AMD engineers posted a set of patches today for enabling VCN IP DUMP support with their open-source AMDGPU kernel driver. This allows for dumping the IP state of all Video Core Next (VCN) hardware from VCN 1.0 through VCN 5.0.

Ilpo Järvinen of Intel sent in a new round of x86 platform driver fixes today for the ongoing Linux 6.11 kernel cycle. This pull request has a few items worth mentioning as part of this fixes queue.

The Broadcom V3DV driver living within the Mesa code-base that provides Vulkan API support most notably for Raspberry Pi 4 and Raspberry Pi 5 single board computers now advertises Vulkan 1.3!

At the start of the year AMD posted an open-source XDNA Linux driver to GitHub for supporting the Ryzen API NPU IP found within their newest Ryzen mobile SoCs. It wasn't until last month though in mid-July that AMD began the process of submitting the driver for review so that it can work its way toward the mainline Linux kernel within the "accel" accelerator subsystem. Today brings a second revision to that driver.

Canonical engineers on Friday announced they are evaluating "-O3" compiler optimized package builds for Ubuntu Linux. As part of this evaluation of using GCC's -O3 compiler optimization level rather than -O2 when compiling Ubuntu packages, experimental Ubuntu desktop and server ISOs are available for testing with this change. Excitingly I ran some initial benchmarks over the weekend in looking at the performance difference.

A one year old merge request to support Wayland's Tearing Control protocol (tearing-control-v1) has finally been merged into the Sway compositor codebase.

Mozilla Firefox 129.0 is now available for download ahead of its formal release announcement on Tuesday. Making Firefox 129 notable is that for non-local sites it's now replacing HTTP with HTTPS by default. Firefox will now aim for HTTPS as the default protocol on non-local sites.

A three month old merge request finally landed in mainline LLVM Git this past week to deliver improvements initially for Intel Meteor Lake processors.

The Linux 6.12 kernel cycle later this year is expected to see a number of new Kconfig options introduced for greater build-time control over what CPU speculative execution security mitigations are included as part of the kernel build.

In-step with the GCC compiler beginning to see Intel AVX10.2 support patches, the LLVM Clang 20 Git code is already seeing initial AVX10.2 code merged for this open-source compiler.

The second weekly release candidate of Linux 6.11 is now available for testing.

As the next step toward releasing GNOME 47.0 in mid-September, the GNOME 47 beta release is imminent and today the GNOME Shell and Mutter compositor "47.beta" releases were made.

GNU Binutils 2.43 is out as stable this Sunday as the newest update to this important piece of the open-source GNU compiler toolchain.

Last August I wrote an article about the open-source AMD GPU kernel driver crossing 5 million lines of code -- including their overzealous header files -- and following the recent Linux 6.11 merge window curiosity got the best of me with how much larger the kernel driver is now that the initial RDNA4 support is merged... Well, it's about to cross 5.8 million lines, or about a 16% increase just over the past year.

Ahead of the Linux 6.11-rc2 kernel due for release later today there is the weekly "x86/urgent" material to merge.

Building off some "request for comments" patches sent out in April, a new set of patches appeared on Friday for the Intel P-State Linux driver for setting the asymmetric CPU capacity on hybrid systems. This is another attempt at helping to improve the Linux kernel scheduler behavior in ensuring optimal task placement between Intel Core processors having a mix of P and E cores. This patch series in particular helps when SMT / Hyper Threading support is disabled or like with upcoming Lunar Lake processors where there is no HT support.

It's been four years now that the Btrfs file-system has been the default for Fedora on the desktop. The Fedora and Btrfs love affair has been going well and is only getting better with more integration enhancements planned and a special interest group (SIG) now getting off the ground for furthering these efforts.

The Redox OS project that is a from scratch open-source operating system written in the Rust programming language now has a working web server, among other improvements achieved during the month of July.

The Linux 6.12 kernel cycle later this year has a change coming that will impact users of the "Schedutil" CPU frequency scaling governor. This change is dropping the "LATENCY_MULTIPLIER" that has been within the kernel code the past two decades to slowdown how frequent the CPU frequency evaluation occurs. In turn the revised logic can allow for that CPUFreq frequency re-evaluation to occur more often.

For those intrigued by the likes of Fedora Silverblue, Vanilla OS, and NixOS for an immutable Linux distribution but desiring something based on Arch Linux, Manjaro Linux has an immutable variant now available for testing.