Next-generation AMD server SoCs -- presumably the AMD EPYC "Venice" on Zen 6 -- is poised to introduce a firmware-agnostic platform configuration platform configuration change method/format. This is This aims to improve server platform interoperability and eliminate redundant configuration efforts for different firmware solutions.

With next-gen AMD platforms we are very much looking forward to openSIL as AMD's replacement to AGESA across their product portfolio. Beyond openSIL, AMD engineers have been engaging in other interesting firmware efforts too like openSFI . It

Natalie Vock as one of the open-source developers on Valve's Linux graphics team has been spearheading another big ray-tracing performance improvement for the AMD Radeon Vulkan driver. RADV ray-tracing performance improved a lot in 2025 but it's looking like 2026 could be even more exciting.

This past weekend Valve contractor Natalie Vock opened a Mesa merge request to rework the launch ID swizzling of the RADV ray-tracing code to fix Unreal Engine 5's Lumen illumination and reflection system

A new feature in the queue for likely introduction with the next version of the Linux kernel (Linux 6.20~7.0) is compiler-based context and locking analysis. This kernel code depends on the yet-to-be-released LLVM Clang 22 compiler but can provide some powerful insights to kernel developers.

Marco Elver of Google has been working on this compiler-based context and locking analysis of the kernel using static analysis on kernel primitives.

Marco explained of this powerful functionality in the current

For those with Acer laptops running Linux on GitHub there has been an out-of-tree driver providing an experimental "acer-wmi-battery" kernel module to allow controlling battery-related features. Now a cleaned-up version of that driver is working on getting into the mainline Linux kernel.

The acer-wmi-battery driver the past two years has lived on GitHub as an out-of-tree, experimental driver for battery health controls. The functionality aims to match what is available in the Acer Care

Back in October was an initial proposal for a DRM splash screen client for the Linux kernel that would be primarily useful for embedded systems for rendering a simple "splash screen" when updating the system firmware/software, early display activation at boot, during system recovery, or similar processes. Sent out today was a second revision to the DRM splash screen code.

There is already Plymouth as a great boot splash screen solution for Linux systems while this DRM splash screen primarily aims to fill different niches mainly in the embedded space when

The Linux kernel's " new mount API " that has been in the kernel since 2019 and recently made rounds for taking 6+ years to land the man page documentation on it will soon be the the only mount API internally within the kernel. Removing the "old" Linux kernel mount API internals is a candidate for the upcoming Linux 7.0 kernel cycle.

Christian Brauner has queued a patch by Red Hat's Eric Sandeen to remove the kernel-internal portion of the old mount API code

The Gentoo Linux project published their 2025 retrospective this week with their many accomplishments, including the recruitment of four more developers and now being up to 31,663 ebuilds and a total of 89GB worth of x86_64 binary packages on mirrors.

Gentoo in 2025 moved away from GitHub to the Forgejo-based Codeberg in order to avoid Microsoft Copilot usage of their repositories. On the financial front, Gentoo moved their financial structure over to Software in the Public

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has approved a Fedora 44 change for switching all KDE variants away from using the SDDM display manager to instead use the newer Plasma Login Manager.

Over the past year KDE developers have been developing the Plasma Login Manager as a modern alternative to SDDM and looking at GNOME's GDM as the "gold standard" for log-in/display managers.

The Rust-written Redox OS operating system had an exciting end to the year as it began developing its own native Intel graphics driver.

Redox OS lead developer and System76 engineer Jeremy Soller has begun creating an Intel graphics driver for Redox OS as an alternative to the current generic and unaccelerated BIOS VESA / UEFI GOP display handling for this Rust open-source OS. Before getting too excited, at this stage the Redox OS Intel graphics driver is just around mode-setting support and doesn't yet provide any hardware