Mesa 26.3 Enables Intel’s New Jay Shader Compiler By Default, Compile Times 55% Faster Or 66% Faster Than Windows
Over the past year Jay has been in development as a new open-source shader compiler for Intel GPUs. Alyssa Rosenzweig has been leading its development since joining Intel in 2025. For Mesa 26.3 the Jay shader compiler is being enabled by default for modern Intel graphics hardware and is around ~10% faster than the existing BRW compiler code… ⌘ Read more

AMD PerfOpt To Deliver New Performance Optimization For AMD iGPUs With Linux 7.4
Those using AMD integrated graphics on Linux such as the beefy Ryzen AI Max+ Strix Halo and Gorgon Halo hardware will be able to enjoy even better performance with the upcoming Linux 7.4 kernel… ⌘ Read more

AI Bug Fixes, Crescent Island Power Brake & Nouveau Fixes For Linux 7.3-rc5 DRM
The Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) subsystem fixes for the week are heavier on the side with many fixes to these kernel graphics/display drivers ahead of Sunday’s Linux 7.3-rc5 release… ⌘ Read more

Wisp Makes It Easier To Manage Btrfs Snapshots From The GNOME Desktop
Wisp is a new GNOME Shell extension making it easier to graphically manage Btrfs file-system snapshots… ⌘ Read more

AMD Sends Out New Linux Patches Further Enhancing HDMI 2.1 Reliability
Linux 7.4 is going to be the big kernel release where the AMD graphics driver will finally expose HDMI 2.1 by default and comes with features including HDMI FreeSync, VRR, and ALLM. Ahead of that milestone there have been various other last minute tweaks and improvements to its HDMI 2.1 support. Sent out on Thursday was the latest round of AMDGPU DC patches that includes a few more patches for improving the HDMI 2.1 reliability… ⌘ Read more

Intel Developing Their DXVK-IGDEXT For Improved Linux Gaming On Arc Graphics
Intel engineers have been quietly developing dxvk-igdext as their own component for DXVK Direct3D 8 / 9 / 10 / 11 atop the Vulkan API for leveraging Intel Direct3D 11 Graphics Extensions… ⌘ Read more

Qualcomm Posts Open-Source GPU Driver Patches For Adreno 850 One Day After Announcement
Yesterday Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 as quite an interesting mobile SoC. The Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 features Adreno 850 graphics and already one-day later their engineers are out with initial Linux kernel patches for bringing up the A850 with the MSM kernel driver… ⌘ Read more

Open-Source NVIDIA “Nouveau” Driver Sees Patches For HDMI Deep Color Support
The Nouveau Linux kernel graphics driver for open-source NVIDIA driver support has new patches posted for enabling HDMI Deep Color support… ⌘ Read more

Variable Refresh Rate “VRR” Target Limiter Proposed For Linux Graphics Drivers
A new proposal being discussed is introducing a Linux user-space API to be able to specify frame rate targets for Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) handling on the Linux desktop… ⌘ Read more

SPEC Releases SPECviewperf 15.0.1 For Linux
SPEC back in May 2025 introduced SPECViewPerf 15 as the newest major release of this industry-standard workstation graphics benchmark. Sadly, the Linux support once again fell behind with SPECViewPerf 15 only debuting on Microsoft Windows. Today though Linux has caught up with SPEC releasing a Linux-native build of SPECViewPerf 15.0.1… ⌘ Read more

ZLUDA Now Implements Some NVIDIA cuFFT APIs With hipFFT
ZLUDA as the open-source project working on CUDA for non-NVIDIA GPUs like AMD Radeon graphics cards now has implemented support for some of NVIDIA’s core cuFFT APIs… ⌘ Read more

AMD Begins Preparing Open-Source Linux Driver For Graphics Cards With GDDR7
AMD sent out their latest Linux kernel graphics driver patches today for enabling some new hardware IP blocks. And as part of that, preparing for GDDR7 video memory with the AMDGPU driver… ⌘ Read more

Intel Xe Driver For Linux 7.4 Adds vRAM Health Check, Degraded Memory Handling
Sent out this week were more Intel Xe kernel graphics driver changes targeting the upcoming Linux 7.4 kernel cycle. The theme this week was around dealing with video memory health and also being able to better deal with hardware degraded video RAM… ⌘ Read more

Steam Frame Making Use Of Zink For OpenGL On Vulkan
Valve’s Steam Frame VR headset that makes use of a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 SoC with Adreno graphics is using the open-source “Turnip” Vulkan driver from Mesa as reported last year. For OpenGL it turns out that the Mesa Zink driver is being used on the Steam Frame for OpenGL atop the Vulkan API… ⌘ Read more

