The fifth weekly release candidate of the Linux 6.15 kernel is now available for testing.

For those that happen to have the ASUS ROG MAXIMUS Z690 FORMULA or are shopping for a higher-end Intel Alder Lake / Raptor Lake desktop motherboard for Linux use, the ROG MAXIMUS Z690 FORMULA is the latest motherboard seeing hardware sensor monitoring support under Linux with the next version of the kernel.

The EXT2 file-system's direct access "DAX" mode is being deprecated and expected for removal at the end of 2025, after this year's Long Term Support (LTS) kernel version.

In addition to Bcachefs working on better self-healing / automatic repair capabilities, this modern copy-on-write file-system is also working on faster snapshot deletion performance. A patch series was posted this week to speed-up the deletion of snapshots though it comes with another bump to the on-disk format of the file-system.

As another alternative to the likes of the SiFive HiFive Premier P550 RISC-V developer board, the Andes Voyager is in the process of seeing patches reviewed for mainline Linux kernel support.

The QEMU processor emulator that plays an important role in the open-source Linux virtualization stack has been seeing experimental support for the Rust programming language developing within its codebase. There continues to be good progress being made on this Rust support as more QEMU components get ported over to this programming language for memory safety and other security benefits.

Labwc 0.8.4 is out as the newest stable update to this wlroots-based, window-stacking Wayland compositor.

Blueprint is a currently-experimental markup language and compiler for crafting GTK4 user interfaces. Blueprint allows declaratively creating GTK UIs and aims to be a very easy and nice developer experience.

NVIDIA CUDA 12.9 is now available as the newest minor feature update to NVIDIA's GPU compute stack. CUDA 12.9 adds compiler targetr support for SM 10.3 and 12.1, compiler support for "family-specific architectures", new NVML counters being exposed, and other minor feature improvements. The NVIDIA CUDA 12.9 documentation is also now more verbose in encouraging anyone still relying on Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta hardware to upgrade.

The first beta release of FreeBSD 14.3 was released on Friday night for testing. FreeBSD 14.3 will become the newest stable release this summer while later in 2025 we can look forward to the big FreeBSD 15.0 release.

The KDE Plasma developer sprint in Graz wrapped up just days ago but there's still been no shortage of new feature work landing into Plasma 6.4 this week. It was another exciting week of feature development as the soft feature freeze approaches for Plasma 6.4.

Wine 10.7 is out today as the newest bi-weekly release of this open-source software for running Windows games and applications on Linux and other platforms.

Sent out a few minutes ago was the latest batch of AMDGPU graphics and AMDKFD compute kernel driver feature patches for DRM-Next in getting ready for the Linux 6.16 merge window opening in a few weeks. This pull request contains a big new feature: the initial albeit currently experimental support for AMDGPU user mode queues.

Going back to last year an AMD engineer has been pursuing "Attack Vecotr Controls" to rethink CPU security mitigation handling. Attack Vector Controls aims to make it easier to manage CPU security mitigation settings by focusing on the class/scope of vulnerabilities rather than managing the mitigations at an individual level. It's looking like the initial attack vectors control code will be ready for mainlining in the upcoming Linux 6.16 cycle but stopping short of the complete implementation.

For anyone storing personal information on their laptops especially, I definitely recommend making use of Linux LUKS-based full disk encryption capabilities. I've been recommending going with the full disk encryption capabilities for nearly two decades to help protect personal data in case your laptop is lost or stolen. The performance implications of using full disk encryption have went down over time and in most real-world workloads you'll see minimal to any difference out of it. As it's been a while since running any reference benchmarks looking at no disk encryption to full disk encryption, here are some results on the newly-released Ubuntu 25.04 paired with the Framework Laptop 13 powered by AMD Ryzen AI 300 "Strix Point".

The Debian developer community is pursuing a General Resolution for voting on their policy around AI models.

In the event of your AMD Ryzen or EPYC system being randomly reset or unexpectedly rebooted under Linux, the Linux kernel with the upcoming Linux 6.16 cycle is gaining the ability to report the reason for that reset. This is making use of a technical capability found going back to the AMD Zen 1 processors that the Linux kernel is now tapping into for reporting the cause of any previous system reset.

This week's batch of Bcachefs file-system fixes have been submitted ahead of the Linux 6.15-rc5 test kernel due out on Sunday.

The MoltenVK 1.3 release candidate didn't end up needing much baking and overnight the MoltenVK 1.3 stable release was issued for Vulkan 1.3 API support on Apple devices that is built atop Apple's Metal drivers.

OpenZFS 2.3.2 is out today with a number of bug fixes for this ZFS file-system implementation for Linux and FreeBSD systems. With OpenZFS 2.3.2 also comes official support for the Linux 6.14 stable series.