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.

While Mesa is predominantly used for GPU drivers, open-source developer Tomeu Vizoso continues advancing the capabilities of NPUs within the Mesa driver stack.

Intel ISPC 1.32 released today as the newest version of this Intel Implicit SPMD Program Compiler built atop LLVM/Clang. ISPC is a variant of the C programming language with extensiosn catering to Single Program Multiple Data programming for both Intel CPUs and GPUs.

Last year Framework Computer launched the Framework Laptop 12 as a convertible, 2-in-1 laptop that was friendly with Linux and upgradeable inline with the beloved Framework Laptop 13 and 16 models. The initial Framework Laptop 12 was nice but the use of an Intel Raptor Lake U SoC in 2025 wasn't all that exciting. Now though Framework Laptop 12 is available with Intel Core 3 "Wildcat Lake" for offering better performance and power efficiency.