LLVM/Clang 22 Merges Support For Intel Nova Lake “-march=novalake”
Merged today to LLVM Git for next spring’s LLVM 22.0 release is support for the Intel Nova Lake ISA targeting with the “-march=novalake” option… ⌘ Read more

Mesa NVK Lands Support For VK_NVX_image_view_handle - Needed For NVIDIA DLSS
Just days ago Valve developer Autumn Ashton announced initial NVIDIA DLSS upscaling for the open-source Mesa NVK driver. One of those needed Vulkan extensions, VK_NVX_image_view_handle, is already merged to Mesa Git… ⌘ Read more

Latest Linux Patches For Homa Posted: TCP Alternative With 10~100x Lower Tail Latency
Posted to the Linux networking mailing list on Wednesday were the latest patches for enabling the Homa transport protocol. Homa is the clean-sheet design aiming to become an alternative to TCP within data centers and capable of offering 10~100x reductions in tail latency for short messages… ⌘ Read more

Proposed Patches Make Upstream Linux Kernel Usable For The OpenWrt One Router
Announced nearly one year ago was the OpenWrt One as a router/AP that is “hacker-friendly” and open-source. The OpenWrt One is powered by a Filogic 820 SoC and features WiFi 6. This official OpenWrt device is manufactured by Banana Pi. While there is downstream open-source code available for customizing the OpenWrt One to your heart’s content, the upstream Linux kernel support to date hasn’t been full-featured… ⌘ Read more

Intel Proposes “SYCLBIN” As New Format For SYCL Device Code
SYCLBIN has been proposed by a longtime Intel compiler expert as a new way for storing SYCL device code for use as part of their GPU/XPU programming ambitions… ⌘ Read more

Mesa 26.0 Enters Feature Development With Mesa 25.3 Branched
The latest Mesa Git code is now under version Mesa 26.0-devel with the Mesa 25.3 code being branched overnight for what will become this quarter’s stable feature release… ⌘ Read more

Mesa Gallium3D Driver Merged For Arm Ethos NPUs
Arm has been working on an open-source Linux kernel accelerator “accel” driver for their Ethos NPUs. That kernel driver continues being revised and under review for inclusion into a future mainline Linux kernel release. Already though a Gallium3D driver for Mesa has been merged for leveraging the Ethos NPU… ⌘ Read more

ollama Rolls Out Experimental Vulkan Support For Expanded AMD & Intel GPU Coverage
The ollama 0.12.6-rc0 software released this evening and with it comes experimental Vulkan API support… ⌘ Read more

Valve Developer Contributes Open-Source Driver Fixes For 12 Year Old Hawaii GPUs
Valve’s open-source Linux graphics team continues carrying out great feats from getting NVIDIA DLSS working on the open-source NVK driver to enhancing Linux GPU driver support for hardware long forgotten about by the hardware vendors. The latest improvement from Valve’s stellar group of open-source contributors are some fixes that benefit old Radeon Rx 200 series graphics cards that are more than one decade old… ⌘ Read more

PyTorch 2.9 Released With Easier Install Support For AMD ROCm & Intel XPUs
PyTorch 2.9 is out today ahead of the PyTorch Conference happening next week in San Francisco. Notable with PyTorch 2.9 is better AMD ROCm and Intel XPU installation support via expanded wheel variant support… ⌘ Read more

Open 3D Engine O3DE 25.10 Brings Build Improvements, Vulkan & Linux Fixes
It’s been four years now since the Open 3D Engine was born out of Amazon’s Lumberyard project and hosted by the Linux Foundation. Today marks the release of the Open 3D Engine “O3DE” 25.10 release with the newest features and fixes for this cross-platform game/graphics engine… ⌘ Read more

Intel ISH Firmware Upstreamed Ahead Of Intel Panther Lake Laptops
In preparation for Panther Lake laptops shipping in early 2026, after Intel appears to have largely wrapped up work on the Linux driver enablement they are now ensuring the necessary firmware bits are out in time… ⌘ Read more

