At the end of April was the open-source surprise of NVIDIA posting Nouveau Linux driver patches for their Hopper and Blackwell GPUs. This comes to complement their official (open-source but out of tree) kernel driver support for these newer NVIDIA GPUs and in the absence of the modern Rust-based NOVA Linux kernel driver not being in working shape yet on the mainline kernel. An updated version of these Nouveau driver patches for NVIDIA Hopper and Blackwell GPUs were posted overnight.

Queued within the development tree for the RISC-V processor code for the Linux kernel is supporting several new vendor-specific ISA extensions for SiFive RISC-V CPU cores.

While it took two and a half years for DragonFlyBSD 6.4.1 to materialize from DragonFlyBSD 6.4, only one week passed since that recent v6.4.1 release to now see v6.4.2.

Shotcut 25.05 was released on Sunday as the newest feature release for this non-linear, open-source video editing software.

Linus Torvalds has released Linux 6.15-rc6 today with hopes of releasing Linux 6.15 stable in two weeks.

At the end of April I reported on a significant performance regression affecting newer AMD CPUs and was bisected to a change in the AMD SRSO mitigation handling for Zen 4/5 processors with the Linux 6.15 kernel. The fix for that significant performance regression was merged today ahead of the imminent Linux 6.15-rc6 release.

Merged today to Linux Git ahead of the Linux 6.15-rc6 release is support for several more gaming controllers.

A number of Phoronix readers have been inquiring in recent weeks around seeing updated Linux graphics/gaming benchmarks for the Intel Arc B-Series "Battlemage" graphics cards. So for your viewing pleasure today is a look at the Arc Graphics B580 and B570 graphics cards on Ubuntu 25.04 for showing how the graphics performance have improved with the open-source Intel Linux graphics driver stack since launch.

This week Google announced all of the accepted projects for this year's Google Summer of Code (GSoC). There are 1,272 accepted students/projects this year for student developers working on various interesting open-source efforts over the summer.

Queued up for removal in the upcoming Linux 6.16 kernel cycle is dropping "echo", a software-based echo cancellation code within the kernel intended for telecommunications use. But it's old, unmaintained, and likely not actively used.

Intel software engineers released oneDNN 3.8 to end out the week with various new performance optimizations and more.

With the copy-on-write Bcachefs file-system considering its on-disk format now "soft frozen" and nearing the point of potentially removing the "EXPERIMENTAL" flag on it, a number of Phoronix readers have been requesting some fresh benchmarks of this open-source file-system. For your viewing pleasure today are some fresh benchmarks of Bcachefs and other file-systems atop the Linux 6.15 kernel being released as stable later this month. On the benchmarking block today are Bcachefs, Btrfs, EXT4, F2FS, and XFS in-tree file-systems.

KDE Plasma 6.4 embarked on its soft feature freeze this week. Thus KDE Plasma developers are now predominantly working on bug fixing and UI polishing for this next open-source desktop release.

Merged yesterday to Linux 6.15 Git and marked for back-porting to stable kernel series in the coming days is an x86 memory management fix to eliminate a window whereby TLB flushes could be inadvertently skipped.

The second beta release of FreeBSD 14.3 is now available for testing as an incremental update to this BSD operating system and ahead of the feature-rich FreeBSD 15.0 due out later in 2025.

The Servo browser engine project has published a status update outlining some of the enhancements made over the past two months for this Rust-based web layout engine. This includes hitting a notable milestone that some websites like Gmail and Google Chat can now render correctly.

Back in January you may recall the news of GNOME's Showtime app looking to replace Totem as the default video player. That didn't happen in time for GNOME 48 back in March but this week all the formalities were met that Showtime has been cleared to replace the outdated Totem with GNOME 49.

With modern Linux distributions beginning to see good support for HDR displays, if you have been looking to upgrade to a high dynamic range OLED monitor, one of the newest options that recently launched by Samsung is the Odyssey OLED G8 G81SF. I've been testing out the Samsung G81SF the past few weeks and it's been working out well paired with the likes of Ubuntu 25.04 and Fedora 42 to deliver a beautiful desktop experience and a great experience for Linux gamers with supporting a 240Hz refresh rate and AMD FreeSync Premium Pro.

Introduced at the end of March was Vulkan 1.4.311 with VK_KHR_shader_bfloat16 for allowing BFloat16 "BF16" operations within SPIR-V shaders with SPV_KHR_bfloat16. This BFloat16 support can be beneficial for Vulkan machine learning / AI workloads and other use cases moving forward. Now the Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" is the newest wiring up support for VK_KHR_shader_bfloat16.

The past year we've been looking forward to a RISC-V motherboard option coming to the Framework Laptop 13 via Framework's partnership with DeepComputing. There was early access in late 2024 while this week DeepComputing has formally announced the DC-ROMA RISC-V AI PC Mainboard II now available at $349 USD.