Beta builds of the Blender 5.0 3D modeling software are now available ahead of the planned stable release in mid-November.

Today marks the first beta builds of Blender 5.0 and a shift by which Blender 5.0 is now focused just on bug-fixing and the code has been branched from main to "blender-v5.0-release". Blender's main Git repository is now working toward what will become Blender 5.1 next year.

Tvrtko Ursulin of Igalia has been leading the work on developing a "fair" DRM scheduler for Linux kernel graphics drivers. This scheduling algorithm is inspired by CFS and aims to improve the experience of running interactive graphical clients in parallel with heavy GPU workloads. This scheduler is inching closer to being ready for the mainline Linux kernel.

The Fair DRM Scheduler aims to schedule better than FIFO scheduling and avoiding priority starvation, a simplification over the existing code, and virtual GPU time based scheduling. The Fair DRM Scheduler has been showing off

The GNU Compiler Collection will be shifting to its "stage three" development in November as focusing more on bug fixing now and new ports and less on existing compiler functionality/features.

SUSE compiler engineer Richard Biener announced today that stage three will go into effect on 17 November. This stage of development is focused just on bug fixing and new ports not requiring changes to other parts of the compiler. New functionality for GCC should have been merged by then if it wants to be part of GCC 16.

Biener noted

In recent days there have been two rounds of Kernel-based Virtual Machine "KVM" feature updates to be merged for Linux 6.18 in enhancing the open-source virtualization stack.

KVM feature highlights for Linux 6.18 are particularly notable for AMD and Intel CPU users. The Linux 6.18 KVM feature additions include:

- Support for virtualizing Control-flow Enforcement Technology on x86/x86_64 KVM. This allows leveraging Shadow Stacks and Indirect Branch Tracking on Intel

In addition to the NTFS3 driver changes to land last week for the Linux 6.18 kernel, the exFAT file-system driver for that other Microsoft file-system has also seen some notable updates this cycle.

Microsoft's exFAT as their file-system choice for USB flash drives, SD cards, and other flash media continues seeing improvements for its Linux driver support. One improvement that stands out with exFAT in Linux 6.18 is to optimize the allocation bitmap loading time. This is the enhancement

Meta already has Zstd (Zstandard) compression while this week they announced the release of OpenZL as a new open-source, format-aware compression framework.

OpenZL aims to provide high compression ratios while maintaining high speed. High compression and high performance typically don't go hand-in-hand for generic compressors while OpenZL is format-aware in trying to leverage the best of both worlds using a specialized compressor depending upon the format.

OpenZL focuses on lossless compression for structured data and the performance of format-specific compressors

In addition to a lot of rust code merged last week for Linux 6.18, more Rust code has since landed by way of the char/misc pull request.

The char/misc pull request merged recently for Linux 6.18 Git includes Google's Binder driver now written in Rust . This is the successor to their C-based Binder driver long part of the Linux kernel and used by Android devices. Both the C and Rust versions of Binder will exist within the Linux kernel for a few

Python 3.14 is now available as the newest annual major feature release for the Python programming language.

Python 3.14 delivers on official support for the free-threaded Python code path, a new Zstd compression module, various performance improvements, a zero-overhead external debugger for Python, C API improvements, enhanced error messages a new opt-in interpreter, and many other enhancements.

- PEP 779: Free-threaded Python is officially supported
- PEP 649: The evaluation of annotations

AMD today announced the Ryzen Embedded 9000 series for industrial computing and automation platforms.

The Ryzen Embedded 9000 series is now available for industrial customers as an alternative to the conventional Ryzen 9000 series (non-Embedded) processors and the likes of the EPYC 4005 series.

The Ryzen Embedded 9000 series focus is on industrial PCs, automation systems, and machine vision applications. The Ryzen Embedded 9000 series will feature up to seven years of product