Canonical engineer Matthieu Clemenceau has posted a status update on the behalf of the Ubuntu Foundations engineers now half-way through the Ubuntu 25.04 development cycle. A number of notable package updates have landed as well as continued work on better ARM64 support and coming to a decision over "-O3" optimized packages.

Back in January at CES was the Ryzen 9 9000X3D and Ryzen 9 9950X3D announcement while today AMD officially confirmed the release date and pricing on these new Zen 5 desktop CPUs with 3D V-Cache.

The GCC "-fschedule-insns" option allows for reordering of instructions to eliminate execution stalls when required data is unavailable. This early scheduling option can be beneficial for systems with slow floating point performance or costly memory load instructions. With the upcoming GCC 15 release, AArch64 will be enabling this early scheduling optimization at the -O3 optimization level and higher.

The community-based ROCm SDK Builder is an unofficial project leveraging the open-source AMD ROCm code and making it easy to build machine learning and GPU compute software across a range of environments and helping ensure proper integration with other machine learning tools and models. The ROCm SDK Builder takes special focus on the consumer Radeon iGPUs and dGPUs that typically aren't as much of a focus for the upstream AMD ROCm stack.

Intel engineers today sent out their final drm-xe-next feature pull request to DRM-Next of the remaining features they are ready to land for the modern Intel Xe kernel graphics driver with the upcoming Linux 6.15 cycle. It's a big one.

The latest bit of increased driver code unification and decreasing code duplication among Mesa's OpenGL and Vulkan drivers is finally introducing a common shader statistic framework.

Well known AMD Mesa driver developer Marek Olšák has been at it again working on some further performance optimizations to the open-source RadeonSI Gallium3D driver code.

Sent out today was a batch of platform-drivers-x86 fixes for the ongoing Linux 6.14 kernel cycle. Notable among these fixes is introducing Intel Xeon "Diamond Rapids" support to the Intel VSEC driver.

A new set of patches hitting the Linux kernel mailing list today may cause some flashbacks and likely not on your 2025 bingo card... Some DeviceTree updates for AMD's short-lived Opteron A1100 "Seattle" ARM SoC that was cancelled shortly after being announced back in 2016.

The upcoming Linux 6.15 kernel is expected to merge two new Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) display drivers for supporting the Apple Touch Bar displays on older Intel x86 Macs and a newer "ADP" driver for handling the Apple Touch Bar displays on the newer Apple M1/M2-powered MacBooks.

For the past number of months there has been talk in the Ubuntu developer space around replacing initramfs-tools with Dracut for handling initrd generation. While there has been progress in switching to Dracut, they aren't over the finish line yet and not until Ubuntu 25.10 are they planning to use Dracut by default.

Adding to the excitement around the possibilities provided by the in-kernel eBPF Linux tech, Meta shared that their Strobelight software they are working on open-sourcing for profiling across servers has yielded a 20% reduction in CPU cycles and in turn a 10-20% reduction in the number of required servers for Meta’s top services.

SiFive recently sent over a review sample of the much anticipated HiFive Premier P550 developer board, their newest RISC-V creation featuring four RISC-V cores, Imagination AXM-8-256 integrated GPU, Gigabit Ethernet, PCIe x16 slot, and 16GB or 32GB of RAM. The HiFive Premier P550 is a modern RISC-V developer board capable of desktop uses, developer build boxes, and similar with pricing starting out at $399 USD. Here is a look at the SiFive HiFive Premier P550 as well as comparison benchmarks of this RISC-V board to the popular Raspberry Pi single board computers.

Wim Taymans of Red Hat today released PipeWire 1.4 as the newest major update for this leading open-source software to replace PulseAudio, JACK, and other solutions on the modern Linux desktop for managing audio and video streams in a very excellent way.

The FreeBSD Foundation paired with resources committed by AMD, Dell, and Framework are working to improve FreeBSD laptop support. In recent months there have been FreeBSD development efforts to improve the power management support with modern laptops as well as a strong focus on enhancing the WiFi driver support. A status update was issued yesterday for highlighting the latest FreeBSD laptops efforts.

With the release of Blender 4.3 last November an experimental Vulkan back-end was added and it continues to be improved upon for modernizing this 3D creation suite for digital artists and serving a variety of other purposes. The upcoming Blender 4.4 release will further refine the Vulkan support while later in the year it should be reaching production readiness.

FEX 2503 is out as the newest monthly update to this open-source emulator that enables the ability to run Linux x86_64 binaries on Linux ARM64 (AArch64) hosts.

Rui Ueyama released Mold 2.37 today as the newest feature update to this high performance linker as an alternative to GNU Gold and LLVM LLD.

Another announcement at AMD today beyond the open-source Linux driver fun for the Radeon RX 9070 series is announcing the open-sourcing of Instella as their new fully open 3B parameter language models.

After a few Habana Labs driver maintainers left Intel last year and the upstream open-source Habana Labs driver going on rather a hiatus, it looks like Intel software engineers will be returning to work on this upstream Linux kernel driver for supporting the Gaudi AI accelerators.