In addition to this week seeing Apple SoC DT updates prepped for Linux 6.18 and Apple laptop lid events and power button driver patches posted for review for the mainline Linux kernel, published today on the Linux kernel mailing list are the request for comments (RFC) on patches for enabling USB3 support with Apple Silicon M1 / M2 SoCs...

Earlier this month we looked at the Linux laptop performance of AMD's Krackan Point using the Ryzen AI 5 340 within a HP OmniBook 5 that can be found for as low as ~$450 during sales. For six Zen 5 cores and RDNA 3.5 graphics, Krackan Point worked well as a budget Linux laptop option. For those wondering how the Linux vs. Windows 11 performance compares for the budget HP OmniBook, here are some benchmarks.

Following the recent Apple SMC driver upstreaming to handle rebooting Apple Silicon Macs under Linux, the latest code volleyed on the kernel mailing list for review is support for handling laptop lid events and power buttons. Plus Apple sensor monitoring driver support too...

Released minutes ago was the newest monthly feature release to the Intel Compute Runtime providing open-source OpenCL and Level Zero capabilities on Intel graphics hardware...

VKD3D 1.17 made its debut this morning as the newest version of this Direct3D 12 over Vulkan API implementation...

The open-source Panthor Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver providing the modern kernel graphics driver support for recent Arm Mali GPUs will be supporting a number of additional GPU models with the Linux 6.18 kernel later this year...

The first Linux kernel patches specific to their next-gen Vera Rubin NLV144 "VR144NVL" were posted today to the public Linux kernel mailing list...

David Rosca who started out as a contractor for AMD working on their open-source video encode/decode capabilities for Linux formally joined the company earlier this summer. He's continued to be quite busy plumbing numerous enhancements into their accelerated video support on Linux, which includes RADV with Vulkan Video...

The Libre-Chip project led by Jacob Lifshay has received a grant from NLNet to develop a prototype/proof-of-concept processor design that can be high performance but not vulnerable to speculative execution vulnerabilities like Spectre...

Systemd 258 is nearing release with many big changes to this init system / service manager. Systemd 258-rc3 was released today with some last minute fixes while also now adding that the next release, systemd 259, will face increased Linux system requirements...

AMD's GPUOpen team just released the FidelityFX SDK 2.0 development kit and with it is now the inclusion of the FidelityFX Super Resolution 4 (FSR 4) upscaling tech to complement the existing FSR 2 / FSR 3 support...

Following the release of Mesa 25.2 from two weeks ago, Mesa 25.2.1 is out now as the first point release. Mesa 25.2.1 is quite heavy on bug fixes and some other notable back-ports from Mesa 25.3-devel...

MoltenVK 1.4 is available today for this Vulkan portability implementation that layers the Vulkan API atop Apple's Metal graphics drivers for allowing Vulkan games/apps to run across macOS, iOS, and tvOS devices...

With the Ubuntu 25.10 release in October they are aiming to have a better ARM64 experience with their generic desktop ISO thanks to a new improvement they have been working on called Stubble...

LibreOffice 25.8 is now available as the latest half-year feature release to this open-source office suite that is one of the most comprehensive alternatives to Microsoft Office for Linux and other platforms...

Given the promising AMD Strix Halo benchmark results on Linux 6.17 following the recent merge window and early regression fixes landing in the kernel, I was curious to see how Linux 6.17 was fairing on more powerful AMD EPYC server hardware. Here is a brief look at some of the performance improvements found running EPYC 9005 "Turin" with the latest Linux 6.17 development kernel compared to Linux 6.16 stable...

One of the new hardware drivers expected to appear in the Linux 6.18 kernel later this year is the "us144mkii" USB sound driver for supporting the TASCAM US-144MKII USB audio interface...

AMD's GPUOpen HIPRT 3.0.9ba63f3 released today as the first update since HIPRT 2.5 shipped near the beginning of the year. HIPRT is AMD's ray-tracing library built around their HIP Interface for making it easier to enable ray-tracing workloads for HIP-based software like Blender...

Merged yesterday to the Chromium open-source codebase for the Google Chrome web browser is Wayland color management support! Linux users running on Wayland will now be able to enjoy high dynamic range (HDR) video playback within Google's web browser...

While Ubuntu 25.04 has been shipping since April and following software support already upstreamed into the Linux kernel and related virtualization components, Ubuntu maker Canonical today put out a blog post to announce their AMD SEV-SNP host support found in Ubuntu 25.04. This complements the guest-side support present since Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and is an important milestone on the host-side ahead of next year's Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release...

Tinygrad 0.11 is out as the newest version of this deep learning framework maintained by Tiny Corp...

As part of Intel's ongoing Project Battlematrix efforts that include SR-IOV support for Arc Pro cards as well as multi-device (multi-GPU) support for allowing up to eight Intel Arc Pro graphics cards in a single system, today Intel engineers posted their preliminary Linux driver patches for pinned device memory functionality that is important for multi-GPU usage...

One of the set of tests I have been meaning to carry out for a number of months has been comparing the Mesa Rusticl performance to different dedicated hardware drivers. Rusticl is the Rust-based OpenCL 3.0 driver within Mesa that works across Gallium3D drivers and over the past many months has been maturing rather well. Among the targets I have been wanting to compare is how well Rusticl competes with the AMD ROCm OpenCL implementation for Radeon GPUs. Given all the interest recently around Strix Halo and the Framework Desktop as well, today's benchmarking is looking at the performance between these different OpenCL driver implementations for the Radeon 8060S Graphics.

Bhyve is the BSD hypervisor / virtual machine manager (VMM) developed by FreeBSD that supports a range of operating systems and across CPU vendors. With time Bhyve has also been ported to other BSDs and even Illumos and macOS. The Linux kernel is now in the process of adding guest detection for the Bhyve hypervisor in order to support VMs with 255+ vCPUs...