Following the Linux 6.16 kernel release from Sunday evening, GNU Linux-libre 6.16-gnu is now available for that kernel downstream that strips out driver/kernel code dependent upon non-free-software microcode/firmware, the ability to load proprietary kernel modules, and carving out other bits of the Linux kernel not meeting their stringent free software standards.

For the GNU Linux-libre 6.16-gnu release they have had to deal with Intel CPU microcode changes, the NOVA and

As anticipated the Linux 6.16 kernel was promoted to stable. Linux 6.16 now greets the world with various performance improvements, NVIDIA Hopper and Blackwell open-source GPU driver support in Nouveau, Intel Advanced Performance Extensions (APX) preparations, and many other exciting enhancements.

Linux 6.16 is a great kernel update for the summer of 2025. I've already covered the Linux 6.16 highlights at length within the feature overview article of Linux 6.16

The modern AMD Kernel graphics driver consisting of AMDGPU, the AMDKFD compute code, and associated infrastructure continues to easily be the largest mainline open-source driver. With the Linux 6.16 kernel debuting as stable as soon as later today, the AMD kernel graphics driver cracks the 5.9 million line threshold. In comparison, the entire Linux kernel source tree comes in at

The Linux 6.16 Git state as of today has the drivers/gpu/drm/amd area above 5.9 million lines

In advance of the Linux 6.17 merge window expected to open soon following the Linux 6.16 release, all of the SoC updates have been submitted to Linus Torvalds for this next kernel version.

There are new Arm and RISC-V SoCs being supported with Linux 6.17 plus enabling a number of new laptops, developer boards, smartphones, and other devices. The SoC highlights of what's been submitted ahead of the Linux 6.17 merge window includes:

- New SoC support

A few days back I wrote about Canonical releasing new Ubuntu 25.04 "Concept" ISOs for the Snapdragon X laptops with the new install images being re-based to the Linux 6.16 kernel and expanding the device support. But as I found out from my own testing, depending upon the laptop the support was still less than ideal. Since then there have been two more ISO releases and addressing one of my show-stopping problems albeit encountering another.

The plucky-desktop-arm64

GNU Binutils 2.45 was released on Sunday morning as the newest version of this set of open-source binary tools.

A common theme of work around GNU Binutils 2.45 is continued work around SFrame support for lightweight stack tracking and overcoming the run-time performance cost of involving frame pointers and the impact of losing a general purpose register.

In GNU Binutils 2.45 the Gas assembler delivers:

- Various SFrame stack trace information improvements.

- Adding .errif and .warnif directives for user-

There are a few AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization improvements on the way for the Linux 6.17 kernel worth noting.

Sean Christopherson of Google sent out all the KVM x86 changes this weekend for Linux 6.17. Those changes were submitted to the Kernel-based Virtual Machine maintainer Paolo Bonzini of Red Hat. Notable with the KVM x86 changes this cycle are some AMD SEV optimizations as well as continued work on Intel TDX.

Most notable on the AMD side is smarter cache flushing for AMD SEV

Shotcut 25.07 is out today as the newest feature release for this prominent open-source and cross-platform video editing solution.

The Shotcut 25.07 video editor brings a new speech-to-text model downloader, new and improved UI themes, and a new outline video filter as the most prominent changes. The speech-to-text support continues to be focused around the Whisper.cpp GGML models.

Shotcut 25.07 also brings other UI enhancements, a soft focus

Assuming no objections are raised by Linus Torvalds, an early pull request has been submitted for the upcoming Linux 6.17 merge window to address an obscure kernel limitation that has been in place going back all the way to 1993 during the Linux v0.99 kernel days.

A Linux engineer working at Alibaba recently reported on a script-generated Assembly file that when built by the GCC compiler and running as an ELF file would cause odd problems. This ELF file would fail to run on Linux