It was a busy week for KDE developers ahead of yesterday's Plasma 6.1 Beta release. KDE developer Nate Graham in his weekly development summary outlined all of the interesting changes to make it into the Plasma 6.1 desktop ahead of the feature freeze that went into effect with the beta release.

Intel software engineers did a late Friday night release of the Intel NPU Acceleration Library v1.1, their Python library for tapping into the Intel Neural Processing Unit (NPU) found on the new Core Ultra (Meteor Lake) processors. This Python library makes it easier to interface with the Intel VPU/NPU kernel driver and in turn enjoying accelerated operations for AI.

Merged this Friday evening into the Linux 6.10 kernel is the new mseal() system call for memory sealing.

Famed open-source AMD Mesa driver developer Marek Olšák has landed 13 more patches in Mesa 24.2-devel to provide fixes for GFX12 (RDNA4) graphics IP while also adding more GFX11 (RDNA3) APUs.

The beta release of Plasma 6.1 is now available for testing over the US holiday weekend.

The four month old KWin merge request by Xaver Hugl to allow for triple buffering has been merged and just in time for the Plasma 6.1 code branching!

For those considering an Intel Core Ultra 7 165U "Meteor Lake" powered laptop, here are some benchmarks of the 165U using a Lenovo ThinkPad T14 Gen 5 compared against the Acer Swift 14 with the Core Ultra 7 155H (Meteor Lake), the AMD Ryzen 7 7840U (Zen 4) within the Framework 13, and the AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS (Zen 4) within the Framework 16 under Linux.

POCL as the "Portable Computing Language" OpenCL implementation that originally began as a CPU-based run-time and has expanded to support a variety of GPU and accelerator targets is out with its first release candidate of the upcoming PoCL 6.0.

Last week saw the main Btrfs pull request for Linux 6.10 that delivered on some performance optimizations while today saw a secondary set of merge window changes for this CoW file-system that is now adding back the "norecovery" mount option.

The Device Mapper changes were merged last week into the Linux 6.10 kernel, including a new "high priority" option for DM-Crypt.

Following the recent PipeWire 1.2 release candidate, a second release candidate is out today that also includes the ability to stream to Snapcast servers.

The hardware monitoring "HWMON" subsystem changes for the Linux 6.10 kernel include enabling monitoring of more all-in-one liquid coolers for CPUs, a new driver for exposing monitoring on Lenovo ThinkStation workstations, and other new monitoring capabilities.

The Framework 13 and Framework 16 AMD Ryzen powered laptops make use of an NPCX embedded controller that rely on the ChromeOS open-source embedded controller (EC) firmware. With the Linux 6.10 kernel the Chrome OS "cros_ec_lpc" driver is being extended to support these latest Framework upgradeable laptops.

Following the HID changes last week that brought Steam Deck IMU and ASUS ROG Ally support along with other Human Interface Device additions, on Thursday the input subsystem updates were submitted for this new kernel. The Machenike G5 Pro gaming controller is now supported along with other input additions.

Following the NFS server changes from a few days ago for Linux 6.10 that brought optimizations and prepping for the new "nfsdctl" utility, the Network File System client changes have been submitted and merged for this new kernel.

The GNOME Foundation has published a draft copy of their five-year strategic plan that calls for more around the community, DEI, services, a more streamlined and inclusive annual event, and strengthening the foundation.

Coreboot 24.05 is available today as the newest stable release of this open-source system firmware solution. With Coreboot 24.05 there is support for 25 more motherboards/platforms and an assortment of other improvements.

The ACPI and power management / thermal subsystem changes were merged last week for the Linux 6.10 kernel. This cycle there are updates to both the Intel and AMD P-State CPU frequency scaling drivers.

Merged last week for the Linux 6.10 kernel were all of the 64-bit ARM (ARM64 / AArch64) architecture changes. There is ACPI FACS support, the ability to easily construct FIT images, and a new command-line option for disabling 32-bit application support.

While earlier this week was looking at the AMD EPYC 4004 vs. Intel Xeon E-2488 performance for entry-level server performance, in today's benchmarking showdown is a fresh look higher up the stack at the current generation server performance out of Intel Xeon Sapphire Rapids / Emerald Rapids and AMD EPYC Genoa(X) / Bergamo / Siena with a leading-edge open-source software stack of using Ubuntu 24.04 LTS while also jumping from Linux 6.8 to Linux 6.9 for the very latest x86_64 Linux server performance.