AMD EPYC 9005 Brings Incredible Performance To The Cloud With Amazon M8a Benchmarks
Last week Amazon/AWS announced the new EC2 M8a instances as their latest-generation, general-purpose compute instances now powered by AMD EPYC 9005 “Turin” processors. Amazon announced the M8a as having up to 30% higher performance and up to 19% better price performance over M7a. With my testing of both at 32 vCPUs, the new AMD EPYC Turin instance provided 1.59x the performance over the prior-generation EPYC Genoa instance! ⌘ Read more

Apple Announces M5 With Much Faster GPU For AI
Apple today announced the M5 SoC as the newest in the Apple Silicon family and with claims of 4x the peak GPU compute performance for AI of the M4… ⌘ Read more

Tinygrad Gains A Mesa NIR Backend - Initially Supporting NVK/NAK & LLVMpipe Execution
Merged today to the Tinygrad deep learning framework is a Mesa NIR back-end to allow targeting that common intermediate representation used by these open-source Linux GPU drivers. Initially supported with this Tinygrad NIR back-end is the open-source NVIDIA Vulkan driver “NVK” with its Rust-based NAK compiler as well as the CPU-based LLVMpipe driver… ⌘ Read more

AMD HIP-RT Is Stable For Blender 5.0 But Will Be Off By Default Until Blender 5.1
AMD’s HIP-RT is used by the Blender 3D modeling software for GPU-accelerated ray-tracing on Radeon GPUs. For Blender 5.0 the AMD HIP-RT support is expected to be declared “stable” but will not be enabled by default until Blender 5.1… ⌘ Read more

Intel Wildcat Lake “-march=wildcatlake” Added To GCC & LLVM Clang Compilers
While the open-source GCC and LLVM/Clang compilers saw Panther Lake support added in early 2024, only overnight was support upstreamed to GCC and Clang for the similar Wildcat Lake target… ⌘ Read more

Mesa’s Zink OpenGL-On-Vulkan Driver Lands Mesh Shader Support
In development for around the past year was the cross-vendor mesh shading extension for OpenGL. Last week GL_EXT_mesh_shader was merged to the OpenGL Registry for this mesh shader support and first new GL extension in a while… ⌘ Read more

Basic HDR Support For AMD Radeon Accelerated Video Processing On Linux
David Rosca at AMD continues leading the efforts for improving the open-source Radeon video acceleration support under Linux with the Mesa Gallium3D code. This is especially important now that AMD is encouraging customers to no longer use the AMD Multimedia Framework (AMF) on Linux but resort to using VA-API and the Mesa multimedia capabilities instead… ⌘ Read more

Linux Gains Tool For Defragmenting exFAT Filesystems
A new release of exfatprogs is now available as the user-space programs on Linux for the exFAT file-system to complement the in-tree kernel driver for the Microsoft exFAT support… ⌘ Read more

Valve Developer Gets Initial DLSS Support Working On Open-Source NVIDIA “NVK” Driver
Autumn Ashton of Valve’s Linux graphics driver team and responsible for many great Mesa and DXVK/VKD3D-Proton improvements over the years has managed an exciting new feat: getting NVIDIA DLSS upscaling working atop Mesa’s NVK open-source NVIDIA Vulkan driver. The code isn’t ready to be merged yet but is an exciting early milestone… ⌘ Read more

FSF Announces The LibrePhone Project
The Free Software Foundation today announced the LibrePhone project with a goal of creating a fully free software OS for mobile devices and to reverse-engineer obstacles where necessary… ⌘ Read more

Path Cleared For Nix Package Manager On Fedora With /nix Approved
There’s been work to get the Nix functional package manager available on Fedora Linux for those wanting to leverage its available packages or features like supporting side-by-side packages of different versions, atomic upgrades/rollbacks, non-root user for installing software, and other features. One of the hurdles though is that the Nix package manager relies by default on the /nix directory, which goes against Fedora’s default directory requiremen … ⌘ Read more

Intel Announces “Crescent Island” Inference-Optimized Xe3P Graphics Card With 160GB vRAM
Back during the Intel Tech Tour in Arizona, Intel teased a new inference-optimized enterprise GPU would be announced soon. This new product would feature enhanced memory, bandwidth, and enterprise-level AI inference capabilities. Today the embargo expires on talking about this new GPU offering. ⌘ Read more

