Vulkan SER Showing Up To ~47% Performance Improvement For Ray-Tracing
Last week’s Vulkan 1.4.333 brought a new ray-tracing extension with VK_EXT_ray_tracing_invocation_reorder that was derived from a prior NVIDIA vendor extension (VK_NV_ray_tracing_invocation_reorder). This new extension for Shader Execution Reordering “SER” is showing to deliver some nice performance potential for Vulkan ray-tracing performance… ⌘ Read more

Uniwill Laptop Driver Set To Premiere In Linux 6.19 Kernel
For the past several months a Uniwill laptop driver for the Linux kernel has been in development to expose extra platform capabilities for laptops manufactured by this Taiwanese OEM/ODM manufacturer. Assuming no last minute issues, this driver is now set to premiere in Linux 6.19 for helping Uniwill laptops and hardware from other brands relying on Uniwill as the device manufacturer… ⌘ Read more

Intel LASS Feature Looks Like It Will Be Upstreamed For Linux 6.19
Intel’s LASS functionality was queued today into tip/tip.git’s “x86/cpu” Git branch. With LASS now making it into a TIP branch, it looks like it will be submitted for the upcoming Linux 6.19 merge window barring any last minute issues or objections from Linus Torvalds… ⌘ Read more

Blender 5.0 Released With Better Vulkan Support, HDR On Wayland
It’s the Blender 5.0 release day! Blender 5.0 is a big step forward for this open-source 3D modeling software with better Vulkan viewport support across different GPUs/drivers, HDR support when using Vulkan and Wayland on Linux, and other very nice refinements for this popular cross-platform software package… ⌘ Read more

AMD ROCm 7.1 vs. RADV Vulkan For Llama.cpp With The Radeon AI PRO R9700
In the past we have seen Llama.cpp with Vulkan outperforming AMD’s ROCm compute stack in some of the large language model (LLM) AI benchmarks. Curious if anything has changed given the recent ROCm 7.1 release, I ran some benchmarks of an up-to-date Llama.cpp using the AMD ROCm back-end compared to the Vulkan back-end with the latest RADV driver. For this round of testing the Radeon AI PRO R9700 graphics card was used. ⌘ Read more

NVK Still Working Toward Ray-Tracing, Vulkan Video & More Performance
In addition to the RADV driver status update shared recently in Vienna at XDC2025, there was also a presentation on the current status of the NVK driver as the open-source NVIDIA Vulkan driver within Mesa that currently targets the Nouveau kernel driver and the Rust-based Nova kernel driver in the future… ⌘ Read more

Qualcomm Updates AI Accelerator Firmware To Fix Power / Performance Issue
Qualcomm upstreamed new Cloud AI 100 “AIC100” firmware today to linux-firmware.git to fix a rather significant power/performance issue for these AI accelerators… ⌘ Read more

Python Developers Looking At Introducing The Rust Programming Language In CPython
A proposal has been raised by two CPython core developers to introduce the Rust programming language to CPython. Initially the focus is on allowing Rust to be used for developing optional extension modules for CPython but ultimately their goal is for Rust to become a hard dependency of CPython and used throughout its codebase… ⌘ Read more

SUSE’s Agama 18 OS Installer Released - i586 Support Dropped
SUSE developers working on their modern Agama operating system installer used by SUSE Linux Enterprise 16 and openSUSE is out with a new release. With Agama 18 they have officially dropped support for 32-bit / i586 processors… ⌘ Read more

The State Of The AMD RADV Vulkan Driver In Late 2025
In addition to talking about the Valve-backed open-source driver work for old AMD Radeon GPUs, Timur Kristóf also presented at the XDC2025 conference on the state of the RADV Vulkan driver. Timur was joined by Daniel Schürmann to talk about the great Linux gaming experience now possible on the RADV driver with the work done by Valve, AMD, Red Hat, Google, and the open-source community. RADV ray-tracing is much better today than in the past, the ACO compil … ⌘ Read more

MLPerf Client 1.5 Introduces Experimental Linux Support
MLPerf Client as MLCommons’ machine language inferencing benchmark for client form factors / PCs now has a Linux build. MLPerf Client 1.5 was released yesterday with an experimental Linux build but for now at least is not nearly as full-featured as this AI benchmark on Windows and macOS… ⌘ Read more

