With the start of a new month comes the latest Steam Survey statistics from Valve for providing interesting software and hardware insight.

Like most modern Intel and AMD laptops, the new ASUS Zenbook S 16 models for the AMD Ryzen AI 300 series "Strix Point" support ACPI Platform Profiles for allowing the system platform behavior to be modified depending upon whether you are seeking maximum performance, balanced (default), or power savings/efficiency. With the Ryzen AI 9 365 and Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 testing I have been doing thus far it's been on the default balanced mode (along with other laptops being compared) while in this article is a look at the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 performance impact on the ASUS Zenbook S 16 UM5606WA when trying the other platform profile options.

Microsoft is today promoting the v3.0 release of Azure Linux to stable / general availability status for this Linux distribution formerly known as CBL-Mariner.

Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund has done a wonderful job providing funding to various open-source projects for advancing their work on free software. STF has been a huge success for prominent open-source projects while now it's also preparing a pilot program for STF Fellowships to provide funding to open-source maintainers that may be doing important work across multiple projects.

Sent out today was the first batch of drm-misc-next patches of Direct Rendering Manager updates that will be targeting the Linux 6.12 kernel later in the year. Notable from this pull is introducing a new DRM Power Saving Policy for display connectors and is initially wired up for the AMDGPU kernel graphics driver.

Intel closed out July by publishing AVX10.2 technical details as part of a now public document. Intel's compiler engineers are also already at work on enabling AVX10.2 in the GCC and LLVM/Clang compilers.

July was an interesting month both in the open-source software world with the Linux 6.11 merge window and other software milestones while also being eventful on the hardware side with the AMD Ryzen AI 300 series launch as the first of the Zen 5 processors. During July on Phoronix were 255 original news articles written by your's truly and another 15 featured articles / multi-page reviews.

Mike Blumenkrantz of Valve's Linux graphics driver team has recently begun pushing changes to the Mesa 3D graphics code-base as part of "The Juiciest Refactor Ever". After merging the first of the patches last week, this week has brought more code for this juicy refactoring.

For those intrigued by Ikey Doherty's work in recent times on Serpent OS as a new from-scratch Linux distribution that makes use of lots of tooling, Ikey is kicking off August by releasing the first pre-alpha image of this Linux OS.

GCC 14.2 hit the Internet today as the first stable point release update to the GCC 14 series following the inaugural GCC 14.1 stable release from early May.

Now that I am through with my testing of the initial Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 and Ryzen AI 9 365 Linux performance benchmarking and support exploration, I've begun diving in to other areas of the Linux support/performance for these Zen 5 "Strix Point" SoCs. The area for a quick look today is with the yet-to-be-merged AMD Heterogeneous Core Topology patches.

ARM Linux maintainer Arnd Bergmann laid out a proposal with deprecation timeline today for beginning to work toward removing many older ARM boards and obsolete features.

Mesa 24.2 is barreling towards its stable release in August while out today is the third weekly release candidate for this set of open-source OpenGL, Vulkan, and video acceleration drivers.

Ampere Computing hosted an AmpereOne architecture briefing this week where more details were shared on their long talked about AArch64 server processors. This announcement finally included a SKU table with suggested pricing as well as talking up a next-gen "AmpereOne Aurora" offering for a processor with up to 512 cores and some newly-disclosed Ampere AI acceleration IP.

The Xen Project has announced version Xen 4.19 of this open-source hypervisor that is rolling out security improvements, performance and scalability enhancements, and other refinements to this cross-architecture option for open-source virtualization.

The Servo project is out with their latest monthly status report to highlight advancements made on this open-source, Rust-written web layout engine.

One of the many exciting features merged for Linux 6.11 is getrandom() in the vDSO for very fast yet secure random number generation. Now that the kernel bits have landed, it's on to making use of it in the GNU C Library and other libc implementations.

There's been no shortage of cheap, ARM-based handheld game consoles coming to market. Given Linux on Arm tending to work better than Windows and in keeping vendor costs to a minimum, they've tended to be running Linux or Android with various open-source games/emulators. Many of the vendors have kept their Linux support downstream while with time more of these gaming handheld consoles are seeing mainline Linux support. Yet another one being worked on for mainline Linux kernel support is the GameForce Ace.

Merged on Sunday prior to tagging the first release candidate of Linux 6.11 were some last minute updates to Turbostat, the tool that lives within the kernel source tree and used for reporting CPU frequency and idle statistics along with other useful metrics. With Linux 6.11, Turbostat is gaining some new abilities.

For those enjoying the classic game Snake (Blockade) or rather wanting to learn about the SDL3 API to develop your own software using this cross-platform software/hardware abstraction library, a game of Snake has been added to the SDL3 repository to serve as a more full-featured example.