The intel-speed-select tool that lives within the Linux kernel source tree for allowing some control over Intel Speed Select Technology (SST) and managing of clock frequencies / performance behavior will finally allow limited non-root usage.

Ahead of the Linux 6.20~7.0 kernel cycle, a pull request to the x86 platform driver maintainers has been submitted with updates to the intel-speed-select tool.

Most notable with the intel-speed-select tool update is beginning to allow for

A new BSD on the block is ChaosBSD that intends to serve as a testing distribution for unfinished and broken drivers not suitable for upstreaming to FreeBSD proper.

ChaosBSD is a downstream fork of FreeBSD that is self-described as:

"A Driver Proving Ground

ChaosBSD is a fork of FreeBSD. It exists because upstream cannot, and should not, accept broken drivers, half-working hardware, vendor trash, or speculative hacks.

We can."

ChaosBSD aims to be an "abuse lab" for hardware, a staging ground

With the Linux 6.19-rc6 kernel release due out later today there will be a number of sound fixes/workarounds to note from the ASUS ROG Xbox Ally X gaming handheld to several newer laptops seeing fixes for their audio support.

Merged on Friday was the latest batch of sound fixes for the in-development Linux 6.19 kernel. One item previously covered on Phoronix is avoiding audio problems on the ASUS ROG Xbox Ally X . By skipping the calibration process and instead just relying on calibration data

Synex is a Linux distribution that's been around for some months as a Debian-based, minimalistic Linux distribution out of Argentina focused on the needs of small and medium businesses. Making it a bit more intriguing for some now is that with their new release based on Debian 13 is a server edition and they have added native OpenZFS file-system support for new installations.

Synex got its start last year and has been tracking Debian 13. To this point it featured MATE, KDE, IceWM, LXDE,

On Friday AMD sent out another set of AMDGPU kernel graphics driver and AMDKFD kernel compute driver patches for queuing in DRM-Next ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.20~7.0 kernel cycle kicking off in February.

Already queued in DRM-Next ahead of this next Linux kernel merge window is enabling new graphics IP for upcoming products, including an additional RDNA 3.5 target and preparing for the little-detailed GFX12.1 RDNA4-based hardware.

With this week's pull request

FreeBSD 15.0 had been aiming to offer a KDE desktop installation option as part of the FreeBSD OS installer. This initiative as part of the FreeBSD laptop support enhancements project didn't pan out in time for FreeBSD 15.0 but now they are working on getting the installer option ready for FreeBSD 15.1. Adding a NVIDIA GPU driver option to the FreeBSD installer was also recently carried out.

Rather than just always installing a command-line/text only FreeBSD installation and then manually installing the

CVE-2026-0915 was published on Friday as a security issue with the GNU C Library "glibc" for code introduced 30 years ago. The latest Glibc Git code is now patched for this issue introduced in 1996.

The oss-security bulletin sums up the issue as the getnetbyaddr and getnetbyaddr_r functions leaking the stack contents to the DNS resovler. It does note though that it is rare to call these APIs with a network value of zero and for an

KDE developers have been quite busy this week in preparing for the upcoming Plasma 6.6 release in February while also beginning to land features for what will be the Plasma 6.7 desktop.

This Week in Plasma is out with its newest issue and some of the Plasma highlights for the past week include from Plasma 6.6 and 6.7 features to various fixes and more:

The Shotcut 26.1 beta was released overnight as the newest version of this Qt6-based, cross-platform video editing solution. Standing out the most with this new development release are some new GPU-accelerated hardware decode options for aiming to help speed-up this free software video editor.

First up for the Preview Scaling there is now the option to use hardware decoding and it defaults to on. For Shotcut on Linux this will use the Video Acceleration API (VA-API) while on Microsoft Windows