Patches were posted to the Linux Kernel Mailing List this morning for wiring up the ESWIN EIC7700 RISC-V SoC support and the most notable board using this SoC so far, the SiFive HiFive Premier P550.

The Servo open-source web engine is out with its February 2025 status update to highlight work on the engine itself as well as its demo browser and embed API capabilities for using Servo by other applications.

Since last year we have continued to be impressed by the AMD EPYC 9005 "Turin" server processors while today they are announcing the EPYC Embedded 9005 line-up. The AMD EPYC Embedded 9005 Series processors are much like the EPYC 9005 series processors but with a few differences.

FreeBSD 13.5 is out today as the final update to the FreeBSD 13 series. Users should begin making plans for upgrading to the current FreeBSD 14 stable series or eyeing the future FreeBSD 15.0 release.

Building off the big OpenZFS 2.3 feature release from January, OpenZFS 2.3.1 is out today with Linux 6.13 kernel compatibility as well as various bug fixes.

Mir 2.20 is out today as the newest version of this Canonical-developed Wayland compositor and set of libraries for developing Wayland-based shells.

Box64 0.3.4 is out today as the newest version of this open-source Linux x86_64 user-space emulator that runs on ARM64 as well as RISC-V 64-bit and LoongArch 64-bit systems.

While the Asahi AGX Gallium3D and Honeykrisp Vulkan drivers continue to be developed within mainline Mesa for supporting OpenGL and Vulkan with Apple Silicon M1/M2 SoCs, the necessary Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) kernel driver has yet to be upstreamed. But hitting the mailing list today is a patch getting the user-space API (UAPI) with more eyes on as the precursor to the actual kernel driver that is currently held up by waiting on Rust kernel abstractions to be upstreamed.

With the new AMD EPYC 9005 processors there are SKUs up to 500 Watt with the likes of the EPYC 9965 flagship at 192 cores for Turin Dense cores or 128 Turin classic cores with the EPYC 9755. But for those looking at upgrading from an existing EPYC 9004 series server and bound by the motherboard BIOS support and/or cooling/power capacity, 400 Watts is a sweet spot. Many of the existing platforms designed for EPYC 9004 Bergamo/Genoa(X) and now extended for EPYC 9005 Turin are limited to a 400 Watt TDP. With the prior AMD EPYC 9655 testing I have already shown off the great Zen 5 uplift when maintaining the same core counts as Zen 4, but even sticking to 400 Watts at the top-end is room for more. The EPYC 9845 is AMD's top-end SKU for 400 Watts or less that allows for 160 dense cores (320 threads) per socket compared to the 128 core EPYC 9754 Bergamo. Effectively the same power level and 25% more -- and better (Zen 5C) -- cores. Plus with EPYC Turin supporting the new AMD P-State CPU frequency scaling driver there is greater headroom in optimizing for power efficiency if so desired. Here is a look at how the AMD EPYC 9845 delivers a great leap to performance and power efficiency for those looking at a surprisingly robust upgrade from prior generation EPYC 9004.

Fedora 42 isn't even releasing until next month but a number of early change proposals have been filed for the upcoming Fedora 43 development cycle that will be released this autumn.

The hardware monitoring "HWMON" subsystem updates are building up ahead of the Linux 6.15 merge window opening up later this month. Here is a look at a few of the HWMON changes worth mentioning to be found in this next version of the Linux kernel.

Along with other exciting Intel kernel graphics driver updates submitted for the upcoming Linux 6.15 merge window, another batch of drm-intel-next code was sent out today to DRM-Next. This pull request is mostly around bug fixing and other low-level work but it does provide a new "dirty rect" feature being introduced with next-gen Intel Xe3 graphics.

In hopefully helping Asahi Linux reduce their downstream patch burden and helping to enhance the overall flow of new Apple Silicon related code into the mainline Linux kernel, another developer has agreed to serve as an official code reviewer over the ARM Apple bits within the Linux kernel.

For quite a while Red Hat engineers have been developing the open-source, Rust-written NOVA driver to in effect serve as the successor to the reverse-engineered Nouveau driver that isn't too actively developed in more recent times. But unlike Nouveau's extensive range of NVIDIA GPU support, the NOVA driver is intentionally limited to the RTX 20 "Turing" GPUs and newer where there is the NVIDIA GPU System Processor (GSP) with the firmware support to leverage for an easier driver-writing experience. The very initial NOVA driver code was sent out on Sunday for DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 6.15 merge window.

Linus Torvalds released Linux 6.14-rc6 a few minutes ago as we work toward the stable Linux 6.14 kernel release later in March.

On Friday AMD sent out another batch of AMDGPU and AMDKFD kernel driver feature patches destined for the upcoming Linux 6.15 kernel cycle. One notable feature in this late pull request is introducing a new "high precision" mode to be found with the GFX950 target, which is believed to be the upcoming Instinct MI350X series.

Intel's new Platform Temperature Control (PTC) feature is a hardware-based solution to manage skin and/or board temperatures of a device. Platform Temperature Control will adjust the SoC power/performance if the temperature thresholds are exceeded, which are programmed by the device manufacturer. But new Linux patches posted allow controlling the Intel Platform Temperature Control feature found with new Core Ultra Lunar Lake laptops and upcoming Panther Lake hardware.

Already queued ahead of the Linux 6.15 merge window opening later this month are DeviceTree support for Apple's T2 SoCs as well as other DeviceTree additions set to be mainlined. A third round of DeviceTree patches were sent out on Sunday morning to the Linux kernel mailing list for the upcoming v6.15 cycle.

ALGOL 68 is an imperative programming language that's more than a half-century old and went on to inspire and influence other programming languages. It has its place in programming language history but a recently published compiler front-end for ALGOL 68 has been decided for now at least not to be upstreamed into the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC).

For two years now the Intel IVPU accelerator driver has been part of the mainline kernel for supporting the Neural Processing Unit (NPU) that's part of the Core Ultra "Meteor Lake" CPUs and newer. Only this week though was the firmware for the Intel NPUs now upstreamed to the linux-firmware.git repository.