OpenZFS 2.4 Squeezes In Some Last Minute Improvements
Following OpenZFS 2.4-rc3 from nearly one month ago is now a fourth release candidate for the upcoming OpenZFS 2.4. A few more features and improvements have been squeezed into this release in nearing the stable milestone… ⌘ Read more

GIMP 3.2 RC1 Brings More UI/UX Improvements, Proper SVG Export
Last year GIMP developers expressed a goal of releasing GIMP 3.2 within one year of GIMP 3.0. With GIMP 3.0 having released in March, it looks like their GIMP 3.2 release goal will become a reality with the GIMP 3.2-RC1 debuting today… ⌘ Read more

FreeBSD 15.0-RC1 Brings Build Fixes For Google Cloud & Azure, Base Repository Changes
FreeBSD 15.0-RC1 is available today for testing as this leading BSD operating system works toward the stable release in early December… ⌘ Read more

Wayland-Only Budgie 10.10 Desktop Preview Released
At the start of the year developers behind the Budgie desktop environment hoped for shipping Budgie 10.10 in Q1-2025. We are now in Q4 without a stable release but at long last a preview version is at least available. Budgie 10.10 is the point at which Budgie is going all-in on Wayland in leaving behind the X11 desktop session support… ⌘ Read more

systemd 259-rc1 Released With Musl libc Support, New run0 “Empower” Mode
Released a short time ago was systemd 259-rc1 as the first test release toward this next version of this dominant Linux init system and service manager… ⌘ Read more

Git 2.52 Released With More Preparations Toward Git 3.0
Git 2.52 is out today as the newest feature release of this distributed revision control system and in working toward Git 3.0 that will hopefully release by the end of 2026… ⌘ Read more

SUSE Developer Working To Reimplement SSH Using The Zig Programming Language
SUSE engineer Lucas Mülling is leading an effort to work on implementing SSH within the Zig programming language, a popular language for robust, optimal, and reusable software… ⌘ Read more

VKD3D-Proton 3.0 Released: Big Update To Direct3D 12 On Vulkan With FSR4 Support
Hans-Kristian Arntzen of Valve just announced VKD3D-Proton 3.0 as a major update to this Direct3D 12 implementation atop the Vulkan API that is used by Valve’s Steam Play (Proton)… ⌘ Read more

Updated LLVM/Clang Compiler Enables AVX 10.2 & APX For Intel Nova Lake
Last month when the LLVM/Clang 22 compiler merged support for Intel Nova Lake with the “-march=novalake” target there was no mentions of AVX10 or Advanced Performance Extensions (APX) support. But last week Intel published a new programming reference manual where they confirmed AVX 10.2 and APX for Nova Lake. Now that it’s official, Intel compiler engineers are updating the LLVM/Clang (and GCC) compiler support to reflect these ISA addition … ⌘ Read more

AMD Enterprise AI Suite Announced: End-To-End AI Solution For Kubernetes With Instinct
The AMD ROCm blog just announced a new open-source AMD AI software project: the AMD Enterprise AI Suite as well as AMD Inference Microservices (AIMs)… ⌘ Read more

systemd Lands Experimental Support For musl libc
Systemd today finally merged support for building against and using the musl libc library. This is a win for Linux distributions like postmarketOS, Alpine Linux, and others that use musl by default as their standard C library or offer it as an option… ⌘ Read more

Intel Nova Lake Power Management Bits Prepped Ahead Of Linux 6.19
Intel engineers continue working on the Nova Lake next-gen processor enablement for the Linux kernel. In addition to the Intel Xe3P graphics and other early Nova Lake enablement work already queued in “-next” Git branches ahead of the Linux 6.19 merge window, the initial power management code is also ready for this next kernel cycle… ⌘ Read more

GCC Patch Enables Support For The Rust-Based Wild Linker
The Wild linker is a very speedy linker written in the Rust programming language that has become quite competitive with the likes of Mold. A patch sent out this weekend adds Wild support for use with the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC)… ⌘ Read more

