The HID subsystem updates have been merged for the in-development Linux 6.12 kernel. Notable this time around are some new feature additions for the popular Wacom drawing tablet support.

Most Linux distributions have been defaulting to MariaDB as the default MySQL server for years. Ubuntu though has been a notable outlier still relying on Oracle MySQL for the default MySQL service. A proposal raised by an Ubuntu developer hopes to change that for Ubuntu 25.04 in the new year.

After seven months under review, Google's Gfxstream code has been upstreamed into Mesa 24.3 as a Vulkan virtualization solution.

The Haiku open-source operating project known for letting the BeOS spirit live on is out with their newest monthly progress report.

The OpenZFS project has merged DirectIO (O_DIRECT) support for the ZFS file-system to bypass the ARC for reads and writes.

Following the other recent work around Linux enablement for Snapdragon X1 powered laptops, yesterday patches were posted for getting the X1 Elite powered Dell XPS 9345 working with Linux but not all functionality is currently working.

After many years in the making, it finally was merged overnight... The real-time "PREEMPT_RT" kernel support was merged a few hours ago into Linux Git for this year's Linux 6.12 kernel!

Well this is a hell of a surprise... Microsoft announced today that DirectX will be adopting SPIR-V as the interchange format of the future. Microsoft's DirectX 12 will accept shaders compiled to SPIR-V, the intermediate representation defined by The Khronos Group and commonly associated with Vulkan / OpenGL / OpenCL drivers.

After several weeks of testing Valve has released Proton 9.0-3 as the newest version of this Wine downstream that powers Steam Play for being able to enjoy Windows games on Linux.

Oliver Smith as the Interim Engineering Director for Ubuntu Desktop at Canonical is out with a new status update on Ubuntu 24.10 development and related ambitions. This also includes more details about bringing the KDE Plasma desktop to Ubuntu Core Desktop in Snap form.

There has been a lot of talk the past few days over the AMD AGESA PI 1.2.0.2 update that has begun rolling out to AMD AM5 motherboards with BIOS updates. The AGESA 1.2.0.2 is said to improve inter-core latency for Ryzen 9000 "Zen 5" processors when cores from different CCDs are cross-communicating. Some -- at least under Windows -- have reported performance improvements and thus several Phoronix readers have requested I run some of my tests with AGESA 1.2.0.2. Here are said comparison benchmarks using an AMD Ryzen 9 9950X on Ubuntu Linux.

The Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) kernel graphics/display driver updates have been submitted and already merged for the in-development Linux 6.12 kernel.

The core perf subsystem updates have been merged for the in-development Linux 6.12 kernel.

Intel engineers today released OpenVINO 2024.4 as the newest version of their open-source AI toolkit. OpenVINO 2024.4 prepares for upcoming Intel Core Ultra Series 2 "Lunar Lake" processors, supports newer Gen AI models, now supports Python 3.12, and finally adds official support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.

The Microsoft Hyper-V updates have been submitted for the Linux 6.12 kernel. They are mostly small changes but does bring work to optimize the boot time for large Hyper-V VMs.

The scheduler updates have been submitted for the Linux 6.12 kernel and come with several notable enhancements.

The XFS file-system changes have been merged for the Linux 6.12 kernel and introduce new ioctls for being able to exchange the contents of two files.

For anyone still relying upon virtual reality (VR) applications written for the OpenGL API rather than the Vulkan API that has been dominant among VR apps (and other modern games / software) for years, the Mesa code and in particular the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver now supports the OpenGL VR (OVR) extensions.

An interesting merge request opened this week and already merged for Mesa 24.3 comes from an Autodesk engineer adding Vulkan Windowing System Integration (WSI) around Apple's Metal API for use on macOS.

The FFmpeg multimedia library continues to enhance its support around the Vulkan Video APIs with the latest commits seeing H.264 and H.265/HEVC Vulkan encode support merged.