The Linux 6.16 kernel is expected to be released as stable this coming Sunday, 27 July, barring any last minute issues that cause Linus Torvalds to have reservations over issuing v6.16 stable and to instead do a v6.16-rc8 test release. With Linux 6.16 imminent, here's a reminder about some of the most interesting features in this next Linux kernel version.

Ahead of the Linux 6.16 stable kernel expected to be released on Sunday, some last minute Bcachefs file-system fixes join various other kernel regression/bug fixes landing today in Git.

Last week Friday the unfortunate news came down that Intel was discontinuing their Clear Linux project effective immediately. For the past ten years Intel software engineers have been crafting Clear Linux as a high performance distribution that is extensively optimized for x86_64 processors via aggressive compiler tuning, various patches to the Linux kernel and other packages, and a variety of other optimizations throughout the operating system. For years Clear Linux has led Linux x86_64 performance not only on Intel desktop/mobile/server hardware but on AMD systems too. Here is a final look at the Clear Linux performance on the Intel side compared to the performance of the latest Ubuntu 25.04 release.

Last month AMD detailed the Ryzen Threadripper 9000 series as the new Zen 5 Threadrippers. After the Threadripper PRO 9000WX Series debuted this week, AMD announced today that the Threadripper 9000 series will begin hitting retailers next week.

Given that non-UEFI BIOS systems are quite old at this point and Intel/AMD systems for the past number of years have all supported UEFI, another change proposal being considered this week by Fedora Linux is limiting the release-blocking status of various (non-UEFI) BIOS systems.

Ayn is a Chinese brand of handheld gaming devices that have included Arm-based devices shipping Android as well as AMD Ryzen powered handhelds with Windows 11 or even the option of installing Ubuntu. Better support for the Ayn x86 gaming handheld devices is on the way with patches posted for a new Ayn platform driver for the Linux kernel.

Greenboot is a generic health check framework for systemd on RPM-OSTree based Linux distributions. Red Hat engineers have worked on Greenboot as part of the likes of Fedora IoT and their other RPM-OSTree initiatives for checking on the overall system health with ease.

Fedora 43 is looking to offer packages to support the Hare system programming language.

Following the Vulkanised 2025 presentation how NVIDIA is finding great success with Vulkan for AI / machine learning and already competitive to CUDA in some areas, Red Hat engineer and DRM subsystem lead maintainer David Airlie began exploring the potential of Mesa Vulkan drivers for AI inferencing. He was successful in using the Intel ANV, NVIDIA NVK, and Radeon RADV drivers for Vulkan-based AI inferencing while for the Radeon hardware tested is where it's showing the most potential (performance) at the moment and for even competing with the ROCm compute stack.

A new Linux driver patch series posted by AMD today introduces a new kernel driver "SFS" for Seamless Firmware Servicing. I hadn't heard AMD talk about Seamless Firmware Servicing at any previous events but it appears to be supported for current-generation AMD EPYC 5th Gen "Turin" processors.

With the Linux 6.16 kernel that will be debuting as stable as soon as this coming Sunday there are some minor performance benefits for the Radeon integrated graphics with the incredible Strix Halo SoC. Here are some comparison benchmarks of Linux 6.15 vs. Linux 6.16 Git for the AMD Radeon graphics of the Ryzen AI Max+ 395 with the HP ZBook Ultra G1a laptop.

The Ubuntu Concept ISO images that contain experimental patches -- or "hacks" to make things work -- to enable Ubuntu Linux on the Qualcomm Snapdragon X1 Elite powered laptops is out with a fresh spin. The new Ubuntu Concept ISOs move to using the Linux 6.16 kernel while also enabling some additional Snapdragon X laptop models.

Well known open-source AMD Mesa developer Marek Olšák has landed his latest set of 16 patches into Mesa 25.3-devel for enhancing the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver. Notable here is getting OpenGL sparse textures working on the latest Radeon RX 9000 series RDNA4/GFX12 graphics cards.

An exciting addition landing into the Mesa 25.3 codebase today is support for AMD's Vulkan anti-lag extension, VK_AMD_anti_lag.

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.