The Apple System Management Controller (SMC) driver was successfully merged this week into Linux 6.17 for being able to reboot modern Apple M1 / M2 Macs under Linux (the Apple M3 / M4 Linux support remains in development). It's the latest improvement for Apple Silicon on the upstream Linux kernel compared to the downstream Asahi Linux code that has been carrying the SMC driver and other in-development/tentative patches.

The AMD Radeon RX 480 / RX 580 "Polaris" graphics cards remain very popular on the Steam Survey and among enthusiasts/desktop users at large even though they are nearly a decade old. The nine year old Polaris graphics cards have aged well in the marketplace and are an affordable choice. For Linux users they continue enjoying strong open-source driver support. It turns out Linux creator Linus Torvalds himself is still relying on an AMD Radeon RX 580 with one of his main systems.

Another change proposal filed recently for the Fedora Linux 43 release is to hardlink identical files within /usr by default for RPM-provided files that are 100% identical and can be then deduplicated to help conserve disk space and increase system efficiency.

Upstreamed to the Linux kernel back in 2019 was the Lockdown security module for opt-in hardware/kernel security restrictions. It was a difficult and contentious process getting to the Linux kernel but then was left without any formal maintainer shortly after being mainlined. Now for helping to renew this Linux security module, two developers have stepped up to takeover maintainership of Lockdown.

Libinput 1.29 was just released as the newest version of this open-source input handling library used on the modern Linux desktop both under X.Org and Wayland environments.

In recent days there have been an increasing flow of leaks surrounding the Legion Go 2 as the next-generation handheld from Lenovo. The Lenovo Legion Go 2 is reported to be launching later this year with an AMD Ryzen Z2 Extreme SoC, 144Hz OLED display, and a variety of other hardware upgrades over the original Lenovo Legion Go. Linux driver activity around the Legion Go 2 has begun.

The Linux 6.17 kernel has merged a new driver for powering up the Imagination PowerVR-based graphics processor found within the Alibaba T-HEAD TH1520 RISC-V SoC. This power sequencing driver is just for being able to power-up the GPU before the actual graphics driver can takeover.

The third weekly release candidate of Mesa 25.2 is now available for testing ahead of its planned stable release in August.

Ahead of the Threadripper 9000 series hitting store shelves tomorrow, today the review embargo lifts on these new high-end desktop/workstation Zen 5 processors. I have been testing out the Threadripper 9970X and 9980X this month and have been extremely excited about the generational uplift and all-around performance of these new AMD Ryzen Threadripper 9970X/9980X processors on Linux for delivering the best possible workstation performance in 2025.

Merged already for the in-development Linux 6.17 kernel were the many block subsystem and IO_uring changes for enhancing I/O on Linux as we roll toward the H2'2025 Linux distribution releases.

Two notable AMD CPU feature additions were merged overnight for the in-development Linux 6.17 kernel.

AMD yesterday upstreamed a batch of new CPU microcode files to linux-firmware.git as the de facto repository where component firmware/microcode is easily distributed to Linux distributions. This also marks the first time that Family 1Ah (Family 26) CPU microcode is updated there for the latest Zen 5 processors.

Earlier this year Linux kernel patches were posted for making SMP support unconditional so the kernel is always built for multi-core capabilities. With uniprocessor core environments being extremely rare especially for those that would be using an up-to-date, upstream Linux kernel, dropping non-SMP support would allow simplifying code paths within the kernel. Well, for Linux 6.17 it's finally happening.

Archinstall 3.0.9 released today as the newest iteration of this text-based Arch Linux operating system installer.

After all of these years of Linux dominating the high performance computing (HPC) space and other industries, one might think (most) all the interesting performance nuggets have been uncovered and well thought out and robust fallbacks in place across all important code paths. As we showcase almost each cycle, interesting new performance bits to be uncovered within the Linux kernel. For Linux 6.17 thanks to a NVIDIA engineer is applying a better fallback for NUMA locality rather than simply picking a random CPU core.

Facebook's Meta already employs an all-star team of Linux kernel engineers and it doesn't appear that they are over in recruiting top-tier Linux kernel talent. One of Intel's senior Linux software engineers is now the latest high profile kernel developer onboard at Meta.

Proton 10.0-2 beta was released today by Valve and CodeWeavers for furthering this Wine-derived software powering Steam Play for running Windows games on Linux with great success.

The staging area of the Linux kernel, where preliminary code initially appears to mature until being promoted out, continues seeing a lot of code churn. With Linux 6.17 the staging updates were submitted and now merged with one driver in particular standing out.

Christian Schaller, a Fedora developer and Director of Software Engineering at Red Hat, recently began exploring the potential of AI usage more from the open-source/Linux perspective. He was left impressed from his ability to easily generate a Python application for internal Red Hat use to porting the venerable Xtraceroute program to GTK4 and Vulkan.

It had been two years since the last update to the AMDGPU X.Org DDX driver but now xf86-video-amdgpu 25.0.0 is now available for those relying on this driver/hardware-specific driver for X.Org enabled Linux systems rather than the xf86-video-modesetting generic driver or a Wayland-based desktop.