Adding to the list of pull requests submitted early in advance of the Linux 6.18 merge window opening are several cryptography-related improvements. In particular, some nice performance optimizations once again for the Linux kernel.

Introduced two years ago was the Intel/Codeplay oneAPI Construction Kit for helping to bring SYCL support to new hardware. As part of that the oneAPI Construction Kit was brought to RISC-V and other platforms. Out this week is now oneAPI Construction Kit 5.0 and sadly it drops Vulkan API support.

Following the release earlier this year of the Fish 4.0 shell that was ported from C++ to Rust, Fish 4.1 was released this weekend as the next major feature release.

The Linux kernel's audit subsystem/framework for greater insight into system activity for security purposes will now be able to properly cope with multiple Linux Security Modules (LSMs).

All of the ARM64 feature changes intended for the Linux 6.18 merge window have been submitted in advance. There are a few new features worth calling out for 64-bit ARM Linux users.

FreeBSD 15.0 Alpha 4 is out today as the newest weekly test release in working toward the FreeBSD 15 stable release in early December.

When it comes to open-source games, Unvanquished remains one of the most promising and interesting open-source FPS games from a technical perspective. With its next release, Unvanquished has been ported to the SDL3 library and is working well natively on Wayland.

Thirteen years after the AMD GCN 1.0 "Southern Islands" GPUs initially launched as the Radeon HD 7000 series, recently there has been an effort to improve the support for both GCN 1.0 and the GCN 1.1 graphics processors with their open-source Linux driver stack. This recent effort has been led by one of the developers on Valve's Linux graphics team.

Linux engineer at Microsoft Christian Brauner sent out his set of 12 pull requests touching the VFS portion of the Linux kernel. These changes for the Linux 6.18 kernel include one pull request that touches the writeback code to address a situation of lockups being reported by users when systemd units read lots of files.

Among the early pull requests submitted already to Linus Torvalds in advance of the Linux 6.18 merge window opening soon is the Btrfs file-system updates. Btrfs for Linux 6.18 has a few items worth calling out but no major features this cycle.

The sched_ext scheduler framework that allows creating kernel thread schedulers via BPF programs is ready with some updates for the Linux 6.18 kernel.

Following last week's KDE Plasma 6.5 beta release, the focus has shifted to bug fixing ahead of the October release of Plasma 6.5.0. There have been some minor features to still squeeze in, a lot of bug fixing has commenced, and also some early feature work around Plasma 6.6.

Following last week's GNOME 49 release, This Week in GNOME is out with their latest weekly summary of all interesting GNOME developments. Notable now for this post-49.0 time is libadwaita adding an adaptive sidebar widget.

Back in June it was announced by Canonical that for the Ubuntu 25.10 release they would be raising the RISC-V baseline to the RVA23 profile even with barely any available RISC-V platforms supporting that newer RISC-V profile. That change is still going ahead and leaves Ubuntu 25.10 on RISC-V currently only supporting the QEMU virtualized target.

With Linux 6.17 expected for release this weekend, the Linux 6.18 merge window will in turn kick-off for its usual two week dance. Here is a look at some of the features on our radar that are expected to be merged for Linux 6.18, which is also likely to be the 2025 LTS kernel version.

Vulkan 1.4.328 is now available as the latest specification update to this high performance graphics and compute API from The Khronos Group.

The Linux 6.17 kernel is tracking well for its planned stable release on Sunday. Here is a look back at some of the most interesting changes to find with this next kernel version.

I noticed a number of benchmarks failing to run on Ubuntu 25.10 this week with reported checksum errors on the files... I quickly realized it's due to the recent Rust Coreutils transition for Ubuntu 25.10 causing some major breakage for those relying on Makeself archives.

After being on a hiatus for more than one year and going through several rounds of Habana Labs driver maintainers due to Intel layoffs, there finally is some updated "habanalabs" AI accelerator kernel driver code slated to go into the upcoming Linux 6.18 kernel cycle. There is some new feature work but still no Gaudi 3 support for the upstream Linux kernel.

The Linux 6.18 kernel is bringing a new patch to benefit those using the decade-old AMD Bulldozer processors and wanting to make use of Linux's X86_NATIVE_CPU build option for enhancing performance in some areas by optimizing the kernel build for your particular processor/ISA capabilities.