The AlmaLinux project announced today that there is now "native" NVIDIA graphics driver support for AlmaLinux 10 and AlmaLinux 9 using NVIDIA's open-source kernel modules that are now conveniently packaged in an AlmaLinux repository for easy usage complete with NVIDIA's closed-source user-space packages like CUDA.

Merged last week for Linux 6.17 were the FUTEX locking changes that include addressing an observed performance bottleneck.

On Linux 6.15.3+ there have been increased reports of log tree corruption being hit by users of the Btrfs file-system. Fortunately, a fix has now been submitted for Linux 6.17 Git and then for back-porting to the recent stable kernel versions.

Merged today for Mesa 25.3-devel to benefit the RADV Vulkan and RadeonSI Gallium3D AMD drivers are improved scheduling heuristics for the ACO compiler back-end developed by Valve.

Andrew Morton this week sent in some additional memory management "MM" changes for the Linux 6.17 to complement last week's many MM patches from new optimizations to more DAMON features. Most notable with this secondary set of patches are khugepaged optimizations that especially help ARM64 Linux systems.

All of the Kbuild changes were merged today for the Linux 6.17 kernel. Most notable with the Kbuild changes is the gconfig graphical utility for configuring the Linux kernel configuration now being ported from GTK2 to GTK3.

Released two weeks ago was systemd 258-rc1 with many changes throughout its massive codebase. Out today is a second release candidate of the forthcoming systemd 258.

The Rust project put out a status update concerning its 2025 project goals to summarize what has been accomplished during the first half of the year.

The PCI-SIG announced today the PCI Express 8.0 specification due out in 2028 will double the data of the PCI Express 7.0 specification, taking it to 256 GT/s.

If all goes according to plan Debian 13.0 will be released this weekend. Already in its effectively final state aside from any last minute fixes, I've begun running Debian 13 testing builds on various systems in the lab to great success. With two years since Debian 12, the new software packages of Debian 13 help in delivering better performance especially on modern systems. Here is a look at Debian 12 versus Debian 13 performance on an AMD EPYC server across 130 benchmarks. Coincidentally, Debian 13 is coming in at 13% faster than Debian 12.

Following yesterday's F2FS pull request, the exFAT file-system updates were sent out and since merged for the ongoing Linux 6.17 kernel merge window.

For several years now Intel has been working on SYCL support within LLVM and various related efforts like the LLVM SPIR-V back-end as part of their oneAPI ambitions and Data Parallel C++ across their spectrum of hardware. The latest hitting upstream LLVM is libsycl as a SYCL run-time library.

Oxmiq Labs exited stealth mode today as a new startup led by Raja Koduri of AMD / Apple / Intel fame to focus on GPU software and licenseable graphics IP. Oxmiq Labs is a new GPU software and IP startup that has been in development for two years already and built a team of talented GPU and AI architects.

For Linux gamers relying on the X.Org Server, the SDL3 library that is widely-used by cross-platform games has landed support for precision/pixel scrolling.

FFmpeg developers are known for delivering some really wild performance gains from hand-optimized Assembly code especially around Intel/AMD AVX-512 optimizations for various features of this widely-used open-source multimedia library. Merged this week was enhancing the Bwdif deinterlacing video filter with a 23~28x speed-up over the basic C code path when using AVX-512.

Linus Torvalds yesterday merged a patch from SUSE's Petr Mladek introducing a new boot parameter option for the kernel to provide greater control over the behavior of hashing pointer values.

Last year Intel's open-source Compute Runtime stack for OpenCL and oneAPI Level Zero support discontinued its support for Broadwell through Ice Lake integrated graphics to focus strictly on Tigerlake with Intel "Gen12" graphics and newer. Today though they issued an update to their legacy driver branch for helping with the graphics compute support on those older hardware platforms.

Working toward the stable openSUSE Leap 16.0 release in late 2025, the release candidate period has begun for this Linux distribution aligned with SUSE Linux Enterprise 16 sources.

Sent out today for the Linux 6.17 merge window and already merged hours later were the Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) feature updates.

Junio Hamano announced the release of Git 2.51-rc0 to kick off the new week and the first step toward Git 2.51 as the next milestone for this open-source distributed version control system.