The Debian release team announced that the Debian 13 "Trixie" transition and toolchain freeze began on-schedule this month.

The big set of open-source graphics driver updates for Linux 6.15 have been merged but Linux creator Linus Torvalds isn't particularly happy with the pull request. In particular, he's unhappy with some new "hdrtest" testing code being built as part of full kernel builds and the "turds" it leaves behind and this code "needs to die" at least from the perspective of non-DRM driver developers.

While fresh off the GNOME 48 release, GNOME desktop developers aren't slowing down and there's been some interesting activity to report this week.

The big pull request was sent out today of the numerous Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) updates for the in-development Linux 6.15 kernel. There are new drivers, a lot as usual for the AMD Radeon and Intel kernel graphics drivers, and a lot of other changes throughout for advancing these open-source kernel graphics/display drivers.

While there were a few graphics benchmarks in yesterday's Ubuntu 25.04 beta benchmarks, today's article is looking more at the Ubuntu 25.04 Linux gaming performance for both the GNOME 48 and KDE Plasma 6.3 desktops that default to the Wayland-based session by default while also trying out the X11 session for both of these desktops.

Back during the Linux 6.13 kernel cycle initial support for many (pre-M1) Apple devices were upstreamed including various iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch devices. That though was the very preliminary support and continuing to work their way upstream are various drivers/patches to further enhance the support. Now for the Linux 6.15 kernel is a new Apple backlight driver for controlling the backlight on various mobile Apple devices.

The networking subsystem updates for the in-development Linux 6.15 kernel bring multiple nice performance optimizations to enhance Linux networking speeds. The Linux 6.15 networking pull also has support for a number of new wireless and wired network chipsets.

All of the ARM64 changes were merged this week to the Linux 6.15 kernel for enhancing the 64-bit ARM processor support.

Since last year Canonical had been investigating using -O3 compiler optimizations for their Ubuntu package builds in the name of delivering better performance for Ubuntu Linux. A few weeks back though they decided they would not use -O3 optimizations for all packages. They have now provided more engineering insight into their reasoning and the results of their investigation into -O3 compiler optimizations for more packages.

A two year old Intel Mesa merge request was finally merged for Mesa 25.1 today for enabling functionality on DG2/Alchemist GPUs and newer.

All of the HID subsystem updates have been merged for the ongoing Linux 6.15 merge window.

Set to be merged for the Linux 6.15 kernel is the very initial NOVA driver core code that will be incrementally built up over time in succeeding kernel versions. For Linux 6.15, this open-source NVIDIA kernel driver isn't of any use for end-users as it's just the very preliminary pieces to begin crafting the foundation for the driver that is leveraging the NVIDIA GSP found with Turing and newer hardware. In preparation for future kernel cycles, the NOVA skeleton driver pieces were posted for review yesterday to begin fleshing out more of the driver's design.

The many SoC and DeviceTree updates have now been merged for the Linux 6.15 kernel merge window. There's a lot on the ARM hardware side plus some additions for RISC-V and various interesting new device/board additions.

The Ubuntu 25.04 "Plucky Puffin" beta is now available for testing ahead of the official release set for 17 April.

Ted Ts'o at Google has sent out the EXT4 file-system updates for the in-development Linux 6.15 kernel.

Ubuntu 25.04 beta is set to be released today and thus this week I've begun testing out the latest Ubuntu 25.04 builds on different systems for seeing how this six-month Ubuntu Linux update is looking compared to the prior Ubuntu 24.10 release. In this first Ubuntu 25.04 beta benchmarking article is a look at the performance using an AMD Ryzen 9000 series desktop and Radeon RX 7900 XTX graphics.

It's not only FreeDesktop.org that has been transitioning to new infrastructure this month but separately, Kernel.org is now receiving hosting and CDN needs provided by Akamai.

Linux 6.15 keeps getting more exciting... The big Zstd update has landed! The in-kernel Zstandard compression code is finally re-based against the newer upstream state that brings better performance as well as new APIs for allowing Intel QAT acceleration by Intel hardware offering QuickAssist Technology. This Zstd code is relied upon by Btrfs transparent file-system compression and other in-kernel users for compression/decompression.

The printk changes submitted for the Linux 6.15 kernel introduce a new "NULL_TTY_DEFAULT_CONSOLE" Kconfig build-time option for allowing the null TTY to be the default for those building the Linux kernel without virtual terminal (VT) support.

As a very exciting improvement for the open-source PostgreSQL database server, it has merged initial support for making use of IO_uring on Linux servers for asynchronous I/O and can provide for some nice performance improvements.