Back in May a big patch series was published for reworking the Linux kernel to make the SMP support unconditional. Right now those that happen to be running Linux in a uniprocessor (1 CPU core) configuration can build with "CONFIG_SMP" disabled but the proposed patches would make symmetric multi-processing support always present. Those patches took a step forward this week and could be merged for the Linux 6.17 cycle later in the summer.

The X.Org Server has been seeing a lot of commits this week... to revert bad code.

Prominent AMD Mesa developer Marek Olšák this week landed a number of fixes for the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver code in working to enable medium precision "mediump" support for this open-source graphics driver.

While the Linux 6.16 merge window just passed one week ago, already there are new feature changes beginning to queue for the Linux 6.17 kernel later in the summer.

Linux 6.15 mistakenly shipped with a nasty power regression for some systems, such as those relying on the "nosmt" option to disable Simultaneous Multi-Threading / Hyper Threading. That idle power regression was fixed for Linux 6.15.2 and Linux 6.16 Git by reverting the troubled patch that introduced the regression. Now merged ahead of Linux 6.16-rc2 is a proper fix for that problematic patch so it could be re-merged without the power fallout.

Sasha Levin just sent out an initial "request for comments" patch series for the Linux kernel in aiming to establish a Kernel API Specification Framework.

Introduced with this week's Wayland Protocols 1.45 release is adding the Pointer Warp protocol to staging. The SDL hardware/software abstraction library commonly used by cross-platform games was quick to merge support for using the native Pointer Warp protocol on Wayland.

This Week in GNOME is out with its latest issue and there being a number of recent controversial changes to the desktop platform.

The Haiku open-source operating system project inspired by BeOS published their latest monthly report to outline progress made over the past month.

While KDE Plasma 6.4 is set for release next week, there are already exciting feature improvements brewing for Plasma 6.5.

Wine 10.10 is out today as the newest bi-weekly development release of this open-source software that allows running Windows games and applications on Linux and other platforms.

Another round of Bcachefs file-system fixes were submitted and merged this week for the ongoing Linux 6.16 cycle, including the ability to auto-fix more file-system check "fsck" errors.

In addition to Intel recently upstreaming Linux support for new QAT "Gen 6" hardware as their next-generation QuickAssist Technology IP, Intel today began posting Linux kernel driver patches for a new version of their Data Streaming Accelerator (DSA). It looks like upcoming Xeon processors will be rolling out a lot of new accelerator IP.

LibreOffice 25.8 beta is now available for this popular open-source office suite. LibreOffice 25.8 has been baking many improvements for this popular Microsoft Office alternative and leading office suite option for the Linux desktop.

Just one week past the notable Vulkan 1.4.317 release, Vulkan 1.4.318 is out with some documentation clarifications plus two new extensions.

Back in April at Google Cloud Next was the introduction of the new C4D family of VMs powered by AMD EPYC 9005 "Turin" processors. Back on launch day I looked at the C3D vs. C4D performance at some of the smaller, more common VM sizes. In today's article is a look at the top-end performance of the C4D family with 384 vCPUs. For those wondering about the compute potential of the c4d-standard-384, here are some benchmarks of this 192-core / 384-thread EPYC Turin configuration compared to the prior C3D AMD EPYC Genoa based instance that topped out at 360 vCPUs.

Wayland Protocols 1.45 was released today with new staging and experimental protocols for Wayland compositors to begin rolling out.

Introduced last week with Vulkan 1.4.317 was Vulkan Video support for VP9 video decoding. Following that the open-source Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver landed its VK_KHR_video_decode_vp9 support and now similarly the open-source Intel Vulkan driver has too.

Two years ago DreamWorks Animation open-sourced their MoonRay renderer that is an award-winning, state-of-the-art production MCRT renderer used for a number of feature films. Since then they have continued advancing this open-source code as OpenMoonRay and adding more features. The newest feature release of OpenMoonRay is now available with yet more capabilities for this impressive renderer.

Sound Open Firmware 2.13 debuted today as the newest feature update to this open-source audio DSP stack started by Intel. With Sound Open Firmware 2.13 comes support for new Intel platforms and other enhancements.