The Etnaviv kernel graphics driver that provides reverse-engineered open-source support for Vivante graphics (and NPU) IP has seen a fresh round of patches ready to go for queuing in DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 6.11 cycle kicking off in mid-July.

Merged on Saturday ahead of today's Linux 6.10-rc6 release is the latest batch of x86 platform driver changes. Notable as part of this week's fixes is improving support for the very latest (2024) LG laptop models.

For those on the Debian stable train, Debian 12.6 is out this weekend as the newest point release to Debian Bookworm.

For the Branch History Injection variant of Spectre (Spectre BHI) there is a patch pending to add a new mitigation option for that two year old CPU security vulnerability.

The Open-Source Firmware Foundation is out with an interesting blog post by Google firmware engineer Subrata Banik around adapting the Coreboot-based Chrome AP Firmware for 64-bit booting. The transition to 64-bit booting is happening for the system firmware powering Chromebooks and other Chrome devices and is driven in part for Intel Panther Lake generation hardware.

This Week in GNOME is out with the latest summary to highlight all of the interesting changes this week.

Niri 0.1.7 is out today as the latest version of this scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor. While the version number may not signify it, Niri 0.1.7 is quite a notable feature update.

KDE developers have still been busy addressing early fallout from the Plasma 6.1 desktop that released earlier this month while also beginning more feature activity for Plasma 6.2.

Wine 9.12 is out as the latest bi-weekly development release and in passing roughly the half-way point before Wine 10.0 stable enters the sights for early 2025.

On top of already having queued Intel Battlemage display support and the Battlemage device PCI IDs and other Intel kernel graphics driver features like hardware hang replays, Intel engineers today sent out another batch of "drm-intel-next" material slated for introduction in the upcoming Linux 6.11 cycle.

The Rust-written Servo web layout engine continues progressing for this open-source project now stewarded by the Linux Foundation Europe and seeing code contribution from a range of developers. They have published their June 2024 status update to outline the latest accomplishments for this alternative web engine.

The DRM Panic handler in Linux 6.10 that is used for presenting a visual error message in case of kernel panics and similar when CONFIG_VT is disabled continues seeing new features. This is the Linux equivalent to Windows' Blue Screen of Death or in the case of DRM Panic can also be a black screen of death. With Linux 6.11, the DRM Panic display can now handle monochrome logos.

Merged into Mesa 24.2 on Thursday is Vulkan sparse binding support for the CPU-based Lavapipe driver.

Besides Red Hat / Fedora working on a new web-based UI for their Anaconda OS installer, (open)SUSE developers remain very busy working on their Agama installer with new web-based interface. Agama 9 has now been announced as the latest iteration of SUSE's OS installer work.

A few days ago was the release of the OpenShot 3.2 open-source video editor while Shotcut 24.06 also released this week as another great cross-platform, free software video editing solution.

Open-source developer Tomeu Vizoso had been doing a lot of work on the Etnaviv driver stack for open-source, reverse-engineered Vivante driver support that began with the 3D graphics support but Vizoso tackled enabling the Vivante NPU IP as well. After all the successes with the Etnaviv NPU support, he turned his attention to creating an open-source driver stack for the Rockchip NPUs. Now thanks to a new sponsorship deal, he's back to making more Etnaviv improvements.

Sent in as the sole patch for this week's Linux power management subsystem updates is an important fix for Intel Core hybrid systems with buggy firmware. The Intel P-State driver fix can address as much as a 50% performance hit seen with existing Linux kernel versions on affected Intel hybrid platforms.

Last week the GNOME 47 development code saw Wayland DRM lease protocol support for enhancing VR headset handling and separately was also accent color support for GNOME Shell. Adding to the recent slew of changes landing for GNOME 47, the GNOME Shell and Mutter code can now be successfully compiled -- optionally -- without any X11 support or requiring any X11 build dependencies.

AMD today published version 1.4.34 of its Advanced Media Framework (AMF) SDK. This accelerated multimedia framework is used on Linux and Windows for integrating with games/applications leveraging DirectX, OpenGL, and OpenCL with interoperability support for Radeon GPU customers.

PipeWire 1.2 was christened today as the latest major feature update to this solution common to the modern Linux desktop for managing audio/video streams.