The past number of months has seen work by AMD Linux driver engineers in enabling cleaner shader functionality for various generations of GPUs to help ensure user/application isolation. Being merged overnight as part of the AMDGPU "fixes" for Linux 6.16 is cleaner shader support for more AMD GFX9 / CDNA hardware, notably to benefit various Instinct accelerators with this security feature...

The RADV Vulkan driver's ray-tracing performance has improved a lot over time such as shown within yesterday's RADV vs. AMDVLK performance comparison on Strix Point. Coincidentally, merged today is yet another ray-tracing optimization to benefit RDNA3 (GFX11) and newer AMD graphics processors...

While a number of Linux desktop users have expressed disappointment over Intel and AMD not providing any GUI for their GPU driver settings and similar functionality like they do under Windows, there are a number of third-party open-source GUI programs for managing graphics driver settings. One of the most capable solutions is LACT for GPU configuration and monitoring. Out today is LACT 0.8 with more features now in place...

KDE developers this week have been busy with a mix of polishing the recent Plasma 6.4 release as well as taking on more feature development work for Plasma 6.5 coming later in the year...

An unexpected announcement this Friday evening is an introduction to Tyr, a new Linux kernel DRM graphics driver written in the Rust programming language. As is sadly becoming more common among Linux GPU kernel drivers is the increasing obscure driver names. Tyr?!?..

Wine 10.11 is out for testing today as the newest bi-weekly development release of this software for running Microsoft Windows games and applications on Linux and other platforms...

The latest in our ongoing testing of AMD Strix Halo performance using the HP ZBook Ultra G1a is analyzing the Vulkan API performance between Mesa's RADV driver and the AMDVLK official open-source AMD Vulkan driver for Linux systems. More than one hundred benchmarks were run looking at the performance from Steam Play games to Vulkan compute workloads.

Similar to the Ubuntu 24.10 concept ISOs for Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite laptops, Canonical has begun publishing new "concept" images of Ubuntu 25.04 ISOs optimized for use on the growing number of Qualcomm Snpadragon X Elite laptops. This week marks the release of the new ISOs for enhancing Ubuntu Linux on various ARM laptops...

Canonical's Multipass lightweight VM manager for not only Linux systems but also Windows and macOS is now considered fully open-source. Multipass started out as a means of running an Ubuntu environment with ease from a single command on major operating systems. With today's Multipass 1.16 release candidate, it's now fully open-source...

Merged for the current Linux 6.16 cycle was initial NVIDIA Blackwell GPU support with the Nouveau open-source driver. NVIDIA Blackwell GPU support was tacked onto the existing Nouveau kernel driver rather than having to wait for the new "NOVA" driver and like prior generations continuing to leverage the GSP firmware. For going along with that Nouveau support, the Mesa NVK Vulkan driver support for Blackwell continues being put together too...

Last week was a Bcachefs pull request consisting of fixes and a new "journal_rewind" feature to aide as a disaster recovery tool for the file-system. But with that code being submitted as part of the ongoing Linux 6.16 release candidates, it drew criticism from Linus Torvalds and other kernel developers. However, one week later and that discussion having subsided a few days ago, Linus Torvalds ended up merging all of the code. But there is a concerning warning for the future of Bcachefs in the mainline Linux kernel...

The Debian project announced on Thursday that AMD has got on-board for being a platinum sponsor of their upcoming DebConf25 developer conference happening in July in Brest, France...

In addition to releasing Oracle Linux 10 today, Oracle also released the second beta of the upcoming VirtualBox 7.2 cross-platform virtualization software...

Last month saw the release of Rust 1.87 that celebrated ten years of the Rust programming language while out today is Rust 1.88 that continues iterating the language with new features...

A decade ago Canonical did around $81 million in revenue (2014) with a head count of around 337 at the company behind Ubuntu Linux while their Linux desktop efforts were still gaining a footing with OEMs/ODMs pre-loads, within enterprise desktop environments, and the lucrative server/cloud space. Canonical recently filed their 2024 annual report and they are now up to almost $300 million USD in revenue and a headcount of more than 1,100...

