Intel Readies Big Graphics Driver Changes For Linux 6.17: Multi-Device Prep, SR-IOV, WCL Intel has some terrific improvements lined up for their modern "Xe" kernel graphics driver with the upcoming Linux 6.17 kernel cycle. New hardware support, SR-IOV preparations for Battlemage, other Intel Battlemage work, and also preparations for the upcoming multi-device support... |
NovaCustom Launching An Intel Meteor Lake NUC Box Running On Dasharo/Coreboot For those interested in a small form factor PC running on the open-source Coreboot firmware, Netherlands-based vendor NovaCustom is launching an Intel Meteor Lake powered NUC box running on the Dasharo downstream of Coreboot... |
OpenCL 3.0.19 Released With SPIR-V Queries & Android Hardware Buffer Extensions The Khronos Group today published the OpenCL 3.0.19 documentation as the latest specification for the OpenCL 3.0 compute API... |
Nouveau NAK Lands A Big Improvement For NVIDIA Kepler GPUs: As Much As 2.5x Faster Merged today to the open-source NVIDIA "NAK" compiler code within Mesa 25.2 is Kepler instruction scheduling. This real instruction scheduling support for GeForce GTX 600/700 "Kepler" graphics processors can provide some significant performance benefits in select workloads... |
Linux 6.15.6, 6.12.37 LTS & Other Stable Kernels Deliver TSA Mitigations Greg Kroah-Hartman just released the Linux 6.15.6 point release as well as the Linux 6.12.37 LTS kernel and new point releases in prior-year Long Term Support kernel versions. The main headline of today's stable kernel releases are picking up the mitigations for the Transient Scheduler Attacks (TSA) mitigations that were disclosed this week for AMD processors... |
Blender 4.5 RC1 Released With Much Better Vulkan Support The release candidate of the Blender 4.5 3D modeling software is now available for testing. There are many great improvements to find with Blender 4.5 and this new version is all the more important in being the next Long Term Support (LTS) release for this popular cross-platform 3D modeling software... |
LibreOffice 25.8 RC1 Released With Various File Performance Improvements The first release candidate of the LibreOffice 25.8 open-source office suite is now available for testing. This half-year update as the leading free software alternative to Microsoft Office has been working on performance improvements for various file types, dropping support for old versions of Windows, and various other enhancements... |
Canonical Releases Multipass 1.16 As Now Fully Open-Source Project Ubuntu maker Canonical today released Multipass 1.16 stable for this Linux / Windows / macOS means of deploying Ubuntu VM instances using this lightweight VM manager built atop Linux's KVM, Windows' Hyper-V, and QEMU on macOS. Notable with Multipass 1.16 is that it's now fully open-source software... |
Linux 6.17 Looks To Drop The pktcdvd Packet Writing CD/DVD Driver Linux block maintainer Jens Axboe queued up a patch this week to drop the pktcdvd driver from the mainline kernel, which is expected to be submitted for the upcoming Linux 6.17 cycle. The pktcdvd driver has been in the kernel for over two decades since the Linux 2.6 days for packet-writing CD/DVD support albeit is hardly useful in today's world... |
openSUSE Is Deciding Whether To End 32-bit ARM Support The openSUSE project is currently contemplating if it's time to end support for 32-bit ARM devices... |
libinput 1.29 Improving Scroll Wheel Responsiveness For Most Devices Peter Hutterer of Red Hat announced today the first release candidate of libinput 1.29, the newest version of this input handling library used across both X.Org and Wayland environments with the modern Linux desktop... |
Wayback Is Now Hosted On FreeDesktop.org Wayback began recently as an experimental X11 compatibility layer for non-Wayland desktop environments to leverage Wayland components. While still in early form, the project has already taken off from being a personal GitHub project to now being hosted on FreeDesktop.org alongside other projects such as Wayland and the X.Org Server itself plus other prominent software like Mesa and GStreamer and much more... |
Mesa 25.2 Drops Legacy DRI2 Code With A Bonfire To Pre-DMABUF Winsys Support A big merge today to Mesa Git ahead of next week's Mesa 25.2 code branching is removing the pre-DMA-BUF winsys support and as part of that clearing out all of the old DRI2 driver support... |
New ZLUDA 5 Preview Released For CUDA On Non-NVIDIA GPUs ZLUDA Version 5-preview.43 was released today as this open-source CUDA implementation for use on non-NVIDIA GPUs, with one of the current focuses being on enabling CUDA on AMD Radeon GPUs with ROCm... |
AMD's Epic Performance Gains From The Original EPYC 7601 To EPYC 9755 / EPYC 9965 Last week I published fresh benchmarks showing how AMD's EPYC 4005 series for budget servers can outperform the original EPYC 7601 flagship processor when EPYC first launched during the Zen 1 period. Even with lower core counts and fewer memory channels, the modern EPYC 4005 "Grado" processors were able to outpace that original EPYC "Naples" flagship processor from 2017. With carrying out the fresh re-testing of the AMD EPYC 7601 on a modern 2025 Linux software stack, in today's article is a look at how the EPYC 7601 Zen 1 performance compares to the EPYC 9005 "Turin" series with today's flagship EPYC 9755 and EPYC 9965 processors. |