The open-source and upstream Imagination Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) kernel graphics driver for supporting their modern graphics IP and pairing with their PowerVR Vulkan driver within Mesa is now being extended to work on the TI AM62P, AM67A, and J722S SoCs...
The Servo open-source web layout engine continues advancing with its demo Servoshell and continued work around making it suitable for embedding into other software. The Servo project this morning published their latest monthly status update to inform the community what they have been up to the past several weeks...
Intel engineers yesterday released QATlib 25.08 as the first new update in nearly one year for this QuickAssist Technology library. Intel QuickAssist allows hardware-accelerated offloading of various security authentication and compression operations from the CPU onto dedicated accelerator IP found in recent Xeon processors. Intel's QATlib is the open-source library for enabling that magic to happen from the user-space side...
For the upcoming Linux 6.17 kernel cycle AMD already queued fixes for GPU compute on some older AMD hardware, improved debugging support for AMDGPU, and other enhancements. Sent out today was a final batch of feature changes for AMDGPU/AMDKFD expected for the upcoming Linux 6.17 merge window. Most notable is AMD SmartMux support coming to Linux...
The first release candidate of LLVM 21.1 is now available for testing, which under their modern versioning scheme will represent the first stable version of the LLVM 21 compiler stack...
For those using an AMD Radeon RX 500 "Polaris" graphics card on Linux and routinely suspend/resume your system, going into the Linux 6.16 kernel and then to be back-ported to the stable series is a fix where the AMDGPU driver could end up producing a lot of spam in the kernel log...
Mesa 25.2 entered its feature freeze yesterday with many exciting driver improvements with new features and performance optimizations while one feature that wasn't ready for merging in this quarter's release is Magma, which is a recent effort by Google engineers working on a cross-platform system call interface for Mesa. And it's written in Rust...
The long in development work around proxy execution for the Linux kernel appears to be ready for the upcoming Linux 6.17 merge window with the Single RunQueue Proxy Execution patches queued into a TIP branch after going through 19 rounds of patch review/revisions...
Launched back in 2014 was the Marvell PXA1908 SoC intended for 4G LTE smartphones and featured four Arm Cortex-A53 cores. Not too impressive for its time and far less so today. Though after a decade of not seeing mainline Linux kernel support and some vendor kernels stuck in the Linux 3.14 era, the upcoming Linux 6.17 cycle is expected to upstream support for this old smartphone SoC...
While late in the Linux 6.16 cycle and hitting the cut-off for when the period to queue new DRM driver feature material for Linux 6.17 ends, an additional drm-misc-next pull request was sent out today with some last minute kernel graphics driver changes for this next kernel cycle. Motivating this extra pull were the recent AMDGPU system hibernation patches...
In addition to releasing Mesa 25.2-rc1 with its many new features to test, Mesa release manager Eric Engestrom today released Mesa 25.1.6 as the newest bi-weekly stable point release for last quarter's series...
Earlier this year when the Framework 13 was updated for the AMD Ryzen AI 300 series I ran benchmarks looking at the performance gains across different Linux distributions with Debian 13, Clear Linux, and CachyOS being the outstanding performers for that Strix Point hardware. With the recent launch of the Framework 12 2-in-1 laptop powered by Intel Raptor Lake you may be wondering what Linux distributions have the edge there. Here is an eight-way comparison of different Linux operating systems on the Framework 12 with Intel Core i5 1334U with the likes of Arch Linux, CachyOS, Clear Linux, Debian, Fedora, openSUSE, and Ubuntu.
Mesa 25.2 is now branched and thus under a feature freeze and with Mesa 25.2-rc1 having just been released. This marks the start of weekly release candidates until the Mesa 25.2 stable release is ready to ship sometime in August...
Similar to the 3D class header files previously open-sourced by NVIDIA for prior generation GPUs, yesterday NVIDIA carried out a similar open-source move to publish all the 3D class header files for their newest Blackwell graphics processors...