Linux Ready With Fix For Intel’s FRED Crashing Some Games Under Wine / Steam Play
Recently there have been some bug reports to Mesa around Intel Panther Lake graphics crashing with some games like Red Dead Redemption 2 and Elden Ring crashing or freezing quite quickly. This turns out not to be an Intel Xe3 Arc Graphics B390 driver bug with Panther Lake but rather due to a kernel issue with the new Flexible and Return Event Delivery “FRED” that debuted with the Core Ultra Series 3 processors… ⌘ Read more

AMD Sends In More HDMI FRL Updates For Linux 7.4, Fixes For Upcoming Hardware
Linux 7.4 is set to be a very exciting holiday gift for AMD Radeon graphics customers. As covered last week on Phoronix, with this next kernel AMD Is enabling HDMI 2.1 support by default now that FreeSync, VRR, and ALLM support is included too. This week another round of AMDGPU kernel graphics driver updates were sent out ahead of the Linux 7.4 merge window in October… ⌘ Read more

Proposal Raised To Finally Standardize Video Memory Stats Reporting Under Linux
The idea has been talked about before but in 2026 still hasn’t made it to the mainline Linux kernel…. Standardized reporting of video memory statistics that would work across different vendors / kernel graphics drivers. A new proposal was raised today in an effort to get a standardized interface established… ⌘ Read more

AMD P-State Driver For Linux 7.4 Will Tune For Zen 6 Client CPUs
Linux 7.4 looks like it will be a very exciting kernel update for AMD customers. On the AMD Radeon graphics side HDMI 2.1 is being enabled by default with the AMDGPU driver with the HDMI FreeSync, VRR, and ALLM features in tow. On the AMD Ryzen client CPU side, there will be Zen 6 tuning with the AMD P-State CPU frequency scaling driver… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.3 Delivering Some Performance Gains On Intel Panther Lake / Framework Laptop 13 Pro
Linux 7.1 brought some performance improvements for Intel Core Ultra Series 3 “Panther Lake”, Linux 7.2 enhanced the performance for the integrated Arc B390 Xe3 graphics, and now for the in-development Linux 7.3 kernel are various performance improvements at large. Today’s article is looking at the performance of the in-development Linux 7.3 kernel compared to Linux 7.2 stable using the Core Ultra X9 388H within the Framewo … ⌘ Read more

Gitte As Git Client For GNOME Continues Maturing Quite Nicely
For those in pursuit of a graphical Git client for GNOME or the Linux desktop at large, the GTK4-powered Gitte continues advancing rather well and out this week is its v0.10 release… ⌘ Read more

Prominent Mesa Developer Now Working For Arm On PanVK & Panfrost Code
Erik Faye-Lund who has contributed to the Mesa 3D graphics driver stack working on areas like Zink and most notably the PanVK Vulkan and Panfrost Gallium3D drivers forr Arm Mali hardware is now working directly for Arm… ⌘ Read more

Patches Ready For AMDGPU HDMI 2.1 Enabled By Default With Linux 7.4 With FreeSync, VRR & ALLM
Linux 7.4 is now set to reach the elusive milestone of HDMI 2.1 support for the AMDGPU kernel graphics driver. After the HDMI Forum previously rejected HDMI 2.1 for the AMDGPU open-source driver implementation going back years, earlier this year something changed – widely speculated to be with Valve’s involvement – that HDMI 2.1 patches began appearing for the AMDGPU driver. With the upcoming Linux 7.4 cycle, the b … ⌘ Read more

Mesa 26.3 RADV + RadeonSI Ready With DRM Format Modifiers For Older AMD GPUs
Coming with Linux 7.3 is DRM format modifiers for GFX6 through GFX8 era GPUs covering the original Raddeon HD 7000 (GCN 1.0) graphics cards up through the Polaris and Fiji series. This work by Valve’s Timur Kristóf is necessary for these older GPUs to support Vulkan-based Wayland compositors, better interoperability between OpenGL and Vulkan or other APis, compositors running on the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver implementation, and o … ⌘ Read more

System76 Launches The Thelio Mira AI With AMD Ryzen + NVIDIA Or AMD Graphics
System76 today unveiled their newest desktop computer as the Thelio Mira AI. The System76 Thelio Mira AI is designed for multi-GPU AI training, model fine-tuning, AI inferencing, computer vision and image generation tasks on tthe AI side. Or with its AMD Ryzen 9000 series CPU and NVIDIA/AMD GPU options is also a good candidate for simulations and other HPC-type workloads… ⌘ Read more

New Patches Provide HDMI 1.4 3D Mode Support For AMD Radeon Graphics On Linux
It turns out one of the feature limitations of the AMDGPU Linux graphics driver is HDMI 1.4 3D output support with frame packing, top-and-bottom, and side-by-side options for transmitting simultaneous video streams. I wasn’t aware of this limitation for the lack of any 3D displays and many Linux enthusiasts/gamers as well, but if you happen to have a compatible HDMI 1.4 3D display, there are pending patches to finally make this a reality … ⌘ Read more

