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
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
New Patch Moves AMD GCN 1.0 GPUs Over To AMDGPU Driver By Default
Following the recent patch proposal for moving AMD GCN 1.1 generation GPUs over to the AMDGPU Linux driver by default in place of the legacy Radeon driver, a similar patch has now been proposed for the GCN 1.0 graphics processors. AMD GCN 1.0/1.1 GPUs are at parity with the AMDGPU driver to the Radeon driver while needing this newer kernel driver for enjoying RADV Vulkan support, better performance, and overall a better experience… ⌘ Read more
RadeonSI OpenGL Mesh Shader Support Is Now Completed For Mesa 26.0
For next quarter’s Mesa 26.0 release, the AMD RadeonSI Gallium3D driver will present OpenGL mesh shaders support. It’s been a long journey from the GL_EXT_mesh_shader extension being crafted and merged to wiring up the Mesa driver support while now it’s in place for the AMD Radeon Linux graphics driver… ⌘ Read more
Valve Enters the Console Wars
Valve has unveiled a new Steam Machine console, taking a second shot at living room gaming a decade after its 2015 Steam Machine initiative failed. The 6-inch cube runs Linux-based SteamOS but plays Windows games through Proton, a compatibility layer built on Wine that translates Microsoft graphical APIs.
Valve spent over a decade working on SteamOS and ways to run Windows games on Linux after the original Steam … ⌘ Read more
Framework Laptop 16 Upgrade To AMD Ryzen AI 300 Series Benchmarks
Framework Computer announced back in August that the Framework Laptop 16 would be rolling out upgrades to the AMD Ryzen AI 300 series and a GeForce RTX 5070 graphics option. Today the review embargo lifts on these new Framework 16 laptop upgrades and some Linux benchmarking of the new hardware. ⌘ Read more
Valve’s Open-Source Radeon Linux Driver “Love Song For Gamers With Old GPUs”
As covered recently on Phoronix there has been several exciting improvements for aging AMD Radeon GCN 1.0 and GCN 1.1 era graphics cards for the open-source AMD Linux graphics driver stack. This work has been led by Timur Kristóf of Valve’s Linux Open-Source Graphics Driver Group with an ultimate goal of shifting the GCN 1.0/1.1 open-source Linux driver hardware support from the aging “Radeon” kernel graphics driver over to the “AMD … ⌘ Read more
Intel Xe Linux Driver Working Toward UALink & High Speed Fabrics Support
The YouTube video recordings for the X.Org Developers’ Conference 2025 that took place at the end of September in Austria are finally available. Among the many interesting XDC2025 presentations was Intel engineer Matthew Brost talking about the GPU Shared Virtual Memory (SVM) within Intel’s modern Xe kernel graphics driver… ⌘ Read more
SDL3 Now Implements Render Batching For Direct3D, Metal & Vulkan
The SDL3 library that is popular with cross-platform games for abstracting various software/hardware features has implemented render batching for its built-in rendering API. This render batching is successfully wired up now for Direct3D 11/12, Apple Metal, and Vulkan APIs for more efficient graphics rendering… ⌘ Read more
Patches Proposed For Radeon GCN 1.1 GPUs To Use AMDGPU Linux Driver By Default
For those still using an AMD GCN 1.1 “Sea Islands” GPU like the Radeon R9 290/390 series, HD 7790 / 8870, or other Radeon Rx 200 / Rx 300 series GPUs, there is an exciting early Christmas present this year. Timur Kristóf of Valve’s Linux graphics driver team sent out the patch series on Sunday for enabling the GCN 1.1 GPUs to use the newer AMDGPU driver on Linux by default in place of the existing “Radeon” driver. This can mean … ⌘ Read more
AMD Preps More Graphics Driver Changes For Linux 6.19
AMD continues preparing more kernel driver code for Linux 6.19. This week another round of AMDGPU kernel graphics driver updates were submitted to DRM-Next ahead of the early December merge window… ⌘ Read more
RadeonSI + ACO Brings Some Performance Gains For Radeon Workstation Graphics
Last week Mesa 26.0-devel enabled the ACO back-end by default within the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver for all supported Radeon graphics cards by this open-source Linux driver. This move was done in the name of better performance, faster shader compilation times, and ACO being all-around better than the AMDGPU LLVM back-end these days for both OpenGL and Vulkan use. It was also noted that RadeonSI has “slightly better” viewperf performance w … ⌘ Read more
More Intel Crescent Island Enablement Prepped For Linux 6.19
Following Intel’s disclosure less than one month ago of Crescent Island as a upcoming Xe3P graphics card with 160GB of vRAM focused on enterprise-level AI inferencing, Intel’s open-source Linux graphics driver engineers have been quick to begin plumbing the Xe kernel graphics driver for this next-generation graphics card… ⌘ Read more
Linux 6.19 To Support Additional Arm Mali & Vivante Graphics Hardware
Sent out today to DRM-Next was the latest weekly batch of drm-misc-next patches for enhancing the various smaller Direct Rendering Manager drivers within the kernel. Included with this week’s update is supporting some additional Mali and Vivante hardware as well as continuing to enhance the in-kernel accelerator “accel” drivers… ⌘ Read more
How did the Windows 95 user interface code get brought to the Windows NT code base?
