Following the recent Xe3P graphics enablement for Nova Lake as well as Nova Lake compiler target enablement and other early hardware enablement for Intel's Nova Lake processors, today has brought initial enablement for Nova Lake's NPU.

Last year following the launch of the Intel Xeon 6900P Granite Rapids processors I ran some benchmarks looking at the SNC3 vs. HEX clustering mode performance. With having an Intel Xeon 6980P server back up and running on a Giga Computing R284-A92-AAL server after my AvenueCity reference server failed nearly one year ago, I revisited the SNC3 vs. HEX clustering performance for those curious how it's looking on a modern software stack and with new/updated benchmarks.

Going public today is CVE-2025-62518, or better known by the name given by the security researchers involved: TARmageddon. The TARmageddon vulnerability affects the popular async-tar Rust library and its various forks like tokio-tar. In turn TARmageddon impacts the uv Python package manager and other users of this library.

Following the initial set of drm-misc-next updates for Linux 6.19, another round of drm-misc-next updates were sent out today in queuing ahead of that next kernel cycle. There are a number of updates to the smaller DRM graphics/display drivers as well as growing activity around the accelerator "accel" open-source drivers for different NPUs / AI accelerators.

The AMD Platform Management Framework "PMF" Linux driver is being extended to enable better integration with user-space tooling. AMD SystemDeck is the initial beneficiary of the integration improvements to this AMD platform Linux driver.

The Linux 6.19 kernel coming out in early 2026 will add full support for the Logitech G13 gaming keypad, a device first launched back in 2009. Some functionality has worked in Linux over the past 17 years while full support is only coming to this next version of the Linux kernel.

While the Blender 5.0 3D modeling software is being released next month, there is already exciting changes to look forward to with Blender 5.1 in the new year. Beyond AMD HIP-RT ray-tracing by default in Blender 5.1, this follow-on Blender release is also planning on enabling Vulkan API support by default.

KDE Plasma 6.5 is out today as the newest major feature release for the Plasma 6 desktop. Plasma 6.5 brings many great improvements and continues further evolving this modern, Wayland-focused open-source desktop.

The most unexpected surprise today was AMD releasing ROCm 7.9 as a new technology preview / development branch for the open-source ROCm GPU compute stack just one month after formally releasing ROCm 7.0. While not a fan of how they handled the version discontinuity, ROCm 7.9 has been working out well in my very initial tests on AMD Ryzen AI Max "Strix Halo".

Over the weekend we wrote about the visually-impressive Tellusim Core SDK being posted to GitHub as a C++ SDK for high-end graphics and compute. The downside was that the Tellusim Core SKD was rather restrictive in only being free for education, free for companies with less than $200k USD in annual revenue, and evaluation purposes. Or you needed to obtain a negotiated license for the software. As a pleasant surprise, OSI-approved open-source projects not backed by for-profit organizations can now openly use this superb graphics SDK.

Currently on Linux if you are putting the system into hibernation, there isn't a way to interrupt it and cancel it if you change your mind, even with most systems taking a number of seconds to successfully hibernate. But a new patch series sent out this weekend would introduce that capability.

LunarG in August announced KosmicKrisp as a Vulkan-to-Metal driver for a better Vulkan API experience on Apple macOS devices compared to the likes of using MoltenVK as another Vulkan-on-Metal adaptation. As of today the KosmicKrisp driver for Vulkan 1.3 on Apple devices is now in the Mesa 26.0 codebase.

AMD is hosting an AI Day out in San Francisco today and as part of those festivities today they announced the ROCm Core SDK 7.9 SDK paired with TheRock build and release infrastructure system they have been crafting.

For those wondering how the AMD 3D V-Cache performance with the Ryzen 9 9950X3D is looking on Linux relative to Microsoft Windows, a few weeks back I carried out some comparison benchmarks of Windows 11 25H2 against Ubuntu Linux both the Ubuntu 24.04.3 LTS release and an Ubuntu 25.10 development build using both the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X and Ryzen 9 9950X3D processors.

It looks like the upcoming Linux 6.19 kernel could land initial Tenstorrent vendor support and provide initial support for the Blackhole SoC with the initial Blackhole P100/P150 PCIe accelerator cards.

Well this wasn't on my bingo card for 2025... There is now yet another NTFS file-system driver for Linux. There's long been the read-only NTFS driver in the Linux kernel, the more capable NTFS FUSE driver in user-space, and then in recent years the NTFS3 driver that was upstreamed to the Linux kernel by Paragon Software. NTFS3 offers read/write support and other improvements over the prior kernel driver. Now there is "NTFSPLUS" as a new driver with read/write support and claiming to offer better performance and features than NTFS3.

Earlier this month Intel Linux graphics driver engineers began posting the initial Intel Xe3P graphics enablement code with a focus on the integrated graphics to be found with Nova Lake. Xe3P will also later be found in Intel discrete graphics cards like Crescent Island and more. That very early Intel Xe3P code is now expected to be merged as part of the Linux 6.19 kernel as what will be the first Linux kernel release of 2026.

It was to much surprise waking up this morning and seeing the Servo 0.0.1 release for this Rust-based web layout engine that began as a Mozilla project and is now being developed independently via Linux Foundation Europe and other parties.

Linux 6.18-rc2 is now available with another week's worth of fixes for Linux 6.18, which is anticipated to be this year's Long Term Support (LTS) kernel version.

Linux 6.16 introduced the ability to report the cause of AMD system resets/reboots thanks to specialized information available on AMD Zen platforms for indicating the detected cause of previous resets. This is a handy addition and the information is automatically reported to the kernel log on the next system boot, but in some instances that information could be stale/inaccurate. Today's Linux 6.18-rc2 will fix that.