Intel on Wednesday released version 1.5 of their Linux NPU driver, their user-space driver component for Linux systems in enabling the neural processing unit found with Core Ultra "Meteor Lake" processors and newer. This goes along with their upstream IVPU kernel accelerator driver for allowing a full open-source solution for AI workloads with the likes of OpenVINO.

While the Raspberry Pi 5 debuted last September, the mainline Linux kernel support for this popular single board computer continues to lag behind the state of Raspberry Pi's downstream kernel. SUSE has been working to upstream various Raspberry Pi 5 driver support while now Raspberry Pi engineers have also begun the trek toward upstreaming their kernel graphics driver support.

In addition to Mutter seeing Wayland DRM lease protocol support merged, another long-in-development patch series hit GNOME Shell this morning: accent color support!

Merged today into GNOME's Mutter compositor is support for the Wayland DRM lease protocol to allow for nice virtual reality (VR) headset support for GNOME on Wayland.

It was just a few months back that Intel introduced a Gaudi "2C" variant of Gaudi2 to their open-source Linux driver. This variant might be for some export model or otherwise a hyperscaler/customer-specific revision or something along those lines. Now appearing within new Habana Labs driver patches for the upcoming Linux 6.11 kernel are patches for a new Gaudi 2D variant.

Theseus Ship is the X11/Wayland compositor previously known as KWinFT developed by Roman Gilg as a fork of KDE Plasma's KWin. Pulling in patches from KWin in this week's KDE Plasma 6.1 release, Theseus Ship 6.1 is now available.

For those continuing to rely on the GCC 12 series open-source compiler that was introduced as stable in 2022, GCC 12.4 is out today as the newest bug fix release.

Another weeks worth of random DRM-Misc-Next changes have been queued ahead of next month's Linux 6.11 merge window.

Zhaoxin Shijidadao CPU support was upstreamed today into the GCC 15 compiler codebase. Zhaoxin as a reminder is the joint venture between VIA and the Shanghai Municipal Government for creating x86/x86_64-compatible processors for the Chinese market.

As written about this morning, AMD announced ROCm 6.1.3 with multi-GPU support, beta support for Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2), Radeon PRO W7900 Dual Slot compatibility, and TensorFlow framework qualification support. The upstream ROCm code on GitHub as of writing continues pointing only to the prior ROCm 6.1.2 software but there is now a Radeon Software for Linux packaged driver offering up ROCm 6.1.3.

Building off the Xe2 foundation in place for the Lunar Lake integrated graphics, more recently Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver engineers have begun pushing out code focused on enabling the Xe2-based Battlemage discrete GPUs as the successor to the DG2/Alchemist hardware. That enablement work remains ongoing and with the upcoming Linux 6.11 kernel cycle the important fundamental milestone is being crossed of actually being able to drive a connected display/monitor by a Battlemage GPU.

Mike Blumenkrantz of Valve's open-source Linux GPU driver team and known for his work on the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver has issued a proposal for creating a new legacy branch for older/less-maintained Gallium3D drivers.

While it looked like all of the Intel Lunar Lake support was wrapped up with the first of these next-gen Core Ultra laptops set to debut next quarter and the Panther Lake bring-up for Linux has begun, it looks like there may be some stragglers still around Lunar Lake. Sent out today was the patch series enabling DLVR (Digital Linear Voltage Regulator) support for these upcoming mobile SoCs.

The first release candidate of Zlib-ng 2.2 for this drop-in replacement to the Zlib data compression library is now available for testing. Zlib-ng continues to ship new performance optimizations and other tuning for providing faster Zlib performance on modern processors.

AMD today announced the ROCm 6.1.3 open-source GPU compute stack. While a point release, this new ROCm revision comes with several notable refinements.

Sent out last month were the very preliminary Rust-written Nova GPU kernel driver patches for this in-development Direct Rendering Manager driver for open-source NVIDIA GPU support for RTX 20 / Turing GPUs and newer by leveraging the NVIDIA GPU System Processor (GSP). Sent out this week is the second iteration of the stubbed Nova kernel driver and the associated Rust language DRM subsystem abstractions.

For those running the command "systemd-tmpfiles --purge" and think that this command just deletes your temporary files, think again and watch out. In reality it will delete all files and directories created by a tmpfiles.d entry... Including the /home that is created by systemd-tmpfiles' home.conf. With users being bitten in recent days by this behavior when they were just expecting tmp files to be removed, systemd 256.1 is now available and does have a change to avoid inadvertently deleting your all-important home directory.

The Linux kernel "FORCE_NR_CPUS" Kconfig option has been around a few years to force the number of CPU cores the kernel expects in order to allow for better compiler optimizations. When building a kernel targeted for a specific device/platform with a given number of CPU cores, the compiler can optimize CPU mask routines and shrink the size of the resulting kernel image rather than having to accommodate up to a dynamic upper-limit for the number of CPU cores to be found at boot time. Linus Torvalds himself has turned to demoting this CONFIG_FORCE_NR_CPUS option further to avoid confusion.

While Intel Panther Lake processors aren't expected until at least mid-2025, with Intel open-source Linux engineers already having much of the Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake support in order (the main Lunar Lake area still being ironed out is the Xe2 graphics), work is slowly beginning on upstreaming Panther Lake support.

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee has approved of Fedora 41 switching from power-profiles-daemon to "Tuned" as the default power profile management daemon on Fedora Workstation as well as the KDE Plasma and Budgie desktop spins.