KDE Gear 25.08 is out this morning as the newest feature release to this collection of KDE applications.

Some of the highlights to find with today's KDE Gear 25.08 release include:

- The Akonadi engine powering many KDE productivity applications like Kontact and Merrkuro has seen its memory usage reduced by up to 75% for different resources.

- Akonadi also now better integrates with the Microsoft InTune enterprise authentication service as part of its Micrsoft Exchange support.

- Many improvements to the Dolphin file

Sent out today was the first DRM-Misc-Next pull request to DRM-Next for queuing ahead of the Linux 6.18 merge window opening around early October. There are a number of smaller DRM graphics driver improvements ready as well as continued work around the accelerator "accel" drivers for the increasing number of NPUs in devices.

Today's first drm-misc-next pull for the Linux 6.18 cycle includes now defaulting to using the NVIDIA GSP firmware by the Nouveau driver . As explained

Next year's LibreOffice 26.2 open-source office suite is set to better handle documents with restricted embedded fonts. This is for dealing with situations where fonts may have restricted licensing rights and where up to now LibreOffice Writer simply hasn't dealt with them correctly.

Opened back in 2021 was a bug report over the lack of information exposed to the user when some embedded fonts can't be used due to license restrictons on said embedded fonts:

"The sample file that the user provided

Tbe BeOS-inspired Haiku operating system has continued in advancing this open-source platform with more fixes and other enhancements. The project published its July recap to outline the interesting changes made.

July was a lighter month for development with Haiku but still there were some hardware support improvements and a variety of fixes made throughout the codebase for Haiku. Some of the July 2025 highlights for the project include:

- Improvements to behavior in malloc for better coping on 32-bit systems. This can fix GCC compilation

A change queued in drm-misc-next for DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 6.18 kernel cycle later this year is promoting the Nouveau driver for open-source NVIDIA GPU support to be using the GSP firmware by default. This reflects the reality that using the NVIDIA GPU System Processor "GSP" firmware with Turing and Ampere GPUs should provide a better experience than the older firmware alternative with Nouveau.

The Nouveau driver beginning on the Linux 6.18 kernel will begin using the GPU System Processor (

SR-IOV for virtualization with the Intel Xe kernel graphics driver will only be supported on the Arc Pro products and -- unfortunately -- not the consumer Arc B-Series graphics cards.

While SR-IOV will be found with Panther Lake Xe3 graphics and other select integrated graphics, when it comes to the Battlemage discrete graphics processors it will only be supported with the Arc Pro products.

Upstreamed for Linux 6.17 was enabling SR-IOV support for Battlemage GPUs with the Xe kernel graphics driver. That

While it looked like Linux 6.17 was going to be a good baseline for support with upcoming Intel Panther Lake powered laptops given that this next kernel release ships with the Xe3 graphics enabled by default and other bits coming together, it looks like there is at least one late item only being presented today in patch form: a new "SoC Power Slider" feature as part of the Intel thermal driver for this new feature of Panther Lake SoCs.

Missing out on Linux 6.17, which is unfortunate

Back during the Linux 6.17 merge window was an optimization geared for ARM64 that could have a "16x reduction" in the number of calls . Unfortunately that commit ended up causing a rather significant regression for some systems that has now been addressed.

Last week Intel's kernel test robot began reporting a 37% regression in one of the stress-ng kernel micro-benchmarks. Oracle engineer Lorenzo Stoakes was able to reproduce and from an Intel Raptor Lake system observed a 43%

Google engineers today introduced KFuzzTest as a new lightweight framework for in-kernel fuzz targets for internal kernel functions. KFuzzTest aims to make it easier to exercise Linux kernel code paths that are difficult to do from the system call boundary.

Google engineer Ethan Graham describes KFuzzTest as:

"This patch series introduces KFuzzTest, a lightweight framework for creating in-kernel fuzz targets for internal kernel functions.

The primary motivation for KFuzzTest is to simplify the fuzzing of low-level, relatively stateless functions (e.g., data parsers