After the release of Windows 95, with its brand new and incredibly influential graphical user interface, it was only a matter of time before this new taskbar, Start menu, and everything else would make its way to Microsoft’s other operating system line, Windows NT. The development of Windows 95 more or less lined up with that of Windows NT 3.5, but it wouldn’t be unt … ⌘ Read more
I’d like to speak to the Bellcore ManaGeR
I love it when I discover – usually through people smarter than I – an operating system or graphical user interface I’ve never heard of. This time, we’ve got Bellcore MGR, as meticulously detailed by Nina Kalinina a few weeks ago. I love old computers, and I enjoy looking at old user interfaces immensely. I could spend a whole evening on installing an old version of MS Word and playing with it: “Ah, look, how cute, they didn’t invent scrollbars just … ⌘ Read more
Computational Complexity (2023)
This essay explores Computational Complexity, most notably the growth of functions with Big-Oh notation, this essay also includes graphical demonstrations of different types of complex functions represented as mathematical functions.
A deep dive into the Silicon Graphics Indigo² IMPACT 10000
This beautiful purple slab is the Silicon Graphics Indigo² (though, unlike its earlier namesake, not actually indigo coloured) with the upper-tier MIPS R10000 CPU and IMPACT graphics. My recollection was that it worked at the time, but I couldn’t remember if it booted, and of course that was no guarantee that it could still power on. If this machine is to stay working and in the collection, we’re gonna need a … ⌘ Read more
Liquid Glass is cracked, and usability suffers in iOS 26
With iOS 26, Apple seems to be leaning harder into visual design and decorative UI effects — but at what cost to usability? At first glance, the system looks fluid and modern. But try to use it, and soon those shimmering surfaces and animated controls start to get in the way. Let’s strip back the frost and look at how these changes affect real use. ↫ Raluca Budiu I have not yet used Apple’s new “Liquid Glass” graphical … ⌘ Read more
A case for learning GPU programming with a compute-first mindset – Maister’s Graphics Adventures
Comments ⌘ Read more
Redox gets X11 support, GTK3, and Mesa3D EGL
We’ve cleared another month by the skin of our teeth, so it’s time for another month of progress in Redox, the Rest-based operating system. They’ve got a big one for us this month, as Redox can now run X11 applications in its Orbital display server, working in much the same way as XWayland. This X11 support includes DRI, but it doesn’t yet fully support graphics acceleration. Related to the X11 effort is the brand new port of GTK3 and the arriv … ⌘ Read more
Two weeks with AR glasses and Linux on Android
I recently learned something that blew my mind; you can run a full desktop Linux environment on your phone. That’s a graphical environment via X11 with real window management and compositing, Firefox comfortably playing YouTube (including working audio), and a status bar with system stats. It launches in less than a second and feels snappy. ↫ Hold the Robot In and of itself, this is a neat trick most of us are probably aware of. Running a … ⌘ Read more
An i386 Hobby sperating system with graphics, multitasking, networking and an i386 C compiler
Comments ⌘ Read more
We’re all old farts. When we started, there weren’t a lot of options. But today? I’d be completely overwhelmed, I think.
Hence, I’d recommend to start programming with a console program. As for the language, not sure. But Python is probably a good choice
That’s what I usually do (when we have young people at work who never really programmed before), but it doesn’t really “hit” them. They’ve seen so much, crazy graphics, web pages, it’s all fancy. Just some text output is utterly boring these days. ☹️ And that’s my problem: I have no idea how I could possibly spark some interest in things like pointers or something “low-level” like that. And I truly believe that you need to understand things like pointers in order to program, in general.
I should probably clarify: Which language/platform? Something graphical or web-based right from the beginning or do you start with a console program?
