AMD today released AMDVLK 2024.Q3.3 as their latest open-source Vulkan API driver for Linux systems prior to ending the quarter.

As expected the Linux 6.12-rc1 kernel is out today in marking the end of the very exciting two-week Linux 6.12 merge window that saw many high profile features land.

The Linux 6.12 merge window is wrapping up today with the release of Linux 6.12-rc1 in the coming hours. This is going to be a heck of an exciting kernel. There's real-time PREEMPT_RT finally in mainline, the much anticipated sched_ext code also was merged, QR codes for DRM panic messages, initial out-of-the-box support for Intel Xe2 graphics with Lunar Lake and Battlemage, initial Raspberry Pi 5 support, and a ton of other hardware support additions and new innovative kernel software features.

The Arch Linux based CachyOS operating system that is known for pursuing aggressive performance while still delivering a nice Linux desktop experience is out with its September 2024 release.

The x86 platform driver changes that were merged last week for the Linux 6.12 kernel continue to be quite lively with changes for enhancing Linux laptop support along with other Intel platform improvements.

The hardware monitoring "HWMON" subsystem updates for Linux 6.12 added some new drivers as well as adding new device support to some of the existing drivers.

Submitted today as the "x86 fixes" for the Linux kernel ahead of the Linux 6.12-rc1 release this evening is adding two new Intel CPU model numbers.

Taking place this week in Berlin was systemd's annual "All Systems Go" developer conference. Among the interesting talks was Lennart Poettering talking about the ongoing challenges of D-Bus for inter-process communication (IPC) with systemd and how they are looking at Varlink for IPC needs moving forward.

The KVM x86/x86_64 changes were merged today as we are nearly done with the Linux 6.12 merge window.

Following AMD and FreeBSD Foundation collaborations and the Sovereign Tech Fund making a big investment into FreeBSD, the FreeBSD Foundation and Quantum Leap Research have announced a $750,000 USD commitment to improve laptop support on this BSD operating system with backing by Dell, AMD, and Framework Computer.

File-systems in user-space continue to become more robust with the latest FUSE updates merged for Linux 6.12.

It's been a busy week for Valve Linux graphics software engineer Mike Blumenkrantz. Besides hacking on Mesa's Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver implementation, this week his latest target was working to help accelerate the pace of Wayland protocol development. He's been working through a few proposals like addressing NACK usage for how Wayland protocols can be rejected and in ending out the week he has drafted some additional workflow improvements.

The LoongArch architecture support for these Chinese processors continue seeing better support with the upstream Linux kernel.

Ahead of the Linux 6.12 merge window wrapping up this weekend with the Linux 6.12-rc1 release, merged on Friday were all of the Compute Express Link (CXL) updates for the new kernel.

KDE developers remain very busy landing bug and crash fixes ahead of the upcoming Plasma 6.2 desktop release.

Valve's SteamOS is built atop Arch Linux and now the company is further helping the upstream Linux distribution by collaborating with resources to help with build service infrastructure and a secure signing enclave.

It's been just one week since the release of ROCm 6.2.1 while today ROCm 6.2.2 was released.

The input subsystem updates merged this week bring a number of improvements to existing drivers while adding one new input driver.

AMD today announced "AMD-135M" as their first small language model they are publicly releasing. AMD-135M is open-source with the training code, dataset, and weights all being open-source to help in the development of other SLMs and LLMs.

With the Linux 6.12 merge window wrapping up this weekend and the bulk of the new feature merges now in the tree, I've begun running some Linux 6.12 benchmarks. Here is an initial look at Linux 6.10 vs. 6.11 vs. 6.12 Git on an AMD Ryzen 9 9950X desktop.