Queued up in the past few days to the USB subsystem's "usb-next" Git branch are the Intel USBIO drivers for Linux 6.18. These drivers are needed to support the web cameras on various newer Intel laptop models.

Patches were posted this past weekend for enabling the mainline Linux kernel to run on the Tenstorrent Blackhole SoC of A0 silicon on the Blackhole P100 and P150 PCIe accelerator cards.

Godot 4.5 is out today as the latest update to this leading open-source and cross platform game engine.

After being in the works for the past two years and going through 18+ rounds of code review, AMD ABMC looks poised to be mainlined for the upcoming Linux 6.18 kernel.

The Alliance for Open Media announced today that they will be launching the next-generation AV2 video codec at the end of 2025.

To no real surprise given the happenings (or there the lack of) the past few months, AMD formally announced publicly today that their open-source AMDVLK driver has been discontinued in favor of the Mesa RADV driver for Vulkan needs on Linux.

The maintainer of the libxml2 project announced he is stepping down from this widely-used open-source library without any replacement maintainer yet determined.

Canonical announced today that they will formally support the NVIDIA CUDA toolkit and also make it available via the Ubuntu repositories.

It's been a while since delivering any benchmarks on Phoronix of Microsoft's Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2) for running Linux applications and other software under the confines of Windows 11. When recently carrying out the Windows 11 25H2 vs. Linux benchmarks I also took the opportunity for seeing how WSL is performing on that leading-edge Windows release compared to running a bare metal Ubuntu Linux installation.

Casilda 1.0 is out today as the Wayland compositor widget for the GTK4 toolkit.

Prominent KDE developer Jonathan Riddell who was formerly involved with Kubuntu and then KDE Neon, served for a while on KDE Plasma release management, and other significant contributions over the years announced he's stepping away from the KDE world.

Ubuntu 25.10's transition to using Rust Coreutils in place of GNU Coreutils has uncovered a few performance issues so far with the Rust version being slower than the C-based GNU Coreutils. Fortunately there still are a few weeks to go until Ubuntu 25.10 releases as stable and upstream developers are working to address these performance gaps.

Back in late 2023 ASRock announced AI QuickSet to make it easier to get up and running with AI workloads on their hardware under Windows or Linux. Today they announced their second incarnation of that as "AI QuickSet WSL" as making it quicker and easier to setup AMD ROCm under Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) and streamlining the deployment of various AI Linux software packages under WSL.

CRIU is for Checkpoint/Restore in Userspace to be able to freeze a running container or app, preserve its state to disk, and later restore said running workload. A few years ago we saw AMD working on being able to checkpoint/restore running ROCm workloads. As seemingly the first work in a while on the matter by the AMDGPU/AMDKFD kernel drivers, there are some new CRIU elements coming for Linux 6.18.

The latest tranche of Rust code ready to go for the upcoming Linux 6.18 kernel is now ready to go and has been queued into a TIP branch ahead of the merge window.

For fans of open-source projects embracing the Rust programming language, merged for the LibreOffice 26.2 development code for this open-source office suite is "Rustmaker" as a Rust code maker for UNO integration with this open-source office suite.

The second alpha release of the upcoming FreeBSD 15 is now available for testing ahead of its planned official release in December.

The newest weekly test release of Linux 6.17 is now available as we work toward the stable kernel release around the end of September.

It's unfortunate the number of significant Linux engineering losses at Intel this year. Beyond the staffing reductions throughout the company, seeing the loss of Linux engineering talent and many of their open-source contributors outside of kernel space too has been especially hard hitting to see. Intel for years has been very well regarded for their prolific open-source contributions and typically leading early hardware enablement within the Linux kernel, compiler toolchains, and related components. There's another hit to the Intel Linux team with one of their USB4/Thunderbolt maintainers departing the company.

Adding to the list of feature caveats around the different Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite laptops and the varying Linux state is video acceleration support. But patches were posted this week by a Linaro engineer enabling hardware accelerated video playback for two X Elite laptop models.