 6.9.

Going back to last year the Igalia open-source consulting firm has been working on enhancing the Linux kernel to help Steam Play gaming on ARM64 and ensuring the FEX emulator is operating efficiently for x86/x86_64 games running on the likes of the Steam Frame. After other kernel work in recent months, there's finally an updated round of the FUTEX get_robust_list2 and set_robust_list2 system call patches.

GDB 18.1 is out today as the newest version of the GNU Debugger that works across C/C++, Fortran, Rust, and other languages like Go, Ada, and more.

The Redox OS open-source, Rust-based operating system has seen a lot of activity in recent weeks with many notable improvements landing.

The coffee window is closing. Going back many years with the time it's taken to compile the Linux kernel has been a well known opportunity for a coffee break or even eating a meal during the lengthy Linux kernel build process. Even when the Linux kernel was much smaller than it is today, with the hardware at the time it would often be a very time consuming process... Thus incredible to think that we are now on the horizon of a ten second clean, default kernel build on Linux x86_64.

While Linux 7.2 brought initial Apple M3 support and Linux 7.3 brought M3 Pro / Max / Ultra support, the mainline Linux kernel support for the M3 series hardware remains very basic and not yet ready for daily driving. But more work continues to be upstreamed and today the patches were posted for getting NVMe storage up and running across all Apple M3 hardware.

Linux 7.4 is going to be the big kernel release where the AMD graphics driver will finally expose HDMI 2.1 by default and comes with features including HDMI FreeSync, VRR, and ALLM. Ahead of that milestone there have been various other last minute tweaks and improvements to its HDMI 2.1 support. Sent out on Thursday was the latest round of AMDGPU DC patches that includes a few more patches for improving the HDMI 2.1 reliability.

Last call for the Phoronix autumn "Oktoberfest" Premium sale: it runs through end of day Sunday, 27 September (any timezone - I'm not particularly strict). If you have been meaning to support the site, this is the window.

A new blog post published on Thursday covers the experimental support for SIMD with the Go programming language. This expanding Go SIMD support also includes a platform-independent API for making use of SIMD with modern processors.

Samba 4.25 is out as the newest stable release for this open-source software enabling file and print services sharing between Linux servers and Windows systems.

While the Linux kernel continues to be bombarded with patches from AI/LLM agents, to date the kernel hasn't carried an AGENTS.md Markdown file with instructions catering to AI/LLM agents. But a patch set out today would finally introduce one.

Yesterday Qualcomm posted open-source GPU driver patches for their Adreno 850 GPU one day after being announced with the Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6. Yesterday Qualcomm also announced their Snapdragon X2 Linux support plans. Today they have posted the GPU enablement patches for what's found in the Mahua SoC for lower-tier Snapdragon X2 SoCs.

The open-source ReactOS project striving to provide binary compatibility with Microsoft Windows applications/games as well as drivers took a huge step forward today with landing a significant update to its DirectX stack from code leveraged from the Wine project.

For those with a Framework Laptop 13 Pro or another Intel Core Ultra Series 3 "Panther Lake" laptop, the upcoming Ubuntu 26.10 release is delivering some nice out-of-the-box improvements over Ubuntu 26.04 LTS.

COSMIC Epoch 1.9 was released last night as the newest version of the System76-sponsored, Rust-based desktop environment. COSMIC Epoch 1.9 release notes only became available today and it's a big one with new apps and improvements to existing offerings.