Overnight Intel released IGSC 1.0 as their library for handling graphics system firmware updates for rolling out firmware updates to Intel discrete graphics card devices.

Last year Raspberry Pi launched the Raspberry Pi 500 for taking their Raspberry Pi keyboard computer into the Raspberry Pi 5 world. Today they are announcing the Raspberry Pi 500+ as an upgraded version of the device now with a mechanical keyboard, LED lighting, 16GB of RAM, and NVMe SSD storage.

SUSE in partnership with NVIDIA today announced making the NVIDIA CUDA TOolkit officially available on all SUSE platforms.

Qualcomm today announced the Snapdragon X2 Elite SoCs as building off their X Elite laptop SoCs that shipped last year. With the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme (X2E-96-100) flagship is 18 cores with a 5.0GHz single and dual core boost frequency.

Linux/Windows laptop vendor MALIBAL that caused quite a fuss last year when suggesting against supporting Coreboot and in turn blocked shipping of products to states/countries where the involved developers were located is now pursuing an initiative of made-in-America laptops. But it's going to be a lengthy journey and first they are soliciting investments to first pursue American-made keyboards and touchpads.

Besides the support for MRDIMM-8800 memory, another distinct advantage of Intel Xeon 6 "Granite Rapids" processors is the continued presence of Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX). Here are some fresh benchmarks looking at the impact of AMX on the Intel Xeon 6980P processors for AI inference workloads.

Imagination's open-source PowerVR Vulkan driver within Mesa now is able to generate its different internal shaders required by the driver to forego shipping old hard-coded shaders.

Intel announced this week that its moving its graphics driver support for integrated graphics on 11th Gen through 14th Gen processors over to their legacy driver model on Microsoft Windows. While this is a setback for those using Raptor Lake processors on Windows as well as the few Xe DG1 discrete graphics out there, Linux users don't have much to worry about.

Function Multi-Versioning (FMV) is the compiler feature that allows developers to specify multiple versions of the same function that can be used for optimizing execution for specific target features. For example, FMV can allow optimized functions to be called if the CPU supports AVX, AVX-512, SSE4.2, or other differing ISA capabilities. With the GCC 16 compiler release, AArch64/ARM64 now considers its FMV support to be stable and complete.

The widely-used FFmpeg open-source multimedia library has merged support for MPEG-H 3D Audio decoding.

In addition to the patches providing haptic touchpad support for Linux 6.18, another notable HID addition queued into the "hid-next" tree ahead of the imminent Linux 6.18 merge window is proper audio jack handling with the Sony PlayStation DualSense controller.

SquashFS developer Phillip Lougher posted a patch today just over one hundred lines of code yielding an outright massive performance gain for some operations with this compressed read-only file-system.

The upcoming Linux 6.18 kernel is expected to land initial haptic touchpad support as part of the HID subsystem updates.

It was just a few days ago that a multi-kernel architecture was proposed for the Linux kernel. Separate from that proposal from Multikernel Technologies, it turns out Bytedance has been working on their own similar solution called Parker. Today Bytedance lifted the lid on Parker as their solution for running multiple kernels simultaneously on the same hardware/system.

With DKMS packages now being available for Ubuntu and Debian Linux distributions for running the latest out-of-tree Bcachefs file-system driver support with ease and reproducibility, I decided to try out the updated Bcachefs driver on Ubuntu Linux to see how the performance is relative to the upstream Linux 6.17 kernel with its now-frozen Bcachefs support.

Two pull requests were submitted this weekend of new Apple Silicon material ready for upstreaming with the soon-to-start Linux 6.18 kernel cycle.

For further enhancing the upstream Linux kernel support for the AMD (Xilinx) Versal SoCs, a new Error Detection And Correction (EDAC) driver is set to premiere in the upcoming Linux 6.18 kernel for the Versal NET SoCs with DDR memory.

Merged to Mesa 25.3-devel on Monday is SPIR-V shader replacement support as a new feature for helping Mesa's Vulkan drivers in testing and debugging issues.

A set of 13 patches were posted today to the Linux kernel mailing list for optimizing the online defragmentation handling by the EXT4 kernel driver. The online defragmentation improvements for EXT4 can net a nice performance win with a very significant improvement in a variety of scenarios.

Beyond the continued flow of new performance optimizations via hand-written Assembly, with the FFmpeg project it's also interesting to monitor their ever-expanding scope of supported audio/video formats. The newest to land in FFmpeg Git is support for AHX audio files.