All of the LoongArch CPU architecture changes have been merged for the Linux 6.16 kernel with the merge window set to wrap up later today.

The Linux Mint project published its newest monthly status report to outline various interesting development activities around this Linux desktop distribution project building off Ubuntu and Debian bases.

All of the kernel build system "Kbuild" updates were merged today for the nearly-over Linux 6.16 merge window that is expected to conclude tomorrow with the Linux 6.16-rc1 release. Notable with the Kbuild pull is the introduction of the EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL_FOR_MODULES helper.

NumPy 2.3 is out today as the latest release of this widely-used library for scientific computing. Notable with NumPy 2.3 is finally adding some parallelization support via OpenMP.

The RISC-V architecture feature updates were merged on Friday for the Linux 6.16 merge window that is set to end on Sunday with the Linux 6.16-rc1 release.

It was just earlier this week that Mesa 25.1.2 arrived as the newest bi-weekly bug-fix release for these open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers. Coming out today is an emergency bug-fix release to fix a regression affecting AMD Radeon RX 9000 series RDNA4 graphics card owners.

Vulkan 1.4.317 was made public on Friday with a number of exciting new extensions, including VP9 video decoding for Vulkan Video, 8-bit floating-point data type support, and other additions.

For those making use of GNOME Papers as the increasingly popular document viewer app for the GNOME desktop, a major rework was merged to enhance the annotations experience.

Posted as a request for comments this week were the initial Linux kernel patches for the Hierarchical Constant Bandwidth Server (HCBS).

Intel's Clear Linux distribution has made some packaging improvements to help better suit the needs of its users.

While there isn't much new MIPS activity taking place due to other CPU architectures like RISC-V and LoongArch taking the interest away, the MIPS code within the Linux kernel does continue seeing enhancements as well as upstreaming of hardware that has long been relegated to downstream kernels.

Merged on Friday to the Linux 6.16 kernel by way of the USB/Thunderbolt branch was the massive set of patches (12k+ lines of code) for USB offload support for audio devices.

KDE developers are on the final stretch of fixes and polishing ahead of the Plasma 6.4 release next Thursday. Plus there has been plenty of early work building toward Plasma 6.5.

New AMD code merged today to the mainline Linux 6.16 kernel that's in-development is the introduction of the AMD-SBI driver/subsystem for primarily benefiting EPYC server platforms. AMD-SBI is for their Side-Band Interface also known as the Advanced Platform Management Link (APML).

Merged today to Mesa 25.2 is an adjustment for the Intel "ANV" open-source Vulkan driver to help with Direct3D games running under Linux with Valve's Steam Play via Proton + VKD3D.

Last month Intel software engineers began posting Linux enablement patches for Wildcat Lake. Some of those first patches were merged for Linux 6.16 while more work is forthcoming. Posted yesterday for the first time on the Linux kernel mailing list was enabling the NPU accelerator support for Wildcat Lake.

Since recently picking up a Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite laptop for Linux testing now that the Linux support is starting to evolve into better shape (albeit still with many rough corners limiting the daily usability of such devices with Linux), one of the areas I was curious about was looking at the performance of Linux binaries with GCC vs. LLVM Clang. Here are some benchmarks for those wondering how the GCC and Clang compilers are competing on the Snapdragon X Elite with the Oryon CPU cores.

Just a few days after the FEX 2506 release for that open-source emulator enabling x86_64 binaries to run on ARM64 (AArch64) hosts, Box64 is out with its newest feature update for this open-source project with similar goals.

While the AMD Ryzen AI Max+ Strix Halo SoCs have a nice out-of-the-box experience with modern Linux distributions for the Radeon 8050S and Radeon 8060S graphics, if going for the recently-released Linux 6.15 kernel there are some performance gains to enjoy as well as if opting for the latest Mesa 25.2 development code for the latest RadeonSI OpenGL and RADV Vulkan driver support.

The many PCI subsystem changes have been merged for the in-development Linux 6.16 merge window.