Intel Begins Xe Kernel Graphics Driver Enablement For Xe3P With Nova Lake
Intel Linux engineers have begun posting patches for enabling the Xe3P architecture. While Xe3P is also expected to be found with next-generation Intel discrete GPUs, the initial focus is on enabling support for Nova Lake… ⌘ Read more

Yet Another Longtime Linux Driver Maintainer At Intel Has Left
Adding to the unfortunately long list of unfortunate Intel Linux/open-source setbacks over the past year, yet another Intel Linux software engineer that was an upstream Linux kernel driver maintainer has departed Intel… ⌘ Read more

Firefox 145 Beta Released With 32-bit Linux Support Dropped
Firefox 144.0 is now available but it’s not a particularly exciting browser release. But with Firefox 144 stable now comes Firefox 145 beta and that is a bit more noteworthy as it ditches 32-bit Linux support… ⌘ Read more

Amazon AWS Working On Linux “PCSC” To Help With Dense SR-IOV Deployments
A low-level Linux kernel improvement being worked on by engineers at Amazon Web Services (AWS) is for introducing a PCI Configuration Space Cache “PCSC” to help with dense SR-IOV deployments that can end up hitting significant overhead with the current Linux kernel… ⌘ Read more

Linux Mint LMDE 7 Officially Released - Based On Debian 13
Linux Mint Debian Edition 7 is officially out today as the latest version of this Linux Mint distribution based on upstream Debian rather than Ubuntu… ⌘ Read more

Ubuntu 26.04 Looks To Retire Its ISO Tracker: “Held Together With Duct Tape & Goodwill”
Canonical is looking to eliminate use of its Ubuntu ISO Tracker that has been relied on the past 15+ years and in turn 30+ releases. Their ISO Tracker has grown unreliable and difficult to maintain. But without any proper solution ready, for Ubuntu 26.04 LTS the ISO Tracker may be replaced by a temporary spreadsheet and Discourse thread… ⌘ Read more

Arm Posts Initial Open-Source Driver Patches For New Mali-G1 GPUs
Last month Arm announced the Lumex CSS platform with C1 CPUs and Mali G1 GPUs. One month later, Arm is already beginning to open-source graphics driver patches for enabling the new Mali-G1 graphics processor… ⌘ Read more

Haiku OS Improves Its FreeBSD/OpenBSD Network Driver Compatibility Layer
The BeOS-inspired Haiku operating system has published their September 2025 progress report to outline recent work on this open-source OS… ⌘ Read more

AMD & Intel Mark x86 Ecosystem Advisory Group’s Anniversary: FRED, ACE, AVX10, ChkTag
It’s been one year already since Intel and AMD formed the x86 Ecosystem Advisory Group in cooperation with other industry stakeholders. Today both companies are marking the first anniversary while reaffirming their commitment to the group… ⌘ Read more

Intel Lands Big Linux GPU Driver Fix: Fixing Rendering Issues & Game Hangs/Crashes
Problematic code dating back to 2017 has now been reverted within the Intel open-source Mesa driver code that led to various games having rendering/corruption issues as well as various hangs and crashes in other games. This affected a variety of Intel graphics hardware and software while now has finally been tracked down with the problematic code removed. This is a big improvement for Linux gamers on Intel graphics… ⌘ Read more

AMD Dev Proposes Dynamic Mitigations For Linux: Run-Time Toggling Of CPU Mitigations
A big patch series was posted today for the Linux kernel that would allow enabling/disabling CPU security mitigations at run-time rather than the current handling that can only be managed at boot-time via various Linux kernel command-line arguments. Thus due to changing security needs, differing workloads mandating different CPU security concerns and the like, this proposed feature would allow Spectre, Meltdown, and other CPU se … ⌘ Read more

Linux Patches Updated For Apple Silicon USB3 Support
While more code enabling Apple Silicon is reaching the mainline Linux kernel, a lot of important functionality so far remains under development or out-of-tree in the downstream Asahi Linux repository. One piece that’s quite important for modern computing and still working its way to the mainline kernel is enabling USB3 functionality with Apple Silicon devices on Linux… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.18 Features: New AMD & Intel CPU Features, Rocket Driver, DM-PCACHE, Other New Drivers
Now that the Linux 6.18 merge window is over with Linux 6.18-rc1 having released yesterday, here is a look at all the interesting new features and changes to find with this kernel. Making Linux 6.18 all the more exciting is that it’s expected to become the 2025 Linux LTS kernel once its stable release occurs in December. ⌘ Read more

