The patch series in the works for a while to provide the necessary kernel abstractions for the Rust programming language to actually implement real device drivers looks like it will finally premiere in the Linux 6.14 kernel cycle...

It's been a few months since hearing anything new out of Serpent OS, the original Linux distribution led by Ikey Doherty, who started Solus Linux and also was involved with Intel's Clear Linux. As a Christmas surprise, Serpent OS has now reached the alpha stage of development...

Eric Biggers of Google who has pursued countless CPU optimizations within the Linux kernel's crypto subsystem over the years has some noteworthy optimizations coming for AMD processors with the upcoming Linux 6.14 kernel cycle...

Intel engineers are working on contributing upstream support to the GNU Debugger (GDB) for debugging software running on Intel GPUs...

Linux 6.13 cleared out more than 100k lines of old and unmaintained code while that end of year code cleaning isn't stopping... With Linux 6.14 at least another old and seemingly useless driver is being gutted from the input subsystem: evbug...

AMD has squeezed in one more open-source Vulkan driver update for the year to benefit Linux gamers and others wanting to use this official AMD Vulkan Linux driver option...

This past week Intel published an Intel Core Ultra 200S Series "Arrow Lake" performance status update following mixed reviews since launch around the Arrow Lake gaming performance that were inconsistent with Intel's internal findings. Among Intel's findings detailed in their report this past week were some new BIOS performance optimizations, some misconfigured performance settings in early/reviewer BIOSes, and also some Windows 11 updates being pushed down to help with different performance issues. ASUS already started releasing new BIOSes that incorporate the 0x114 Arrow Lake intended to help the situation. While it's been a Windows-focused issue, I couldn't help but to run Intel Arrow Lake performance comparison benchmarks on Linux with the new microcode / BIOS.

Linus Torvalds just released the Linux 6.13-rc4 kernel as the newest weekly test release leading up to Linux 6.13 stable by mid to late January...

OpenShot 3.3 is out today as the newest feature release for this popular open-source video editor. This Qt-based cross-platform non-linear video editor has a new default theme and many other enhancements in time for editing any of your year-end or holiday videos...

Since AMD Zen 3 processors there has been the INVLPGB instruction for invalidating TLB entries for a range of pages with broadcast. As mentioned back during the AMD EPYC 7003 "Milan" launch, INVLPGB usage around this new instruction was limited... Over the past nearly four years the INVLPGB use has been limited in part because Intel CPUs do not support it but there is now a Linux kernel patch series for making use of INVLPGB for some nice performance benefits...

Intel processors have long identified in the Family 6 series going back to the 1990s but over the past number of months Intel engineers have been adapting the Linux kernel to prepare for a post Family 6 Intel CPU era for the model/family CPU identification handling. Patches posted in September introduced Diamond Rapids support as the first Intel Family 19 CPU while new patches for the Linux kernel are indicating Intel will be using both Family 18 and Family 19 identification for future processor models...

Merged this week to the LLVM Git codebase ahead of next year's LLVM 20 release is a simple telemetry framework...

For those interested in making use of Linux on the Qualcomm Snapdragon X1 Elite laptops that have been appearing since earlier this year, there's a new embedded controller (EC) driver posted for the Linux kernel for this EC that's found on most of the X1 laptop models...

For devoted SysVinit users trying to avoid systemd still on Linux systems in 2025, SysVinit 3.12 has been released for the holidays with the latest fixes to this open-source init system...

Debuting as a new development release today was XDG-Desktop-Portal 1.19.1 as this portal front-end service for Flatpak sandboxed apps and other desktop containment frameworks. The XDG-Desktop-Portal 1.19.1 milestone is exposing new and expanded portal capabilities for dealing with various hardware devices and APIs...

In time for editing any end-of-year/holiday photos, Darktable 5.0 is out today as a major update to this open-source RAW photography workflow application...

The CachyOS December 2024 update is out today as the newest monthly release to this performance-optimized, Arch Linux based operating system...

The latest work that Raspberry Pi is working to upstream to the mainline Linux kernel is a HEVC/H.265 video decode driver that works on Raspberry Pi 4 and Raspberry Pi 5 single board computers...

The widely-used Curl project has removed support for its Rust-written Hyper HTTP back-end that they were experimentally shipping for several years. The removal of this Rust back-end comes from having little end-user and developer interest in this portion of the code...

AdaptiveCpp 24.10 is out today as this implementation of SYCL and C++ standard parallelism for CPUs and GPUs across hardware vendors. This compiler for C++ heterogeneous programming models has tacked on more features and additional performance optimizations with this update...