While not talked about as much as the Intel CPU security mitigations, Intel graphics security mitigations have added up over time that if disabling Intel graphics security mitigations for their GPU compute stack for OpenCL and Level Zero can yield a 20% performance boost. Ubuntu maker Canonical in cooperation with Intel is preparing to disable these security mitigations in the Ubuntu packages in order to recoup this lost performance.

I haven't looked at the Intel graphics security mitigation costs as closely as on the CPU side but apparently now it's up

The 3mdeb firmware consulting firm recently hosted another one of their virtual events about open-source firmware and beer . There they talked about AMD's ongoing work around OpenSIL for open-source CPU silicon initialization. In addition, they shared work on an experimental port of OpenSIL back to Zen 1 processors.

AMD began prototyping OpenSIL for Zen 4 processors and have been continuing to experiment with the newer Ryzen/EPYC processors. We still are awaiting the Zen 5 proof-of-concept code that was supposed to be out

Prominent KDE developer Nate Graham put out a blog post today reaffirming the KDE Plasma's intent that Wayland is their main focus and X11 support continues to be maintained but eventually it will go away. Nate Graham also noted around 73% of KDE Plasma 6 users are already using the Wayland session.

Nate Graham in his blog post today conveniently sums up the current KDE Plasma X11 session support as:

- We’ll make sure Plasma continues to compile and deploy on X11.
- Bug

Ahead of the all-important Ubuntu 26.04 LTS cycle, Canonical is looking to raise the required RISC-V ISA baseline for its Ubuntu 25.10 release due out later this year.

Canonical developers are planning for Ubuntu 25.10 to raise the required RISC-V ISA profile baseline to RVA23 that was ratified last year.

This Week in GNOME is out with its latest issue that outlines some UI progress made as well as addressing an aging GNOME bug that could result in not all files/directories being properly removed when emptying the Trash from the GNOME desktop.

Among the GNOME highlights for the past week include the GNOME Settings app has been ported to the Blueprint UI definition files. The developers hope this Blueprint port will make it more approachable to newcomers. The Blueprint UI approach is still considered experimental but now GNOME Settings follows GNOME Calendar in being initial

XLibre 25.0 was just released as the first tagged release of this recent X.Org Server fork.

XLibre 25.0 comes with various code clean-ups, some of which were reverted from upstream xorg-server code due to various issues, as well as work on some new functionality. Noted changes with XLibre 25.0 include:

a) Xnamespace extension: a novel approach for isolating clients from different security domains (eg. containers) into separate X11 namespaces, where they can

KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his weekly blog post summarizing all of the interesting KDE Plasma developments for the past week. Notable this week was the debut of Plasma 6.4 stable and from early user feedback appears to be in good shape.

Nate Graham wrote of initial user feedback and bug reports on Plasma 6.4:

"So far it’s been getting a really positive reception. The bug reports bear this out; most of the real actual bugs reported against 6.4.0 are either pre

A number of AMD firmware/microcode updates were upstreamed today to the linux-firmware.git repository, including introducing the AMD Instinct MI350 series files that are necessary for the open-source Linux compute driver stack to function for those newly-announced Instinct accelerators.

This merge just hit linux-firmware.git a few minutes ago for updating many AMDGPU microcode files of existing Radeon GPUs as well as Instinct accelerators -- most notable being the inclusion of the AMD Instinct MI350 series microcode files.

Going back to January of 2023 there were the initial Intel patches for the Linux kernel introducing Linear Address Space Separation (LASS). Two and a half years later, these Intel LASS patches remain in-development with today the sixth iteration of these patches having been posted.

Intel's Linear Address Space Separation is designed to harden the operating system against various classes of side-channel exploits. LASS support on the CPU side first premiered with Sierra Forest processors and has continued with the Xeon 6 line-up