Posted today to the Linux kernel mailing list are a set of nine patches for bringing up support for the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite/Plus powered Microsoft Surface Pro 11 2-in-1 laptop.

A number of Phoronix readers have been interested in seeing some fresh benchmarks of Mesa's NVK Vulkan driver in providing open-source Vulkan API support on NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards as well as the modern OpenGL approach of using Zink for layering OpenGL atop Vulkan. Here are some fresh benchmarks using the very latest Mesa 25.2 code for NVK on the latest upstream stable Linux kernel compared to the NVIDIA R575 official Linux graphics driver stack.

Merged today into the upstream GNU C Library code ahead of next month's Glibc 2.42 release is support for SFrame stack tracing with ELF binaries on x86 and AArch64 architectures.

New feature patches posted for review today on the Linux kernel mailing list are working to implement the NVMe specification's Controller Data Queue (CDQ) functionality within the NVMe storage driver.

In addition to last minute feature work on the latest AMD RDNA4 graphics cards ahead of the Mesa 25.2 code branching, there's also some new fixes going into Mesa for the open-source Radeon driver code... Coming in this Monday morning by surprise are some fixes for the Radeon HD 2000/3000 series approaching two decades old as well as a fix for the Radeon HD 4000 graphics processors.

Ahead of the Mesa 25.2 code branching / feature freeze expected later this week, last minute feature additions and other changes continue landing in the codebase for these open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers. One of the additions today worth mentioning are continued Vulkan Video improvements for AMD Radeon graphics.

One of the interesting new additions with the upcoming Intel Xe3 integrated and discrete graphics is the Variable Register Thread "VRT" feature. Making use of Variable Register Thread can reduce register splitting, reduce bandwidth consumption, and improve overall performance. More background information on Intel VRT can be found in that aforelinked Phoronix article. But now the ability is coming to optionally disable VRT.

The Linux Mint developers have put out their monthly status update to outline their work in recent weeks. Over the course of June, Linux Mint developers were primarily focused on Linux Mint 22.2 with the beta release expected soon.

Debian's annual Debian Conference "DebConf" started this morning and runs all week in Brest, France.

As we approach the stable Linux 6.16 kernel release later this month, Linux 6.16-rc6 is out today as the newest weekly test candidate.

The popular Arch Linux based CachyOS operating system is out with its "July 2025" update for providing the latest innovations for this performance-optimized, feature-rich Linux distribution.

Ahead of the Linux 6.16-rc6 kernel release due out later today, an x86/urgent pull request was sent out today that includes some fixes for old AMD Zen 2 hardware.

Last week I wrote about a number of patches coming out of AMD for Next-Gen Geometry "NGG" improvements to the AMD OpenGL and Vulkan drivers for Linux. Some of that code hadn't been merged as of writing but fortunately this week the remainder of the NGG improvements were successfully merged to Mesa Git for this quarter's Mesa 25.2 release.

Amid Intel's ongoing financial difficulties and multiple rounds of layoffs some Linux engineers at Intel left last year and there's been at least one prominent departure this week amid the latest round of challenges at the company.

Last month when the Fairphone 6 smartphone was announced, same-day Linux support patches were posted for this modular and repair-friendly smartphone. That Linux support code with the Device Tree (DT) files have been under review and out today is the second iteration of those enablement patches.

The Haiku open-source operating system project inspired by BeOS had a busy month of June with a number of enhancements made to this OS. Haiku just published their convenient monthly recap that highlights all of the interesting changes made the past month to this open-source OS.

GStreamer 1.27.1 released this week as the first development version toward the GStreamer 1.28 release coming later in the year. GStreamer 1.27/1.28 is bringing a lot of modern feature enhancements for this widely-used multimedia library.

Ahead of tomorrow's Linux 6.16-rc6 kernel release a number of Bcachefs file-system fixes were merged.

It's been a while since there have been any new patches in the Wine-Staging experimental area to note. More patches though have continued working their way from Wine-Staging to upstream/mainline Wine while this weekend Wine-Staging 10.12 is out at 292 patches atop upstream Wine and containing two new patches.

In addition to Intel preparing Bartlett Lake S EDAC driver support for Linux 6.17, several other recent and upcoming Intel processors are also set to see Error Detection and Correction (EDAC) driver coverage with this next version of the Linux kernel.