Easter doesn't get in the way of Linus Torvalds' weekly kernel release regiment: Linux 6.15-rc3 is now available for testing the latest kernel fixes ahead of the stable Linux 6.15 kernel release coming around the end of May.

Merged for the Linux 6.15 kernel were the very early boilerplate code around the NOVA driver as a new, open-source and Rust-written NVIDIA Linux kernel graphics/display driver. This successor to the Nouveau kernel driver is going to leverage the NVIDIA GPU System Processor (GSP) to make it easier to develop and maintain this open-source driver. But depending upon the GSP also means the NOVA driver will only work with RTX 20 class GPUs and newer. This driver is going to be built up gradually within the mainline Linux kernel and coming out this Easter were a new set of 16 patches for further laying the NOVA groundwork.

Sway 1.11-rc1 is out today as a test release ahead of this next Wayland compositor feature release. Sway 1.11 is bringing a number of new features for this i3-inspired Wayland compositor while also building off the new features laid out in the recent wlroots 0.19-rc1 library.

The FreeType library for rendering text onto bitmaps that is widely used by a variety of applications has landed a set of three patches today providing an important performance improvement to address a significant inefficiency within the existing FreeType codebase.

Greg Kroah-Hartman has released a few new Linux kernel stable point releases today for Easter and also capping off the Linux 6.13 kernel cycle in the process.

The long-in-development OpenVPN DCO kernel driver for providing data channel offloading (DCO) to yield faster OpenVPN performance looks like it's now in a state for upstreaming with the Linux 6.16 kernel.

Just a few days ago there was talk of potentially removing the Apple HFS and HFS+ file-system drivers from the Linux kernel considering they had been orphaned for a decade and beginning to cause a maintenance burden. After briefly being marked for deprecation, it now looks like the drivers may be maintained with new maintainers alleging to step-up to the role.

The Intel Integrated Sensor Hub "ISH" allows for offloading sensor polling and other tasks to a low-power co-processor to help reduce overall system power consumption for extending battery life with tablets, embedded devices, and 2-in1 laptops.

While the FFmpeg multimedia library merged Vulkan Video encode support last year, it was initially limited to H.264 and H.265 formats. With a new patch posted for review this week, AV1 encode support using the Vulkan Video API is now underway.

GNU/Hurd has long struggled with hardware support and is still working on its x86_64 support while having a host of various hardware limitations but it also appears they are eager to explore Hurd on RISC-V platforms.

Engineers from Google are proposing that distributed ThinLTO build support be introduced for LLVM/Clang when compiling the Linux kernel. The distributed ThinLTO mode for link-time optimizations can lead to quicker build times than the current in-process ThinLTO mode while also being more convenient and work with kernel live-patching solutions.

KDE developers continue to be very busy working toward the Plasma 6.4 desktop release and making other enhancements throughout this open-source desktop.

Merged today ahead of the Linux 6.15-rc3 kernel test release on Sunday were the set of "x86 fixes" for the week. Of these x86 fixes are two notable changes in particular.

In recent kernel releases there have been performance enhancements to the AES implementations and other cryptographic subsystem code for speeding up the performance on modern Intel and AMD processors. With Linux 6.16 there will be at least some additional small gains to find with Intel and AMD processors bearing AVX-512 when employing AES-XTS.

Earlier this week the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5060 Ti launched and there were launch-day Linux CUDA/OpenCL compute benchmarks on Phoronix. But for the Linux gaming performance tests we were waiting on a new supported driver release, which happened to be on launch day with the NVIDIA 575.51.02 Linux beta. Now that the gaming-ready Linux driver is available for the GeForce RTX 5060 series, here are some initial benchmarks of the PNY GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 16GB up against other NVIDIA GeForce and AMD Radeon graphics cards using the newly-released Ubuntu 25.04.

Back in the Linux 6.12 kernel cycle the Intel i915 kernel graphics driver added fan speed reporting support. Finally for the upcoming Linux 6.16 cycle that fan speed reporting will also be working with the modern Intel Xe kernel graphics driver used by default with Intel's latest integrated and discrete graphics processors.

Following the GCC 15 code branching after working its way down to zero "P1" regressions of the highest priority, GCC 15.1 Release Candidate 1 is out today for testing.

With Fedora 42 having released earlier this week, more feature development work and planning around Fedora 43 is heating up. Another one of the early change proposals now filed for Fedora 43 is changing the CMake build system's default generator from Make to Ninja.

The Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) with the Fwupd client makes it wonderfully easy to enjoy seamless system UEFI and device/peripheral firmware updates under Linux. LVFS is backed by a growing number of major OEMs/ODMs and serves up millions of firmware files. But they are in need of more financial resources from the biggest hardware vendors.

Following this week's updated Intel Graphics Compiler release, a new version of the Intel Compute Runtime was also published in providing OpenCL and oneAPI Level Zero GPU compute support on Windows and Linux systems.