The Alliance for Open Media announced today that they will be launching the next-generation AV2 video codec at the end of 2025.

To no real surprise given the happenings (or there the lack of) the past few months, AMD formally announced publicly today that their open-source AMDVLK driver has been discontinued in favor of the Mesa RADV driver for Vulkan needs on Linux.

The maintainer of the libxml2 project announced he is stepping down from this widely-used open-source library without any replacement maintainer yet determined.

Canonical announced today that they will formally support the NVIDIA CUDA toolkit and also make it available via the Ubuntu repositories.

It's been a while since delivering any benchmarks on Phoronix of Microsoft's Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2) for running Linux applications and other software under the confines of Windows 11. When recently carrying out the Windows 11 25H2 vs. Linux benchmarks I also took the opportunity for seeing how WSL is performing on that leading-edge Windows release compared to running a bare metal Ubuntu Linux installation.

Casilda 1.0 is out today as the Wayland compositor widget for the GTK4 toolkit.

Prominent KDE developer Jonathan Riddell who was formerly involved with Kubuntu and then KDE Neon, served for a while on KDE Plasma release management, and other significant contributions over the years announced he's stepping away from the KDE world.

Ubuntu 25.10's transition to using Rust Coreutils in place of GNU Coreutils has uncovered a few performance issues so far with the Rust version being slower than the C-based GNU Coreutils. Fortunately there still are a few weeks to go until Ubuntu 25.10 releases as stable and upstream developers are working to address these performance gaps.

Back in late 2023 ASRock announced AI QuickSet to make it easier to get up and running with AI workloads on their hardware under Windows or Linux. Today they announced their second incarnation of that as "AI QuickSet WSL" as making it quicker and easier to setup AMD ROCm under Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) and streamlining the deployment of various AI Linux software packages under WSL.

CRIU is for Checkpoint/Restore in Userspace to be able to freeze a running container or app, preserve its state to disk, and later restore said running workload. A few years ago we saw AMD working on being able to checkpoint/restore running ROCm workloads. As seemingly the first work in a while on the matter by the AMDGPU/AMDKFD kernel drivers, there are some new CRIU elements coming for Linux 6.18.

The latest tranche of Rust code ready to go for the upcoming Linux 6.18 kernel is now ready to go and has been queued into a TIP branch ahead of the merge window.

For fans of open-source projects embracing the Rust programming language, merged for the LibreOffice 26.2 development code for this open-source office suite is "Rustmaker" as a Rust code maker for UNO integration with this open-source office suite.

The second alpha release of the upcoming FreeBSD 15 is now available for testing ahead of its planned official release in December.

The newest weekly test release of Linux 6.17 is now available as we work toward the stable kernel release around the end of September.

It's unfortunate the number of significant Linux engineering losses at Intel this year. Beyond the staffing reductions throughout the company, seeing the loss of Linux engineering talent and many of their open-source contributors outside of kernel space too has been especially hard hitting to see. Intel for years has been very well regarded for their prolific open-source contributions and typically leading early hardware enablement within the Linux kernel, compiler toolchains, and related components. There's another hit to the Intel Linux team with one of their USB4/Thunderbolt maintainers departing the company.

Adding to the list of feature caveats around the different Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite laptops and the varying Linux state is video acceleration support. But patches were posted this week by a Linaro engineer enabling hardware accelerated video playback for two X Elite laptop models.

The input subsystem fixes for the week were sent out on Saturday ahead of the Linux 6.17-rc6 kernel due out later today. Notable with this batch of "fixes" is enabling support for the high-end FLYDIGI APEX 5 gaming controller.

The Samsung Exynos 7870 Octa SoC released back in 2016 on a 14nm process and powered by eight Arm Cortex-53 cores and a Mali T830 GPU. Finally now for late 2025 there is open-source display driver happenings going mainline for this aging SoC.

The Rust-based open-source operating system project Redox OS published a blog post today outlining their development priorities for the remainder of 2025 and then onward to 2026.

Earlier this week I wrote about Sheaves as an opt-in, per-CPU array-based caching layer likely coming for Linux 6.18. The sheaves patches have been queued into the "slab/for-next" Git branch ahead of the Linux 6.18 kernel merge window. Patches posted now by Google are showing the Linux Sheaves code having a massive beneficial impact for large AMD systems.