Following all of the Linux and broader open-source software enablement around Power11 the past three or so years, IBM today formally announced their new Power11 hardware.

The AMD Hardware Feedback Driver has been queued up via a TIP branch for expected merging during the upcoming Linux 6.17 kernel cycle. This new open-source AMD driver is designed to help make the kernel's scheduler make better decisions around task placement for heterogeneous processor designs with a mix of the "classic" and "dense" cores.

In addition to Intel upstreaming the Xe3 graphics firmware needed for upcoming Panther Lake SoCs to linux-firmware.git so those firmware binaries can get picked up by Linux distributions ahead of Panther Lake laptops shipping, Intel also upstreamed fan control firmware as a first for their graphics card efforts.

The Ardour digital audio workstation (DAW) software has removed its build support for the GTK+ (GTK2) toolkit in favor of now exclusively relying upon "YTK" as its own localized fork of this toolkit.

Interestingly a batch of new AMD GPU firmware files were upstreamed to linux-firmware.git yesterday in preparing for the next AMD product launch of hardware featuring RDNA 3.5 integrated graphics.

FEX 2507 is now available for this open-source emulator that allows running x86/x86_64 games and applications atop 64-bit ARM Linux devices whether they be AArch64 servers or ARM64 single board computers and other devices.

OBS Studio 31.1 is now available for those using this cross-platform free software for screencasting and other screen recording purposes. OBS Studio 31.1 is another great step forward for this open-source software that has a devoted following and user-base across Windows, macOS, and Linux.

U-Boot 2025.07 is out today as the newest version of this popular open-source boot loader that is widely-used among embedded devices across different CPU architectures.

The Thunderbird mail client developers today formally announced Thunderbird 140 as the newest Extended Support Release (ESR) for this cross-platform alternative to Microsoft Outlook.

One topic we haven't heard AMD talk too much about publicly this year has been their openSIL effort that was announced back in 2023 as their eventual replacement to AGESA and being an open-source CPU silicon initialization effort. They still appear to be working toward making openSIL production-ready for next-generation Zen 6 platforms but some of their proof-of-concept milestones have been running behind schedule. Meanwhile their EPYC 9005 "Turin" proof-of-concept code was recently published.

Being worked on for a number of months now has been the Lenovo Gaming Series WMI Drivers for Linux to expose additional power/performance settings for Lenovo gaming series hardware like the Lenovo Legion Go S gaming handheld with Steam OS. With the upcoming Linux 6.17 kernel, the Lenovo WMI Gaming Series Drivers are expected to be finally upstreamed.

The GNOME 49 Alpha "49.alpha" release was just announced as the first formal test release in the road to the GNOME 49 desktop release due out in September.

Merged today for the LLVM/Clang compiler is -mcpu=gb10 support for catering to NVIDIA's forthcoming Grace Blackwell GB10 Superchip.

While coming a few weeks too late for making it into the LibreOffice 25.8 open-source office suite release, merged today to LibreOffice Git for next year's LibreOffice 26.2 is adding initial support for importing Markdown files into the LibreOffice Writer word processor.

With the upcoming Linux 6.17 kernel cycle Intel is further building out their Platform Monitoring Technology (PMT) capabilities with the introduction of a new discovery driver.

The AMDKFD "Kernel Fusion Driver" used as the Linux kernel GPU compute driver and necessary part of their ROCm compute stack it turns out can build and run on the Chinese-developed LoongArch systems rather easily.

As a good sign of the progress being made on the Xe3 integrated graphics Linux support and of the Core Ultra Panther Lake launch approaching, the necessary graphics firmware binaries have now been upstreamed to the linux-firmware.git repository.

TornadoVM version 1.1.1 is now available for this OpenJDK and GraalVM plug-in that supports Java offloading to GPUs, FPGAs, and other heterogeneous hardware. The past few years TornadoVM has been making a lot of progress to automatically run Java programs across GPUs and other devices supporting OpenCL, NVIDIA PTX, and Khronos SPIR-V/Vulkan.

Linus Torvalds just tagged Linux 6.16-rc5 as the newest test release of Linux 6.16.

Minutes ago Simon Ser announced the official release of Wayland 1.24.