The upcoming Linux 6.14 kernel cycle is set to introduce support for the Blaize BLZP1600 SoC series that is powering various PCIe add-in-card and M.2 adapters for local AI edge processing.

Sent out today was the latest drm-misc-next pull request of various Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) changes queuing up ahead of the Linux 6.14 kernel cycle. Most exciting this week is the DRM boot logger being queued for landing to better present kernel messages.

For those interested in using Linux on the Samsung Galaxy Book line of laptops that ship with Microsoft Windows out-of-the-box, a new "samsung-galaxybook" driver is being worked on for supporting additional laptop functionality not currently found with these laptops under Linux.

Ahead of AMD's approaching RDNA4 next-generation graphics card launch, today a set of last minute improvements to the AMD GFX12 graphics IP were merged to Mesa 25.0 for the open-source Linux graphics driver support.

Linus Torvalds announced the release this evening of the Linux 6.13-rc3 kernel as Linux 6.13 works its way to stable release by late January.

Last month I looked at the impact of AMD's BIOS tuning guide on AI / machine learning workloads for new 5th Gen EPYC "Turin" processors. In today's article I am looking at the performance and power efficiency impact of AMD EPYC 9005 series processors with AMD's BIOS tuning recommendations for Java workloads on Linux.

It's not too often that "fixes" to the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) are noteworthy but today is an interesting exception with among the KVM fixes sent in today ahead of the Linux 6.13-rc3 tagging is for beginning to deal with a "hilarious/revolting" performance regression affecting recent generations of Intel processors. This performance regression won't be fully worked around until Linux 6.14 but at least there is an interim step in place once the code is merged later today.

After roughly two years of development the Xfce 4.20 lightweight desktop has been released ahead of the year end holidays.

It's been a while since there has been anything new to report on the Btrfs file-system's built-in RAID functionality but that is changing with RAID1 round-robin read balancing.

In addition to Linux 6.14 set to add sensor monitoring support for the ASUS TUF GAMING X670E PLUS, another lower-cost AMD AM5 motherboard is also set to see sensor monitoring support with this next version of the Linux kernel.

Linux 6.6.66 was released today alongside other updated Long Term Support (LTS) kernel versions.

Some Qualcomm processors/SoCs on the mainline Linux kernel are left vulnerable to Spectre security issues since Qualcomm hasn't upstreamed patches for properly treating affected CPU cores to their relevant mitigations. But a new patch series from a Google engineer is working to get those Qualcomm CPU security mitigations in order.

As covered last month on Phoronix, Intel has been experimenting with Energy Aware Scheduling (EAS) for the Intel P-State driver with a goal of enhancing the power efficiency of Core Ultra "Lunar Lake" processors. Recently a second iteration of that work was posted for review ahead of possible inclusion in a future version of the Linux kernel.

An interesting addition to Mesa 25.0 this week is Alyssa Rosenzweig adding a standard library for the driver OpenCL C code, including the initial abbility to support assert() on device and other standard C constructs for the OpenCL C code.

After some six months of silence, this past week the NTSYNC LInux kernel driver patches were revived for completing this open-source driver to better match the Windows NT synchronization primitives to help with Wine / Proton (Steam Play) Windows gaming performance on Linux. Following those "v6" patches posted a few days ago, on Friday evening a seventh iteration of the patches were volleyed to offer up some API design improvements for this NTSYNC driver.

While not as popular as their Snapdragon SoCs, Qualcomm has been offering their Cloud AI line of accelerators for scalable AI inference. The current flagship is the Qualcomm Cloud AI 100 Ultra as a 150 Watt rated PCIe Gen4 x16 card for up to 870 TOPS INT8 performance, 576MB of SRAM, and 128GB LPR4x memory. But given the latest open-source Linux driver patch activity, Cloud AI 200 "AIC200" wares are on the way.

KDE developers continue to be quite busy ahead of the holidays to pack more features into the upcoming Plasma 6.3 desktop release.

Building off last week's release of Wine 10.0-rc1 is now Wine 10.0-rc2 as the next test release in working toward the Wine 10.0 stable debut around mid January.

Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver engineers are busy working to further refine the Xe2 graphics performance for Lunar Lake integrated graphics and the newly-launched Battlemage discrete graphics. Landing in Mesa 25.0-devel this Friday afternoon is a new "Round Robin Strict" optimization to benefit both their OpenGL and Vulkan drivers on Linux with Xe2 hardware.

Following the OpenZFS 2.2.7 stable point release earlier this week that brought Linux 6.12 LTS kernel compatibility along with various fixes, OpenZFS 2.3-rc4 is out today as the latest step toward the big OpenZFS 2.3 feature release.