It's a very busy week for the open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers leading up to the Mesa 25.2 code branching. On top of RADV ray-tracing improvements, Vulkan 1.2 conformance for Kepler GPUs, Xe3 Panther Lake graphics enabled by default, and many other last minute changes, over the past week has also been a push getting more AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution 4 "FSR 4" improvements merged for the Radeon RADV driver...
Canonical announced today that they teamed up with ESWIN Computing to ship Ubuntu Linux as the preferred operating system on their ESWIN Computing EBC77 Series single board computer...
The Intel Media Driver is out with its quarterly feature release for bringing all of the latest open-source video acceleration improvements for Intel graphics hardware on Linux. Enhancing support for upcoming Panther Lake SoCs continues to be a primary focus...
Yet more feature code continues piling in for the Mesa 25.2 release due out next month and days ahead of the feature freeze. Hitting Mesa Git this evening is now treating NVIDIA Kepler GPUs as Vulkan 1.2 conformant following the Vulkan 1.2 CTS passing with the NVK open-source driver paired with the Nouveau kernel driver...
Ahead of the Mesa 25.2 feature freeze and code branching expected later this week, some additional ray-tracing optimizations were merged today for the Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver. These latest RADV ray-tracing improvements benefit the latest Radeon RX 9000 series "RDNA4" the most but there are also some optimizations too for RDNA3 class GPUs...
The upcoming Linux 6.17 kernel is going to be an especially nice release for users of modern Intel graphics hardware on Linux. The very latest feature being enabled for this next Linux kernel version is SR-IOV for Battlemage GPUs to vastly enhance the Intel Linux graphics experience in virtualized environments...
Blender 4.5 is now officially available today as the newest feature release and one that is a Long Term Support (LTS) for this popular, cross-platform 3D modeling software...
One month ago there was the report on Phoronix of the Broadcom "BNGE" open-source driver being published for forthcoming BCM5770X networking chipsets. That new Broadcom BNGE driver is now set to be introduced in the upcoming Linux 6.17 kernel for supporting the new Broadcom wired networking hardware at up to 800 Gigabit speeds...
The LLVM 21 compiler stack was branched today as release preparations get underway for shipping this next half-year compiler release as stable in late August or early September. In turn that now opens up LLVM 22 for development...
Last month patches were posted for porting the Linux kernel's "gconfig" graphical kernel configuration utility from GTK2 to GTK3. It looks like those patches for the GTK3-ified gconfig are ready for upstreaming come Linux 6.17...
While the Intel Media SDK with VA-API has long supported accelerated video decoding, the latest Mesa 25.2 development code has now landed support for AV1 decoding using the Vulkan Video API with the Intel ANV driver for Xe2 Battlemage / Lunar Lake graphics and Gfx125 Xe graphics too...
The latest round of cost-cutting at Intel seems to be having a larger impact on their software engineering efforts than some of their previous rounds of layoffs. In addition to a prominent Linux kernel developer veteran leaving Intel last week where he worked for the past 14 years and responsible for many great upstream improvements, other Intel software engineers working on their Linux/open-source affairs have also been departing. In just the latest instance, one of the upstream Intel Linux kernel drivers is now "orphaned" due to the developer departing and no one experienced left to maintain the code...
Merged yesterday to the latest development code for the LibreOffice open-source office suite is now recognizing Bitcoin "BTC" as a supported currency for use within the Calc spreadsheet program and elsewhere within this cross-platform free software office suite...
As part of work going back to 2019, an engineer on Google's Chromium OS team submitted an updated proposal on Monday for seeking to standardize the haptic touchpad support within the Linux kernel...
Making it into the RADV Vulkan driver ahead of this week's Mesa 25.2 feature freeze is experimental support for the VK_EXT_host_image_copy extension. The Vulkan host image copy extension was worked on by Valve and others for letting applications/games copy data between the host memory and images on the host processor without having to first stage via a GPU-accessible buffer...
