Following the FUSE improvements in Linux 7.3 for file-systems in user-space, it looks like the upcoming Linux 7.4 kernel will be ready to enable the large folios feature.

The Igalia consulting firm working with Valve is aiming to improve the Firefox web browsing experience when running on the Steam Deck handheld Linux-powered device.

AMD engineers continue to prepare for upcoming Zen 6 powered Ryzen client processors on Linux.

Shiva is entering development for Mesa Vulkan drivers as a new framework akin to Gallium3D but for Vulkan drivers rather than OpenGL. It's going to be some time before the work will come to fruition but should hopefully lead to more code sharing and a better Mesa Vulkan driver development experience in the future.

As an initiative from NVIDIA for improving the Linux ecosystem outside the world of AI, they have been developing Display-Config-Server as a new solution to help enhance the Linux capabilities for complex display walls.

SIMDjson is the open-source, high performance JSON parser that surprisingly began making use of AVX-512 to deliver big performance gains years ago. SIMDjson has continued further refining itself to deliver even greater speeds and out today is SIMDjson 5.0.

Qualcomm hiring one of Red Hat's top x86_64 Linux laptop experts last year, Hans de Goede, is indeed having a positive benefit on enhancing the Fedora Linux support for Qualcomm Snapdragon X powered hardware.

As part of the Mozilla Firefox bi-weekly release regiment, the Firefox 157 binaries are now available for this open-source web browser.

Flatpak 1.18.4 is out today with a number of high profile security fixes for this app sandboxing and distribution tech.

Recently I was provided remote access to a NVIDIA Vera server with the dual socket Vera CPU Superchip providing 176 Olympus cores plus with NVIDIA's Spatial Multithreading "SMT" implementation providing 352 total threads. With this benchmarking was free rein for testing, including CPU power and frequency monitoring. Over the next few weeks will be a number of articles looking at different areas of NVIDIA Vera performance. One of the areas I was most eager to test was looking at Vera's Spatial Multithreading. Here is a first look at the impact of NVIDIA Vera SMT.

Those using AMD integrated graphics on Linux such as the beefy Ryzen AI Max+ Strix Halo and Gorgon Halo hardware will be able to enjoy even better performance with the upcoming Linux 7.4 kernel.

The release candidate phase has begun for the upcoming openSUSE Leap 16.1 in-step with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 16.1. Most notable with the openSUSE Leap 16.1 is the introduction of its new immutable mode.

Now queued up for introduction in the Linux 7.4 merge window later in October is the steal governor driver for preferred CPUs and steal-driven vCPU backoff for today's virtualized world.

Following the earlier Shotcut 26.9 beta at the beginning of September, the open-source developers behind the open-source non-linear video editor are out with the Shotcut 26.9 stable release.

In working toward the stable Linux 7.3 kernel release hopefully on 18 October, out today is Linux 7.3-rc5 as the newest weekly test candidate.

Budgie 10.10.3 is out today as the newest point release to this open-source desktop.

In addition to the Linux kernel's Zstd compression code being improved, the LZ4 compression code within the kernel tree is also seeing a separate set of enhancements.

Adding to the features expected to land for Linux 7.4 is a significant performance optimization for the memory hotplugging speed for adding additional RAM. In particular, the memory hotplugging being most applicable for cases like expanding the amount of memory for VMs or in today's CXL world for adding additional system memory.

For those considering Lenovo's recently launched and beautifully crafted ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 14 laptop powered by Intel Core Ultra Series 3 "Panther Lake", one of the lingering missing features under Linux will hopefully soon be addressed: its second web camera.

Earlier this year developers at LINBIT began working toward a goal of upstreaming ~15 years worth of their Distributed Replicated Block Device changes into the mainline Linux kernel. That major update has yet to land but sent out this week was a new patch series in preparing the trek toward introducing DRBD 9 support in the mainline kernel.