This week's "sched/urgent" pull request was sent out today of scheduler updates for the ongoing Linux 7.0 cycle. Notable this week are fixing some hangs as well as a possible performance regression on large systems.

In addition to GNOME OS seeing recent improvements, KDE Linux continues seeing more enhancements too for this leading reference platform for showcasing the KDE Plasma desktop.

SuperTux 0.7 officially released overnight for this nostalgic open-source game now seeing its first new release since December 2021. SuperTux 0.7 brings many significant improvements for this open-source game inspired by Super Mario.

An open-source, independently developed Linux kernel module called GreenBoost aims to augment the dedicated video memory on NVIDIA discrete GPUs with system memory and NVMe storage. The intent here with GreenBoost is a CUDA caching layer to more easily run larger AI models for LLMs that otherwise won't fit solely in your graphics card's dedicated vRAM.

Just under one year since the long-awaited GIMP 3.0 release, GIMP 3.2 is out today as the first feature release building off the GIMP 3.0 foundation.

Debian 13.4 rolled out today with dozens of security fixes and other general bug fixes with the updated install media for Debian 13 Trixie.

OpenRazer 3.12 was just released today as the newest update to these independently-maintained, open-source drivers for Razer devices on Linux. Paired with the likes of the Polychromatic GUI, OpenRazer allows for a pleasant experience for the Razer gaming peripherals under Linux.

This week I tried out the current Ubuntu 26.04 development state on the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite with the Acer Swift 14 AI laptop I have been using for my X Elite benchmarks over the past year. Unfortunately, it wasn't a smooth experience with new issues encountered for this Windows On ARM laptop.

This week's round of drm-misc-next patches bring a few improvements to the AMDXDNA accelerator driver used for supporting the Ryzen AI NPUs. Plus some new panel additions and various other minor Direct Rendering Manager driver changes.

Google's Android LLVM toolchain team shared publicly this week that they have begun making use of AutoFDO for automatic feedback directed optimizations of their Linux kernel build used by Android.

Mike Blumenkrantz of Valve's Linux graphics driver team has landed support for mesh shaders within Mesa's LLVMpipe software driver.

KDE developers continue being very busy working on Plasma 6.7 feature development as well as continuing to drive new fixes and refinements to the current Plasma 6.6 stable series.

GNOME OS as the Linux-based distribution that serves as the leading-edge, reference platform of GNOME desktop development is now using KMSCON by default.

Announced today was debaudit, a new set of tools and services designed to verify the integrity and reproducibility of Debian source packages.

Less than a week after their prior NVIDIA Vulkan beta driver in the R595 driver series, today NVIDIA released another new Vulkan beta driver for Linux and Windows systems.

While the Linux support for Intel Core Ultra Series 3 Panther Lake is largely in good shape as shown in my numerous articles over the past month and a half, there are occasional missing remnants landing in the kernel. As the latest example, or the upcoming Linux 7.1 kernel, the unified Panther Lake C-States table is being added for the Intel Idle driver.

After going through five rounds of review under a Request For Comments (RFC) flag, today the latest round of Kernel API Specification Framework patches were sent out with the RFC flag removed.

Earlier this month were various Linux 7.0 file-system benchmarks showing how XFS is leading the race in the overall upstream Linux file-system performance on this forthcoming kernel. Stemming from that testing some premium supporters requested a fresh look at the historical performance of XFS as well as EXT4. So today's article is a look at how XFS and EXT4 have performed on every kernel release going back to Linux 6.12 LTS.

Sent out this week were more Intel Xe driver feature patches to DRM-Next for queuing ahead of next month's Linux 7.1 merge window.

Vulkan 1.4.346 was published today with one big new extension in tow: VK_KHR_device_address_commands.