Announced just once month ago was Wayback as an X11 compatibility layer build atop Wayland components . In the past month Wayback has been off to a quick start with a goal of being production-ready next year and has also already became a project under the FreeDesktop.org umbrella . Today marks the release of Wayback 0.1 as the first preview release for this X11 compatibility layer.

For those that missed the prior articles about Wayback, the open-source project sums itself up as:

"Wayback is

Systemd 257 debuted last December and now finally systemd 258 is preparing to roll out... Systemd 258-rc1 was issued today as the first test release toward this next major release. It's a big one with more than 260 changes noted in the announcement, including multiple new tools and other additions.

Systemd 258 is going to be a big one for H2'2025 Linux distributions and beyond. There is a lot of new features

The Zed open-source code editor that is written in Rust, has begun supporting Linux rather well , and has continued tacking on new features to assist developer workflows has introduced another new feature: the ability to easily disable all AI features.

For more than one year now since Zed began adding various AI coding features there have been requests by users to be able to disable all of these AI features. Whether it's for privacy/security reasons, environmental impact, training data, and/or other reasons. Zed

In addition to Blender 5.0 supporting HDR on Linux when using the Vulkan API and with Wayland , another important high dynamic range (HDR) milestone landed this week into Blender: the ability to both import and export HDR videos.

Opened all the way back in March 2024 was the pull request Video: HDR video input/output support . This week that pull request by Aras Pranckevicius was finally merged to Blender Git for Blender 5.0's release later this year.

Eric Engestrom just released Mesa 25.2-rc2 as the newest, on-time weekly release candidate for this quarter's Mesa 25.2 feature series.

A number of fixes have landed since last week's Mesa 25.2-rc1 release that also marked the code branching / feature freeze . Some of the latest backports and fixes that are new to Mesa 25.2-rc2 include:

- The Intel Wildcat Lake support in Mesa for open-source OpenGL and

With the Linux 6.16 stable kernel potentially being released this coming Sunday, the Linux 6.17 merge window is quickly approaching. Btrfs maintainer and SUSE engineer David Sterba sent out the Btrfs pull request already of new feature code for this copy-on-write file-system in Linux 6.17 .

An experimental configuration option is introduced for enabling large folios for data that has the potential of enhancing Btrfs performance. This large folio support for Btrfs is experimental for now as it's getting close

For those making use of Open Virtual Machine Firmware (OVMF) such as for UEFI booting of VMs with KVM+QEMU, the upcoming Linux 6.17 kernel is set to offer a convenient new driver to help in debugging the system boot when needed.

Open Virtual Machine Firmware (OVMF) since edk2-stable202508 supports writing their debug log to a memory buffer. Coming with Linux 6.17 in turn is the "ovmf-debug-log" driver that when enabled

Pogocache 1.0 was released today as a fast open-source caching software that aims for low latency and great CPU efficiency. Pogocache supports Memcache / Valkey / Redis / HTTP / Postgres wire protocols while claiming to offer much better throughput and lower latency than these caching alternatives.

Pogocache 1.0 is open-source under an AGPLv3 license and claims to outperform the likes of Memcache, Garnet, Dragonfly, Valkey, and Redis. Here are some of the Pogocache benchmarks claimed by its developer:

Cloud Hypervisor is the open-source, Rust-based VMM started originally by Intel engineers but under the stewardship of the Linux Foundation has evolved into a nice multi-vendor initiative with the likes of Microsoft, Cyberus, Arm, and others all contributing. Even with Intel's cutbacks due to their ongoing corporate restructuring, the Cloud Hypervisor project is thriving as a multi-vendor open-source project for a security-focused hypervisor.

Cloud Hypervisor 47 was released on Tuesday and brings block device error reporting to guests