Intel's accelerator efforts in recent generations of Xeon processors have been challenging to say the least. From limited software support and configuration obstacles to some current-generation accelerators not being safe for VM use due to security issues to having to deal with higher latency and other nuances if wanting to achieve decent performance. One of the Linux kernel users of Intel's QuickAssist Technology "QAT" accelerators has been the FSCRYPT code for native file encryption support. But the Linux kernel with the FSCRYPT usage is now demoting the Intel QAT accelerator support along with other problem-causing accelerator drivers.

The open-source, reverse-engineered Rockchip NPU driver "Rocket" developed by Tomeu Vizoso will soon be in the mainline kernel. The Rocket Gallium3D driver was also merged today for Mesa 25.3 in the user-space code for their AI accelerator support.

Among the number of early pull requests submitted in advance for the Linux 6.17 merge window were all the power management updates as well as to related areas like ACPI and thermal control drivers.

For the past two years Ubuntu developers have been talking about adding TPM-based full disk encryption to the installer for those wanting to leverage their system's Trusted Platform Module 2.0 capabilities to enhance security. It looks like for Ubuntu 25.10 this October that support will finally be in good shape.

The Linux support for Intel's next-generation Panther Lake SoCs appears to be largely set with Linux 6.16 ahead of the Core Ultra Series 3 laptops debuting in the coming months. There are though a few stragglers of Panther Lake support such as the performance events code in Linux 6.17 only now landing the perf integration.

Following the Linux 6.16 kernel release from Sunday evening, GNU Linux-libre 6.16-gnu is now available for that kernel downstream that strips out driver/kernel code dependent upon non-free-software microcode/firmware, the ability to load proprietary kernel modules, and carving out other bits of the Linux kernel not meeting their stringent free software standards.

As anticipated the Linux 6.16 kernel was promoted to stable. Linux 6.16 now greets the world with various performance improvements, NVIDIA Hopper and Blackwell open-source GPU driver support in Nouveau, Intel Advanced Performance Extensions (APX) preparations, and many other exciting enhancements.

The modern AMD Kernel graphics driver consisting of AMDGPU, the AMDKFD compute code, and associated infrastructure continues to easily be the largest mainline open-source driver. With the Linux 6.16 kernel debuting as stable as soon as later today, the AMD kernel graphics driver cracks the 5.9 million line threshold. In comparison, the entire Linux kernel source tree comes in at

In advance of the Linux 6.17 merge window expected to open soon following the Linux 6.16 release, all of the SoC updates have been submitted to Linus Torvalds for this next kernel version.

A few days back I wrote about Canonical releasing new Ubuntu 25.04 "Concept" ISOs for the Snapdragon X laptops with the new install images being re-based to the Linux 6.16 kernel and expanding the device support. But as I found out from my own testing, depending upon the laptop the support was still less than ideal. Since then there have been two more ISO releases and addressing one of my show-stopping problems albeit encountering another.

GNU Binutils 2.45 was released on Sunday morning as the newest version of this set of open-source binary tools.

There are a few AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization improvements on the way for the Linux 6.17 kernel worth noting.

Shotcut 25.07 is out today as the newest feature release for this prominent open-source and cross-platform video editing solution.

Assuming no objections are raised by Linus Torvalds, an early pull request has been submitted for the upcoming Linux 6.17 merge window to address an obscure kernel limitation that has been in place going back all the way to 1993 during the Linux v0.99 kernel days.

This past week Qualcomm sent out a set of 17 patches for the MSM DRM kernel graphics driver for enabling support for the Inter Frame Power Collapse (IFPC) feature with the X1-85 GPU found in the current Snapdragon X laptops.

Linux sound subsystem maintainer Takashi Iwai of SUSE submitted already the sound code feature changes ready for Linux 6.17.

We are just a few weeks out from seeing the release of the FFmpeg 8.0 multimedia library with many new features and improvements for this widely-used open-source software.

One of the nice Linux kernel accomplishments during the pandemic was getting the NTFS3 driver upstreamed for that modern NTFS file-system read/write driver developed by Paragon Software. In recent times that NTFS3 driver has been seeing occasional fixes and for the Linux 6.17 kernel -- and perhaps then back-ported to existing kernels -- are some notable fixes for those relying on drives formatted with this Microsoft file-system.

The ARM64 (AArch64) architecture updates have been submitted ahead of the imminent Linux 6.17 merge window.

Released on Friday was a new version of the oneDNN deep neural network library maintained by Intel and the UXL Foundation. This library used by various deep learning applications continues preparing for upcoming Intel CPUs and GPUs.