While we await the formal IBM Power11 launch in 2025, IBM engineers are already working on compiler support for "future" post-Power11 processors with the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC).

While the latest Intel Core Ultra processors have done away with Hyper Threading (HT), Intel Xeon CPUs continue supporting HT/SMT, including with their latest Xeon 6300 series budget server processors. As the new AMD EPYC 4005 "Grado" processors also support Simultaneous Multi-Threading (SMT) and can be found at the same core/thread count count as the flagship Xeon 6369P processor, it makes for an interesting look at comparing the SMT/HT performance impact and power efficiency. Here are some benchmarks showing the Xeon 6300 against the AMD EPYC 4005 in SMT performance.

Mozilla Firefox 140 release binaries are available today as what's going to be the web browser project's next Extended Support Release (ESR) version.

Being worked on for a while has been a "Fair" DRM scheduler inspired by Linux's CFS scheduler and aiming for better performance and scheduling behavior between multiple GPU interactive clients sharing GPU resources.

GIMP 3.1.2 was just released as the first development version on the road toward GIMP 3.2 stable.

Support for UEFI Secure Boot Advanced Targeting "SBAT" looks like it could be buttoned up in the mainline kernel for the upcoming Linux 6.17 cycle.

The Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" is now the first Mesa in-tree driver supporting 8-bit floating point use within shaders via the new VK_EXT_shader_float8 extension.

Over the past three days the new AMD "GFX1250" GPU target has started being built out within the upstream LLVM compiler codebase for the AMDGPU LLVM shader compiler back-end.

For those preferring an X11-based desktop experience on Linux, IceWM 3.8 released on Sunday as the newest version of this lightweight X11 window manager focused on speed and simplicity.

Linus Torvalds just announced the release of Linux 6.16-rc3 in marching toward the Linux 6.16 kernel release due out around late July.

Merged minutes ago ahead of the Linux 6.16-rc3 release due out shortly was this week's batch of Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) updates. Beyond the usual KVM fixes merged for the week, a bit of feature code was pulled in by Linus Torvalds for this post-merge-window phase.

While not talked about as much as the Intel CPU security mitigations, Intel graphics security mitigations have added up over time that if disabling Intel graphics security mitigations for their GPU compute stack for OpenCL and Level Zero can yield a 20% performance boost. Ubuntu maker Canonical in cooperation with Intel is preparing to disable these security mitigations in the Ubuntu packages in order to recoup this lost performance.

The 3mdeb firmware consulting firm recently hosted another one of their virtual events about open-source firmware and beer. There they talked about AMD's ongoing work around OpenSIL for open-source CPU silicon initialization. In addition, they shared work on an experimental port of OpenSIL back to Zen 1 processors.

Prominent KDE developer Nate Graham put out a blog post today reaffirming the KDE Plasma's intent that Wayland is their main focus and X11 support continues to be maintained but eventually it will go away. Nate Graham also noted around 73% of KDE Plasma 6 users are already using the Wayland session.

Ahead of the all-important Ubuntu 26.04 LTS cycle, Canonical is looking to raise the required RISC-V ISA baseline for its Ubuntu 25.10 release due out later this year.

This Week in GNOME is out with its latest issue that outlines some UI progress made as well as addressing an aging GNOME bug that could result in not all files/directories being properly removed when emptying the Trash from the GNOME desktop.

XLibre 25.0 was just released as the first tagged release of this recent X.Org Server fork.

KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his weekly blog post summarizing all of the interesting KDE Plasma developments for the past week. Notable this week was the debut of Plasma 6.4 stable and from early user feedback appears to be in good shape.

A number of AMD firmware/microcode updates were upstreamed today to the linux-firmware.git repository, including introducing the AMD Instinct MI350 series files that are necessary for the open-source Linux compute driver stack to function for those newly-announced Instinct accelerators.

Going back to January of 2023 there were the initial Intel patches for the Linux kernel introducing Linear Address Space Separation (LASS). Two and a half years later, these Intel LASS patches remain in-development with today the sixth iteration of these patches having been posted.