An interesting new driver set to premiere in the upcoming Linux 6.14 kernel is the NVMe PCI Endpoint Function Target code authored by Western Digital.

It's been over four years now that the GNOME Mutter pull request has been open for introducing dynamic triple/double buffering support. It's still not clear that it will be ready for merging with GNOME 48 due out in March but at least the patches have been updated to work with the latest upstream Mutter code.

Being merged back in the Linux 6.9 kernel was AMD Preferred Core support within the amd_pstate driver for being able to communicate the "preferred" cores to the kernel for those that are able to reach a higher maximum frequency or otherwise be preferred over other CPU cores. For the upcoming Linux 6.14 merge window, an important set of patches are queued up for better positioning this Preferred Core handling.

Linux has supported KVM virtualization with RISC-V for several years while now patches are pending to introduce Xen hypervisor support for this CPU architecture for RISC-V guests.

Libvirt 11.0 was christened today as the newest version of this open-source Virtualization API for managing VMs on Linux and other platforms while supporting KVM, QEMU, Xen, VMware ESX, LXC, Bhyve, and other hypervisors.

In development for several years has been LACT as a Linux GPU Control Application to allow adjusting various GPU/driver settings via a convenient graphical application. AMD and NVIDIA graphics have been supported to date while now Intel graphics are also supported with the brand new LACT 0.7.

Rsync 3.4 is out today for this widely-used utility for incrementally transferring and synchronizing files between systems. Rsync is widely-used especially for backing up Linux servers in an incremental manner and unfortunately this v3.4 release isn't some cheery news.

Added today to the Mesa documentation for the open-source Intel OpenGL/Vulkan drivers used on Linux systems is a set of "performance tips" for ensuring an optimal Intel Linux graphics 3D accelerated experience.

Yesterday I looked at how the Intel OpenCL GPU compute performance evolved for the Arc Graphics B580 in the one month since that first Battlemage graphics card premiered. There were nice Intel GPU compute optimizations merged over the past month to improve the experience. Here are some Linux graphics/gaming benchmarks for the Intel Arc B580 comparing the prior launch day Linux driver performance to where the Mesa performance is at now.

The modern GNOME desktop hasn't had a core application to playback audio files although many different audio/multimedia players exist. But now for the upcoming GNOME 48 desktop release, there is now a promoted core app for audio playback: Decibels.

ARM64 ILP32 is the Armv8 architecture with a 32-bit ABI rather than 64-bit -- akin to the "x32" x86 effort that never really took off on Linux. ARM64 ILP32 support never ended up making it into the mainline Linux kernel or GNU C Library but did appear within the GNU Compiler Collection. But years later and little use, GCC developers are consider deprecating ILP32 support ahead of its eventual removal.

Back in 2022 there were Linux kernel developers like Linux's second-in-command Greg Kroah-Hartman recommending that Intel Alder Lake laptops be avoided. This was due to the Intel web camera support in those new-at-the-time laptops yet to be properly upstreamed and relying on binary bits. Over time that Intel IPU6 MIPI camera support has seen portions of the code upstreamed into the mainline Linux kernel and distributions like Fedora taking extra steps to make them work but still in 2025 those with newer Intel laptops boasting the latest web camera technology are often facing a challenging experience.

It's not only the Intel GPU compute stack seeing some nice improvements recently but over with the Mesa 25.0-devel code for the Intel "ANV" open-source Vulkan driver there have been some new performance optimizations arriving this week.

The BeOS-inspired Haiku open-source operating system has published their latest monthly development report. During December they worked on a number of features and fixes as well as getting a modern web browser up and running.

For those looking toward better I/O performance with Java, there is JUring for making use of IO_uring and the reported performance benefits are very enticing.

Open Image Denoise 2.3.2 was released by Intel on Monday. Contrary to being a point release, it's actually an exciting update.

OpenZFS 2.3 is out as stable this evening as the latest major feature release to this open-source ZFS file-system implementation used on Linux and FreeBSD systems. OpenZFS 2.3 is heavy on new features.

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has granted approval of the change proposal for shipping Fedora Linux WSL images to enhance the user experience for those wanting to run this Linux distribution within the confines of Microsoft's Windows 11 WSL2 environment.

Last month with the launch of Intel Battlemage with the Arc B580 graphics card, there was fairly nice open-source GPU compute performance but with some outliers... Today it's a pleasure to report that with the newest open-source GPU compute stack as of this past week, there are some nice Xe2 / Battlemage improvements for enhancing the performance of some OpenCL workloads and also correcting the performance of some workloads that were in poor standing on launch day.

Oracle today announced the Oracle Linux Enhanced Diagnostics (OLED) as their newest project that aims to enhance the debugability of the Linux kernel.