It's been a while since we have seen anything new to report on Unvanquished as one of the few remaining and promising open-source game projects. The Unvanquished FPS/RTS game has been in development for 12 years now and built atop the Daemon engine that is now a very distant fork from the id Tech 3 engine. The latest now is that Unvanquished has been pushing forward OpenGL 4.6 rendering support.

The OpenBSD project has released LibreSSL 4.0 as the newest version of this open-source TLS implementation that was forked from OpenSSL a decade ago.

OpenZFS 2.3-rc1 released last week with RAIDZ expansion, fast deduplication, and direct IO support among other changes for this ZFS file-system implementation for use on Linux and FreeBSD systems. OpenZFS 2.3-rc2 is out today with a few more interesting changes.

In addition to NVIDIA engineers being at XDC 2024 in Montreal last week for talking about their Wayland driver plans, there was also a presentation by NVIDIA's Daniel Dadap around current Linux challenges in supporting dynamic display mux hardware on modern laptops with iGPU/dGPU combinations and their hopes for improving the support.

With the newly-launched AMD EPYC 9005 series processors continuing to use Socket SP5, there is drop-in upgrade compatibility for existing EPYC 9004 series motherboards/servers. That's assuming, of course, the vendor provides a BIOS update for enabling the EPYC 9005 series "Turin" support and there may be limitations on the maximum CPU/TDP supported given power/thermal constraints. But in going from EPYC 9004 to EPYC 9005 is also upping the maximum memory speed from DDR5-4800 to DDR5-6000 (or DDR5-6400 in validated configurations). For those trying to weigh the benefits of also upgrading your memory if on an existing EPYC 9004 Genoa/Bergamo server to DDR5-6000, here are some memory performance comparison benchmarks for some reference points.

Richard Biener of SUSE published a GCC 15.0.0 status report for outlining the current development state of the GCC 15 open-source compiler as it works its way toward the stable GCC 15.1 release in the early months of 2025.

The Wine developers at CodeWeavers who also collaborate with Valve on Steam Play's Proton have been working to enhance input device support for Proton/Wine gaming. In particular, for various gaming input devices that were never designed with Linux support in mind and various nuances around properly supporting them under Linux with different limitations from (X)Wayland to kernel driver handling.

Inkscape 1.4 released on Sunday as the newest version of this cross-platform, open-source vector graphics editor.

For those that happen to have a Corsair Void headset or are looking for a new gaming headset this upcoming holiday season, the upcoming Linux 6.13 kernel cycle is expected to merge a new driver for these wired and wireless PC gaming headsets.

Llamafile is the open-source project from Mozilla that allows distributing large language models as a single file that can work across operating systems, run on CPUs or GPUs, and all-around makes it much easier to distribute and run LLMs. This Mozilla Builders project ended out the weekend with a new feature release.

Linux 6.12-rc3 is out today as expected as the newest weekly release candidate in working Linux 6.12 toward a stable release in November.

With a number of patches queued this week into the staging tree ahead of the Linux 6.13 kernel, a number of old and no longer maintained hardware drivers are set to be removed in the next kernel cycle.

As a result of user feedback and being able to reproduce some annoying ad experiences, particularly on mobile devices, I've been able to make some enhancements to hopefully improve the user ad experience when browsing Phoronix.

Building off the recent infrastructure merged for Mesa 24.3 as a build option to allow Rusticl driver support to be enabled by default, Red Hat's Karol Herbst has added the Asahi Gallium3D driver to the default list.

Adding to the growing set of features for NVK as this open-source NVIDIA Vulkan driver within Mesa, the VK_KHR_fragment_shading_rate fragment shading rate extension is now supported.

While Azure Linux 3.0 has been available since the late summer, for those continuing to rely on Azure Linux 2.0 in production there is a big update out this weekend. Azure Linux 2.0.20241006 brings dozens of security fixes to this Microsoft Linux distribution.

Wayland Protocols 1.38 is out with three new staging protocols.

Back in January AMD published an open-source XDNA Linux kernel driver for supporting their Ryzen AI NPUs. But it wasn't until July that the formal review process for the AMD XDNA driver began as the necessary prerequisite for getting picked up into the mainline Linux kernel. On Friday the fourth iteration of those patches for review were published as it hopefully is closing in on landing within the mainline kernel.

The Haiku open-source operating system project inspired by BeOS is out with their newest monthly development summary to highlight advancements made to this unique OS.

With Intel Core Ultra Lunar Lake systems now shipping and the Linux support largely settled, Intel open-source software engineers have begun ramping up their support for Panther Lake due out in a year.