The BeOS-inspired Haiku open-source operating system now enables Advanced Vector Extensions 512 on capable Intel/AMD CPUs. A number of other hardware driver improvements were also merged for this interesting OS during the last month.

Ahead of the much anticipated Plasma 6.7 desktop release next week, KDE developers have been busy putting final touches on it, mostly in the form of bug/regression fixes.

The day started out with Arch Linux's AUR user-contributed repository seeing more than 400 packages compromised with malware. Now in ending out the day they believe all affected commits have been addressed. But it ended up being more than 1,500 affected packages.

OpenZFS 2.4.3 is out today as the newest stable point release to this open-source ZFS file-system implementation as well as point releases for the OpenZFS 2.3 and 2.2 series too.

Alexandre Julliard just released Wine 11.11 as the newest bi-weekly development release of this open-source software that powers Valve's Steam Play (Proton) and allows for running Windows games and applications under Linux as well as other platforms.

AMD today announced the opening of pre-orders for their Ryzen AI Halo petite PC powered by AMD Ryzen AI Max+ "Strix Halo" and working with either Microsoft Windows or Linux.

Linux 7.1 stable is expected to be released this Sunday with its many new features. Immediately following the Linux v7.1 tagging, the Linux 7.2 merge window will open and a lot of new feature material is expected to be merged over the next two weeks.

Last year when releasing Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10.0, Red Hat announced a RHEL 10.0 developer preview for RISC-V. Since then that RISC-V developer preview hadn't been updated but now Red Hat has published a new developer preview snapshot based on RHEL 10.2.

On Sunday it's anticipated that Linus Torvalds will released the stable Linux 7.1 kernel. This is a really terrific mid-year update to the Linux kernel! Here's what makes me excited about Linux 7.1.

Among the many new features planned for Ubuntu 26.10 is switching the default D-Bus implementation over to using the high performance Dbus-Broker drop-in replacement.

Ever since AMD announced openSIL in early 2023 for open-source CPU silicon initialization to eventually replace AGESA and enhance their Coreboot support, I have been eager to try it out. The openSIL code drops to date though have just focused on select reference platforms with only aiming for production status in the Zen 6 timeframe. But thanks to 3mdeb porting openSIL and Coreboot to a Gigabyte server motherboard, it's now possible to try out openSIL+Coreboot right now on Zen 5 hardware.

One of the exciting additions to the Linux 7.1 kernel is the introduction of the new NTFS file-system kernel driver. While in good shape already and proving advantageous over other NTFS open-source driver options, one of the initial limitations on it is around Windows native symbolic link handling but that is now in the process of being resolved.

The Arch Linux User Repository "AUR" was hit by a large-scale malware campaign this week with more than 400 of these user-supplied packages being compromised.

Linux cryptography subsystem expert Eric Biggers Eric Biggers of Google worked on some pretty nice Intel/AMD x86_64 optimizations over the years. Especially around AVX-512 optimizations within the Linux kernel's crypto code has been one of his many nice improvements to the kernel in recent times. Today he's out with another enticing AVX-512 optimization and this time it's for the software RAID code.

The Wine Wayland driver continues to be improved upon for bettering the experience around Windows games/applications running natively on Wayland Linux desktops without having to go through X11/XWayland. The newest feature merged is alpha modifier support for opacity handling of surfaces.

The first beta release of the Qt 6.12 toolkit is now available for testing. Qt 6.12 is packing a number of refinements and new features compared to earlier Qt6 releases. For paying Qt commercial customers, Qt 6.12 is also going to be the latest Qt6 Long Term Support (LTS) release.

For those relying on last year's stable GCC 15 series in not yet having migrated to the latest GCC 16, out today is GCC 15.3 to ship all of the latest back-ported bug fixes.

Being submitted on the kernel side with the upcoming Linux 7.2 kernel is initial support for the GFX 11.5.6 graphics IP block along with several other newer IP blocks such as SDMA 6.4, NBIO 7.11.5, IH 6.4, HDP 6.4, MMHUB 3.4.2, SMU 15.0.5, ATHUB 3.4.2, and VPE 2.2. Now in user-space for the Mesa RadeonSI Gallium3D and RADV Vulkan drivers is the GFX1156 (GFX 11.5.6) support being prepared too.

Git 2.55-rc0 is out today as the first tagged test version of the forthcoming Git 2.55 distributed version control system. Most notable with Git 2.55 is that Rust support is being enabled by default.

With Canonical engineers again experimenting with x86_64-v3 package builds for Ubuntu Linux using an "amd64v3" archive for the current Ubuntu 26.10 development, I decided to see how these latest amd64v3 packages comparing to their conventional Ubuntu 26.10 amd64 packages.