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.

Linux sound subsystem maintainer Takashi Iwai of SUSE has submitted all the feature updates slated for Linux 6.15. There is a lot of new audio hardware support and other enhancements that are now merged for this next kernel release.

Earlier this month Mesa deprecated the Clover OpenCL driver in favor of the modern Rust-written Rusticl Gallium3D state tracker. Clover is expected to be removed in Q3's Mesa 25.2 release while today the RadeonSI driver has decided to preemptively remove its Clover support.

NVIDIA has published new Vulkan beta driver builds for Windows and Linux that introduce VK_KHR_shader_bfloat16 for BFloat16 "BF16" support within shaders.

Submitted today for upstreaming into the Linux 6.15 kernel is support for the Versal NET SoC, an addition to the AMD/Xilinx Versal family that doesn't appear to have been talked about much publicly yet but should be an interesting addition to their product line-up.

Microsoft last year announced the open-source Hyperlight project as an embedded VMM for use as a micro-VM manager of sorts that can be run within Windows and Linux applications. This VM-based security for small embedded functions now has its scope expanded with the open-source release today of Hyperlight Wasm for bringing in WebAssembly to the party.

While there is a lot of exciting new x86_64 CPU features coming with Linux 6.15, there is also some of the not so fun changes too: namely the "x86/bugs" pull request to bring the latest CPU security mitigation work to the mainline kernel.

The x86 platform drivers co-maintainer Ilpo Järvinen sent out the pull request today of all the feature additions set for the in-development Linux 6.15 kernel. As usual, most of the platform-drivers-x86 material is around improvements to benefit modern Intel Core and AMD Ryzen laptops.

The Linux Error Detection And Correction (EDAC) subsystem updates have been merged for the ongoing Linux 6.15 kernel.

AerynOS 2025.03 is now available for this Linux distribution that began life as Serpent OS as a new original distribution started by Ikey Doherty of Solus Linux fame.

KDE developer David Edmundson has published a lengthy blog post today outlining the long-standing challenges they have with the SDDM display manager, unimplemented features they want out of a log-in manager, and acknowledging GNOME's GDM as a "gold standard" for display managers. While not yet an official project, they have begun working on a new KDE Login Manager for improving the situation.

The Linux 6.15 kernel is set to remove support for IBM Cell Blade servers for those server platforms from around two decades ago that used the Cell Broadband Engine Architecture processors. IBM Cell Blades at the time powered a few supercomputers but these IBM QS20 / QS21 / QS22 platforms are no longer relevant and the IBM Linux kernel maintainers no longer even have these platforms available/running. With no apparent users remaining, it's time to say goodbye to the IBM Cell Blades from the mainline kernel.

Among other Linux Virtual File-System (VFS) changes submitted and already merged for Linux 6.15 was a set of minor performance optimizations around VFS file operations.

Intel engineers today released LPMD 0.0.9, the newest version of their open-source Low Power Mode Daemon for Linux systems to optimize active idle power consumption on Intel Core processors.