Introduced last month in the Vulkan 1.4.311 spec was VK_KHR_shader_bfloat16 for supporting BF16 types within SPIR-V shaders. Merged today for Mesa 25.2 is that BFloat16 support for Intel's open-source Vulkan Linux driver.

It's almost majestic: HDR display support working on the Linux desktop. If you asked me at the start of the calendar year if I'd expect to see modern Linux distributions shipping with working HDR display support in H1'2025, I would have been doubtful. But after a lot of miraculous work that landed across numerous upstream repositories over the past two months or so, everything has come together just in time for the likes of Ubuntu 25.04 and Fedora Workstation 42. There still are apps not supporting HDR and the like, but the core infrastructure is in place and working. The past two weeks I've begun testing out the Linux HDR desktop experience with the ASUS ROG Swift OLED PG27UCDM 27-inch 4K display. Between the ASUS PG27UCDM's QD-OLED display and HDR support enabled under Linux, it delivers a very beautiful Linux desktop experience.

Sent out today was a batch of drm-misc-next patches for queuing ahead of the Linux 6.16 merge window. There are a few notable changes here as part of the Direct Rendering Manager updates for the core code and smaller kernel drivers.

In addition to the recent merge to Mutter for improving fullscreen apps with direct scanout enhancements for GNOME 49, another early addition also landed today in Mutter: support for Wayland's toplevel tag protocol.

For nostalgic open-source fans, React OS as the "open-source Windows" operating system striving for binary compatibility with Windows drivers and applications can now work with the 3dfx Voodoo 5 driver.

On top of the Intel Xe driver changes already queued in DRM-Next for the upcoming Linux 6.16 merge window, an additional set of Intel Xe kernel graphics driver changes were mailed out yesterday.

Another round of x86 platform driver updates was sent out today for the ongoing Linux 6.15 merge window. Besides some fixes, there is also new hardware support making it into this week's platform-drivers-x86 updates.

MoltenVK 1.3-rc1 was released today as the first test release of this updated Apple iOS / macOS / tvOS / visionOS layer that implements the Vulkan API atop the Apple Metal drivers. With MoltenVK 1.3 there is Vulkan API 1.3 support finally in tow.

Meson 1.8 was released this afternoon as the newest update to this popular, cross-platform and open-source build system / build automation tool.

Separate from last week in uncovering a big performance regression on Linux 6.15 affecting workloads like Nginx and that regression getting fixed, I unfortunately discovered another heavy-hitting regression on Linux 6.15. This latest performance regression has been bisected and a possible fix is being thought through by the relevant party, but for the moment has yet to be fixed upstream and affects modern AMD processors.

Kdenlive 25.04 is out today as the newest feature release to this KDE/Qt-aligned non-linear, open-source video editing application.

The AMD-XGBE Linux network driver has seen a set of patches published for it in enabling the "new" AMD Ethernet Device codenamed Crater.

The Trinity Desktop Environment as a long ago fork of the KDE 3.5 desktop released TDE R14.1.4 on Sunday as the newest maintenance release with various bug fixes and minor feature improvements.

With the release of Ubuntu 25.04 this month I've looked at its performance on x86_64 laptops and desktop hardware to nice gains on server. That testing so far was focused on Intel and AMD systems given my abundance of x86_64 platforms. Last week I began testing Ubuntu 25.04 ARM64 on the System76 Thelio Astra powered by Ampere Altra processors. For those considering the Ubuntu 25.04 upgrade and not minding that it's not a Long Term Support (LTS) release, Ubuntu 25.04 is also allowing for greater performance on ARM hardware.

Wayland Protocols 1.44 released on Sunday and with it comes one new protocol addition.

Another change to look forward to with GNOME 49 come September is better/faster direct scanout for more applications thanks to a change that was merged to the Mutter compositor this past week.

A fresh take is being pursued around allowing the Linux kernel's out-of-memory (OOM) behavior to be customized using BPF programs.

Linux 6.15-rc4 is now available after a rather eventful week and about one month to go until the stable Linux 6.15.

Theo de Raadt announced today the release of OpenBSD 7.7, the 58th release for this BSD operating system over the past two decades.

Merged today to the widely-used FFmpeg open-source multimedia library is an APV decoder and APV bitstream muxing and demuxing capabilities. APV is the Advanced Professional Video Codec originally developed by Samsung and is a royalty-free format.