Back in May the Ubuntu engineers at Canonical announced plans to ship Ubuntu 25.10 with Linux 6.17 given their recent commitment to always shipping with the latest upstream Linux kernel version . They still are committing to it even if it means the kernel and Ubuntu schedules don't perfectly align and Ubuntu 25.10 out-of-the-box may end up being on an unstable "-rc" kernel.

Brett Grandbois on the behalf of the Canonical Kernel Team announced today they anticipate

The upcoming FFmpeg 8.0 release continues to increase in excitement with this weekend Vulkan hardware acceleration for Apple's ProRes RAW codec being merged.

FFmpeg developer Lynne continues to be quite impressive with expanding the Vulkan capabilities of this widely-used, open-source multimedia library. Beyond the encode/decode support for different codecs like AV1 and VP9 backed by formal Vulkan API extensions, Lynne has also worked out using the Vulkan API to accelerate other codecs. There has been a FFV1 Vulkan decoder merged earlier this

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.

I will have up my feature overview of Linux 6.17 in the next day or two.

Debian 13.0 released yesterday while already Debian developers are beginning to think about Debian 14 as the next major release due out in 2027. Debian 14 is codenamed Forky and among the changes expected is LoongArch64 "Loong64" CPU port support being improved.

With the new Debian 13 release there is RISC-V support making its official debut while for Debian 14 it could be LoongArch64's turn.

Posted to the mailing list following this weekend's

In preparing for the GNOME 49 beta release, GNOME Shell this weekend released 49.beta.1 with a few changes worth highlighting.

First up, GNOME Shell is bringing media controls to the lock screen with GNOME 49! There has been this year-old merge request by Florian Müllner that resurrected an old code branch for bringing MPRIS controls to the lock screen. This stems from a 2018 ticket to allow showing music controls on the lock screen just as many other operating systems /

Ahead of the Linux 6.17-rc1 release due out in the coming hours, the Turbostat updates for that tool living within the kernel source tree were merged.

The Turbostat updates are among the final pull requests being honored today in marking off the two week long Linux 6.17 merge window. Turbostat for those unaware is a command-line tool for displaying CPU frequency/idle/power statistics and other relevant processor information primarily for Intel and AMD processors. Notable to Turbostat in Linux 6.1

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

Meta (Facebook) has long been one of the most prominent users of the Btrfs file-system. Meta employs a number of engineers working on the Btrfs file-system and for years have long been known to use it in production. That's not knew and there have been presentations in the past such as how Meta depends upon Btrfs for their "entire infrastructure":

Josef Bacik,

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

Debian 13 is powered by the Linux 6.12 LTS kernel, uses the GNOME 48 desktop by default, relies on the GCC 14.2 compiler by default, and has a wealth of other package upgrades like OpenJDK Java 21, Python 3.13, and many other updates.

The EFI code updates were merged today for the nearly-over Linux 6.17 kernel with two changes worth mentioning.

First up, the EFI pull landed the OVMF debug log driver to help with analyzing UEFI VM boot issues. Open Virtual Machine Firmware (OVMF) since edk2-stable202508 supports writing their debug log to a memory buffer. The new "ovmf-debug-log" driver in Linux 6.17 allows exposing that debug log memory buffer to Linux user-