One of the interesting Intel Xe Linux kernel graphics driver patches that was volleyed for discussion last month is working on user-mode driver (UMD) direct submission support for allowing work to be directly submitted from user-space to the GPU hardware and avoiding some of the overhead of the kernel driver interactions.

While there are many great new features in Linux 6.13 like the AMD 3D V-Cache Optimizer driver, one of the features that wasn't buttoned up in time for this current kernel cycle were the patches implementing the AMD Hardware Feedback Interface (HFI). But that work remains ongoing and last week brought the seventh iteration of the patches.

Microsoft engineers rounded out their work week by releasing Azure Linux 3.0.20241203 on Friday evening as the newest monthly installment for their in-house Linux distribution.

While the winter holidays are quickly approaching, KDE developers remain very busy working on new feature code for the Plasma 6.3 desktop. A number of new features were merged this week for the KDE desktop.

OBS Studio 31.0 was released this evening as the newest feature update to this open-source, cross-platform software for live streaming and desktop screen recording purposes. OBS Studio remains a leading choice across operating systems for screen recording, game livestreaming, and similar purposes while the new v31.0 release tacks on even more features.

The first release candidate of Wine 10.0 is out today that also now marks the feature freeze ahead of this stable release expected to be out around mid-January.

With the Linux 6.13 merge window having ended this past weekend, here's the Phoronix overview of all the interesting feature additions, new hardware support, and other kernel changes coming for Linux 6.13.

Box64 v0.3.2 is out today as the newest feature release to this Linux user-space emulator for allowing x86_64 binaries to run on ARM64 (AArch64) Linux devices. Box64 is one of the leading ways for allowing x86_64 games and Steam to be able to run on ARM 64-bit Linux devices.

New Linux patches from Huawei engineers are preparing new driver support for controlling High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) with the ARM-based Kunpeng high performance SoC.

openSUSE Leap Micro 6.1 is now available as the newest version of this lightweight Linux operating system built for containerized environments and virtualized workloads.

Fwupd 2.0 debuted back in October while out today is Fwupd 2.0.3 as the newest incremental update to this open-source solution for updating system and device firmware under Linux.

The SDL2 library is widely used by cross-platform games and other software. Fedora 42 is eyeing the possibility of replacing SDL2 with the sdl2-compat code so that by way of this compatibility layer the newer SDL3 version will ultimately be used instead.

While the Linux v6.13 merge window has been over for less than one week, already the first pull requests of new feature code are being submitted to DRM-Next for queuing the display/graphics driver changes ahead of the Linux 6.14 merge window in two months.

It's been a while since there have been any new advancements or performance optimizations to talk about for Multi-Gen LRU (MGLRU) that was upstreamed to the Linux kernel two years ago as a very exciting kernel innovation. But that's changing now with some fresh performance optimizations being worked on for the MGLRU code.

While Linux 6.13-rc1 was only released this past Sunday and there is around two months to go until the start of the Linux 6.14 kernel cycle, AMD P-State driver improvements are already beginning to collect for this next kernel cycle.

Canonical's Matthieu Clemenceau as the Engineering Director for the Ubuntu Foundations Team has provided a public roadmap around some of the plans for Ubuntu 25.04. This next Ubuntu Linux (non-LTS) release that is due out in April is set to enjoy more performance optimizations and other exciting bits.

Linux stable maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman officially designated Linux 6.12 as this year's long-term support (LTS) kernel version.

The Rust-based Redox OS original open-source operating system project is out with a new status report to detail the enhancements they have made over the past several weeks.

System76 today released the newest development/testing version of their Rust-based desktop environment designed for their Pop!_OS Linux distribution.

For the past month and a half the NVIDIA R565 Linux driver series has been in public beta with a number of (X)Wayland improvements, DMA-BUF enhancements, VKD3D fixes, and a variety of other enhancements. Today the NVIDIA 565.77 Linux driver was released as the first stable build in the series.