Mesa 25.0-rc2 was released yesterday and it's rather boring on the changes, but that's a good thing during this bug fixing phase.

With the recent GNU Binutils 2.44 release, one of the changes is worth calling out in its own article: the GNU Gold linker is now officially deprecated and is now being segregated to its own extra Binutils package but risks being removed all together without new developer volunteers stepping up to maintain this linker.

Red Hat engineer and PipeWire lead developer Wim Taymans presented at FOSDEM 2025 last weekend around the state of the PipeWire project for this integral component to the modern Linux desktop.

The modern Intel "Xe" Linux kernel Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver as the clean successor to the i915 driver has been an experimental option for Tigerlake and newer but only for Xe2 graphics (Lunar Lake / Battlemage) and newer is it used by default. But Google at least for their Chromebook use-cases is entertaining the idea of switching over to the Xe driver rather than the long-used i915 kernel driver for Alder Lake era hardware.

Yesterday I showcased Linux 6.14 Git performance worse than Linux 6.13 and 6.12 in a number of multi-threaded workloads. Due to that initial discover being on the lone AMD EPYC Turin 2P server that is always busy running through new benchmarks for future content as well as I am being persistently short on time and constantly under pressure due to the state of the web/ad industry, I didn't expect to get around to digging deeper into the problem in the near-term. But as I ended up being able to reproduce some of the regressions on a System76 Thelio Major workstation at my desk with the still mighty powerful Ryzen Threadripper 7980X, I was able to turn around a quick bisect.

Merged last year for the Linux 6.12 kernel was sched_ext for allowing extensible scheduler possibilities by allowing schedulers to be implemented as eBPF code and dynamically loaded into the kernel. This allows for rapidly developing new schedulers as well as exploring other new possibilities around more intelligent kernel scheduling decisions. Meta, Google, Canonical (Ubuntu), and others have been big proponents of sched_ext and NVIDIA is also increasingly vocalizing their support for these extensible scheduler opportunities.

AMD announced today the release of Schola 1.0 as an open-source reinforcement learning library that is being made available under an MIT license and as part of their GPUOpen software collection for helping game developers.

Now that the Linux 6.14 merge window wrapped up this past weekend with the release of Linux 6.14-rc1, here is a recap of all the great new features, hardware enablement, and other improvements to find with this kernel.

One of the set of patches for the Linux kernel that we have been looking forward to but that wasn't wrapped up in time for the recent Linux v6.14 merge window was the work enabling use of the AMD INVLPGB instruction on Zen 3 CPUs and newer for broadcast TLB invalidation. This can lead to a nice performance bump in some workloads while the eighth iteration of those patches were posted overnight.

The Linux Foundation by way of their LF Energy initiative announced today the release of SEAPATH 1.0, a security-hardened real-time hypervisor.

Red Hat engineer Anirban Sinha presented at FOSDEM 2025 last weekend in Brussels on F-UKI, a new project being worked on at Red Hat as part of the confidential computing push for loading guest firmware within a Unified Kernel Image (UKI) for confidential VMs.

Google engineer Eric Biggers is known for some of his great crypto performance optimization patches to benefit the Linux kernel and his most recent patch series is yielding some very tantalizing results for AMD Zen 5 processors whether it be the Ryzen 9000 series, Ryzen AI 300 series, or EPYC 9005 server processors.

Back in December was word that cURL would be dropping its "Hyper" Rust HTTP back-end due to little demand and lack of developer interest for that experimental code. The cURL 8.12 release is out today with Hyper stripped out.

The GNOME Mutter 48 compositor beta is now available for testing as part of this week's GNOME 48 beta milestone.

While having missed the mark last week for making it into this quarter's Mesa 25.0 release, merged for Q2's Mesa 25.1 release by Microsoft engineers are some enhancements to the Direct3D 12 video encode capabilities.

As somewhat of an annual tradition for the FOSDEM conference, Daniel Kiper of Oracle presented a status update on the GRUB bootloader. As one of the GRUB maintainers he offers great insight to activity around this most common Linux bootloader.

With Linux 6.14-rc1 released I have begun trying out the new development kernel on a few systems locally. At least for high core count hardware tested thus far, Linux 6.14 at the moment during this early testing phase is sporting some performance regressions within some multi-threaded workloads.

With Firefox 135 released, Firefox 136 is now in beta. Most notable with this next iteration of the Mozilla Firefox web browser is finally enabling hardware video acceleration by default for AMD GPUs on Linux.

Landing this week in the FFmpeg open-source library that is widely-used by multimedia applications was NVIDIA video acceleration improvements for Blackwell GPUs. Over on the AMD side, there are also some interesting changes to have been merged this week into upstream FFmpeg.

While the Linux kernel itself may not be often viewed as a bottleneck to typical high performance computing (HPC) workloads, optimizing the Linux kernel with Profile Guided Optimizations (PGO) can prove worthwhile for those seeking maximum performance potential. A presentation this past weekend at FOSDEM 2025 is highlighting around a 3% performance gain for HPC software compiled with PGO enabled.