Following the numerous Intel Linux developer departures last month from the company following layoffs at Intel and others deciding to voluntarily leave, there is another one to report today. One of the Intel IVPU accelerator driver maintainers for the Intel NPUs found in Core Ultra SoCs is departing the company.

For those preferring for the first point release to major new compiler releases before upgrading, LLVM 21.1.1 is out today along with the likes of Clang 21.1.1 for this widely-used open-source compiler stack.

Arm this evening lifted the lid on Lumex, their new compute subsystem platform that is purpose-built around AI for next-gen PCs and smartphones.

Back in May was the announcement by Canonical's kernel team that they were planning to ship Linux 6.17 in Ubuntu 25.10 as what will be the latest upstream kernel version when that Ubuntu release ships in October. But due to the timing of the Linux 6.17 release around late September and the Ubuntu 25.10 kernel freeze around the same time, it's led to some confusion with committing to a Linux 6.17-rc or potentially some suggesting Ubuntu 25.10 would ship with a Linux 6.16 kernel and then ship v6.17 as a stable release update. Well, the situation is more clear with Linux 6.17 having been merged now as the default kernel of Ubuntu 25.10.

It was just a few days ago that Rust Coreutils 0.2 released with "massive" performance gains and production-ready Ubuntu support. Rust Coreutils 0.2.2 is out today and is delivering a few more enhancements -- most excitingly is a faster base64 command that can now outperform the GNU Coreutils version.

FEX 2509 is out today as the latest monthly update to this open-source emulator allowing unmodified x86/x86_64 games and applications to run in ARM64 Linux environments.

One of the AMD software initiatives we have been most excited about in recent times has been openSIL. AMD openSIL is working toward open-source CPU silicon initialization that will jive better with the likes of Coreboot and ultimately replace their existing AGESA implementation. AMD openSIL is expected to span AMD's wide gamut of processors from client/embedded through server offerings. It's still looking to be on track for production readiness in 2026.

Back in May we provided an initial look at the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite laptop performance on Ubuntu Linux with the upstream support for the Qualcomm Snapdragon X1E maturing, more laptops becoming supported, and the Ubuntu X1E "Concept" ISOs enhancing the end-user experience. The performance was okay but short of expectations. Months later we are revisiting the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite Linux performance on the newest Ubuntu Concept ISOs and newer firmware that is providing a much better experience albeit still not as competitive as the newest AMD Ryzen AI 300 series and Intel Core Ultra laptops under Linux.

Canonical's Launchpad service that is closely aligned with the Ubuntu project is finally deprecating code imports from CVS and Subversion repositories that go through the defunct Bazaar.

Released just over one month ago was the general availability of CUDA 13.0 while out this week is CUDA 13.0 Update 1 as the first incremental step forward to CUDA 13.

The upcoming Linux 6.18 kernel cycle is likely to see the new "gpd-fan" driver merged as a hardware monitoring driver for the increasing number of GPD gaming handheld devices.

The long-in-development web-based user interface for the Anaconda installer used by Fedora (and Red Hat Enterprise Linux) continues maturing well and expanding its usage before eventually seeing the Anaconda GTK-based UI deprecated in the future.

A change proposal has been filed to mitigate additional kernel vulnerabilities/attacks via additional kernel tuning by default.

KDE Plasma 6.4.5 is out today as the newest monthly point release for the current Plasma 6.4 desktop series. Making this month's Plasma 6 point release notable are a number of KWin compositor fixes.

The Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 (RHEL 10) downstream AlmaLinux 10 is further distinguishing itself from alternatives by enabling its CRB repository by default. This will be rolling out as an update to AlmaLinux 10.0 and as part of the upcoming AlmaLinux 10.1 point release.

A new set of Linux kernel patches posted today work to improve the nested VMX performance for benefiting Intel processors making use of KVM virtualization.

Microsoft is preparing to ship Windows 11 25H2 as their newest incremental update to their operating system. Windows 11 25H2 is currently available via their preview channel in advance of the formal public release in October. With Canonical also putting the finishing touches on their Ubuntu 25.10 release also due for a stable release in October, here are some benchmarks looking at how those competing operating systems are fairing in various CPU benchmarks on the same hardware.

While the BSDs don't see nearly as much activity around Wayland as the desktop Linux distributions and they continue to predominantly rely on the X.Org Server by default, the modern KDE Plasma 6 desktop can in fact work fine on Wayland under FreeBSD 14 and the upcoming FreeBSD 15.0 release.

Thanks to work by open-source Intel software engineers over the past few months, the upcoming Linux 6.18 kernel is expected to add support for Embedded USB2 Version 2.0 "eUSB2V2" for supporting next-generation, higher-resolution laptop web cameras.

The XFS file-system is ready to declare their online file-system checking "fsck" support in good enough shape for enabling by default in new kernel builds. Plus other XFS alterations ahead of Linux 6.18 that is expected to be this year's LTS kernel version.