Red Hat Losing Another Longtime & Prominent Linux Kernel Engineer
Following prominent Linux x86 platform enabler Hans de Goede leaving Red Hat (as recently noted, he recently joined Qualcomm), there is another prominent Linux kernel engineer that will be departing from Red Hat… ⌘ Read more

NVK’s Cooperative Matrix Support Proving Competitive With Official NVIDIA Driver
Karol Herbst at Red Hat who has been a longtime open-source NVIDIA driver contributor as well as Rusticl developer presented at XDC2025 on the NVK Vulkan driver’s cooperatrive matrix extension support. It turns out this Vulkan extension for machine learning / AI is proving fairly competitive with the open-source NVK driver compared to NVIDIA’s official driver stack… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.18-rc6 Released With Fix For ARM64 “Catastrophic Performance Issue”
Linus Torvalds is out today with the eighth weekly test release of the Linux 6.18 kernel in working toward the stable release at the end of the month… ⌘ Read more

NVIDIA Highlights The Shortcomings With Wayland Screencasting
In addition to showing the need for unifying DRM driver-side APIs within the Linux kernel, NVIDIA’s Linux graphics driver team at XDC2025 also showcased the shortcomings of screencasting under Wayland… ⌘ Read more

Qt Moves Away From Direct RDRAND/RDSEED Usage For Better Performance & Less Bugs
The Qt toolkit is moving away from directly relying on the CPU’s RDRAND and RDSEED instructions for random number generation and to instead rely on the OS-supplied entropy… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.19 Landing Initial Display Support For Xe3P_LPD / Nova Lake
The upcoming Linux 6.19 kernel cycle is set to introduce initial Xe3P_LPD GPU support for Nova Lake as well as beginning to build out support for the Crescent Island graphics card. Now joining DRM-Next with that initial Intel Xe3P_LPD code for Linux 6.19 is being able to drive displays with that Xe3 hardware… ⌘ Read more

NVIDIA Linux Engineer Raises Point Around Unifying DRM Driver-Side API
One of the NVIDIA presentations at the recent XDC2025 developer conference was not around the NVIDIA driver itself but the ongoing fragmentation that’s happening within the Linux Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) subsystem and arguing the need for unifying more driver-side APIs for supporting different Linux DRM clinets… ⌘ Read more

PureAudio Lotus DAC5 & Other PureAudio Hardware Supported For Linux 6.18
As part of this week’s sound subsystem fixes ahead of today’s Linux 6.18-rc6 kernel release is adding some quirks for supporting the PureAudio Lotus DAC5 and other PureAudio audio hardware… ⌘ Read more

Servo 0.0.2 Released For Those Wanting To Try Out This Example Rust Web Browser
Released minutes ago was the Servo 0.0.2 web browser engine update. Along with this new Rust-based web engine release is also the “servoshell” in tow for the example implementation built around this open-source codebase… ⌘ Read more

GNOME’s Nautilus File Manager Finally Supporting Ctrl+Insert & Shift+Insert
GNOME’s Nautilus file manager is finally matching the behavior of other file managers like KDE’s Dolphin and Xfce’s Thunar with a keyboard shortcut for copying and pasting files… ⌘ Read more

Debian 13.2 Released With Dozens Of Fixes
Debian 13.2 is out today as the latest maintenance update to this current stable version of Debian GNU/Linux… ⌘ Read more

Latest Proposed Guidelines For Tool-Generated / AI Submissions To The Linux Kernel
Posted to the mailing list on Friday were the latest proposed guidelines for tool-generated contributions to the Linux kernel. The coding tools in large part being focused on AI generated content… ⌘ Read more

NVIDIA Sends Out Initial Turing GPU Support For Open-Source Nova Driver
NVIDIA engineers continue working a lot on the in-development and in-tree open-source Nova kernel driver for their GPUs. Sent out on Friday night were the Turing enablement patches for this Rust-written Nova-Core driver code… ⌘ Read more

AMD Releases Additional Zen 5 CPU Microcode For RDSEED Issue
Stemming from AMD’s recently acknowledged Zen 5 issue with the RDSEED instruction and AMD releasing Zen 5 CPU microcode updates to address it, this week brought some additional microcode updates… ⌘ Read more

