KDE developers have still been busy addressing early fallout from the Plasma 6.1 desktop that released earlier this month while also beginning more feature activity for Plasma 6.2.

Wine 9.12 is out as the latest bi-weekly development release and in passing roughly the half-way point before Wine 10.0 stable enters the sights for early 2025.

On top of already having queued Intel Battlemage display support and the Battlemage device PCI IDs and other Intel kernel graphics driver features like hardware hang replays, Intel engineers today sent out another batch of "drm-intel-next" material slated for introduction in the upcoming Linux 6.11 cycle.

The Rust-written Servo web layout engine continues progressing for this open-source project now stewarded by the Linux Foundation Europe and seeing code contribution from a range of developers. They have published their June 2024 status update to outline the latest accomplishments for this alternative web engine.

The DRM Panic handler in Linux 6.10 that is used for presenting a visual error message in case of kernel panics and similar when CONFIG_VT is disabled continues seeing new features. This is the Linux equivalent to Windows' Blue Screen of Death or in the case of DRM Panic can also be a black screen of death. With Linux 6.11, the DRM Panic display can now handle monochrome logos.

Merged into Mesa 24.2 on Thursday is Vulkan sparse binding support for the CPU-based Lavapipe driver.

Besides Red Hat / Fedora working on a new web-based UI for their Anaconda OS installer, (open)SUSE developers remain very busy working on their Agama installer with new web-based interface. Agama 9 has now been announced as the latest iteration of SUSE's OS installer work.

A few days ago was the release of the OpenShot 3.2 open-source video editor while Shotcut 24.06 also released this week as another great cross-platform, free software video editing solution.

Open-source developer Tomeu Vizoso had been doing a lot of work on the Etnaviv driver stack for open-source, reverse-engineered Vivante driver support that began with the 3D graphics support but Vizoso tackled enabling the Vivante NPU IP as well. After all the successes with the Etnaviv NPU support, he turned his attention to creating an open-source driver stack for the Rockchip NPUs. Now thanks to a new sponsorship deal, he's back to making more Etnaviv improvements.

Sent in as the sole patch for this week's Linux power management subsystem updates is an important fix for Intel Core hybrid systems with buggy firmware. The Intel P-State driver fix can address as much as a 50% performance hit seen with existing Linux kernel versions on affected Intel hybrid platforms.

Last week the GNOME 47 development code saw Wayland DRM lease protocol support for enhancing VR headset handling and separately was also accent color support for GNOME Shell. Adding to the recent slew of changes landing for GNOME 47, the GNOME Shell and Mutter code can now be successfully compiled -- optionally -- without any X11 support or requiring any X11 build dependencies.

AMD today published version 1.4.34 of its Advanced Media Framework (AMF) SDK. This accelerated multimedia framework is used on Linux and Windows for integrating with games/applications leveraging DirectX, OpenGL, and OpenCL with interoperability support for Radeon GPU customers.

PipeWire 1.2 was christened today as the latest major feature update to this solution common to the modern Linux desktop for managing audio/video streams.

The NVIDIA 555.58 Linux driver has debuted this morning as the first stable version in the R555 driver series. The NVIDIA 555 Linux driver is the most exciting in recent times with offering Wayland explicit sync support, more stable Wayland support in general, and GSP firmware is now used by default on RTX 20 / Turing and newer GPUs where the GPU System Processor is present.

Linux 6.11 is shaping up to be an exciting summertime kernel cycle for AMD Ryzen owners. The newest feature now being queued ahead of next month's merge window is Core Performance Boost support within the AMD P-State CPU frequency scaling driver.

Sent out on Wednesday were the latest set of DRM-Xe-Next changes of the last round of feature updates for this Xe kernel graphics driver targeting the upcoming Linux 6.11 cycle.

AMD compiler engineers have released AOMP 19.0-2 as the newest version of their downstream LLVM/Clang compiler that carries all of their latest work around OpenMP/AOCC GPU device offloading to Radeon and Instinct hardware. With this updated AOMP compiler is now run-time support for zero-copy with CPU-GPU unified shared memory and various other new features for this GPU/accelerator-focused compiler.

Last year a new kernel feature merged in Linux 6.6 was multi-grain(ed) timestamps for file-systems as a means of better timestamp handling originally for NFS compared to the existing coarse-grained timestamps with the once per jiffy timestamps being used for invalidating NFS caches. But multi-grain timestamps was reverted just weeks after landing in the mainline kernel due to corner cases like a newer file with a coarse-grained timestamp appearing earlier than another file with a fine-grained timestamp. Due to subtle bugs like that, multi-grain timestamps were dropped before Linux 6.6 was even released while now there is a revised attempt.

Upcoming Intel Xeon 6 "Granite Rapids" processors will support a new Structural Based Functional Test at Field (SBAF) testing capability to help verify the health of the CPU cores.

Following a more than one year long process, the Free Software Foundation today named three additional board members.