In preparing for the GNOME 49 beta release, GNOME Shell this weekend released 49.beta.1 with a few changes worth highlighting.

Ahead of the Linux 6.17-rc1 release due out in the coming hours, the Turbostat updates for that tool living within the kernel source tree were merged.

Amid the ongoing discussion over what will happen too Bcachefs in the mainline Linux kernel, an interesting anecdote around Btrfs was mentioned.

Debian 13.0 "Trixie" is now officially out as the newest two-year stable release to Debian GNU/Linux.

The EFI code updates were merged today for the nearly-over Linux 6.17 kernel with two changes worth mentioning.

Vulkan 1.4.325 was released on Friday with one new extension in tow: VK_KHR_shader_untyped_pointers for untyped pointers.

Linus Torvalds has used his authority to reject the RISC-V architecture changes for the Linux 6.17 kernel. The RISC-V updates won't land this cycle and will need to try again for v6.18 later in the year. Linus refers to at least some of the proposed RISC-V code as garbage along with being submitted rather late during the merge window.

GNU/Hurd has made it as an official platform target within SDL that is the open-source library widely-used by cross-platform games and other applications for software/hardware abstractions across operating systems.

There were a lot of interesting changes that landed in GNOME's Mutter compositor codebase to end out the weekend and ahead of next month's big GNOME 49 release.

Like clockwork KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his weekly recap of all the interesting Plasma changes for the week. There continues to be a lot of feature work and polishing that is building up for the Plasma 6.5 desktop release.

Well, it's an unpleasant afternoon in Linux land with more signs of the ongoing impact from Intel's corporate-wide restructuring. Just after writing about Intel's CPU temperature monitoring driver now left unmaintained/orphaned, more patches hit the public Linux kernel mailing list to mark additional Intel drivers as orphaned and removing maintainer entries for Linux developers no longer at Intel.

There is yet more apparent fallout from Intel's recent layoffs/restructurings as it impacts the Linux kernel... The coretemp driver that provides CPU core temperature monitoring support for all Intel processors going back many years is now set to an orphaned state with the former driver maintainer no longer at Intel and no one immediately available to serve as its new maintainer.

We still don't know what's going to happen for Bcachefs in the Linux 6.17 kernel even with the merge window set to end on Sunday with the Linux 6.17-rc1 release. Linus Torvalds commented over one month ago that they would be parting ways for Linux 6.17. At the start of the Linux 6.17 merge window a Bcachefs pull request was submitted but nearly two weeks later it's still not been pulled and Linus Torvalds hasn't commented on the matter.

A few new firmware files were upstreamed today to the linux-firmware.git repository for supporting a new GFX12.0.1 (RDNA4) "Kicker" graphics processor. There was also an AMDGPU kernel graphics driver patch that just landed as well in Linux 6.17 for the RDNA4 Kicker variant.

Last week the Threadripper 9000 series began shipping and as shown in our launch-day Linux testing there was stunning performance with the 32-core Threadripper 9970X and 64-core Threadripper 9980X processors. Beyond the improvements thanks to the Zen 5 microarchitecture enhancements, the new Threadrippers while working as a drop-in replacement to existing TRX50 workstation motherboards now can handle DDR5-6400 R-DIMMs up from DDR5-4800 R-DIMMs with the Threadripper 7000 series. For those wondering about the gain attributed to the faster memory modules, here are benchmarks looking at the DDR5-4800 vs. DDR5-6400 real-world performance impact for AMD Ryzen Threadripper 9970X and 9980X CPUs.

While we eagerly await the release of ROCm 7.0, ROCm 6.4.3 is out today as the newest point release to the ROCm 6.4 open-source GPU compute stack.

The Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) is rolling out a "fair use" quota where they will be asking the major hardware vendors (OEMs) to sponsor the project or contribute developer resources for the biggest users that rely on LVFS/Fwupd for serving system and device firmware to customers.

The latest Radeon RADV driver ray-tracing optimization being merged to Mesa 25.3 is support for triangle pair compression with RDNA4 (GFX12) graphics processors.

The PCI changes were merged last week for the Linux 6.17 merge window. There is new PCIe controller support and some other additions worth mentioning with the new PCI feature code.

Ahead of the upcoming FFmpeg 8.0 release for this widely-used, open-source multimedia library some more last minute features continue to land. Hitting FFmpeg Git today are some Vulkan Video additions.