One of the CPU architectures continuing to be supported by the mainline Linux kernel but rarely ever seeing any code activity is the SPARC64 architecture port for the once-interesting processors from Sun Microsystems.

Timur Kristóf as a contractor on Valve's open-source Linux graphics driver team is known for his work on the RADV Vulkan driver and ACO shader compiler but recently he's been working on some improvements to the AMDGPU kernel driver. A big feat he's been tackling is enabling support for analog display connectors within the AMDGPU driver for the "DC" code. Besides a few supported older GPUs having DVI-I connections, this analog support is significant in that it's a milestone for unblocking the aging GCN 1.0 and GCN 1.1 GPUs from using the modern AMDGPU driver by default.

Born out of his work on developing the GNOME Builder integrated development environment (IDE) over the past decade, one of the recent initiatives by GNOME developer Christian Hergert has been on Foundry, a new "IDE in a box" of sorts and with CLI tooling complementary to the GNOME Builder IDE graphical environment.

Announced just once month ago was Wayback as an X11 compatibility layer build atop Wayland components. In the past month Wayback has been off to a quick start with a goal of being production-ready next year and has also already became a project under the FreeDesktop.org umbrella. Today marks the release of Wayback 0.1 as the first preview release for this X11 compatibility layer.

How time flies... This week already marks one year since the debut of AMD's Zen 5 Strix Point laptop processors with the likes of the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 and Ryzen AI 9 365 that also rolled out the RDNA 3.5 integrated graphics. In marking one year that Strix Point laptops have been available, here is a performance benchmarking redux of the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 with the ASUS Zenbook S16 for looking at how the Linux performance at launch-day compares to a very leading-edge Linux software stack now one year later.

Systemd 257 debuted last December and now finally systemd 258 is preparing to roll out... Systemd 258-rc1 was issued today as the first test release toward this next major release. It's a big one with more than 260 changes noted in the announcement, including multiple new tools and other additions.

The Zed open-source code editor that is written in Rust, has begun supporting Linux rather well, and has continued tacking on new features to assist developer workflows has introduced another new feature: the ability to easily disable all AI features.

In addition to Blender 5.0 supporting HDR on Linux when using the Vulkan API and with Wayland, another important high dynamic range (HDR) milestone landed this week into Blender: the ability to both import and export HDR videos.

Eric Engestrom just released Mesa 25.2-rc2 as the newest, on-time weekly release candidate for this quarter's Mesa 25.2 feature series.

With the Linux 6.16 stable kernel potentially being released this coming Sunday, the Linux 6.17 merge window is quickly approaching. Btrfs maintainer and SUSE engineer David Sterba sent out the Btrfs pull request already of new feature code for this copy-on-write file-system in Linux 6.17.

For those making use of Open Virtual Machine Firmware (OVMF) such as for UEFI booting of VMs with KVM+QEMU, the upcoming Linux 6.17 kernel is set to offer a convenient new driver to help in debugging the system boot when needed.

Pogocache 1.0 was released today as a fast open-source caching software that aims for low latency and great CPU efficiency. Pogocache supports Memcache / Valkey / Redis / HTTP / Postgres wire protocols while claiming to offer much better throughput and lower latency than these caching alternatives.

Cloud Hypervisor is the open-source, Rust-based VMM started originally by Intel engineers but under the stewardship of the Linux Foundation has evolved into a nice multi-vendor initiative with the likes of Microsoft, Cyberus, Arm, and others all contributing. Even with Intel's cutbacks due to their ongoing corporate restructuring, the Cloud Hypervisor project is thriving as a multi-vendor open-source project for a security-focused hypervisor.

The newest open-source Linux kernel driver being worked on for the growing accelerator "accel" subsystem is a new hardware driver courtesy of Arm for enabling their Ethos U65 and U85 NPUs.

The crew working on enhancing the FreeBSD laptop support is hoping to have an install option within the installer of FreeBSD 15 that will easily provide a KDE Plasma based desktop environment.

The first release candidate of Python 3.14 is now available for testing as what will be this year's big feature update to this popular scripting language.

The Fedora project is seeking feedback from its user and developer community over potentially updating its release criteria to no longer block on optical media boot issues (DVD images) as well as whether to continue honoring dual boot issues for Intel-based Macs as release-blocking.

Sven Peter today sent out all of the Apple SoC driver and DeviceTree (DT) updates aiming for the soon-to-happen Linux 6.17 merge window.

While downstream Ubuntu is the most popular Linux option for the Qualcomm Snapdragon X powered "Windows on Arm" laptops, that's because of their concept images containing a number of "hacked packages" to lead to a decent user experience. But for upstream Debian Linux the prospects of running it on Snapdragon X Elite/Plus laptops is less than ideal with a number of problems persisting -- similar to other Linux distributions focused on running the mainline Linux kernel and other upstream software.

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) this week voted to approve a number of new features/changes for the upcoming Fedora 43 release.