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.

AMD's GPUOpen group today released the AMD Interactive Streaming SDK 1.1 release that now delivers Linux support alongside the existing Microsoft Windows support. The AMD Interactive Streaming SDK is designed to provide pieces for developers to build-out low-latency streaming solutions for cloud gaming, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), and embedded applications. This MIT-licensed streaming SDK was originally launched by AMD back in March as Windows-only while now is thankfully also native to Linux.

Last week I ran the last planned benchmarks of Intel CPU performance on Clear Linux vs. Ubuntu with Intel having ceased development of Clear Linux following the restructuring at the company. In today's article is a final look at how the AMD EPYC performance compares on Clear Linux relative to Ubuntu Linux and AlmaLinux. An AMD EPYC 9965 "Turin" dual socket server was used for showing the strong out-of-the-box performance on Intel's Clear Linux even for this competing server processor.

Along with the better handling of multi-device file-systems such as Btrfs' native RAID capabilities and now allowing more efficient writing of zeroes to modern storage devices, the number of VFS pull requests for Linux 6.17 also added some other extra goodies.

The kernel locking changes submitted today for Linux 6.17 contain a temporary change worth discussion for yielding a 10x speed-up of a particular function call and as part of that yielding less network egress downtime until a better solution is developed.

Merged on Monday were the EROFS file-system updates for Linux 6.17. EROFS continues to be a common read-only file-system choice for some mobile/embedded devices as well as container use-cases.

For those shopping for a Linux friendly laptop powered by AMD Ryzen AI 300 series "Strix Point" with Zen 5 cores and integrated Radeon graphics plus allowing up to 128GB of RAM, the 15.3-inch InfinityBook Pro 15 Gen10 was announced this morning.

The CRC32C cyclic redundancy check code path within the Linux kernel for error detection is much, much faster with the in-development Linux 6.17 kernel when running on modern Intel and AMD AVX-512 processors.

In addition to the VFS changes merrged yesterday for allowing multi-device file-systems to better cope with losing a disk, another notable change as part of the VFS pull requests for Linux 6.17 allows more efficiently zeroing out a range on modern NVMe SSDs or SCSI drives.

The VFS changes were merged a short time ago to the in-development Linux 6.17 kernel. Among the notable changes there is a patch that will allow file-systems like Btrfs and Bcachefs to better handle losing a disk in their built-in RAID/multi-device capabilities.

Following yesterday's release of GNU Binutils 2.45, the GNU C Library 2.42 released today.

The Hyprland Wayland compositor that is popular with some Linux enthusiasts today formally announced Hyprperks, its new paid subscription service offering a "premium desktop experience" and other benefits.

Jakub Kicinski on Sunday sent out the big set of networking subsystem updates heading into the Linux 6.17 kernel. From high-end enterprise and data center hardware down to consumer Ethernet and WiFi devices, the Linux networking space continues to be as busy as ever.

With the Linux 6.17 merge window now open, Bcachefs file-system lead developer Kent Overstreet has submitted his planned changes for this next kernel version. But we await to see how Linus Torvalds will respond.

With the newly-released Linux 6.16 kernel there is the new X86_NATIVE_CPU build option if wanting to optimize your kernel build for your local CPU in use. Enabling CONFIG_X86_NATIVE_CPU is setting the "-march=native" compiler optimizations for the kernel build in an effort to ensure peak performance/optimizations for the local system. Here are some benchmarks looking at the impact of X86_NATIVE_CPU on Linux 6.16 while using the HP ZBook Ultra G1a laptop with AMD Strix Halo SoC as an interesting test target for squeezing additional performance.

Last year Canonical established a policy to always ship the latest Linux kernel version at Ubuntu release time which for the upcoming Ubuntu 25.10 will mean shipping with Linux v6.17. But during the Ubuntu development cycles they typically don't aggressively update to new interim versions tracking upstream, except that will now change to allow for better kernel test coverage.

While the Broadcom V3D driver has been part of the mainline kernel for supporting the graphics found on recent Raspberry Pi boards, currently it doesn't support run-time power management. The lack of runtime PM has meant the GPU clock remains at full-speed even while idle.

Intel's accelerator efforts in recent generations of Xeon processors have been challenging to say the least. From limited software support and configuration obstacles to some current-generation accelerators not being safe for VM use due to security issues to having to deal with higher latency and other nuances if wanting to achieve decent performance. One of the Linux kernel users of Intel's QuickAssist Technology "QAT" accelerators has been the FSCRYPT code for native file encryption support. But the Linux kernel with the FSCRYPT usage is now demoting the Intel QAT accelerator support along with other problem-causing accelerator drivers.