Blender 5.0 is working its way toward an official release in mid-November and is soon transitioning from its alpha to beta stage. Among the key changes with Blender 5.0 are its Vulkan renderer being in good shape overall, HDR support when using Vulkan and Wayland on Linux, and other enhancements. Today some brief details were shared around the current state of the Vulkan support for Blender 5.0.

Back during the Linux 6.17 merge window the RISC-V changes were rejected as "garbage" for being submitted too late in the merge window and with some code choices that upset Linus Torvalds. With lessons learned, the RISC-V changes for Linux 6.18 were submitted today during the first official day of this new kernel cycle.

Building off yesterday's release of Linux 6.17, the GNU Linux-libre 6.17-gnu kernel is now available for this downstream kernel variant that strips away support for loading non-free microcode and other elements not aligned with the Free Software Foundation principles. This ultimately ends up limiting the hardware support available with most of today's modern hardware requiring microcode/firmware but alas here is the latest release with a fresh round of de-blobbing.

With Q3 coming to an end this week, here is a look back at the most popular Linux hardware reviews and featured multi-page benchmark articles during the third quarter of this year on Phoronix.

While the Linux 6.18 kernel merge window is just getting formally started following yesterday's Linux 6.17 release, one thing is already quite clear: there is a a lot of new Rust programming language code set to head into Linux 6.18.

Control-Flow Enforcement Technology "CET" is coming to the virtualized world with support for running within KVM guest VMs on Linux 6.18+. This CET virtualization support works for both AMD and Intel processors.

As expected, Linus Torvalds just released the Linux 6.17 kernel on-schedule as the kernel version powering Ubuntu 25.10, Fedora 43, and other upcoming Linux distribution releases and rolling releases.

Ahead of the stable Linux 6.17 kernel release expected in the coming hours, Bcachefs lead developer Kent Overstreet put out a blog post around the current multi-Linux distribution support for the out-of-tree DKMS packages for this copy-on-write file-system, some of their plans moving forward, and still aiming to graduate from the "experimental" phase at the end of the year.

GraalVM has been an interesting and performant Java JDK that over time added support for additional programming languages and execution models. Following their 2022 announcement that GraalVM CE Java code would be donated to OpenJDK, Oracle recently announced that moving forward GraalVM will focus on non-Java languages.

There is a lot coming for AMD processors with the Linux 6.18 kernel. Of the early pull requests submitted in advance of the planned Linux 6.17 kernel release later today, there are a number of changes already lined up with some exciting AMD CPU feature additions for the next kernel version. These AMD changes for Linux 6.18 are all the more important with that kernel expected to become this year's Long Term Support (LTS) kernel version.

Adding to the list of pull requests submitted early in advance of the Linux 6.18 merge window opening are several cryptography-related improvements. In particular, some nice performance optimizations once again for the Linux kernel.

Introduced two years ago was the Intel/Codeplay oneAPI Construction Kit for helping to bring SYCL support to new hardware. As part of that the oneAPI Construction Kit was brought to RISC-V and other platforms. Out this week is now oneAPI Construction Kit 5.0 and sadly it drops Vulkan API support.

Following the release earlier this year of the Fish 4.0 shell that was ported from C++ to Rust, Fish 4.1 was released this weekend as the next major feature release.

The Linux kernel's audit subsystem/framework for greater insight into system activity for security purposes will now be able to properly cope with multiple Linux Security Modules (LSMs).

All of the ARM64 feature changes intended for the Linux 6.18 merge window have been submitted in advance. There are a few new features worth calling out for 64-bit ARM Linux users.

FreeBSD 15.0 Alpha 4 is out today as the newest weekly test release in working toward the FreeBSD 15 stable release in early December.

When it comes to open-source games, Unvanquished remains one of the most promising and interesting open-source FPS games from a technical perspective. With its next release, Unvanquished has been ported to the SDL3 library and is working well natively on Wayland.

Thirteen years after the AMD GCN 1.0 "Southern Islands" GPUs initially launched as the Radeon HD 7000 series, recently there has been an effort to improve the support for both GCN 1.0 and the GCN 1.1 graphics processors with their open-source Linux driver stack. This recent effort has been led by one of the developers on Valve's Linux graphics team.

Linux engineer at Microsoft Christian Brauner sent out his set of 12 pull requests touching the VFS portion of the Linux kernel. These changes for the Linux 6.18 kernel include one pull request that touches the writeback code to address a situation of lockups being reported by users when systemd units read lots of files.

Among the early pull requests submitted already to Linus Torvalds in advance of the Linux 6.18 merge window opening soon is the Btrfs file-system updates. Btrfs for Linux 6.18 has a few items worth calling out but no major features this cycle.