FFmpeg is known for carrying a lot of hand-optimized Assembly code for speeding up this widely-used multimedia library and taking advantage of AVX-512 and other modern CPU ISA capabilities. Merged yesterday was support for making use of AES-NI for those relying on Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) within FFmpeg for encrypted video streams.

When it comes to compiler support for Apple Silicon and their hardware at large, Apple has long been focused on the LLVM/Clang toolchain given their long history with it, employing many of the developers, and Xcode being based on LLVM. The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) though may soon see upstream support for the newer Apple Cores thanks to the work of GCC developer Iain Sandoe along with the input of engineers from Arm and the Apple open-source team.

For those that prefer waiting for the first point release before upgrading to a new feature release, Linux 6.14.1 was released this morning with an initial collection of fixes atop the Linux 6.14 codebase from two weeks ago.

On Sunday prior to releasing Linux 6.15-rc1, one of the last feature pulls was merging updates for the Turbostat utility that lives within the Linux kernel source tree. The Turbostat tool provides CPU frequency and power statistics along with the ability to query temperatures and other CPU metrics on AMD and Intel processors.

The Linux 6.15 merge window has been capped off with the Linux 6.15-rc1 test kernel having been just released.

As a win for the open-source community from NVIDIA, the company recently announced they are making their PhysX and Flow GPU-accelerated source code open-source.

As we close out the Linux 6.15 merge window this weekend culminating with the Linux 6.15-rc1 release, the input driver updates were merged that include introducing the new Apple Z2 driver.

In addition to the recent optional IO_uring support for the PostgreSQL database server on Linux and async I/O batch mode, another exciting performance improvement was merged this week. Landing in the PostgreSQL database server this week was support for using AVX-512 instructions for CRC32C computations.

One of the early pull requests for Linux 6.15 that I've been meaning to highlight are the VFS iomap updates sent in by Microsoft engineer Christian Brauner. In particular, the VFS iomap pull brings preparations for large atomic writes and its upcoming usage by the XFS and EXT4 file-systems.

Merged a few days ago for the Linux 6.15 kernel were all of the performance events updates for which there are a few notable patches on the AMD and Intel side this cycle.

Among the pull requests coming in at the tail end of the Linux 6.15 merge window with 6.15-rc1 expected tonight are all of the Kbuild updates as the infrastructure for building out the kernel.

The cryptography subsystem updates for the in-development Linux 6.15 merge window are quite exciting with some optimizations for modern x86_64 Intel/AMD processors enticing us the most.

Merged on Friday for the nearly-over Linux 6.15 merge window were the RISC-V CPU architecture updates for this next kernel release.

APT 3.0 has been officially released as the first stable version following an interesting development cycle. APT 3.0 has been dedicated to the late Steve Langasek with his many Debian and Ubuntu contributions over the years.

In addition to all the KDE Plasma activity this week, GNOME developers have also been quiet busy working on a variety of improvements to the open-source desktop on their side of the pond.

FEX 2504 is out with its newest monthly feature update for this open-source emulator that allows running x86/x86_64 binaries on AArch64 Linux hosts. This alternative to QEMU and Box64 continues focusing on new performance optimizations to further enhance the appeal and speedy potential of this x86_64-on-ARM64 emulator.

LACT 0.7.3 is out this weekend as the newest feature update to this Linux GPU configuration and monitoring tool. LACT helps make up for the lack of any official GUI-based GPU configuration tool on Linux provided by AMD or Intel. It also works on NVIDIA GPUs too for providing a nice unified app for GPU configuration from all three major GPU vendors.

Intel's Open Image Denoise library that is part of their oneAPI Rendering Toolkit as a set of open-source, high performance denoising filters for ray-traced images is out with a new release. Open Image Denoise is used by applications like Blender and with this version 2.3.3 release is expanded GPU support.

It's been a busy start to April for KDE Plasma developers as they continue working toward the Plasma 6.4 feature release. There have been yet more crash fixes along with other polishing and stability enhancements to kick off the new month.

Wine 10.5 is out today as the newest bi-weekly development release of this open-source software that is the basis for Valve's Steam Play and allows Windows games and applications to run on Linux systems and elsewhere.