Linux 6.17 is one step closer to release with Linus Torvalds having issued Linux 6.17-rc3 already today to currently traveling in Europe.

Popular Arch Linux based distribution CachyOS is out today with its August 2025 ISO refresh.

Linux IO_uring and block subsystem maintainer Jens Axboe this week queued the patch series for multi-shot support with provided buffers. Thus the feature should go in for Linux 6.18 as another nice enhancement to the wonderful IO_uring kernel innovation.

It's wild to think that the ARM Cortex-A72 was already announced ten years ago as the ARM core design that went on to appear in the Raspberry Pi 4, AWS Graviton server processor, and various other SoCs. ARM Cortex-A72 based hardware remains in widespread use and finally by the end of 2025 there will be a mainline Error Detection And Correction "EDAC" driver in the mainline Linux kernel for this core.

The open-source upstream driver support for the Qualcomm Adreno X1-45 that is used by the Snapdragon X1 Plus 8-core SoC appears ready for the mainline kernel and could be all aligned for the upcoming Linux v6.18 kernel cycle.

A patch series posted overnight that is part of a larger planned rework for the kernel to introduce a "Swap Table" is poised to bring significant real-world performance gains to the Linux kernel.

For those that happen to have an HP Victus 16-r1000 gaming laptop or considering one with the 14th Gen Intel Core CPUs and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40 graphics, the Linux support is now slightly better off thanks to the HP-WMI driver adding fan and thermal profile support for the Victus 16-r1000 series.

Google is preparing a field trial with the Chrome web browser of accelerated video decoding under Wayland/Linux as a step toward rolling it out by default for a better video playback experience on the Linux desktop with Wayland-based environments.

Nearly a decade after the Tegra X2 SoC shipped in the likes of the Jetson TX2, the Pascal-based GP10B GPU has received a patch for allowing GPU re-clocking within the open-source Nouveau driver.

KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his customary weekend blog post to summarize all the interesting Plasma desktop developments for the week. Most exciting in recent days is Plasma 6.5 receiving an initial system setup wizard.

Glycin 2.0 Beta 3 was released this week for the GNOME project providing a Rust-based library for decoding, editing, and creating images and associated metadata. Glycin is in turn used by a growing number of GNOME components for imaging needs.

The first release candidate of OpenZFS 2.4 is now available for testing of this ZFS file-system implementation for Linux and FreeBSD systems.

Being worked on for a number of months now is GL_EXT_mesh_shader as an extension for bringing mesh shaders to OpenGL. This is an alternative to NVIDIA's GL_NV_mesh_shader extension being worked on for Mesa drivers and in particular the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver.

Released on Thursday were new Ubuntu X1E "Concept" install images for installing the modified Ubuntu 25.04 environment on Qualcomm Snapdragon X1 powered laptops.

FFmpeg 8.0 is now available! FFmpeg 8.0 is a magnificent update to this widely-used open-source multimedia library and with this new version is the introduction of an OpenAI Whisper filter for automatic speech recognition, many Vulkan Video improvements for greater GPU-accelerated video handling, and a number of CPU performance optimizations.

FreeRDP as one of the leading open-source / free software implementations of Microsoft's Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) is out with a new release. While FreeRDP 3.17 is primarily focused on shipping bug fixes, there is one noteworthy addition: fullchain support.

The Servo browser project has published a monthly status report to outline all of the interesting changes made to this interesting, Rust-based browser layout engine over the past several weeks. Development continues moving along with Servo as more critical functionality continues to be added as well as new performance optimizations and other features to make it a compelling option for future embedded web use and more.

Earlier this month Intel released LLM-Scaler 1.0 as part of their Project Battlematrix initiative. This is a Docker container effort to deliver speedy AI inference performance with multi-GPU scaling and PCIe P2P support and more.

In addition to this week seeing Apple SoC DT updates prepped for Linux 6.18 and Apple laptop lid events and power button driver patches posted for review for the mainline Linux kernel, published today on the Linux kernel mailing list are the request for comments (RFC) on patches for enabling USB3 support with Apple Silicon M1 / M2 SoCs.

Earlier this month we looked at the Linux laptop performance of AMD's Krackan Point using the Ryzen AI 5 340 within a HP OmniBook 5 that can be found for as low as ~$450 during sales. For six Zen 5 cores and RDNA 3.5 graphics, Krackan Point worked well as a budget Linux laptop option. For those wondering how the Linux vs. Windows 11 performance compares for the budget HP OmniBook, here are some benchmarks.