Merged today ahead of the Linux 6.15-rc3 kernel test release on Sunday were the set of "x86 fixes" for the week. Of these x86 fixes are two notable changes in particular.

In recent kernel releases there have been performance enhancements to the AES implementations and other cryptographic subsystem code for speeding up the performance on modern Intel and AMD processors. With Linux 6.16 there will be at least some additional small gains to find with Intel and AMD processors bearing AVX-512 when employing AES-XTS.

Earlier this week the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5060 Ti launched and there were launch-day Linux CUDA/OpenCL compute benchmarks on Phoronix. But for the Linux gaming performance tests we were waiting on a new supported driver release, which happened to be on launch day with the NVIDIA 575.51.02 Linux beta. Now that the gaming-ready Linux driver is available for the GeForce RTX 5060 series, here are some initial benchmarks of the PNY GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 16GB up against other NVIDIA GeForce and AMD Radeon graphics cards using the newly-released Ubuntu 25.04.

Back in the Linux 6.12 kernel cycle the Intel i915 kernel graphics driver added fan speed reporting support. Finally for the upcoming Linux 6.16 cycle that fan speed reporting will also be working with the modern Intel Xe kernel graphics driver used by default with Intel's latest integrated and discrete graphics processors.

Following the GCC 15 code branching after working its way down to zero "P1" regressions of the highest priority, GCC 15.1 Release Candidate 1 is out today for testing.

With Fedora 42 having released earlier this week, more feature development work and planning around Fedora 43 is heating up. Another one of the early change proposals now filed for Fedora 43 is changing the CMake build system's default generator from Make to Ninja.

The Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) with the Fwupd client makes it wonderfully easy to enjoy seamless system UEFI and device/peripheral firmware updates under Linux. LVFS is backed by a growing number of major OEMs/ODMs and serves up millions of firmware files. But they are in need of more financial resources from the biggest hardware vendors.

Following this week's updated Intel Graphics Compiler release, a new version of the Intel Compute Runtime was also published in providing OpenCL and oneAPI Level Zero GPU compute support on Windows and Linux systems.

Patches for Linux posted on Thursday by Intel prepare for a new version of Speed Select Technology Turbo Frequency (SST-TF) handling for future processors with more cores.

While the Radeon RX 9070 series as the first of the AMD RDNA4 graphics cards do perform well on Linux, the one area the performance has been less enticing remains with Vulkan ray-tracing while using the Mesa RADV driver. For example, AMDVLK vs. RADV on the RX 9070 series shows the Mesa driver struggling with ray-tracing compared to the official AMD driver. But the good news is there's a concerted effort now to improve the AMD RDNA4 ray-tracing performance with RADV.

Upstreamed to the Linux kernel last year was the alienware-wmi-wmax driver for enabling thermal control support on various Alienware and Dell G-Series systems. Being merged today as a "fix" for Linux 6.15 is extending that thermal control support to a number of additional Dell/Alienware systems.

Today the review embargo lifts on the Framework 13 with AMD Ryzen AI 300 "Strix Point" SoCs: wow, what an upgrade! I've spent the past week testing out the Framework 13 with the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 and it's been terrific. Framework 13's modularity continues to pay off and allows easily upgrading to the new Strix Point bearing motherboard with AMD Zen 5 CPU cores and the Radeon 890M (RDNA 3.5) integrated graphics. If you are on a fresh Linux distribution the support is in great shape and paired with great performance for delivering a great 2025 Linux laptop option.

Ubuntu 25.04 ISO images are now available for download along with the various flavors of this newest six-month, non-LTS Linux distribution update.

Arch Linux is the latest Linux distribution replacing its Redis packages with the Valkey fork.

The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) code was branched today to the releases/gcc-15 branch and GCC 16.0.0 is now the version on the main development branch.

In addition to this week's updated Intel oneVPL GPU Runtime, Intel's software engineers also released their new quarterly version of the Intel Media Driver that provides Video Acceleration API (VA-API) support for integrated graphics hardware going back to Broadwell processors and through the next-gen Panther Lake processors.

LXQt 2.2 was christened today as the newest stable update to this lightweight, open-source Qt desktop environment.

Released on Wednesday was IGC 2.10.8 as the newest update to the Intel Graphics Compiler that is used by their Compute Runtime OpenCL/Level-Zero stack on Windows and Linux as well as being used as their graphics shader compiler under their Windows driver.

Following the recent Plasma 6.3 desktop release, KDE Gear 25.04 is now available for shipping all of the latest and greatest KDE applications.

While Intel's Core Ultra 200V "Lunar Lake" SoCs with on-package memory has been reported to be a one-off design, besides the integrated memory it was also notable for being a hybrid core design while lacking Hyper Threading (HT / SMT) support. The notion of hybrid P/E core CPUs without SMT looks like it will continue with Intel software engineers still exploring Energy Aware Scheduling (EAS) around such layouts.