AMD Instinct MI350P: PCIe Add-In Card For High Performance Open-Source AI/Compute

([Graphics Cards] 7 May 09:00 AM EDT 11 Comments)

While there is the AMD Instinct MI400 series coming this year, today AMD announced an interesting and arguably overdue offering for the Instinct MI350 series: the MI350P. The AMD Instinct MI350P is a PCIe add-in-card to add Instinct MI350 compute capabilities to existing PCIe 5.0 air-cooled servers as an alternative to the Open Accelerator Module (OAM) currently used by the Instinct MI350 series.

KDE Plasma 6.7 To Provide A Much Better Experience For CPU-Based Rendering

([KDE] 7 May 06:29 AM EDT Better Shared Memory Buffer Experience)

KDE developer Xaver Hugl has whipped up another nice improvement for the upcoming Plasma 6.7 desktop release. Due to QtWidgets still relying on CPU-based rendering and finding the performance subpar with Wayland shared memory "wl_shm" usage, Xaver has leveraged UDMABUF for avoiding excess buffer copies to provide a much more fluid experience when dealing with CPU-based rendering / shared memory usage on KDE under Wayland.

New GCC Back-End Proposed For WebAssembly

([GNU] 7 May 06:17 AM EDT GCC WASM WebAssembly)

When it comes to compiling C/C++ code to WebAssembly (WASM), LLVM/Clang and other LLVM-based tooling has dominated the space. Nearly a decade ago was a proposal for a GCC WebAssembly back-end that ultimately never ended up being merged while now there is a new proposal for a WebAssembly back-end for the GNU toolchain.

SR-IOV Support Appears To Be Coming For Next-Gen Ryzen AI NPUs

([AMD] 7 May 06:06 AM EDT Ryzen AI SR-IOV)

AMD recently upstreamed Linux support for their next-gen AIE4 NPU. That next-gen AMD NPU support is expected to premiere in Linux 7.2 while this week an interesting new patch series has surfaced for SR-IOV support with those upcoming neural processing units.

Rust-Written Redox OS Sees Improvements For Running On Real Hardware

([Operating Systems] 6 May 08:22 PM EDT Redox OS April 2026)

Redox OS is out with its status report for April 2026. During the past month this open-source, Rust-based operating system written from scratch has seen improvements for running on real hardware as well as a wide variety of other improvements for bettering this original OS project.

D7VK 1.9 Brings Some Hefty Performance Improvements

([Vulkan] 6 May 07:43 PM EDT D7VK 1.9)

D7VK continues advancing for this Vulkan-based implementation of Direct3D 7 that also supports D3D 6 / 5 / 3 APIs too for vintage games ultimately rendered using the modern Vulkan API.

Mesa 26.1 Released With Many Improvements For Open-Source Vulkan Drivers

([Mesa] 6 May 04:03 PM EDT Mesa 26.1.0)

Eric Engestrom just announced another timely feature release of the Mesa drivers. Mesa 26.1 is out today for this collection of predominantly OpenGL and Vulkan drivers for a variety of hardware as well as the likes of Rusticl for OpenCL, Zink for OpenGL-on-Vulkan, various Windows acceleration components, and more.

PCIe 8.0 Spec Draft 0.5 Released For 1TB/s Bi-Directional x16 Bandwidth

([Standards] 6 May 03:53 PM EDT PCIe 8.0)

The PCI-SIG today held a briefing around PCIe 8.0 that follows the PCIe 7.0 specification that was released to members last June.

Linux 7.2 To Integrate The AMDGPU "Power Module" To Better Align With Windows

([Radeon] 6 May 01:30 PM EDT AMDGPU DC Power Module)

Sent out today was a batch of "new stuff" for the AMDGPU graphics and AMDKFD compute kernel drivers that are ready for DRM-Next to queue until the Linux 7.2 merge window happens in June. Most notable is the introduction of the AMDGPU DC power module to better align with the Radeon power management behavior under Microsoft Windows.

