An exciting change was just merged into Mesa 25.0 that has been about two years in the making... AMDGPU native context support for VirtIO to allow for using native OpenGL and Vulkan graphics drivers within guest virtual machines for better performance.

Back in November it was decided that the Fedora KDE Desktop Spin would be promoted to the same tier as the GNOME-based Fedora Workstation. Fedora KDE as an "Edition" status for Fedora 42 will now be on the same level as Fedora Workstation Edition. More details on those Fedora KDE Edition plans have now come to light.

As a follow-up to the recent news around GCC considering deprecating ARM64 ILP32 support, the free software developers have indeed decided to move ahead in deprecating this 32-bit ABI for ARM64.

A set of Linux kernel patches posted by AMD engineers last week are working on enhancing the CXL address translation support between the HPA decoder and system physical memory addresses. These patches get that CXL address translation support working for the recently launched AMD EPYC 9005 "Turin" Zen 5 server processors.

In anticipation of the Linux 6.14 merge window opening next week if Linux 6.13 releases as expected this coming Sunday, Google engineer Kees Cook has already sent out pull requests to Linus Torvalds of new feature code he's been aligning for the v6.14 cycle. One of the interesting pulls is the introduction of the AT_EXECVE_CHECK flag to the execveat call.

Red Hat engineer Hans de Goede wrote a blog post a few days ago around the Intel IPU6 and newer web camera support still being a challenge on Linux. While various Intel IPU6 open-source code has been upstreamed, there remain differences with a number of laptops currently available still not working out-of-the-box for web camera support on Linux. Hans de Goede has now initiated a change proposal for Fedora 42 to take care of more Intel web camera issues.

A change proposal filed today for the in-development Fedora 42 is looking at making use of the EROFS file-system for all of the live media images.

George Hotz' Tiny Corp that develops the Tinygrad neural network framework and sells the Tinybox NVIDIA and AMD powered AI workstations is nearing a "completely sovereign" software stack for GPU compute on AMD.

The upcoming Linux 6.14 kernel cycle is poised to introduce support for Intel THC... The Touch Host Controller IP block found in the PCH of modern Intel laptops for dealing with touchscreen, touchpads, and similar functionality.

An interesting new driver set to premiere in the upcoming Linux 6.14 kernel is the NVMe PCI Endpoint Function Target code authored by Western Digital.

It's been over four years now that the GNOME Mutter pull request has been open for introducing dynamic triple/double buffering support. It's still not clear that it will be ready for merging with GNOME 48 due out in March but at least the patches have been updated to work with the latest upstream Mutter code.

Being merged back in the Linux 6.9 kernel was AMD Preferred Core support within the amd_pstate driver for being able to communicate the "preferred" cores to the kernel for those that are able to reach a higher maximum frequency or otherwise be preferred over other CPU cores. For the upcoming Linux 6.14 merge window, an important set of patches are queued up for better positioning this Preferred Core handling.

Linux has supported KVM virtualization with RISC-V for several years while now patches are pending to introduce Xen hypervisor support for this CPU architecture for RISC-V guests.

Libvirt 11.0 was christened today as the newest version of this open-source Virtualization API for managing VMs on Linux and other platforms while supporting KVM, QEMU, Xen, VMware ESX, LXC, Bhyve, and other hypervisors.

In development for several years has been LACT as a Linux GPU Control Application to allow adjusting various GPU/driver settings via a convenient graphical application. AMD and NVIDIA graphics have been supported to date while now Intel graphics are also supported with the brand new LACT 0.7.

Rsync 3.4 is out today for this widely-used utility for incrementally transferring and synchronizing files between systems. Rsync is widely-used especially for backing up Linux servers in an incremental manner and unfortunately this v3.4 release isn't some cheery news.

Added today to the Mesa documentation for the open-source Intel OpenGL/Vulkan drivers used on Linux systems is a set of "performance tips" for ensuring an optimal Intel Linux graphics 3D accelerated experience.

Yesterday I looked at how the Intel OpenCL GPU compute performance evolved for the Arc Graphics B580 in the one month since that first Battlemage graphics card premiered. There were nice Intel GPU compute optimizations merged over the past month to improve the experience. Here are some Linux graphics/gaming benchmarks for the Intel Arc B580 comparing the prior launch day Linux driver performance to where the Mesa performance is at now.

The modern GNOME desktop hasn't had a core application to playback audio files although many different audio/multimedia players exist. But now for the upcoming GNOME 48 desktop release, there is now a promoted core app for audio playback: Decibels.

ARM64 ILP32 is the Armv8 architecture with a 32-bit ABI rather than 64-bit -- akin to the "x32" x86 effort that never really took off on Linux. ARM64 ILP32 support never ended up making it into the mainline Linux kernel or GNU C Library but did appear within the GNU Compiler Collection. But years later and little use, GCC developers are consider deprecating ILP32 support ahead of its eventual removal.