DirectX Support Promoted To Official Target Within LLVM
Over the past four years there has been a lot of work on a DirectX back-end within the LLVM compiler stack. Microsoft has backed the initiative for being able to lower LLVM IR into the DirectX Intermediate Language (DXIL) for execution by Windows DirectX 12 graphics drivers. This back-end is now officially supported… ⌘ Read more

2026 Hugo Award Winners Include Ursula Le Guin-Authored Graphic Novel
This year’s Hugo Award winners were announced last weekend at Worldcon — the world’s longest-running science fiction/fantasy convention. The Orange County Register reports there were fans “clad in capes, gowns and elaborate character costumes,” with famous attendees including Game of Thrones author George R. R. Martin, who held a book s … ⌘ Read more

NVIDIA Posts vGPU Manager & VFIO Variant Driver For Open-Source Nova
NVIDIA continues building out more functionality around the open-source, upstream Nova kernel graphics driver within the Linux kernel. Making it out to the mailing list this Saturday is a set of 13 patches for introducing a NVIDIA vGPU manager and VFIO variant driver… ⌘ Read more

Mesa 26.3 Preps For Intel Nova Lake P’s New 64-bit GPU Mode
Merged overnight for Mesa 26.3 are changes to Intel’s graphics compiler code for supporting a new 64-bit shader addressing mode. It turns out with upcoming Nova Lake P graphics will be a big fundamental change… ⌘ Read more

Vulkan 1.4.362 Released With New Extension Developed By Valve
Vulkan 1.4.362 is out this morning as the newest routine spec update. Making Vulkan 1.4.362 more notable beyond a couple bug fixes are two new Vulkan API extensions, both of which were worked on by Valve’s Linux graphics team and one of them being a Valve vendor extension… ⌘ Read more

Intel Improving Its Content Match Refresh Rate “CMRR” Feature With Linux 7.4
Introduced with the Xe2 Lunar Lake graphics hardware was support for Content Match Refresh Rate (CMRR) as an improvement over typical Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) / Adaptive-Sync to more precisely match the video or content frame rates. Particularly for video playback it aims for no stuttering or frame drops. With the upcoming Linux 7.4 kernel will be better support for CMRR with the Intel graphics driver… ⌘ Read more

Mesa 26.2.2 Enables Intel Nova Lake Graphics By Default
Mesa 26.2.2 is out today as the newest bi-weekly stable point release for these open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers… ⌘ Read more

Intel Updates LLM-Scaler-vLLM Build For vLLM 0.26 & Other Improvements
For those looking for the smoothest experience to get vLLM up and running on Intel Arc (Pro) graphics hardware, out today is the newest beta of Intel’s LLM-Scaler-vLLM project for a Docker-based setup of vLLM ready to go on Intel GPUs… ⌘ Read more

AMDGPU Linux Driver’s Latest Patches For HDMI Passive VRR Support
As part of AMD’s ongoing effort for getting HDMI 2.1 support squared away in their upstream AMDGPU kernel graphics driver, sent out today were the latest patches around passive variable refresh rate “Passive VRR” for HDMI connections… ⌘ Read more

Intel Graphics Driver Introducing Cold Reset Recovery For Linux 7.4, Panther Lake IBC v3
While the Linux 7.3 merge window just wrapped up this weekend, on Monday Intel already sent out their first feature pull request of new Xe kernel graphics driver material that is destined for Linux 7.4… ⌘ Read more

@david@daiwei.me

I wish I knew

Just give it a go. This stuff is super cheap. All you need is a “pen”, some nibs, ink, and paper. Costs like 20-30 bucks and lasts for several years. The hardest part is finding good paper, really, because most paper these days isn’t made for ink anymore. 🥴

And since social media is always only full of good results, here’s something “shitty”:

These are my first experiments in 2016 – and that’s after having practiced with a graphics tablet on a PC for a couple of weeks. 😅

A Faster Merge Sort For Mesa 26.3 Vulkan Drivers To Benefit Ray-Tracing
One of the latest optimizations to the Mesa Vulkan drivers by Natalie Vock of Valve’s Linux graphics team is faster and more vRAM efficient sorting for Morton code keys that are important for fast BVH construction and greater GPU parallelism… ⌘ Read more

NVIDIA VA-API Driver 0.0.18 Ships More Fixes, Chrome/Chromium Decode On Direct Backend
Firefox has finally begun supporting Vulkan Video decoding to complement their long-used VA-API support on Linux. This is good news for the official NVIDIA Linux graphics driver stack as it’s been the notable vendor not supporting the Video Acceleration API. But prior to Firefox rolling out its experimental Vulkan Video support, an independent implementation of VA-API built atop NVIDIA’s NVDEC interface has been available fo … ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.3-rc1 Close To 41 Million Lines, AMD Kernel Graphics Driver At 6.5 Million Lines
With Linus Torvalds remarking in the Linux 7.3-rc1 release announcement of the AMD kernel graphics driver changes for amounting around a third of the -rc1 changes due to the big AMD GPU register files for DCN 6.0 and other new IP additions, here are some fresh code stats at large… ⌘ Read more

