Michael Larabel

Linus Torvalds has used his authority to reject the RISC-V architecture changes for the Linux 6.17 kernel. The RISC-V updates won't land this cycle and will need to try again for v6.18 later in the year. Linus refers to at least some of the proposed RISC-V code as garbage along with being submitted rather late during the merge window.

Amid the ongoing discussion over what will happen too Bcachefs in the mainline Linux kernel, an interesting anecdote around Btrfs was mentioned.

Well, it's an unpleasant afternoon in Linux land with more signs of the ongoing impact from Intel's corporate-wide restructuring. Just after writing about Intel's CPU temperature monitoring driver now left unmaintained/orphaned, more patches hit the public Linux kernel mailing list to mark additional Intel drivers as orphaned and removing maintainer entries for Linux developers no longer at Intel.

Several years ago Google engineers began exploring address space isolation for the Linux kernel and ultimately proposing Linux ASI for better dealing with CPU speculative execution attacks. While the hope was it would better cope with the ever growing list of CPU speculative execution vulnerabilities, the effort was thwarted initially by I/O throughput seeing a 70% performance hit. That level of performance cost was unsustainable. But now that I/O overhead has been reduced to just 13%.

There is yet more apparent fallout from Intel's recent layoffs/restructurings as it impacts the Linux kernel... The coretemp driver that provides CPU core temperature monitoring support for all Intel processors going back many years is now set to an orphaned state with the former driver maintainer no longer at Intel and no one immediately available to serve as its new maintainer.

The upcoming FFmpeg 8.0 multimedia library release continues to get more exciting almost by the day. The newest feature being squeezed into this next release is a Whisper audio filter for making use of OpenAI's Whisper model for providing automatic speech recognition / transcription capabilities.

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.

A patch series posted overnight that is part of a larger planned rework for the kernel to introduce a "Swap Table" is poised to bring significant real-world performance gains to the Linux kernel.

The AMD Radeon RX 480 / RX 580 "Polaris" graphics cards remain very popular on the Steam Survey and among enthusiasts/desktop users at large even though they are nearly a decade old. The nine year old Polaris graphics cards have aged well in the marketplace and are an affordable choice. For Linux users they continue enjoying strong open-source driver support. It turns out Linux creator Linus Torvalds himself is still relying on an AMD Radeon RX 580 with one of his main systems.

The EXT4 file-system enhancements for Linux 6.17 were merged on Thursday and bring better scalability to the block allocation code as well as fixing the file-system's large folios support. The scalability work can show some wild gains in select areas.

Newelle is a virtual AI assistant developed for the GNOME desktop that supports voice chat and can handle carrying out web searches, terminal command execution, website reading, file management, document editing, and more. Newell v1.0 was released this week for advancing this GNOME AI virtual assistant.

Following this weekend's release of Debian 13.0 "Trixie", Debian GNU/Hurd 2025 has been released as the state of Trixie while running atop Hurd rather than Linux.

FFmpeg 8.0 is now available! FFmpeg 8.0 is a magnificent update to this widely-used open-source multimedia library and with this new version is the introduction of an OpenAI Whisper filter for automatic speech recognition, many Vulkan Video improvements for greater GPU-accelerated video handling, and a number of CPU performance optimizations.

As has been the trend with recent Linux kernel releases, a lot of Rust programming language abstractions and other additions are coming for the in-development Linux 6.17 kernel.

As another very unfortunate setback for the Asahi Linux project moving forward after Hector Martin left the project as did Asahi Lina pausing work on open-source Apple driver development, Alyssa Rosenzweig announced today that she is stepping away from the project following the successes in bringing up Apple M1 and M2 graphics drivers for Linux.

Linus Torvalds just released the Linux 6.17-rc1 kernel a few hours ahead of his typical release regiment due to currently being in Europe. That marks the end of the Linux 6.17 merge window with many exciting changes merged this cycle. This is notable with Linux 6.17 expected to power Ubuntu 25.10 and other late 2025 Linux distribution releases.

Ahead of the upcoming FFmpeg 8.0 release for this widely-used, open-source multimedia library some more last minute features continue to land. Hitting FFmpeg Git today are some Vulkan Video additions.

KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his customary weekend blog post to summarize all the interesting Plasma desktop developments for the week. Most exciting in recent days is Plasma 6.5 receiving an initial system setup wizard.

Debian 13.0 "Trixie" is now officially out as the newest two-year stable release to Debian GNU/Linux.

Back in February Steam on Linux was at a 1.45% marketshare, then was corrected to 2.33% for Linux gaming in March, 2.27% for April, a nice jump to 2.69% for Linux gaming in May, and June came in at 2.57% for the Linux gaming population as a percent of Steam users. The July numbers were published this evening and show a new recent high for Linux gamers.

Microsoft formally announced today its newest open-source project: Wassette. The Wassette is MIT-licensed and includes Linux and macOS support alongside Windows while being a Rust+WebAssembly-based project focused on securing AI agents.

The GNOME 49 beta release is out this Friday evening as the next stepping stone on the path to GNOME 49 in September. Making the GNOME 49 Beta release even more notable is that it's the 28th birthday of GNOME.

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.

KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his weekly report on the interesting Plasma desktop changes for the week. This week a long-sought feature for the Plasma desktop was finally merged.

The folks at iXsystems announced this afternoon that nightly builds of TrueNAS 25.10 are now available for testing of this Linux-based network attached storage (NAS) operating system. With TrueNAS 25.10 there are more performance improvements, improved installation process, initial support for 400GbE networking, and other enhancements to this ZFS-focused platform.