Yesterday Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 as quite an interesting mobile SoC. The Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 features Adreno 850 graphics and already one-day later their engineers are out with initial Linux kernel patches for bringing up the A850 with the MSM kernel driver.

In addition to AMD working on AVX10_V2_AUX support for the GCC compiler, this summer they also posted AVX10_V2_AUX support for the LLVM/Clang compiler. As of yesterday that enablement was merged for LLVM 24 for that important step toward AI Compute Extensions (ACE).

Merged at the start of the Linux 7.3 kernel cycle was adding Logitech Bolt USB receiver support for Logitech HID++ devices to the hid-logitech-dj driver code. That has resulted in too many bug reports of early Linux 7.3 users encountering varying issues with their Logitech mice that the functionality is now being reverted until it can be better developed.

The Nouveau Linux kernel graphics driver for open-source NVIDIA driver support has new patches posted for enabling HDMI Deep Color support.

Last week I ran some benchmarks showing performance gains for AMD Ryzen AI Max+ "Strix Halo" on Ubuntu 26.10. Then shortly after that testing on its daily state, which used the Linux 7.2 kernel, Canonical switched to Linux 7.3 as the Ubuntu 26.10 kernel. Here are some Linux 7.2 vs. Linux 7.3 benchmarks for the AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 "Strix Halo" with the Framework Desktop.

In 2024 Canonical generated nearly $300M USD in revenue for this company behind Ubuntu Linux and other services and software solutions. For 2025, they not only broke $300M but well exceeded it with $345M in revenue.

A new proposal being discussed is introducing a Linux user-space API to be able to specify frame rate targets for Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) handling on the Linux desktop.

SPEC back in May 2025 introduced SPECViewPerf 15 as the newest major release of this industry-standard workstation graphics benchmark. Sadly, the Linux support once again fell behind with SPECViewPerf 15 only debuting on Microsoft Windows. Today though Linux has caught up with SPEC releasing a Linux-native build of SPECViewPerf 15.0.1.

Systemd 262 made it out today as the newest feature update to this Linux init system and service manager. As with most systemd releases, it's heavy on new features and functionality.

The open-source YSERVER project as a modern X11 sever written in the Rust programming language with the help of Claude Code is out today with a new feature release. Most notable for this AI Rust X11 server is X Display Manager Control Protocol (XDMCP) support for multi-user shared desktops.

The Omarchy project announced today that Alibaba Cloud will be contributing a total of three million USD to their foundation for helping development of this Linux distribution and working to make it an "ideal agentic operating system".

Sent out today was a new HID subsystem pull request of fixes for the week to the Linux 7.3 kernel. Besides some conventional bug fixes are also supporting some additional devices via quirks and new IDs.

As a friendly reminder in case you missed it from over the weekend, the Phoronix autumn "Oktoberfest" premium sale is taking place through the rest of this week for those wishing to help support the site while enjoying ad-free viewing, multi-page articles rendered on a single page, and other benefits while helping for the site to survive and continue producing daily original content.

Later this week it looks like the latest round of Cache Aware Scheduling fixes will be merged for enhancing this kernel scheduler functionality for grouping related tasks together on CPU cores that share the same last level cache (LLC). Cache Aware Scheduling can lead to better cache locality and lower latency by avoiding the costs of potential cache bouncing -- that is when bugs don't get in the way.

A convenient addition that surprisingly hasn't been added to the Linux kernel until now is /sys/devices/system/cpu/sev/sev_status as a new sysfs interface for reporting the AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) status.

ZLUDA as the open-source project working on CUDA for non-NVIDIA GPUs like AMD Radeon graphics cards now has implemented support for some of NVIDIA's core cuFFT APIs.

Valve's Steam client beta today introduced Pyrowave as an experimental video codec for high bandwidth, low-latency video streaming.

AMD sent out their latest Linux kernel graphics driver patches today for enabling some new hardware IP blocks. And as part of that, preparing for GDDR7 video memory with the AMDGPU driver.

There's a new Linux distribution focused on supporting Linux on Apple Silicon Macs. Gravity Linux is this new distribution that is a spin of Fedora Remix and is catering to the still-experimentally-supported Apple M4 Macs and newer. In addition to leveraging Asahi Linux code and reverse engineering, Gravity Linux also leverages OpenAI Codex and Claude Code.

While the downstream Asahi Linux kernel has offered working speaker support and headset jack capabilities on Apple Silicon Macs, the mainline Linux kernel hasn't supported this functionality. But a set of 28 patches sent out today on the Linux kernel mailing list are working toward mainlining this important functionality for using Apple Macs on the upstream Linux desktop.