Plasma 6.6 Will Avoid Running Out Of RAM When Something Crashes In A Loop
KDE Plasma 6.6 continues seeing a lot of development activity while the Plasma 6.5 series is calming down after its first few point releases. Plasma 6.6 landed many more features and improvements this week… ⌘ Read more

Mesa 25.3 Released With Many Open-Source Vulkan Driver Improvements
Mesa 25.3 is out tonight as the newest quarterly feature release to this set of (predominantly) OpenGL and Vulkan drivers widely used across Linux systems. Mesa 25.3 features numerous Vulkan extensions added to the different open-source drivers, continued enhancements to the OpenGL drivers, and various other changes… ⌘ Read more

Wine 10.19 Released With More Improvements
Ahead of the Wine 11.0 code freeze beginning in early December, Wine 10.19 is out today as the newest bi-weekly development release for running Windows games and applications on Linux… ⌘ Read more

AMD GCN 1.0/1.1 GPUs Will Default To AMDGPU Driver In Linux 6.19, SMART POWER OLED Added
Sent out today is likely the last batch of AMDGPU kernel graphics driver feature updates ahead of the Linux 6.19 merge window getting underway around the start of December. And it’s an exciting one too from adding a new SMART POWER OLED feature to switching from the Radeon to AMDGPU drivers by default for aging GCN 1.0 Southern Islands and GCN 1.1 Sea Islands GPUs… ⌘ Read more

ollama 0.12.11 Brings Vulkan Acceleration
ollama 0.12.11 released this week as the newest feature update to this easy-to-run method of deploying OpenAI GPT-OSS, DeepSeek-R1, Gemma 3, and other large language models. Exciting with ollama 0.12.11 is that it’s now supporting the Vulkan API… ⌘ Read more

Vulkan 1.4.333 Released With New Ray-Tracing Extension
Vulkan 1.4.333 is out with a handful of fixes plus two new extensions… ⌘ Read more

AMD GAIA 0.13 Released With New AI Coding & Docker Agents
AMD’s GAIA open-source project as a reminder is their “Generrative AI Is Awesome” quick-setup solution for demonstrating generative AI use on AMD hardware platforms with Ryzen CPUs, Radeon GPUs, and/or Ryzen AI NPUs. GAIA is predominantly Microsoft Windows focused but recently they did introduce limited support for Linux that is currently bound to Vulkan-accelerated GPU support. Out today is AMD GAIA 0.13 as another step forward for this AI demonstrator… ⌘ Read more

Nouveau Driver To Support Larger Pages & Compression Support With Linux 6.19
While the “Nova” driver continues to be developed as a modern Rust-written, open-source and in-kernel NVIDIA graphics driver for Linux, for the time being Nouveau is what’s working for end-users for those wanting a mainline open-source NVIDIA graphics driver for gaming and other workloads. With Linux 6.19 the Nouveau driver is picking up support for handling larger pages as well as compression support… ⌘ Read more

Intel Submits Last Batch Of Xe Driver Feature Updates For Linux 6.19
Intel today sent out their last batch of planned feature patches for their Xe kernel graphics driver of material intended for Linux 6.19… ⌘ Read more

GNU C Library Adds Linux “mseal” Function For Memory Sealing
Introduced last year in the Linux 6.10 kernel was the mseal system call for memory sealing to protect the memory mapping against modifications to seal non-writable memory segments or better protecting sensitive data structures. The GNU C Library has finally introduced its mseal function making use of this modern Linux kernel functionality… ⌘ Read more

Mainline Linux Patches For The VisionFive 2 Lite: RISC-V For As Little As $19.9 USD
Following the mainline Linux kernel support for the VisionFive 2 RISC-V single board computer from StarFive, Linux kernel patches are on the way for their new VisionFive 2 Lite low-cost offering. With the StarFive VisionFive 2 Lite this RISC-V board can be procured for as little as $19.9 USD as one of the cheapest yet fairly capable RISC-V SBCs… ⌘ Read more

The Headaches Supporting Content Protection With Linux GPU Drivers
Intel driver engineer Suraj Kandpal presented at the recent X.Org Developer’s Conference (XDC2025) on the challenges around supporting content protection on Linux such as for High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP) and Protected Audio Video Path (PAVP)… ⌘ Read more