Mir 2.23 Released With New Documentation For Building A Desktop Environment
Mir 2.23 is out today as the newest version of this Canonical-led library for crafting Wayland-based shells and for smaller desktops to ease the adoption of Wayland, with a focus on Ubuntu Linux platforms… ⌘ Read more

Updated Intel Patches For Cache Aware Scheduling Net A 44% Win For AMD EPYC
In the works the past number of months has been cache-aware load balancing / cache aware scheduling support for Linux. The latest iteration of those patches by Intel were posted this weekend and are enjoying the most uplift on AMD EPYC Genoa and newer platforms… ⌘ Read more

Box64 0.3.8 Brings DynaCache As Disk Cache For Generated Native Code From x86_64
Box64 0.3.8 is now available for this x86_64 user-space emulator for Linux that allows ARM64 and RISC-V 64-bit and LoongArch 64-bit systems to enjoy running x86_64 games and applications. Box64 along with the likes of FEX-Emu are the leading options for those needing to run x86_64 programs on ARM64 and elsewhere… ⌘ Read more

Intel Removing AMX-TRANSPOSE From The GCC Compiler
One year ago updated Intel documentation noted AMX-TRANSPOSE as one of the new ISA additions for Diamond Rapids. But in updated Intel architecture documentation last month, it oddly removed all references to AMX-TRANSPOSE. Confirming that the Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX) addition for TRANSPOSE is now dead, an Intel engineer posted a patch to remove AMX-TRANSPOSE from the GCC compiler… ⌘ Read more

ReactOS Making Progress On Windows WDDM Driver Support
The ReactOS project that continues striving toward being an “open-source Windows” ABI compatible operating system has been seeing some activity recently around supporting Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM) display drivers as the newer evolution of XDDM drivers… ⌘ Read more

Blender Experimenting With Vulkan Ray Queries
As part of Blender continuing to build out the Vulkan API capabilities for this open-source 3D modeling software, a proof of concept merge request was opened for beginning to make use of Vulkan ray queries… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.18-rc1 Released With New Tyr & Rocket Drivers, Haptic Touchpads & DM-PCACHE
Linux 6.18-rc1 is now available for testing with the Linux 6.18 merge window closed. Linux 6.18 will be out in December and is anticipated to become this year’s Linux LTS kernel version… ⌘ Read more

CLUDA Posted For Mesa: Gallium3D API Implemented Atop NVIDIA CUDA Driver API
Well, here is a weekend surprise… Red Hat engineer and Rusticl lead developer Karol Herbst has opened a Mesa merge request for “CLUDA” as a compute-only driver that implements the Gallium3D API atop the NVIDIA CUDA driver API. Wow… ⌘ Read more

Intel Posts Patches For New VFIO Xe PCI Linux Driver
Intel engineers continue working on SR-IOV support for the Xe open-source kernel driver as part of Project Battlematrix for ensuring good virtualization support for the latest Intel GPUs on Linux… ⌘ Read more

Linux Patches Posted For Microsoft’s ACPI Fan Extensions
Patches were posted this week for implementing Microsoft’s extensions around the ACPI fan device for allowing the operating system to set fan speed trip points. In turn this should help some HP systems and likely other OEMs too in getting fan information working under Linux… ⌘ Read more

Git Developers Talk About Potentially Releasing Git 3.0 By The End Of Next Year
Git developers have been talking in recent weeks around release plans for Git 3.0. If all goes well we could potentially see Git 3.0 released before the end of 2026… ⌘ Read more

FreeBSD 15.0 Beta 1 Brings OpenZFS Upgrade, Performance Fix For TCP LRO
The first beta release of the FreeBSD 15 operating system is now available for testing… ⌘ Read more

Imagination PowerVR Mesa Vulkan Driver Enables Unofficial Support For More GPUs
Merged today for the Mesa 25.3 graphics driver code is enabling support for more PowerVR Imagination GPUs within the “PVR” Vulkan driver albeit not officially supported nor in active development. Your mileage may vary but for some users with certain GPUs may work out well enough… ⌘ Read more