For those looking for a heatsink fan to cool a custom build of an Ampere Altra / Altra Max server or workstation, the ARCTIC Freezer 4U-M ends up being a very potent option that offers similar performance to more expensive Ampere Altra heatsinks while providing similar performance.

While the main feature pull of new and updated kernel graphics/accelerator drivers were merged already for the ongoing Linux 6.14 merge window, an additional set of AMDGPU changes were sent out this week for squeezing into this next kernel release.

A set of patches being worked on by Oracle engineers allow for optionally sharing page table entries (PTEs) between processes. For some workloads this can equate to very significant memory savings.

Merged this week for the Linux 6.14 kernel were the various sound/audio driver updates. In addition to core API enhancements for better supporting the MIDI 2.0 specification, there is also support for some new audio hardware.

A half-year-old merge request from Igalia's Karmjit Mahil has been merged for Mesa 25.0 that is a Vulkan layer allowing for optionally limiting the amount of video memory reported to games/applications.

The RDMA subsystem updates have been merged for the Linux 6.14 kernel with a light set of changes overall and the most significant being support for the ROCEv2 protocol within the ERDMA driver.

The Shotcut open-source video editor is out with its first new release of 2025.

The Intel Media Driver 2024Q4 release was tagged this Saturday as the quarterly update to Intel's open-source Video Acceleration API (VA-API) driver for Linux systems.

ISD is a new open-source project aiming to provide a more "Interactive SystemD" for simplifying management of Linux systems with systemd.

Alongside the power management and thermal driver updates this week for the ongoing Linux 6.14 kernel cycle were also the ACPI updates. The ACPI pull request was worth calling out on its own thanks to a change that will allow for faster suspend and resume cycles on some systems with this new kernel.

All of the Human Interface Device (HID) subsystem updates have been merged for the ongoing Linux 6.14 merge window.

The SUSE/openSUSE Agama Installer is a modern web UI driven installer for the SUSE/openSUSE Linux distributions. It's modern, sports a cleaner UI and underlying architecture, and supports more features. The Agama 11 installer update was released this week in preparing for the upcoming SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 16 beta with this new installer as well as new openSUSE Leap 16 builds.

The EFI updates have been merged for the Linux 6.14 kernel. The EFI updates this cycle aren't the most exciting but the kernel has finally bid farewell to the long obsolete UGA graphics protocol support.

This week saw an updated KDE Plasma 6.3 beta release and more bug fixing taking place there while also beginning to see early feature work toward the follow-on Plasma 6.4 desktop.

Andrew Morton made for an exciting Friday evening by sending out his "MM" pull request for Linux 6.14 as the large collection of memory management related patches for this next kernel version.

The four SoC pull requests were sent out today for the ongoing Linux 6.14 merge window. These pull requests are principally about various ARM SoC and platform hardware additions/changes but also an increasing number of RISC-V SoC activity too.

Vulkan 1.4.306 was published this morning as the newest routine specification update to this graphics/compute API.

While there have been a lot of GeForce RTX 5090 Windows gaming benchmarks since the review embargo lift yesterday, for those more fascinated by this high-end Blackwell desktop graphics card for its GPU compute potential on Linux, this article is for you. Up today are my very initial GPU compute benchmarks for the GeForce RTX 5090 Founders Edition on Linux with NVIDIA graphics card comparisons across the prior RTX 20, RTX, 30, and RTX 40 series too.

Several of the upstream Linux Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) drivers have become orphaned due to the unfortunately declining health of their lone driver maintainer.

The Common Internet File System (CIFS) as an implementation of the SMB protocol for commonly sharing files with Windows systems will enjoy better read performance with the Linux 6.14 kernel.