With this week's release of Python 3.14 bringing performance improvements, debugging improvements, a new Zstd compression module, and other enhancements I have been eager to run some benchmarks seeing how Python 3.14 compares to prior Python releases.

One week ago FFmpeg merged decode support for Samsung's Advanced Professional Video "APV" codec. APV is designed for professional-grade video recording purposes and is a royalty-free video codec geared for prosumers. Now arriving within FFmpeg Git is APV video encode support.

Last week I published some initial benchmarks of the Amazon/AWS Graviton4 processors now available within the EC2 cloud using the new "R8g" instances. That initial comparison was a 64 vCPU comparison of Graviton4 against AMD EPYC and Intel Xeon 64 vCPU AWS instances. In today's article is a look at the 96-core Graviton4 bare metal performance using the "r8g.metal-24xl" AWS instance type. The Graviton4 r8g.metal-24xl performance was then compared in today's article against various bare metal AMD EPYC, Ampere Altra Max, and Intel Xeon processors in the lab at Phoronix.

Arm has been working on an open-source Linux kernel accelerator "accel" driver for their Ethos NPUs. That kernel driver continues being revised and under review for inclusion into a future mainline Linux kernel release. Already though a Gallium3D driver for Mesa has been merged for leveraging the Ethos NPU.

The ollama 0.12.6-rc0 software released this evening and with it comes experimental Vulkan API support.

Valve's open-source Linux graphics team continues carrying out great feats from getting NVIDIA DLSS working on the open-source NVK driver to enhancing Linux GPU driver support for hardware long forgotten about by the hardware vendors. The latest improvement from Valve's stellar group of open-source contributors are some fixes that benefit old Radeon Rx 200 series graphics cards that are more than one decade old.

PyTorch 2.9 is out today ahead of the PyTorch Conference happening next week in San Francisco. Notable with PyTorch 2.9 is better AMD ROCm and Intel XPU installation support via expanded wheel variant support.

Mesa 25.2.5 is out today as the newest bi-weekly point release for these open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers. Particularly if you are on Intel graphics of Battlemage or Lunar Lake and potentially older, Mesa 25.2.5 contains a very important bug fix for various rendering issues and potential game hangs/crashes.

It's been four years now since the Open 3D Engine was born out of Amazon's Lumberyard project and hosted by the Linux Foundation. Today marks the release of the Open 3D Engine "O3DE" 25.10 release with the newest features and fixes for this cross-platform game/graphics engine.

In preparation for Panther Lake laptops shipping in early 2026, after Intel appears to have largely wrapped up work on the Linux driver enablement they are now ensuring the necessary firmware bits are out in time.

Last week Amazon/AWS announced the new EC2 M8a instances as their latest-generation, general-purpose compute instances now powered by AMD EPYC 9005 "Turin" processors. Amazon announced the M8a as having up to 30% higher performance and up to 19% better price performance over M7a. With my testing of both at 32 vCPUs, the new AMD EPYC Turin instance provided 1.59x the performance over the prior-generation EPYC Genoa instance!

Apple today announced the M5 SoC as the newest in the Apple Silicon family and with claims of 4x the peak GPU compute performance for AI of the M4.

Merged today to the Tinygrad deep learning framework is a Mesa NIR back-end to allow targeting that common intermediate representation used by these open-source Linux GPU drivers. Initially supported with this Tinygrad NIR back-end is the open-source NVIDIA Vulkan driver "NVK" with its Rust-based NAK compiler as well as the CPU-based LLVMpipe driver.

AMD's HIP-RT is used by the Blender 3D modeling software for GPU-accelerated ray-tracing on Radeon GPUs. For Blender 5.0 the AMD HIP-RT support is expected to be declared "stable" but will not be enabled by default until Blender 5.1.

While the open-source GCC and LLVM/Clang compilers saw Panther Lake support added in early 2024, only overnight was support upstreamed to GCC and Clang for the similar Wildcat Lake target.

In development for around the past year was the cross-vendor mesh shading extension for OpenGL. Last week GL_EXT_mesh_shader was merged to the OpenGL Registry for this mesh shader support and first new GL extension in a while.

David Rosca at AMD continues leading the efforts for improving the open-source Radeon video acceleration support under Linux with the Mesa Gallium3D code. This is especially important now that AMD is encouraging customers to no longer use the AMD Multimedia Framework (AMF) on Linux but resort to using VA-API and the Mesa multimedia capabilities instead.

A new release of exfatprogs is now available as the user-space programs on Linux for the exFAT file-system to complement the in-tree kernel driver for the Microsoft exFAT support.

Autumn Ashton of Valve's Linux graphics driver team and responsible for many great Mesa and DXVK/VKD3D-Proton improvements over the years has managed an exciting new feat: getting NVIDIA DLSS upscaling working atop Mesa's NVK open-source NVIDIA Vulkan driver. The code isn't ready to be merged yet but is an exciting early milestone.

The Free Software Foundation today announced the LibrePhone project with a goal of creating a fully free software OS for mobile devices and to reverse-engineer obstacles where necessary.