Google's open-source and cross-platform Flutter UI toolkit has been forked by community developers as Flock.

David Rosca working for AMD has continued to improve their open-source video acceleration support within Mesa. Merged today for Mesa 24.3 is the code within the Gallium3D video acceleration front-end and the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver for handling AV1 still picture encode.

KDE developer Vlad Zahorodnii is out with an insightful blog post today on how XWayland window resizing has been enhanced for Plasma 6.3 so that resizing X11 clients will now appear much more polished than the status quo.

Following last week's launch testing of the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K and Core Ultra 5 245K Arrow Lake desktop processors, the next area I've been exploring deeper has been the DDR5 memory performance including with CUDIMMs. Here's a closer look at the Core Ultra 9 285K performance under Linux while testing several different sets of memory and running Ubuntu 24.10.

Going back to earlier in the year AMD Linux engineers have been prepping the kernel for PCI Express TLP Processing Hints (TPH) support that allows for hints that can be injected to improve latency and lowering traffic congestion when there are several possible cache locations on the server with the TPH noting the optimal location of a Transaction Layer Packet (TLP). This PCIe TPH support is set to be merged upstream with the forthcoming Linux 6.13 cycle.

The Trinity Desktop Environment as a still-maintained fork of the KDE 3.5 desktop software is out with a new point release.

Mozilla Firefox 132.0 release builds are now available for Linux, macOS, and Windows for this newest monthly feature release to this open-source web browser.

While the sched_ext extensible scheduler code was merged for Linux 6.12, work on sched_ext itself it is not over. New patches this weekend continue working on NUMA awareness for it with its default idle selection policy while similar work on CPU last level cache (LLC) awareness are slated for the upcoming Linux 6.13 cycle.

Another feature to look forward to with this quarter's Mesa 24.3 release is the open-source Freedreno Gallium3D driver for Qualcomm Adreno hardware now supporting Rusticl-based OpenCL compute.

Over the past year we have seen Raspberry Pi working a lot on Wayland support for the Raspberry Pi OS desktop and using it on their latest Raspberry Pi models. With today's new Raspberry Pi OS update, Wayland is being used by default across all Raspberry Pi devices.

While the Linux 6.12 kernel enables Intel Xe2 Battlemage discrete GPU support out-of-the-box as a sign of its maturing state, there are a number of patches for the open-source Battlemage driver support that are ongoing. One of the areas seeing some patches recently are around enhancing the display features with Battlemage's upgraded capabilities. Plus there's ongoing work around next-gen Xe3 graphics too.

It turns out the latest AMD Ryzen desktop processors offer support for AMD Smart Trace Buffer (STB) that previously was only limited to mobile platforms.

Intel has issued their newest quarterly feature release of their FFmpeg Cartwheel, which is their developer staging area of new video acceleration related patches for Intel graphics hardware that they are working to upstream within the widely-used, open-source FFmpeg library.

Sway 1.10 released on Sunday as the newest version of this i3-inspired Wayland compositor for the Linux desktop.

Following a busy week of kernel drama stemming from the Russian sanctions impacting Linux maintainers, Linus Torvalds is out with the Linux 6.12-rc5 weekly test candidate.

Sent out in original patch form this past week and already iterated to a second version this Sunday, a new proposal is underway to introduce "hung_task_detect_count" as a convenient means of tracking the number of times hung tasks are detected since boot.

Intel merged Linear Address Masking into the Linux kernel last year as a means of allowing user-space to store metadata within some bits of pointers without masking it out before use. LAM can be useful for virtual machines, sanitizers / profiling / memory tagging, and other uses. While the brand new Intel Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake CPUs support LAM, the Linux kernel is now disabling LAM out of security concerns.

For the past year Intel software engineers have been developing a PCIe cooling driver to reduce the PCIe link speed to cope with thermal issues. In the future with PCI Express 6.0 this driver may be further adapted to also reduce the PCIe link width when encountering thermal problems. This cooling driver is now ready for merging with the upcoming Linux 6.13 kernel.

In addition to Eric Biggers of Google being busy working on various crypto and hashing performance optimizations, the longtime Linux developer has also been working on "dm-inlinecrypt" for better leveraging inline block device encryption.

The Linux NETFS code as a network file-system helper library is seeing patches to help enhance the read performance for solutions like CIFS as well as adding single blob object support.