Alpine Linux 3.23 is out today as the newest feature release for this lightweight Linux distribution built around musl libc and BusyBox that has become quite popular for containers and embedded uses.

Last week I provided a look at how Intel's GPU compute performance on Battlemage evolved in 2025. In today's article is a similar Intel Arc A-Series "Alchemist" and B-Series "Battlemage" look at how the OpenGL and Vulkan graphics performance has evolved over the past year. Simply put, the open-source Intel Linux graphics driver stack has evolved immensely this year... Not just for Vulkan but even the OpenGL support continues moving in the right direction too.

A proposal was raised a month ago for Fedora Linux 44 to replace the kernel's frame-buffer console "FBCON" with KMSCON in user-space. The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has now granted approval for making this change in Fedora 44 as part of a larger foal to eventually deprecate FBCON/FBDEV emulation in the kernel.

Not exactly a big surprise but the recently released Linux 6.18 kernel is now officially promoted to being this year's Long Term Support "LTS" kernel.

The pull requests landing the power management subsystem updates for Linux 6.19 along with the ACPI and thermal control code have landed. There is new hardware support, Microsoft ACPI Fan Extensions support, and other new features for Linux power management in this new kernel.

The first alpha release of the LibreOffice 26.2 open-source and cross platform office suite is now available for testing ahead of its official release in February.

Sound Open Firmware is one of the projects started originally by Intel but has grown into a multi-vendor initiative for open-source audio digital signal processing (DSP) firmware and development tooling for a variety of platforms under the Linux Foundation umbrella.

Merged yesterday to the Linux 6.19 Git codebase was the "core/uaccess" pull that introduces new scoped user-mode access with auto-cleanup functionality. This can reduce the number of speculation barriers encountered when needing to access user-mode memory and thereby avoiding some of the performance penalties incurred by speculation barriers.

Google engineer Eric Biggers who is known for his many Linux crypto subsystem performance optimizations has seen his latest pull requests land in Linux 6.19. Notable among them are some AES-GCM optimizations benefiting AMD Zen 3 processors and separately AVX-512 processors also benefit too from this latest round of optimization work.

Red Hat's Peter Hutterer announced the release today of xkbcomp 1.5, the CLI utility used for compiling X Keyboard Extension (XBD) keyboard descriptions for the X.Org Server. Driving this new xkbcomp release are fixes for four security issues.

In addition to new AMD CPU features being merged today for Linux 6.19, there are also some new Intel CPU features that hit Linux Git today that are worth highlighting.

Linus Torvalds just merged another set of pull requests to Git for the in-development Linux 6.19 kernel. With the latest round of merges, there are two separate AMD changes worth highlighting.

Open-source firmware consulting firm 3mdeb published a blog post today outlining their work on bringing their Coreboot-downstream Dasharo to the ASRock Rack SPC741D8/2L2T, a recent server motherboard for supporting Intel Xeon Sapphire Rapids and Emerald Rapids processors.

An important set of patches were just merged a few minutes ago to Linux Git for the ongoing Linux 6.19 kernel with some important performance implications.

Merged as part of the objtool changes for the Linux 6.19 kernel is introducing the "klp-build" script as a new solution to generate livepatch modules using a source .patch file as the input. This klp-build effort was spearheaded by Josh Poimboeuf with ideas learned from the out-of-tree Kpatch project over the past decade.

TornadoVM 2.0 is out today as the newest feature release for this OpenJDK and GraalVM plug-in that allows Java programs to run on heterogeneous hardware. TornadoVM targets continue to be OpenCL, NVIDIA PTX, and SPIR-V compatible devices for a range of accelerator support for use from conventional Java code.

Linux has maintained a default 4MB minimum writeback chunk size but with the in-development Linux 6.19 kernel it will allow file-systems to override that minimum value. This in turn can help avoid fragmentation and yield a better experience for zoned rotation media and other uses.

NVIDIA today released the 590.44.01 Linux driver build as the first beta of their R590 series driver branch for Linux customers.

Evidently Canonical has been pretty pleased with the uptake of Ubuntu on Microsoft's Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2) within enterprise/corporate environments as they are now offering Ubuntu Pro for WSL.

Via the openSUSE Innovator Initiative, packaging of the Intel Neural Processing Unit (NPU) driver for the openSUSE ecosystem has begun. This is helping to jump-start the Intel NPU support within the openSUSE space although user-space applications ready to leverage the Intel NPU still remains very limited.