ReactOS 0.4.16 Released With New Graphical Installer, Better Hardware Support
ReactOS 0.4.16 released today as the newest major update to this “open-source Windows” project providing an open-source OS with Windows driver and application compatibility… ⌘ Read more

HP Z4 G6i: A Linux-Friendly Workstation Powered By The Intel Xeon 600 Series
The past month I have been testing out the HP Z4 G6i workstation across many different workloads and grueling tasks. This HP workstation powered by the Intel Xeon 600 series “Granite Rapids WS” and NVIDIA RTX graphics offers a lot of compute power, but with the top-end configuration retailing for over $41k USD is quite pricey in today’s environment. Windows 11 Pro is the default operating system of the HP Z4 Gi but Ubuntu LTS releases are supported a … ⌘ Read more

DisplayPort 2.1 ALPM Still Being Worked On For Intel Xe3P / Nova Lake
The in-development Linux 7.3 kernel is marking Nova Lake Xe3P graphics as stable in being enabled by default and no longer hidden behind the “force probe” flag. While on-by-default, there still are some features that have yet to land like the DisplayPort 2.1 ALPM functionality… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.3 Delivers Graphics Driver Improvements From Old GPUs To Next-Gen Hardware
The Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) subsystem updates have been merged for the ongoing Linux 7.3 merge window. There is a lot of exciting GPU kernel driver improvements this cycle ranging from some notable enhancements to old AMD Radeon graphics hardware up through enabling support for some next-generation AMD graphics IP blocks to over on the Intel side where Nova Lake S graphics are being enabled by default… ⌘ Read more

AMD RDNA 4m Firmware Published For Linux Ahead Of Launch
In addition to AMD’s Friday afternoon big code drop of all the UALink enablement patches for the Linux kernel and the AMDGPU driver, there was another big drop from AMD to end out the week… Upstreamed to the linux-firmware.git repository is all the firmware binaries needed by the open-source driver stack for initializing their forthcoming RDNA 4m “GFX 11.7” graphics… ⌘ Read more

Open-Source Etnaviv Driver Now Able To Run YOLOX
The open-source, reverse-engineered Etnaviv driver stack that began for providing accelerated graphics support on Vivante GPU IP and since expanded to handle Vivante NPUs as well is now able to handle YOLOX object detection… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.3 Lands Improvements For Voodoo 3 / 4 / 5 & Vintage Atari Computers In 2026
At a time when Linux continues dropping older hardware drivers due to the influx of AI/LLM-generated bug reports and patches for hardware extremely unlikely to be used with modern versions of the mainline Linux kernel, Voodoo graphics cards and vintage Atari computers are seeing some reprieve with the upcoming Linux 7.3 kernel release… ⌘ Read more

Linus Torvalds Endures A Debug Session From Hell, ‘Enormously Helped’ By AI
Linus Torvalds says AI “enormously helped” him track down a stubborn Intel Xe graphics driver bug that took 24 debugging patches and 18 kernel boots to isolate. “I’d like to call it my tireless helper, but the AI several times stated flat out that this was impossible and unsolvable and that we should just write a report about it, … ⌘ Read more

Intel Compute Runtime 26.31.39395.13 Continues Prepping For Crescent Island, OpenCL LEO
Intel today released the Compute Runtime 26.31.39395.13 open-source GPU compute stack update for Windows and Linux systems. Big ongoing trends for the Intel Compute Runtime continue to be preparing for upcoming Crescent Island and Nova Lake Xe3P graphics hardware as well as building out their new OpenCL LEO driver… ⌘ Read more

Linus Torvalds Endures A Debug Session From Hell, “Enormously Helped” By AI
It’s pretty rare to see Linus Torvalds author patches himself pertaining to the open-source Linux graphics drivers, but waking up this morning I was surprised to see he authored and committed an Intel Xe kernel graphics driver change himself. It ended up being after he encountered a “debug session from hell” but was ultimately helped by AI in fixing a bug that had been irking him… ⌘ Read more

Intel Mesa Linux Drivers Now Treating Nova Lake S / U / H / HX As Stable
Intel’s open-source Mesa drivers for Iris Gallium3D (OpenGL) and ANV (Vulkan) on Linux are no longer treating next-gen Nova Lake processors with integrated graphics as experimental and off-by-default. With today’s Mesa 26.3-devel code, the Intel driver code across Nova Lake’s S, U, H, and HX product families are considered stable and enabled by default… ⌘ Read more