As expected after noting this morning that ROCm 7.1 release preparations were underway, ROCm 7.1 is now officially released as the newest step-forward for this open-source GPU compute stack for Radeon and Instinct hardware.

This week marks fifteen months since AMD Strix Point laptops began shipping. Back at the end of July 2024 the Linux performance and support was already in good shape while since then the Linux performance has only evolved even more to make these AMD Zen 5 laptops perform even better. Here is a fresh look at how the performance has evolved since launch day and the added gains when moving to the recently released Ubuntu 25.10 and some performance advantages too if moving to the in-development Linux 6.18 kernel.

The Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) that goes hand-in-hand with the Fwupd open-source firmware updating utility celebrated the milestone on Wednesday of crossing 135 million firmware updates.

AMD Linux engineers continue to be quite busy working on enabling next-generation Zen 6 processors that will begin shipping next year. The newest patch working its way to the Linux kernel is expanding the range of Zen 6 CPU models detected by the kernel.

Qt Creator 18 is now available as the latest version of this Qt/C++-focused integrated development environment.

Canonical today announced an exciting step forward for Ubuntu Linux: the notion of architecture variants and now initially providing an Ubuntu 25.10 archive with x86_64-v3 built packages for enjoying better performance on modern Intel and AMD hardware.

AMD continues with their aggressive efforts to enhance their GPU software compute ecosystem with ROCm. The fire under them has been lit and they have been taking their software efforts more expeditiously in recent times to better compete with NVIDIA's CUDA ecosystem and ensuring their Instinct hardware is properly primed to compete. The release dance has begun for ROCm 7.1.

Following last week's initial batch of AMDGPU kernel graphics driver changes intended for Linux 6.19, another round of new AMDGPU / Radeon / AMDKFD material was sent out today to DRM-Next. Notable with this pull is the Display Core "DC" work for analog video connectors as the initiative from one of Valve's contractors for improving the Radeon GCN 1.0 era GPU support with the AMDGPU driver.

Eric Engestrom just released Mesa 25.2.6 as the newest bi-weekly stable update to this collection of open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers widely used on Linux systems for 3D support.

Following last month's Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS beta and COSMIC desktop beta, System76 has now shared their stable release plans for this long-awaited LInux distribution release with their Rust-written custom desktop.

Prominent AMD Radeon Gallium3D driver developer Marek Olšák just changed the RadeonSI driver's default from the AMDGPU LLVM shader compiler back-end over to the ACO back-end initially developed by Valve. This should lead to better performance and quicker shader compilation and in turn faster game loads.

On Monday the AMD Radeon AI PRO R9700 officially arrived at Internet retailers and is successfully selling at the $1299 price point. Some models have since sold out but as of writing two days later some Radeon AI PRO R9700 graphics cards remain available at that competitive price point. On Monday I provided some initial benchmarks of the AMD Radeon AI PRO R9700 for vLLM AI inferencing with more AI benchmarks on the way... While the craze is all about AI in 2025, the Radeon AI PRO R9700 does work for other non-AI workloads too and in this article is a look at its competitive OpenCL performance with great value compared to the NVIDIA RTX competition.

In addition to talking up the openSFI firmware collaboration between AMD and Intel at the OCP Global Summit 2025, AMD engineer Raj Kapoor provided a status update on the company's much anticipated openSIL effort for working to ultimately replace AGESA with a new open-source CPU silicon initialization codebase.

Intel Compute Runtime 25.40.35563.4 is out today as the newest update to their open-source GPU compute stack for Level Zero and OpenCL on Intel integrated/discrete graphics hardware.

Yesterday the GitHub-hosted AMD XDNA driver code saw a new tagged release as version 202610.2.21.17. That itself wasn't too interesting but while diving into there is new yet-to-be-merged code for a new "NPU3A" revision to their NPU3 IP in Ryzen AI.

An engineer on Apple's static security tools team announced publicly that they have prototyped a tool to apply security hardening across entire C++ codebases. Ultimately their plan is to open-source and upstream this static analysis based tool into LLVM.

AMD this week uploaded new Family 19h CPU microcode for Zen 3 and Zen 4 processors to the linux-firmware.git repoository that in turn is pulled by the Linux distributions for offering the latest firmware/microcode to users.

SUSE today formally announced SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 16. Given we are in the year 2025, SUSE is heavy on hyping up AI capabilities with SLES 16.

The upcoming Linux 6.19 kernel cycle is now expected to introduce the new "ethosu" accelerator driver for supporting the Arm Ethos U65/U85 neural processing unit IP.

Following Canonical announcing plans to better support NVIDIA CUDA on Ubuntu Linux and make it easier to install as well as SUSE better supporting CUDA along similar lines, Red Hat today affirmed their plans to do the same. Red Hat will be making it easier to use the NVIDIA CUDA stack across RHEL, Red Hat AI, and OpenShift products.