As part of Blender continuing to build out the Vulkan API capabilities for this open-source 3D modeling software, a proof of concept merge request was opened for beginning to make use of Vulkan ray queries.

Linux 6.18-rc1 is now available for testing with the Linux 6.18 merge window closed. Linux 6.18 will be out in December and is anticipated to become this year's Linux LTS kernel version.

Well, here is a weekend surprise... Red Hat engineer and Rusticl lead developer Karol Herbst has opened a Mesa merge request for "CLUDA" as a compute-only driver that implements the Gallium3D API atop the NVIDIA CUDA driver API. Wow.

Intel engineers continue working on SR-IOV support for the Xe open-source kernel driver as part of Project Battlematrix for ensuring good virtualization support for the latest Intel GPUs on Linux.

Patches were posted this week for implementing Microsoft's extensions around the ACPI fan device for allowing the operating system to set fan speed trip points. In turn this should help some HP systems and likely other OEMs too in getting fan information working under Linux.

Git developers have been talking in recent weeks around release plans for Git 3.0. If all goes well we could potentially see Git 3.0 released before the end of 2026.

The first beta release of the FreeBSD 15 operating system is now available for testing.

Merged today for the Mesa 25.3 graphics driver code is enabling support for more PowerVR Imagination GPUs within the "PVR" Vulkan driver albeit not officially supported nor in active development. Your mileage may vary but for some users with certain GPUs may work out well enough.

The Linux 6.18 merge window is winding down this weekend ahead of Linux 6.18-rc1 expected on Sunday. Merged today were some remaining x86 core updates, which includes a Retpoline optimization patch intended to help out Intel E core CPUs.

The Solus Linus project is preparing for an "epoch bump" so they can make breaking / high-impact changes to in effect bump the binary version of their package repository.

Last week during the Intel Tech Tour in Arizona, the Intel XPU Manager 1.3.3 software was released. Intel XPU Manager is a management and monitoring tool focused on Intel data center GPUs for simplifying administration, reliability, and maximizing utilization. Somewhat surprisingly, the Intel XPU Manager now deprecated the Data Center GPU Max Series as well as the Data Center GPU Flex Series.

Intel engineer and Linux power management subsystem maintainer Rafael Wysocki posted a set of patches this week to simplify the energy model used by Core Ultra hybrid systems with a mix of P and E cores while lacking SMT support, such as with the current Lunar Lake SoCs and upcoming Panther Lake.

Besides last-minute breakage with some executables over the switch to Rust Coreutils, Ubuntu 25.10 ended up shipping with broken Flatpak support.

For going along with the recent release of the GNOME 49 desktop, Phosh 0.50 has been released for this Wayland compositor focused on mobile devices.

KDE developer Nate Graham describes this week as having seen a "massive amount of stability work" for the Plasma 6.5 desktop. Among the many fixes to land this week for this next Plasma desktop release were fixing the second and third most common causes of Plasma crashes. Additionally, the most prolific common crash scenario was discovered to be caused by third-party code.

Coreboot 25.09 was released this evening as the latest feature update to this open-source solution common to Google Chromebooks and other select motherboards/systems as an alternative to proprietary BIOS / system firmware.

Vulkan 1.4.329 is now available with one notable new extension in tow.

Introduced last year in Linux 6.10 was TPM bus encryption and integration protection for Trusted Platform Module 2 (TPM2) handling. The intent was on better TPM security after a prior security demonstration showed TPM key recovery from Microsoft Windows BitLocker as well as TPM sniffing attacks. Shortly after being merged it was limited to just an x86_64 default where it had been tested the most at the time. Now more than one year later, this feature is being disabled by default in the mainline Linux kernel.

AMD today released ROCm 7.0.2 as the newest update to the ROCm 7.0 compute stack.

With this week's release of Python 3.14 bringing performance improvements, debugging improvements, a new Zstd compression module, and other enhancements I have been eager to run some benchmarks seeing how Python 3.14 compares to prior Python releases.