Published last November as part of Vulkan 1.3.302 was the VK_KHR_video_encode_av1 extension for adding AV1 video encoding to the Vulkan Video API. Ahead of next quarter's Mesa 25.2 release, the open-source Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" has merged its AV1 encode support...

Mir 2.21 is out today for this Ubuntu/Canonical project to serve as a set of libraries used to simplify the development of Wayland-based shells/environments...

Building off the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 (RHEL 10.0) just over one month ago, Oracle today announced the general availability of Oracle Linux 10.0...

Following this week's release of Firefox 140, Firefox 141 was promoted to beta. Most exciting for Linux users with next month's Firefox 141 release is finally lowering system RAM use! I've been running some benchmarks looking at the impact.

Last month Canonical announced plans for releasing monthly Ubuntu Linux development snapshots and was followed by the Questing Snapshot 1 release in the road toward Ubuntu 25.10. Out today is the Questing Snapshot 2 release for incorporating the latest Ubuntu 25.10 development changes...

As a follow-up to the article a few weeks ago about AMD enabling User CPUID Faulting support for Linux, that code looks like it's ready to go for being introduced in the upcoming Linux 6.17 kernel...

Maxime Ripard at Red Hat sent out the latest weekly pull of "drm-misc-next" changes to DRM-Next for queuing of these kernel graphics/display driver changes ahead of the Linux 6.17 merge window opening up in about one month's time...

The upcoming Blender 5.0 3D modeling software application is introducing High Dynamic Range (HDR) display support on Linux when making use of Wayland -- no X11 support for HDR -- and Vulkan graphics accelerator...

The NOVA-Core driver as the basis for a modern, Rust-written open-source NVIDIA GPU driver for the upstream Linux kernel and eventual successor to the reverse-engineered Nouveau DRM driver has a new co-maintainer...

The controversial proposal to replace the upstream X.Org X11 server packages on Fedora Linux with XLibre is not going to happen... At least not for now. The change proposal has been withdrawn prior to being voted on by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo)...

One of the interesting projects engaged in by Mozilla that directly wasn't related to their web browser efforts was DeepSpeech, an embedded/offline speech-to-text engine. To not much surprise given the lack of activity in recent years, last week they finally and formally discontinued the open-source project...

The AMD EPYC 4005 "Grado"" processors launched by AMD in May for entry-level servers offer downright amazing value, performance, and power efficiency over the Intel Xeon 6300 / Xeon E-2400 series competition. Intel's top-of-stack Xeon 6300 (Xeon 6369P) / Xeon E processors fail to compete with even the mid-tier EPYC 4005 series processors in either performance, power, or cost effectiveness. Among the many advantages to these budget-friendly EPYC processors is having AVX-512 support with a full 512-bit data path compared to the Xeon 6300 series only having AVX2. For providing more insight into the AVX-512 performance impact with the AMD EPYC 4005 series, here are some enabled/disabled comparison benchmarks and how they are positioned relative to the Xeon 6369P server processor.

The Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" has merged support for the VK_NV_cooperative_matrix2 NVIDIA Vulkan extension but it's hidden by default and only partially supported with a focus on helping FidelityFX Super Resolution 4 and VKD3D-Proton...

With the Linux 6.16 kernel Intel enabled the new Platform Temperature Control (PTC) interface as part of their int340x thermal driver. Now ahead of the Linux 6.17 kernel Intel PTC is being extended to support a Throttling Control Interface for those that may prefer running their system(s) hotter in order to enjoy better performance...

Dutch electronics company Fairphone today announced their Fairphone Gen 6 smartphone as the successor to the Fairphone 5. Fairphone 6 continues to be repair-friendly and was just announced this morning while already the Linux support patches have hit the Linux kernel mailing list...

Intel open-source software projects are beginning to relay notices that they may have been developed with support from Intel-operated generative AI solutions...

While WebP and AVIF generate much of the interest these days from a tech perspective for modern image formats, the PNG image format was just updated with new features...