The Canonical Kernel Team confirmed their plans today that with the Ubuntu 25.10 release in October they are planning to employ the Linux 6.17 kernel.

Adding on to the Intel Xeon 6 "Granite Rapids" CPU family are today three new models focused on delivering enhanced GPU-accelerated AI performance.

Last week I began posting Linux benchmarks of the flagship "Strix Halo" SoC, the AMD Ryzen AI Max+ PRO 395 with powerful Radeon 8060S graphics using the HP ZBook Ultra G1a laptop. Both the CPU and GPU results for the data published thus far have been mighty impressive and done at the Ubuntu Linux defaults... But the Ryzen AI Max+ 395 within the ZBook Ultra G1a can be pushed even further by leveraging the ACPI Platform Profiles capabilities. In this article is showing how much further performance -- and the power costs -- can be achieved out of this AMD Strix Halo SoC when leveraging the HP Power Profiles as well as the power efficiency for those wanting to run the SoC instead in the "power saver" / "low power" configuration.

PoCL 7.0 is out today as the newest version of this "Portable Computing Language" implementation that originally was started for supporting CPU-based OpenCL execution but with time and in leveraging LLVM back-ends has added support for OpenCL atop AMDKFD / NVIDIA PTX / Intel Level Zero and other possible back-ends.

FFmpeg developers have been working on Vulkan-accelerated FFV1 video encode/decode for that two decade old lossless video coding format. Merged this week to FFmpeg Git were more enhancements to their Vulkan-based FFV1 encoder and yielding big performance improvements for both AMD and NVIDIA graphics processors.

A recently posted patch series for the MSI WMI platform driver is aiming this open-source driver to reach parity with MSI's official Windows application/driver for the MSI Claw gaming handheld systems.

Longtime AMDGPU driver engineer Alex Deucher has posted an interesting set of patches on Wednesday for enhancing the GPU reset experience under Linux with RDNA graphics cards.

A patch series is baking for likely upstreaming in the Linux v6.17 kernel cycle later in the year to optimize AMD CPU cache flushing when making use of Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) with KVM.

With Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 providing a RISC-V developer preview, CentOS is now in turn also providing initial RISC-V CPU ISA support.

Well, this is a pleasant surprise... Less than 24 hours after the AMD Computex 2025 keynote where better/more-timely ROCm support for client GPUs was brought up, AMD ROCm 6.4.1 is now officially released. With ROCm 6.4.1 there is formal support for RDNA4 GPUs, including the Radeon RX 9000 series consumer graphics cards.

The libinput input handling library that's used by both X11 and Wayland based environments on the Linux desktop is preparing to introduce a Lua-based plug-in system. Via Lua scripts it will be possible to modify evdev input events / input device behavior to deal with quirky/broken input devices and better workaround other problems that aren't currently easily addressable.

With the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 9000 series having just been announced at Computex, it's a good time to revisit the Ryzen Threadripper 7000 series performance ahead of those Zen 5 HEDT CPUs launching in July. In this article is a look at how the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7970X 32-core and 7980X 64-core HEDT processors have evolved on the same system with the software updates released since their late 2023 debut. Overall the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7970X and 7980X Linux performance is up by about 8% overall since launch day less than two years ago with the 64-core processor.

Fwupd 2.0.10 is out today as the newest feature update to this open-source firmware updating solution built around the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS).

At the AMD Computex keynote last night in addition to announcing the Ryzen Threadripper 9000 series, Radeon RX 9060 XT, and Ryzen AI PRO R9700, they also brief talked about the ROCm compute stack and their plans for the second half of 2025.

Last year NVIDIA began publicly outlining known Wayland limitations for their driver and future support plans. This week NVIDIA put out updated information concerning known gaps in Wayland support as well as their ongoing future driver plans for enhancing the feature compatibility under this X11 successor.

The FreeBSD project today published their status report outlining their development happenings during Q1'2025. There's been a lot going on in the FreeBSD world, especially for improving laptop support and other modern hardware coverage for this BSD operating system.

Released yesterday was the newest monthly feature update to the Intel Compute Runtime as their open-source GPU compute stack for OpenCL and oneAPI Level Zero support on Intel integrated and discrete graphics processors.

Merged yesterday to the GNOME Display Manager "GDM" codebase is disabling of the X11/X.Org session by default as the first step toward deprecating GNOME's X11 session support.

Sent out last week was one final batch of drm-misc-next updates ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.16 kernel cycle. Besides a couple fixes, most notable was new async flipping code for the Intel DRM driver with the IN_FORMATS_ASYNC DRM property.

Ongoing Wayland release manager Simon Ser has proposed doing away with alpha and beta releases moving forward as a sign of Wayland's maturity and to ease the release management process.