Nouveau vs. NVIDIA R595 Linux Driver For Workstation Graphics Performance

([Display Drivers] 6 May 12:00 PM EDT 19 Comments)

When having the HP Z6 G5 A workstation in the lab for benchmarking, one of the curiosity-driven tests was seeing how well the latest open-source and upstream Nouveau driver stack is competing against the latest official NVIDIA R595 driver for workstations. The official NVIDIA Linux driver stack remains the best positioned software solution for RTX (PRO) hardware but Nouveau continues evolving while awaiting the Nova kernel driver to reach the limelight.

Intel's Vulkan Linux Driver Now Supports Device Generated Commands "DGC"

([Intel] 6 May 09:53 AM EDT VK_EXT_device_generated_commands)

Exciting yesterday in the land of Intel's open-source Vulkan driver "ANV" for Linux systems was introducing experimental support for descriptor heaps with the VK_EXT_descriptor_heap extension. Today there is another separate exciting development for this open-source Intel driver: Vulkan device generated commands are finally merged!

Vulkan SC SDK Released For Safety-Critical Graphics / Compute

([Vulkan] 6 May 09:22 AM EDT Vulkan Safety-Critical)

Yesterday was the OpenCL 3.1 release and today is another exciting development for The Khronos Group standards: the debut of the Vulkan SC SDK for safety-critical applications.

Dell & Lenovo Now Sponsoring The Linux Vendor Firmware Service

([LVFS] 6 May 09:10 AM EDT Dell + Lenovo)

Dell and Lenovo have stepped up to become premier sponsors for the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) that provides for seamless system firmware and device/component firmware updating under Linux with the Fwupd client.

VKD3D-Proton 3.0.1 Brings More Improvements For Direct3D 12 On Vulkan

([Vulkan] 6 May 08:30 AM EDT VKD3D-Proton 3.0.1)

Hans-Kristian Arntzen of Valve's Linux graphics driver team announced the release today of VKD3D-Proton 3.0.1 for Direct3D 12 over the Vulkan API.

AMD Expands ROCm Support On Windows WSL To More Ryzen Hardware

([AMD] 6 May 07:43 AM EDT librocdxg)

Back in March AMD announced the open-source ROCDXG library for improved ROCm support on WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux). The ROCDXG-based solution provides better ROCm compatibility within these Linux confines atop Windows 11 compared to their prior, now-legacy-based WSL support. A new ROCDXG release now available further expands the ROCm WSL2 support to more Ryzen hardware.

AMD Geode CPU Support Being Orphaned By Linux

([AMD] 6 May 06:35 AM EDT AMD Geode)

For those with fond memories of the AMD Geode x86 embedded processors, the Linux kernel is set to orphan these since discontinued and obsolete CPUs.

Intel Kernel Graphics Driver Brings Panel Replay Tunneling For Linux 7.2

([Intel] 6 May 06:22 AM EDT drm-intel-next)

Now that the Linux v7.1 merge window is well past, Intel kernel graphics driver engineers are busy prepping new feature code for introduction for targeting the Linux 7.2 kernel this summer.

GCC Git Lands Fix For Missing AVX-512 Optimizations On AMD Zen 6

([AMD] 6 May 06:06 AM EDT AVX-512 Optimizations)

Last week marked the release of GCC 16.1 as the first GCC 16 stable release. While that release introduces initial AMD Zen 6 "znver6" support well in advance of those next-generation AMD processors debuting, it's not yet in perfect shape with just today two missing optimizations around AVX-512 having been merged.

Fedora Yet To Decide On x86_64-v3 Packages For Fedora Linux 45

([Fedora] 5 May 09:13 PM EDT x86_64-v3 Packages)

Last month a Fedora Linux change proposal was shared proposing that Fedora 45 be built with x86_64-v3 packages to complement the generic x86_64 (v1) packages currently being compiled. This has the possibility of providing greater performance out of packaged Fedora software but comes with the cost of greater burdens on web mirrors, QA / testing, and related infrastructure impact. The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee "FESCo" decided today to wait on coming to a decision over this Fedora 45 change proposal.

Flatpak 1.17.7 To Track The Age Of Configurations For Providing Much Better Performance

([Free Software] 5 May 08:35 PM EDT Flatpak 1.17.7)

Flatpak 1.17.7 is now available for continuing to advance open-source app sandboxing and distribution on the Linux desktop. Some interesting new features are in tow with this Flatpak update plus there is also an updated XDG-Desktop-Portal release too.