In October it will mark 40 years since the Free Software Foundation (FSF) was founded by Richard Stallman. In marking forty years of supporting the free software movement, they have been running a logo contest to memorialize the milestone. Today that new logo was unveiled.

Ahead of the upcoming NVIDIA GeForce RTX 50 series graphics "Blackwell" and the AMD Radeon RX 9070 series "RDNA4" later in the quarter, I figured it would be worthwhile having a dedicated article looking at the latest upstream Linux graphics/gaming performance for current generation NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40 and AMD Radeon RX 7000 series graphics cards. On the AMD side was the near-final Linux 6.13 kernel along with Mesa 25.0-devel for the latest RADV Vulkan and RadeonSI OpenGL driver support while on the NVIDIA side was their current 565 driver release branch.

Google engineer Vinay Banakar sent out a patch this week for the Linux kernel's memory management code to optimize TLB flushes during page reclaim and are showing very promising results.

An unexpected surprise today are AMD Linux software engineers announcing a new project a bit further outside the scope of their open-source graphics drivers... The AMDGPU Composition Stack "ACS" is for delivering new advanced features atop Wayland for bettering the Linux desktop display capabilities.

Surprisingly a change not made years ago, the Linux Kernel Unit Testing "KUnit" framework with the Linux 6.14 kernel is set to use hardware acceleration by default for faster testing where available.

Linux kernel developers are working to make it easier to debug early boot issues such as Kexec failures as currently dealing with such situations can be a frustrating and time consuming headache for figuring out the problems prior to the kernel being fully brought online.

Merged this week into the LLVM compiler codebase is initial support for "arch15" within the SystemZ back-end. Arch15 likely correlates to the IBM z17 mainframes with Telum II processors.

Back in April 2022 was the announcement by AMD's GPUOpen team of Orochi as a library for HIP/CUDA API run-time switching. Making use of Orochi allows for dynamically targeting either AMD HIP or NVIDIA CUDA at run-time to ease the distribution/usage of apps wanting to target both AMD and NVIDIA GPUs from the same software build. Today Orochi 3.0 was released.

Important code restructuring to the Intel Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) code is landing for the Linux 6.14 kernel to make it more robust moving forward and preparing for future features around this confidential computing / trusted execution environment (TEE) functionality built into the newest Xeon processors.

The second of three planned betas for the Qt 6.9 cross-platform UI toolkit is now available for testing ahead of the planned stable release in March.

The FreeBSD Foundation has begun receiving funding to work on zero-trust builds / reproducible builds. The work will hopefully be wrapped up in time for the major FreeBSD 15.0 release.

In addition to the Wine 10.0 stable release today, making the day very exciting as well for Linux gamers is the first official SDL 3.0 release!

In addition to the Bcachefs changes for the Linux 6.14 kernel, the Btrfs file-system feature updates have also been submitted and merged for this next version of the Linux kernel.

On the first day of the Linux 6.14 merge window there were a number of new AMD CPU features submitted. That's continued today with so far having the new "amd_node" driver to talk about for splitting up the modern Zen-era code and more of the legacy AMD Northbridge code from the pre-Zen days.

As was expected this week, Wine 10.0 stable is now available as the newest annual feature release to this open-source software that allows running Windows games and applications on Linux and other platforms. Wine also serves as the basis for Valve's Steam Play (Proton) and CodeWeavers' CrossOver software.

Along with recently announcing the Raspberry Pi 500 keyboard computer and the Raspberry Pi 5 16GB (review still forthcoming; the 16GB model only arrived last week), the Raspberry Pi Monitor debuted last month as their first foray into displays. For $100 USD you get a 15.6-inch 1080p display that is simple but pairs well with the Raspberry Pi 400/500 or just the single board computer or any other HDMI-connected device for that matter.

Serpent OS as the modern, from-scratch Linux distribution being led by well known open-source developer Ikey Doherty has started on a new project: disks-rs. The disks-rs project is intended to deal with file-systems, installation / partitioning, and block device management in a safe and effective manner from the Rust programming language.

Adding to the plethora of new hardware support coming with the Linux 6.14 kernel is enabling upstream support for the FPGAs found on the Intel-powered AAEON UP single board computers that are targeted for makers, hobbyists, and various industrial uses.

The big networking subsystem feature pull was sent out this morning for the Linux 6.14 merge window.

Over the past week there has been an uptick in patches pertaining to RDNA4's GFX12 graphics engine within the open-source Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" for Mesa 25.0 to benefit Linux systems.