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The x86 platform driver updates have been merged for the ongoing Linux 6.14 merge window. As usual the x86 platform driver updates are predominantly to benefit the many different Intel/AMD laptops out there with various OEM vendor features/functionality. Plus within the platform-drivers-x86 space is a growing number of AMD SoC drivers for not only laptops but also desktops/servers...

With now having a Linux driver for running GPU compute workloads on the GeForce RTX 5090 (as mentioned, Linux gaming benchmarks will come following the formal R570 Linux driver release in the coming days that is better optimized for gaming), I ran some additional GPU compute benchmarks on the GeForce RTX 5090 "Blackwell" graphics card over the weekend...

In addition to all of the exciting "MM" changes for Linux 6.14 that were submitted by Andrew Morton's pull request, he also sent out the set of "non-MM" updates for the Linux 6.14 merge window...

The hardware monitoring "HWMON" subsystem updates have been merged for the Linux 6.14 kernel. As happens with most kernel releases, there are a number of already-launched desktop motherboards beginning to see working sensor monitoring support under Linux...

In a blog post dated for this past Thursday but only being made public on Sunday night, Microsoft issued an announcement open-sourcing their new NoSQL database... Where it gets weirder is that it's named DocumentDB. Amazon also has a database offering named DocumentDB albeit proprietary...

While many Linux distribution vendor kernels are already using SHA-512 for signing modules by default rather than the default SHA-1, the upstream Linux 6.14 kernel is also now switching the default over to using SHA-512 for better security...

For those looking for a heatsink fan to cool a custom build of an Ampere Altra / Altra Max server or workstation, the ARCTIC Freezer 4U-M ends up being a very potent option that offers similar performance to more expensive Ampere Altra heatsinks while providing similar performance.

While the main feature pull of new and updated kernel graphics/accelerator drivers were merged already for the ongoing Linux 6.14 merge window, an additional set of AMDGPU changes were sent out this week for squeezing into this next kernel release...

A set of patches being worked on by Oracle engineers allow for optionally sharing page table entries (PTEs) between processes. For some workloads this can equate to very significant memory savings...

A half-year-old merge request from Igalia's Karmjit Mahil has been merged for Mesa 25.0 that is a Vulkan layer allowing for optionally limiting the amount of video memory reported to games/applications...

Merged this week for the Linux 6.14 kernel were the various sound/audio driver updates. In addition to core API enhancements for better supporting the MIDI 2.0 specification, there is also support for some new audio hardware...

The RDMA subsystem updates have been merged for the Linux 6.14 kernel with a light set of changes overall and the most significant being support for the ROCEv2 protocol within the ERDMA driver...

The Shotcut open-source video editor is out with its first new release of 2025...

The Intel Media Driver 2024Q4 release was tagged this Saturday as the quarterly update to Intel's open-source Video Acceleration API (VA-API) driver for Linux systems...

ISD is a new open-source project aiming to provide a more "Interactive SystemD" for simplifying management of Linux systems with systemd...

Alongside the power management and thermal driver updates this week for the ongoing Linux 6.14 kernel cycle were also the ACPI updates. The ACPI pull request was worth calling out on its own thanks to a change that will allow for faster suspend and resume cycles on some systems with this new kernel...

All of the Human Interface Device (HID) subsystem updates have been merged for the ongoing Linux 6.14 merge window...

The SUSE/openSUSE Agama Installer is a modern web UI driven installer for the SUSE/openSUSE Linux distributions. It's modern, sports a cleaner UI and underlying architecture, and supports more features. The Agama 11 installer update was released this week in preparing for the upcoming SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 16 beta with this new installer as well as new openSUSE Leap 16 builds...

The EFI updates have been merged for the Linux 6.14 kernel. The EFI updates this cycle aren't the most exciting but the kernel has finally bid farewell to the long obsolete UGA graphics protocol support...

This week saw an updated KDE Plasma 6.3 beta release and more bug fixing taking place there while also beginning to see early feature work toward the follow-on Plasma 6.4 desktop...