Valve just dropped a new Steam client beta and it's a big one for Linux gamers.

A patch has been posted to the Linux kernel mailing list by an Intel engineer confirming that Nova Lake S and Nova Lake P processors with integrated graphics will support SR-IOV in conjunction with the Xe kernel graphics driver.

With the recently reviewed Star Labs StarFighter Ultra Linux laptop its BIOS allows for configurable memory speeds unlike many other laptop vendor BIOS implementations these days. Star Labs also made the default design decision to run the LPDDR5-7467 rated memory at LPDDR5-6400 speeds in the name of a balanced user experience for power/performance. So I was curious to run some benchmarks quantifying that power and performance impact of LPDDR5-6400 vs. LPDDR5-7467 plus tossed in LPDDR5-5467 testing as well as the third choice offered with this StarFighter Ultra laptop.

The open-source Memtest86+ program that is popular for RAM testing has expanded beyond the x86/x86_64 (and LoongArch64) world to now support memory testing on ARM64/AArch64 hardware.

3mdeb firmware engineers have been quite busy this year working on porting Coreboot and openSIL to an AMD Ryzen AM5 MSI motherboard and similarly getting openSIL and Coreboot up and running on a Gigabyte server motherboard for AMD EPYC 9005 CPUs. They haven't forgotten about their past projects though and today released an updated version of their Dasharo downstream firmware for the ASRock Rack SPC741D8-2L2T motherboard supporting 4th and 5th Gen Xeon Scalable processors.

AI/LLMs like Claude Code are beginning to prove capable of helping to reverse engineer hardware for Linux support, especially when it comes to the tedious reverse engineering tasks.

Ubuntu 26.10 "Stonking Stingray" is now officially available as the newest six-month non-LTS update to Ubuntu Linux.

For those using the generic ACPI Collaborative Processor Performance Control (CPPC) CPUFreq driver such as on a number of ARM64 Linux server platforms, if the CPUs support a "boost" mode it's disabled by default. But a patch from Huawei is now looking to enable CPU boost mode by default on Linux.

As an early improvement to Mutter to look forward to with GNOME 52 (Update: It will first appear in GNOME 51.2), the compositor is now tracking damage for secondary GPU copy buffers. This should improve the experience for those with multi-GPU setups such as some hybrid laptops.

Microsoft's newest software release for Linux is... Microsoft Defender for the Linux desktop. Microsoft Defender has been ported to Linux to "secure Linux desktops" with Microsoft acknowledging that "more developers begin to use Linux desktops" and thus bringing their security application and threat-protection product to Linux desktops to complement their prior ill-used Linux server support.

In addition to providing Framework systems to the CachyOS Linux distribution for optimizing the support, Framework Computers has also been providing monthly donations to the project. CachyOS confirmed today that Framework Computers has now tripled their monthly donations to this independent Linux distribution built atop Arch Linux.

Apple compiler engineers have contributed to upstream LLVM/Clang today a Scalable Static Analysis Framework (SSAF) driver for whole-program based analysis and source-to-source code transformations.

In addition to Epic Games announced a preview of their new Epic Games Launcher, including Linux support, they also announced plans to improve their Easy Anti-Cheat (EAC) software on Linux. Along with this improved EAC they are also working on official Linux support for the popular Fortnite game.

In addition to Ubuntu 26.10 itself delivering some nice performance gains on Ubuntu 26.10 for AMD EPYC servers and other hardware, the optional and currently-unofficial amd64v3 package archive also provides additional performance uplift. Here is a look quantifying the performance impact of amd64v3 packages on AMD EPYC 9005 series servers.

Canonical engineer Juerg Haefliger posted a set of Device Tree patches in working to support the mainline Linux kernel on the HP EliteBook 6 G1q laptop that is powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon X1 Plus SoC.

The RISC-V RVA23 profile is a big deal for reducing fragmentation in the RISC-V ecosystem and standardizing more of the ISA to make it easier to distribute modern RISC-V binaries and the like. Modern versions of Ubuntu mandate RVA23 even though compliant hardware is still quite limited. Somewhat surprisingly, only coming about now is an easy ability for Linux users to find the answer to "is my RISC-V system RVA23 compliant?" Pending Linux kernel patches are finally offering a one-shot way of telling you.

Released at the end of August was Haiku R1 Beta 6 and over the course of September, further improvements continued to land for this BeOS-inspired project now in its 25th year of development.

Cloud Hypervisor, the Rust-based Virtual Machine Monitor that began as an Intel open-source project and evolved into a multi-vendor Linux Foundation project, is out today with a sizable feature update.

Rustls as the modern TLS library written in the Rust programming language with an emphasis on memory safety is out today with its v0.23.46 release in order to ship four new security fixes.

The feature-packed and polished Plasma 6.8 KDE desktop is now available. Making this release all the more special is that it coincides with the 30th anniversary of the KDE project.