KDE Plasma 6.5 Beta 2 released this week and more fixes have landed for this desktop update due out later this month. Plus KDE developers have begun landing more feature work intended for Plasma 6.6.

Just a friendly heads-up that some brief downtime of Phoronix.com will happen overnight due to replacing a drive in the web server's RAID array.

Wine 10.16 is out today as a very exciting bi-weekly development release of this software for enjoying Windows games and applications under Linux.

A set of patches merged via the networking pull request for the Linux 6.18 will help servers better cope with distributed denial of service "DDoS" attacks. Thanks to a Google engineer there are some significant optimizations found in the Linux 6.18 kernel code for more efficiently handling of UDP receive performance under stress, such as in DDoS scenarios.

The sound changes were merged this week for the pngoing Linux 6.18 merge window. There is some interesting new API additions as well as new audio hardware support and enhancements to existing sound drivers.

After recently carrying out ROCm 7.0 benchmarks on AMD Ryzen AI Max+ "Strix Halo", I ran some complementary tests looking at the OpenCL performance. In particular, the ROCm OpenCL performance compared to using the Mesa-based Rusticl OpenCL driver on Strix Halo. It was an interesting benchmark battle with some healthy competition.

In addition to the Arm and RISC-V SoC changes and new platforms/machines added for the Linux 6.18 kernel, the separate Device Tree pull request was merged for this next kernel version that also now adds the strings for the upcoming Arm C1 Nano, Pro, Premium, and Ultra processor cores.

Intel today released a new version of their NPU Linux driver user-space components that interface with the upstream IVPU kernel driver.

Announced over the summer by Canonical was Stubble as a way to improve the ARM64 experience by providing a minimal UEFI kernel boot stub for loading machine-specific Device Trees embedded within a kernel image. The initial focus with Stubble is on improving the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite laptop experience on Ubuntu Linux. Thanks to some granted feature freeze exceptions, the support is ready for Ubuntu 25.10.

All of the multimedia subsystem feature updates have been merged for the Linux 6.18 merge window.

A new Free Software Foundation president has been elected.

Andrew Morton on Thursday submitted his collection of "non-MM" patches for areas of the kernel he oversees. There is one patch series that stands out in this pull request for Linux 6.18.

As the first update to the Intel Thermal Daemon since February when v2.5.9 brought Panther Lake support, Intel Thermal Daemon 2.5.10 was tagged on Thursday.

The Slab pull request was merged this evening for the ongoing Linux 6.18 merge window. Most notable with the Slab updates is the introduction of Sheaves.

For those wanting to run virtual machines with more than 255 vCPUs on modern AMD EPYC servers, an important code refactoring was merged for Linux 6.18 to ensure the proper topology information is exposed to KVM guest VMs.

After Linus Torvalds yesterday shot down RISC-V big endian prospects for the Linux kernel, today he has used his authority to wage a war on "crazy" Rust code formatting as well as to critique poor text formatting.

ZLUDA 5 is out today as the newest version of this open-source software for running CUDA software on non-NVIDIA GPUs.

The many SoC and platform/machine DeviceTree additions have been merged for the Linux 6.18 kernel! This includes finally having mainline support for the SiFive HiFive Premier P550 RISC-V development board and its EIC7700 SoC, Apple M2 Pro / Max / Ultra DeviceTrees added and associated Apple Mac system support, various new Snapdragon X1 laptops now being supported by the mainline kernel and much more.

The Kbuild changes have been merged for the in-development Linux 6.18 kernel.

Following last month's release of the first KDE Plasma 6.5 Beta, a second beta milestone was released today ahead of the stable release coming later in October.