The Armbian Linux project introduced today a new utility called Armbian Imager for flashing the Armbian operating system to your single-board computer.

Opus 1.6 open-source audio codec introduces 96 kHz Opus HD support, ML-based bandwidth extension, improved redundancy, and more.

Kubernetes 1.35, dubbed ‘Treenetes,’ delivers in-place pod resource adjustments, a capability that benefits AI training workloads and edge computing deployments.

Intel’s Video Processing Library “libvpl” is out with a new version ahead of the holidays. The only major change with libvpl 2.16 is adding experimental APIs for AI-assisted video encode functionality…

For over a year, in close partnership with MediaTek, Collabora has been enhancing Chromium on Genio and Kompanio platforms to fully unlock the hardware users depend on every day, delivering out-of-the-box hardware-accelerated video decoding (H.264, HEVC, VP8, VP9) and encoding (H.264, HEVC) for high-performance, video-centric Chromium applications.

Inside this week’s LWN.net Weekly Edition:

• Front: Civil Infrastructure Platform; COSMIC desktop; Calibre adds AI; Maintainer’s Summit; ML tools for kernel development; linux-next; Rust in the kernel; kernel development tools; Linux process improvements; 6.19 merge window part 2.
• Briefs: capsudo; Asahi Linux 6.18; Pop!_OS 24.04; Vojtux; KDE Gear 25.12; Rust 1.92.0; Quotes; …
• Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

Systemd 259 is out as the newest feature release for this widely-used Linux init system and service manager. Yes, there are more features in tow for this systemd release to top off 2025…

Mozilla CEO Anthony Enzor-DeMeo says Firefox will evolve into a modern AI browser while keeping privacy and clarity at the forefront.

Intel this week released their last planned feature update to their open-source Compute Runtime for 2025. The Intel Compute Runtime 25.48.36300.8 delivers the latest OpenCL and Level Zero performance optimizations, Xe3 workarounds, and other fixes for those on Intel integrated and discrete graphics hardware…

A new set of patches posted today to the Linux kernel mailing list begin adapting the Linux software RAID code paths to begin making use of the folio data structure…

In this article, you will learn what the hash list is, the differences between it and the history list, and how to use its command-line tool to manage records in the hash list in Linux.

Red Hat has quietly bought Chatterbox Labs, a boutique firm that stress‑tests AI models for trouble. Is this a signal that AI safety is moving from marketing slop to production requirement?

The post Red Hat Goes Shopping for AI Safety, Comes Home With Chatterbox Labs appeared first on FOSS Force.

After three years of development, Linux hardware provider System76
has declared
the COSMIC desktop
environment stable. It shipped COSMIC Epoch 1 as part of the
long-awaited Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS
release on December 11, just in time for Linux enthusiasts to
have something to tinker with over the end-of-year holidays. With the
stable release out the door, it seemed like a good time to check back
in on COSMIC and see how it has evolved since the first alpha. For a first
stable release of a new desktop environment, COSMIC shows a lot of
promise and room to grow.

Intel XPU Manager 1.3.5 released today as the newest version of this open-source software for monitoring and managing Intel GPU hardware with a focus on their data center products. Notable with this revision is adding BMG-G31 GPU support…

Doing what it can to keep it alive, Microsoft only loses more money (it now classifies it as “AI” to justify all the losses)

After looking at the new Calibre 8.16 which puts AI on the playing field, our writer wonders if that’s a good idea.

The post Calibre 8.16’s AI Wants to Talk Books. It Can’t Even Find Mine. appeared first on FOSS Force.

The Asahi Linux project has published
its progress report following the release of Linux 6.18. This time
around the project reports progress on many fronts, including
microphone support for M2 Pro/Max MacBooks, work queued for Linux 6.19
to support USB3 via the USB-C ports, and work to improve the Asahi
Linux installation experience. The project is also enabling as
additional System Management Controller (SMC) drivers, which means
that “the myriad voltage, current, temperature and power sensors
controlled by the SMC will be readable using the standard hwmon
interfaces“.

Since receiving the Gigabyte R284-A92-AAL1 a while back as a Xeon 6900 series 2U server platform to replace the failed Intel AvenueCity reference server, I have been getting caught-up in fresh Xeon 6980P Granite Rapids benchmarks with the latest software updates over the past year. I’ve provided fresh looks at the DDR5-6400 vs. MRDIMM-8800 performance, the AMX benefits for AI, SNC3 vs. HEX mode, Latency Optimized Mode, Cache Aware Scheduling, and more with the fresh Linux software stack and this production Gigabyte server platform. One of the areas I have been meaning to re-visit is a fresh head-to-head benchmark battle between 5th Gen AMD EPYC “Turin” and Intel Xeon 6 “Granite Rapids”. In this article is a 128-core showdown between the Xeon 6980P and EPYC 9755 128-core processors with the latest open-source Linux software as of the end of 2025.

The Civil Infrastructure Platform
(CIP) first launched in that form in April 2016, so it has a
tenth-anniversary celebration in its near future. At the 2025 Open
Source Summit Japan, Yoshitake Kobayashi talked about the goals of this
project and where it is headed in the future. Supporting a Linux system
for even one year is a challenging task; maintaining that support for a
decade or more is rather more so, and a changing regulatory environment
complicates the task further.

The Asahi Linux project is out with their latest status report to highlight upstream improvements made for the newly-minted Linux 6.18 kernel as well as some of their efforts going on downstream within Asahi Linux itself…