PostgreSQL 18.0 is out today as the annual major feature release for this widely-used SQL database server. PostgreSQL 18 is a big one with many exciting performance optimizations and other new features.

Queued this week into the BPF subsystem's "bpf-next" Git branch ahead of the Linux 6.18 merge window are some exciting feature additions.

Earlier this month the VMSCAPE CPU security vulnerability was made public and affecting both AMD and Intel processors. VMSCAPE can lead to leaking information from a user-space hypervisor via speculative side channels. An Intel engineer today posted a new set of patches for helping to reduce the mitigation costs of VMSCAPE protections on modern Intel processors.

While the Mold linker has been very impressive for its speed the past few years compared to the linkers out of the LLVM and GNU toolchain projects, there is a new high speed linker on the scene and it's written in Rust: meet Wild.

The Intel Media Driver 2025Q3 release is available today as the quarterly update to this open-source Video Acceleration API (VA-API) driver used by Intel hardware under Linux for video encode/decode.

Yesterday at the Snapdragon Summit in Hawaii Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon X2 Elite SoCs for upcoming laptops. In addition Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 mobile platform too. With those announcements out there, the Qualcomm open-source engineers have been busy in rolling out their latest patches for beginning to enable these new platforms with the Linux kernel.

Overnight Intel released IGSC 1.0 as their library for handling graphics system firmware updates for rolling out firmware updates to Intel discrete graphics card devices.

Last year Raspberry Pi launched the Raspberry Pi 500 for taking their Raspberry Pi keyboard computer into the Raspberry Pi 5 world. Today they are announcing the Raspberry Pi 500+ as an upgraded version of the device now with a mechanical keyboard, LED lighting, 16GB of RAM, and NVMe SSD storage.

SUSE in partnership with NVIDIA today announced making the NVIDIA CUDA TOolkit officially available on all SUSE platforms.

Qualcomm today announced the Snapdragon X2 Elite SoCs as building off their X Elite laptop SoCs that shipped last year. With the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme (X2E-96-100) flagship is 18 cores with a 5.0GHz single and dual core boost frequency.

Linux/Windows laptop vendor MALIBAL that caused quite a fuss last year when suggesting against supporting Coreboot and in turn blocked shipping of products to states/countries where the involved developers were located is now pursuing an initiative of made-in-America laptops. But it's going to be a lengthy journey and first they are soliciting investments to first pursue American-made keyboards and touchpads.

Besides the support for MRDIMM-8800 memory, another distinct advantage of Intel Xeon 6 "Granite Rapids" processors is the continued presence of Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX). Here are some fresh benchmarks looking at the impact of AMX on the Intel Xeon 6980P processors for AI inference workloads.

Imagination's open-source PowerVR Vulkan driver within Mesa now is able to generate its different internal shaders required by the driver to forego shipping old hard-coded shaders.

Intel announced this week that its moving its graphics driver support for integrated graphics on 11th Gen through 14th Gen processors over to their legacy driver model on Microsoft Windows. While this is a setback for those using Raptor Lake processors on Windows as well as the few Xe DG1 discrete graphics out there, Linux users don't have much to worry about.

Function Multi-Versioning (FMV) is the compiler feature that allows developers to specify multiple versions of the same function that can be used for optimizing execution for specific target features. For example, FMV can allow optimized functions to be called if the CPU supports AVX, AVX-512, SSE4.2, or other differing ISA capabilities. With the GCC 16 compiler release, AArch64/ARM64 now considers its FMV support to be stable and complete.

The widely-used FFmpeg open-source multimedia library has merged support for MPEG-H 3D Audio decoding.

In addition to the patches providing haptic touchpad support for Linux 6.18, another notable HID addition queued into the "hid-next" tree ahead of the imminent Linux 6.18 merge window is proper audio jack handling with the Sony PlayStation DualSense controller.

SquashFS developer Phillip Lougher posted a patch today just over one hundred lines of code yielding an outright massive performance gain for some operations with this compressed read-only file-system.

The upcoming Linux 6.18 kernel is expected to land initial haptic touchpad support as part of the HID subsystem updates.

It was just a few days ago that a multi-kernel architecture was proposed for the Linux kernel. Separate from that proposal from Multikernel Technologies, it turns out Bytedance has been working on their own similar solution called Parker. Today Bytedance lifted the lid on Parker as their solution for running multiple kernels simultaneously on the same hardware/system.