Vulkan 1.4.335 released a few hours ago as the latest iteration of this high performance graphics and compute API. With being just a week since the prior update and given the US Thanksgiving week, it's on the lighter side in terms of issues addressed. There is one new extension though and it's a big one: VK_EXT_present_timing is finally merged.

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.

Linux has maintained a default 4MB minimum writeback chunk size but with the in-development Linux 6.19 kernel it will allow file-systems to override that minimum value. This in turn can help avoid fragmentation and yield a better experience for zoned rotation media and other uses.

NVIDIA today released the 590.44.01 Linux driver build as the first beta of their R590 series driver branch for Linux customers.

Evidently Canonical has been pretty pleased with the uptake of Ubuntu on Microsoft's Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2) within enterprise/corporate environments as they are now offering Ubuntu Pro for WSL.

Via the openSUSE Innovator Initiative, packaging of the Intel Neural Processing Unit (NPU) driver for the openSUSE ecosystem has begun. This is helping to jump-start the Intel NPU support within the openSUSE space although user-space applications ready to leverage the Intel NPU still remains very limited.

The big set of kernel scheduler changes were merged on Monday for the in-development Linux 6.19 kernel.

Merged yesterday for the Linux 6.19 kernel were "substantial" improvements to the kernel's credential infrastructure to provide guard-based management that allows for kernel code simplification and avoiding manual reference counting across many subsystems.

The Steam Survey results are out for November 2025 and continue to be very positive for the growing adoption of Linux gaming thanks to the success of the Steam Deck, the underlying Steam Play (Proton) software, and now further excitement thanks to the upcoming Steam Machine and Steam Frame.

FreeBSD 15.0 is officially released as the newest major update to this leading BSD operating system.

SUSE engineer David Sterba submitted the Btrfs pull request for Linux 6.19 on Friday, ahead of the Linux 6.18 stable kernel release that took place on Sunday. This copy-on-write file-system continues seeing some enticing feature work and other improvements for this next version of the Linux kernel.

Fedora stakeholders have been eyeing a nicer experience for NTSYNC usage with Wine and Steam Play by being able to have the NTSYNC kernel module load when it's likely to be used. That approval has now been granted by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) for the Fedora 44 release.

When it comes to AMD Radeon/Instinct GPU compiler support much of the emphasis is on the LLVM/Clang compiler stack with their official AMDGPU LLVM shader compiler back-end as well as having the AOMP downstream compiler fork and the like. But the GNU Compiler Collection "GCC" does continue allow targeting AMD GPU targeting with its "AMDGCN" back-end and using the likes of the OpenMP API. It's not too often seeing new AMD GPU activity there for GCC but merged today is now support for managed memory.

While some Linux distributions have begun establishing AI policies, we haven't seen any communicated from the Ubuntu camp yet but will apparently be permitted at least for project infrastructure. AI is being used currently in an effort to help modernize the Ubuntu Error Tracker.

Miguel Ojeda has already submitted the core Rust programming language infrastructure updates intended for the Linux 6.19 merge window. In the pull request he also notes that moving forward the minimum supported Rust version for compiling the Linux kernel will likely follow whatever the minimum Rust version currently in use by the latest Debian stable release.

Last night Intel finally posted their Gaudi 3 accelerator open-source driver support for the mainline Linux kernel with hopes of getting that long-delayed AI accelerator support into the in-development Linux 6.19 kernel. But as I pointed out, the pull request was coming unusually late for being such a large set of patches and would face an uphill battle to make it for the Linux 6.19 merge window. Sure enough, the pull request was already rejected and withdrawn from being v6.19 material.

Among the big flow of pull requests today for this first day of the Linux 6.19 merge window are some core kernel bug handling improvements.

Fresh off Framework Computer becoming a new corporate sponsor of the LVFS / Fwupd, there is a new Fwpd 2.0.18 update for this solution that enables convenient and easy system and device/peripheral firmware updating under Linux.

Following yesterday's Linux 6.18 kernel release, GNU Linux-libre 6.18-gnu is out today as the latest release of this free software purist kernel that will drop/block drivers from loading microcode/firmware considered non-free-software and other restrictions in the name of not pushing binary blobs even when needed for hardware support/functionality on otherwise open-source drivers.