Thomas Zimmermann of SUSE sent out today what is anticipated to be the last drm-misc-next feature pull request for DRM-Next that is targeting the upcoming Linux 6.18 kernel cycle.

Mesa's Gallium3D video acceleration code has long supported both the VA-API and VDPAU interfaces for video acceleration. VA-API has enjoyed more widespread support among Linux applications and typically more robust while the Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix (VDPAU) was the interface originally started by NVIDIA for their official Linux driver. As of today, Mesa has now removed support for VDPAU acceleration.

Richard Hughes of Red Hat announced the availability today of Fwupd 2.0.15 as the latest increment to this open-source firmware updating solution built around the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS).

Linus Torvalds recently marked Bcachefs as "externally maintained" and isn't merging any new Bcachefs code for the time being but for now at least is keeping the existing Bcachefs code in-tree for anyone that has been relying on this experimental CoW file-system from prior kernel versions. OpenSUSE announced today though they are resorting to disabling the kernel driver in their Linux 6.17+ builds.

A set of 14 patches were merged today to the Mesa 3D graphics driver codebase for fixing some wide-reaching performance issues that would have negatively affected the upcoming Xe3 integrated graphics with Core Ultra Series 3 "Panther Lake" hardware. The patches have been merged so will be very important that anyone buying an upcoming Intel Panther Lake laptop move to using an up-to-date Mesa to avoid these performance problems.

Hyprland 0.51 is now available as the latest feature release for this unique Wayland compositor.

The Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver is well optimized for Linux gaming and desktop use thanks to the work by Mike Blumenkrantz being funded by Valve. Zink has even worked with OpenCL thanks to Rusticl and now another frontier is being conquered for this generic OpenGL on Vulkan driver: workstation graphics with optimizing around the SPECViewPerf test cases.

Pogocache is the open-source fast caching software built from scratch that is optimized for low latency and CPU scalability/efficiency. Pogocache claims to outperform Memcached, Valkey, Redis, and other alternatives. Out today is Pogocache 1.2 as the newest feature release for this fast cache.

Linux kernel developers are evaluating the idea of removing HIGHPTE support from the Linux kernel due to its maintenance burden and just one ARM system currently using it.

The newest Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) display driver that has been in the works for the Linux kernel is "Yhgch" from Inspur.

Following the numerous Intel Linux developer departures last month from the company following layoffs at Intel and others deciding to voluntarily leave, there is another one to report today. One of the Intel IVPU accelerator driver maintainers for the Intel NPUs found in Core Ultra SoCs is departing the company.

For those preferring for the first point release to major new compiler releases before upgrading, LLVM 21.1.1 is out today along with the likes of Clang 21.1.1 for this widely-used open-source compiler stack.

Arm this evening lifted the lid on Lumex, their new compute subsystem platform that is purpose-built around AI for next-gen PCs and smartphones.

Back in May was the announcement by Canonical's kernel team that they were planning to ship Linux 6.17 in Ubuntu 25.10 as what will be the latest upstream kernel version when that Ubuntu release ships in October. But due to the timing of the Linux 6.17 release around late September and the Ubuntu 25.10 kernel freeze around the same time, it's led to some confusion with committing to a Linux 6.17-rc or potentially some suggesting Ubuntu 25.10 would ship with a Linux 6.16 kernel and then ship v6.17 as a stable release update. Well, the situation is more clear with Linux 6.17 having been merged now as the default kernel of Ubuntu 25.10.

It was just a few days ago that Rust Coreutils 0.2 released with "massive" performance gains and production-ready Ubuntu support. Rust Coreutils 0.2.2 is out today and is delivering a few more enhancements -- most excitingly is a faster base64 command that can now outperform the GNU Coreutils version.

FEX 2509 is out today as the latest monthly update to this open-source emulator allowing unmodified x86/x86_64 games and applications to run in ARM64 Linux environments.

One of the AMD software initiatives we have been most excited about in recent times has been openSIL. AMD openSIL is working toward open-source CPU silicon initialization that will jive better with the likes of Coreboot and ultimately replace their existing AGESA implementation. AMD openSIL is expected to span AMD's wide gamut of processors from client/embedded through server offerings. It's still looking to be on track for production readiness in 2026.

Back in May we provided an initial look at the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite laptop performance on Ubuntu Linux with the upstream support for the Qualcomm Snapdragon X1E maturing, more laptops becoming supported, and the Ubuntu X1E "Concept" ISOs enhancing the end-user experience. The performance was okay but short of expectations. Months later we are revisiting the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite Linux performance on the newest Ubuntu Concept ISOs and newer firmware that is providing a much better experience albeit still not as competitive as the newest AMD Ryzen AI 300 series and Intel Core Ultra laptops under Linux.

Canonical's Launchpad service that is closely aligned with the Ubuntu project is finally deprecating code imports from CVS and Subversion repositories that go through the defunct Bazaar.

Released just over one month ago was the general availability of CUDA 13.0 while out this week is CUDA 13.0 Update 1 as the first incremental step forward to CUDA 13.