The LTTng tracing toolkit is twenty years old this year and it's seen significant adoption by different hyperscalers and other notable organizations like IBM and Sony and Siemens beyond basic end-users and administrators for system tracing/debugging. While having many successes over the past two decades, the kernel modules remain outside of the kernel tree. Even with around four different upstreaming attempts to get the LTTng code into the mainline kernel, it still has not happened. A fifth attempt began today but still looks like it could be an uphill battle...
With the upcoming Linux 6.17 kernel the Intel Xe kernel graphics driver is enabling Panther Lake graphics out-of-the-box. Now going along with that Linux 6.17+ support out-of-the-box, the Mesa OpenGL and Vulkan user-space drivers are also ready to declare their Xe3 Panther Lake graphics support by default...
Posted today to the Linux kernel mailing list are a set of nine patches for bringing up support for the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite/Plus powered Microsoft Surface Pro 11 2-in-1 laptop...
A number of Phoronix readers have been interested in seeing some fresh benchmarks of Mesa's NVK Vulkan driver in providing open-source Vulkan API support on NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards as well as the modern OpenGL approach of using Zink for layering OpenGL atop Vulkan. Here are some fresh benchmarks using the very latest Mesa 25.2 code for NVK on the latest upstream stable Linux kernel compared to the NVIDIA R575 official Linux graphics driver stack.
Merged today into the upstream GNU C Library code ahead of next month's Glibc 2.42 release is support for SFrame stack tracing with ELF binaries on x86 and AArch64 architectures...
New feature patches posted for review today on the Linux kernel mailing list are working to implement the NVMe specification's Controller Data Queue (CDQ) functionality within the NVMe storage driver...
In addition to last minute feature work on the latest AMD RDNA4 graphics cards ahead of the Mesa 25.2 code branching, there's also some new fixes going into Mesa for the open-source Radeon driver code... Coming in this Monday morning by surprise are some fixes for the Radeon HD 2000/3000 series approaching two decades old as well as a fix for the Radeon HD 4000 graphics processors...
Ahead of the Mesa 25.2 code branching / feature freeze expected later this week, last minute feature additions and other changes continue landing in the codebase for these open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers. One of the additions today worth mentioning are continued Vulkan Video improvements for AMD Radeon graphics...
One of the interesting new additions with the upcoming Intel Xe3 integrated and discrete graphics is the Variable Register Thread "VRT" feature. Making use of Variable Register Thread can reduce register splitting, reduce bandwidth consumption, and improve overall performance. More background information on Intel VRT can be found in that aforelinked Phoronix article. But now the ability is coming to optionally disable VRT...
The Linux Mint developers have put out their monthly status update to outline their work in recent weeks. Over the course of June, Linux Mint developers were primarily focused on Linux Mint 22.2 with the beta release expected soon...
The popular Arch Linux based CachyOS operating system is out with its "July 2025" update for providing the latest innovations for this performance-optimized, feature-rich Linux distribution...
Ahead of the Linux 6.16-rc6 kernel release due out later today, an x86/urgent pull request was sent out today that includes some fixes for old AMD Zen 2 hardware...
Last week I wrote about a number of patches coming out of AMD for Next-Gen Geometry "NGG" improvements to the AMD OpenGL and Vulkan drivers for Linux. Some of that code hadn't been merged as of writing but fortunately this week the remainder of the NGG improvements were successfully merged to Mesa Git for this quarter's Mesa 25.2 release...
Amid Intel's ongoing financial difficulties and multiple rounds of layoffs some Linux engineers at Intel left last year and there's been at least one prominent departure this week amid the latest round of challenges at the company...
Last month when the Fairphone 6 smartphone was announced, same-day Linux support patches were posted for this modular and repair-friendly smartphone. That Linux support code with the Device Tree (DT) files have been under review and out today is the second iteration of those enablement patches...
The Haiku open-source operating system project inspired by BeOS had a busy month of June with a number of enhancements made to this OS. Haiku just published their convenient monthly recap that highlights all of the interesting changes made the past month to this open-source OS...
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