Linux 6.12 yesterday merged the real-time "PREEMPT_RT" patches that had been in development for two decades. Today another big hitting feature was merged for Linux 6.12 that's been in development nearly as long.

Oracle has shifted their Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel to a Linux 6.10 base with UEK-next.

KDE developers have been busy preparing for Plasma 6.2 with lots of bug fixing and polishing while also beginning to land some features for Plasma 6.3.

The SDL abstraction library commonly used by cross-platform games now prefers using Vulkan on Windows as its ideal graphics API. Direct3D 12 has been demoted lower in priority compared to Vulkan for this Simple DirectMedia Layer.

Following the AMD ROCm 6.2 release from early August, ROCm 6.2.1 was released on Friday evening as the first point release to that series for this AMD GPU compute stack for Linux systems.

Wine 9.18 is out today as the newest bi-weekly development release for this open-source software that enables running Windows games and applications under Linux and other platforms.

The beta release of Ubuntu 24.10 "Oracular Oriole" was released in time for some weekend testing.

For months there has been talk and speculations around Raspberry Pi working to release a Compute Module 5 (CM5) in putting the power of last year's Raspberry Pi 5 into the small form factor for various embedded/industrial applications. It's pretty much a given that the Compute Module 5 will come, it's just a matter of when. With recent activity by Canonical engineers working on Ubuntu Linux, it's looking like the CM5 could be here soon.

When it comes to the question of the fastest x86_64 Linux distribution the answer is very easy with Intel's Clear Linux. But what about in the AArch64 world? When having the AmpereOne server in the lab curiosity got the best of me and I ran benchmarks across seven different Linux distributions on this Supermicro ARM server for seeing what platform had the fastest out-of-the-box Linux performance. The Linux distributions tested on this AmpereOne A192-32X server included Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, Ubuntu 24.10 daily, Fedora Server 40, AlmaLinux 9.4, openSUSE Tumbleweed, Debian Testing, and CentOS Stream 10.

The HID subsystem updates have been merged for the in-development Linux 6.12 kernel. Notable this time around are some new feature additions for the popular Wacom drawing tablet support.

Most Linux distributions have been defaulting to MariaDB as the default MySQL server for years. Ubuntu though has been a notable outlier still relying on Oracle MySQL for the default MySQL service. A proposal raised by an Ubuntu developer hopes to change that for Ubuntu 25.04 in the new year.

After seven months under review, Google's Gfxstream code has been upstreamed into Mesa 24.3 as a Vulkan virtualization solution.

The Haiku open-source operating project known for letting the BeOS spirit live on is out with their newest monthly progress report.

The OpenZFS project has merged DirectIO (O_DIRECT) support for the ZFS file-system to bypass the ARC for reads and writes.

Following the other recent work around Linux enablement for Snapdragon X1 powered laptops, yesterday patches were posted for getting the X1 Elite powered Dell XPS 9345 working with Linux but not all functionality is currently working.

After many years in the making, it finally was merged overnight... The real-time "PREEMPT_RT" kernel support was merged a few hours ago into Linux Git for this year's Linux 6.12 kernel!

Well this is a hell of a surprise... Microsoft announced today that DirectX will be adopting SPIR-V as the interchange format of the future. Microsoft's DirectX 12 will accept shaders compiled to SPIR-V, the intermediate representation defined by The Khronos Group and commonly associated with Vulkan / OpenGL / OpenCL drivers.

After several weeks of testing Valve has released Proton 9.0-3 as the newest version of this Wine downstream that powers Steam Play for being able to enjoy Windows games on Linux.

Oliver Smith as the Interim Engineering Director for Ubuntu Desktop at Canonical is out with a new status update on Ubuntu 24.10 development and related ambitions. This also includes more details about bringing the KDE Plasma desktop to Ubuntu Core Desktop in Snap form.

There has been a lot of talk the past few days over the AMD AGESA PI 1.2.0.2 update that has begun rolling out to AMD AM5 motherboards with BIOS updates. The AGESA 1.2.0.2 is said to improve inter-core latency for Ryzen 9000 "Zen 5" processors when cores from different CCDs are cross-communicating. Some -- at least under Windows -- have reported performance improvements and thus several Phoronix readers have requested I run some of my tests with AGESA 1.2.0.2. Here are said comparison benchmarks using an AMD Ryzen 9 9950X on Ubuntu Linux.