KDE developer Nate Graham describes this week as having seen a "massive amount of stability work" for the Plasma 6.5 desktop. Among the many fixes to land this week for this next Plasma desktop release were fixing the second and third most common causes of Plasma crashes. Additionally, the most prolific common crash scenario was discovered to be caused by third-party code.

Coreboot 25.09 was released this evening as the latest feature update to this open-source solution common to Google Chromebooks and other select motherboards/systems as an alternative to proprietary BIOS / system firmware.

Vulkan 1.4.329 is now available with one notable new extension in tow.

Introduced last year in Linux 6.10 was TPM bus encryption and integration protection for Trusted Platform Module 2 (TPM2) handling. The intent was on better TPM security after a prior security demonstration showed TPM key recovery from Microsoft Windows BitLocker as well as TPM sniffing attacks. Shortly after being merged it was limited to just an x86_64 default where it had been tested the most at the time. Now more than one year later, this feature is being disabled by default in the mainline Linux kernel.

AMD today released ROCm 7.0.2 as the newest update to the ROCm 7.0 compute stack.

With this week's release of Python 3.14 bringing performance improvements, debugging improvements, a new Zstd compression module, and other enhancements I have been eager to run some benchmarks seeing how Python 3.14 compares to prior Python releases.

Just over one year ago NVIDIA posted open-source Linux GPU driver code for GPU virtualization "vGPU" support. That NVIDIA vGPU driver work was recently revised while still posted under a request for comments (RFC) flag.

Microsoft's Hyper-V virtualization support within the Linux kernel continues to be steadily enhanced and it's inched along further for Linux 6.18.

One of the exciting additions on the way for the C++26 programming language is a standardized library around Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) operations. This portable SIMD implementation makes it easier to leverage SIMD and data parallelism in C++ for better performance and to work across SIMD architectures like AVX-512.

In addition to last week's HID subsystem pull that brought haptic touchpad support and other exciting additions for Linux 6.18, the input subsystem pull was merged this week to introduce a few new input drivers.

Released this evening is the first beta of the Shotcut 25.10 open-source video editor. This prominent video editing application for Linux systems is introducing yet more AI-powered functionality.

This morning while finishing up work on the concerning Intel open-source comments from Intel Tech Tour in Arizona and summing up the declining open-source contributions and departures of numerous Intel open-source/Linux developers from the company, yet another Linux engineering departure crossed my wire.

In addition to Intel talking up their Panther Lake SoC and its Xe3 integrated graphics at their Tech Tour in Arizona last week, they also hosted sessions on additional aspects of Panther Lake like the IPU 7.5 for web cams and the new NPU 5 IP for AI acceleration. For those wondering, the Intel NPU 5 support under Linux is already largely squared away.

The expanse of Rust-written kernel drivers for Linux continues. Posted to the Linux kernel mailing list is the first LED kernel driver written in the Rust programming language.

Intel Tech Tour 2025 in Arizona was primarily focused on disclosures around Xeon 6+ Clearwater Forest and Panther Lake / Xe3 but during the opening keynote was also teasing a yet-to-be-announced inference-optimized GPU.

At the Intel Tech Tour in Arizona, an entire slot was devoted to talking up their next-gen IPU to be found with upcoming high-end Panther Lake laptops. This was in addition to the main Intel Panther Lake / Xe3 presentation. IPU product marketing manager Tomer Rider presented on their IPU7.5 tech, but unfortunately like we have seen with Intel's IPU tech since Alder Lake, there are user-space binary blobs involved.

A few months back it was brought up on the Intel driver mailing list around SR-IOV support for Panther Lake's Xe3 graphics. This goes along with Intel open-source Linux driver developers being quite busy on SR-IOV support for Battlemage dGPUs as part of their Project Battlematrix. Unfortunately, I wasn't provided any answer at Intel Tech Tour in Arizona whether SR-IOV support will be found with all Panther Lake SKUs or reserved for select offerings.

In addition to announcing Clearwater Forest as Xeon 6+, Intel also used their Tech Tour 2025 Arizona event for predominantly focusing on upcoming Panther Lake SoCs for laptops shipping in 2026.

Details during the Clearwater Forest briefing at Intel Tech Tour Arizona were rather light... Especially as for what's known about the cores already from prior events like Hot Chips and other Intel disclosures around the Darkmont E-core. But we do now know the branding: Xeon 6+ for Clearwater Forest.

For the past 21+ years of running Phoronix and even longer than that being a Linux user, I have loved and consistently promoted Intel's open-source efforts and leading Linux support. Even through Intel's difficult periods of delayed and stagnate hardware launches, what had remained consistent at the company and rather legendary had been their open-source contributions. From the Linux kernel to compiler toolchains and hundreds -- if not thousands -- of different open-source projects over the past two decades have been advanced thanks to Intel's open-source leadership. It is with much sadness that my faith and confidence in Intel's open-source leadership position is being questioned and questioning the direction they are now apparently steering their open-source focus/philosophy moving forward.