RetrOS-32: a 32bit hobby operating system with graphics, multitasking, and more
RetrOS-32 is a 32bit operating system written from scratch, with graphics, multitasking and networking capabilities. The kernel is written in C and assembly, while the userspace applications are written in C++, using Make for compilation, all licensed under the MIT license. It runs on Qemu, of course, but a variety of real hardware is also supported, which is pretty cool and r … ⌘ Read more
@bender@twtxt.net Don’t worry, I can’t replicate that score, either. 😂 Even tried with a graphics tablet, which is – to my surprise – not magically easier. 🥴
I don’t need an X11 compositor for fancy graphics effects or whatever. I have true hardware support for that.
My TFT just slightly burns in and then it looks like dmenu has a semi-transparent background.
Yeah.

Nvidia Linux GPU driver ported to Haiku
Nvidia releasing its Linux graphics driver as open source is already bearing fruit for alternative operating systems. As many people already knows, Nvidia published their kernel driver under MIT license: GitHub – NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules: NVIDIA Linux open GPU kernel module source (I will call it NVRM). This driver is very portable and its platform-independent part can be compiled for Haiku with minor effort (but it need to implement OS-specific … ⌘ Read more
More pro for the DEC Professional 380 (featuring PRO/VENIX)
Settle down children, it’s time for another great article by Cameron Kaiser. This time, they’re going to tell us about the DEC Professional 380 running PRO/VENIX. The Pro 380 upgraded to the beefier J-11 (“Jaws”) CPU from the PDP-11/73, running two to three times faster than the 325 and 350. It had faster RAM and came with more of it, and boasted quicker graphics with double the vertical resolution built right into … ⌘ Read more
Monero Observer Artistic Saturday Top 5 - Week 11, 2025
Previous Artistic Saturday weekly reports can be found in the [art] 1 section.
![‘Spe … ⌘ Read more
Google makes Vulkan the official graphics API for Android
Google’s biggest announcement today, at least as it pertains to Android, is that the Vulkan graphics API is now the official graphics API for Android. Vulkan is a modern, low-overhead, cross-platform 3D graphics and compute API that provides developers with more direct control over the GPU than older APIs like OpenGL. This increased control allows for significantly improved performance, especially in multi-threaded a … ⌘ Read more
Monero Observer Artistic Saturday Top 5 - Week 8, 2025
Previous Artistic Saturday weekly reports can be found in the [art] 1 section.
Did the Windows 95 setup team forget that MS-DOS can do graphics?
One of the reactions to my discussion of why Windows 95 setup used three operating systems (and oh there were many) was my explanation that an MS-DOS based setup program would be text-mode. But c’mon, MS-DOS could do graphics! Are you just a bunch of morons? Yes, MS-DOS could do graphics, in the sense that it didn’t actively prevent you from doing graphics. You were still responsible for everything you … ⌘ Read more
Monero Observer Artistic Saturday Top 5 - Week 7, 2025
Previous Artistic Saturday weekly reports can be found in the [art] 1 section.
 and high-quality audio equalization with FFmpeg filters. Linux users will also find useful information, especially in the context of configuri … ⌘ Read more
Monero Observer Artistic Saturday Top 5 - Week 6, 2025
Previous Artistic Saturday weekly reports can be found in the [art] 1 section.
10 Films That Are Still Banned in the UK
Westerners live in an age of relative freedom when it comes to the films we can enjoy. U.S. and UK censors are more forgiving than they used to be, and horrific, graphic, and downright lewd films that would previously have been banned from even the roughest fleapit make it into mainstream cinemas. https://web.archive.org/web/20200924204745/https://www.bbfc.co.uk/education-resources/education-news/video-nasties The UK’s […]
The post [10 Films That Are … ⌘ Read more
Ten Horror Games That Were Banned for Being Even Darker
We’ve already covered the ten horror games banned for being too dark, but apparently, there’s no shortage of developers willing to take things even further. Whether it’s graphic violence, real-life tragedies turned into “entertainment,” or just concepts that should’ve been rejected immediately, these games didn’t just cross the line—they removed it. Due to commenters’ demands, […]
The post [Ten Horror Games That Were Ban … ⌘ Read more
Android 16’s Linux Terminal will soon let you run graphical apps, so of course we ran Doom
Regardless, the fact that Android’s Linux Terminal can run graphical apps like Doom now is good news. Hopefully we’ll be able to run more complex desktop-class Linux programs in the future. I tried running GIMP, for example, but it didn’t work. Eventually, Android should be able to run Linux apps as well as Chromebooks can, as I believe one of the goals … ⌘ Read more
Monero Observer Artistic Saturday Top 5 - Week 4, 2025
Previous Artistic Saturday weekly reports can be found in the [art] 1 section.