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The open-source, Rust-based Redox OS operating system has published their April 2025 status report to outline interesting changes made over the past several weeks to this innovative project...

As part of fresh re-testing of existing laptops on-hand given the recent release of Ubuntu 25.04 and then also recent Linux reviews of some interesting models like the Framework Laptop 13 with AMD Strix Point and the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition, I have been running a lot of Linux laptop benchmarks the past few weeks. I ended up taking things a bit further after those reviews and have now extended it to a 21-way laptop comparison of AMD Ryzen and Intel Core SoCs from the past few generations in looking at their performance on Ubuntu 25.04 across more than 200 benchmarks.

Longtime Linux kernel developer Ingo Molnar sent out a patch series this morning to enable additional kernel features by default for the Linux default configuration "defconfig" on x86-based kernels. The defconfig improvements aim to reflect modern Linux x86 kernel use with various features commonly being enabled by distribution vendor kernels and related improvements...

Vulkan 1.4.314 is now available as the newest routine spec update for this high performance GPU graphics and compute API. With Vulkan 1.4.314 there are more early preparations toward Vulkan Roadmap 2026 in aiming for a baseline of high-end smartphones, computers, and more for next year...

Merged for Linux 6.15 was IO_uring network zero-copy receive "io_uring zcrx" while now on track for landing in Linux 6.16 is extending it to support passing DMA-BUF buffers...

Introduced last year for Linux 6.13 was lazy preemption "PREEMPT_LAZY" for a preemption model that is similar to full preemption but less eager to preempt normal scheduler tasks to provide some of the performance benefits found with voluntary preemption. After initially being supported for x86_64 and RISC-V, it looks like Linux 6.16 will support lazy preemption on ARM64 (AArch64)...

One week ago FFmpeg merged decode support for Samsung's Advanced Professional Video "APV" codec. APV is designed for professional-grade video recording purposes and is a royalty-free video codec geared for prosumers. Now arriving within FFmpeg Git is APV video encode support...

The fifth weekly release candidate of the Linux 6.15 kernel is now available for testing...

For those that happen to have the ASUS ROG MAXIMUS Z690 FORMULA or are shopping for a higher-end Intel Alder Lake / Raptor Lake desktop motherboard for Linux use, the ROG MAXIMUS Z690 FORMULA is the latest motherboard seeing hardware sensor monitoring support under Linux with the next version of the kernel...

The EXT2 file-system's direct access "DAX" mode is being deprecated and expected for removal at the end of 2025, after this year's Long Term Support (LTS) kernel version...

In addition to Bcachefs working on better self-healing / automatic repair capabilities, this modern copy-on-write file-system is also working on faster snapshot deletion performance. A patch series was posted this week to speed-up the deletion of snapshots though it comes with another bump to the on-disk format of the file-system...

As another alternative to the likes of the SiFive HiFive Premier P550 RISC-V developer board, the Andes Voyager is in the process of seeing patches reviewed for mainline Linux kernel support...

The QEMU processor emulator that plays an important role in the open-source Linux virtualization stack has been seeing experimental support for the Rust programming language developing within its codebase. There continues to be good progress being made on this Rust support as more QEMU components get ported over to this programming language for memory safety and other security benefits...

Labwc 0.8.4 is out as the newest stable update to this wlroots-based, window-stacking Wayland compositor...

Blueprint is a currently-experimental markup language and compiler for crafting GTK4 user interfaces. Blueprint allows declaratively creating GTK UIs and aims to be a very easy and nice developer experience...

NVIDIA CUDA 12.9 is now available as the newest minor feature update to NVIDIA's GPU compute stack. CUDA 12.9 adds compiler targetr support for SM 10.3 and 12.1, compiler support for "family-specific architectures", new NVML counters being exposed, and other minor feature improvements. The NVIDIA CUDA 12.9 documentation is also now more verbose in encouraging anyone still relying on Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta hardware to upgrade...

The first beta release of FreeBSD 14.3 was released on Friday night for testing. FreeBSD 14.3 will become the newest stable release this summer while later in 2025 we can look forward to the big FreeBSD 15.0 release...

The KDE Plasma developer sprint in Graz wrapped up just days ago but there's still been no shortage of new feature work landing into Plasma 6.4 this week. It was another exciting week of feature development as the soft feature freeze approaches for Plasma 6.4...

Wine 10.7 is out today as the newest bi-weekly release of this open-source software for running Windows games and applications on Linux and other platforms...

Sent out a few minutes ago was the latest batch of AMDGPU graphics and AMDKFD compute kernel driver feature patches for DRM-Next in getting ready for the Linux 6.16 merge window opening in a few weeks. This pull request contains a big new feature: the initial albeit currently experimental support for AMDGPU user mode queues...