In addition to Friday night's release of DXVK 3.0.2, debuting separately a short time later was D7VK 2.0 as the latest major feature release for this implementation of Direct3D 7 and earlier built off the Vulkan API.

In addition to the initial build of Holo Core as AArch64 Arch Linux for the Steam Frame, another software milestone today in Valve's Linux gaming space is the release of DXVK 3.0.2 for Direct3D 8 / 9 / 10 / 11 APIs implemented over the Vulkan API for running Windows games.

With reviewing hardware for more than 22 years, when it comes to cooling products there are few brands that can still get me intrigued like Noctua. With their recent launch of the NL-LC1 all-in-one liquid coolers, I decided to try out the Noctua NL-LC1-36 360mm AIO cooler that is working out well for cooling high-end desktop CPUs like the recently launched Ryzen 9 9950X3D2.

On top of releasing ROCm 7.14 as the new production release of ROCm now built offTheRock, rolling out the Lemonade 11.0 local AI server, and GAIA 0.22, AMD has some more open-source news in the lead up to next week's AMD Advancing AI event.

As part of Valve's upcoming Qualcomm-powered Steam Frame headset, Valve has been collaborating with Collabora on the Arch Linux AArch64 base for their platform. Published today are the initial sources and binaries of this "Holo Core" base of Arch Linux AArch64 to be used by the Steam Frame.

Linux developer Armin Wolf sent out a set of patches today for enabling AArch64 support for the ACPI Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) driver to work on AArch64 in no longer being bound to x86/x86_64. This is a step toward the long goal of being able to support modern Windows on ARM laptops via ACPI on Linux.

A new open-source Linux driver announced today by Arm is the Arm Core Local Accelerator "CLA" driver as a CPU-local interface for programming attached accelerators. This is an agnostic interface for attached accelerators with the initial target focusing on an attached compute engine.

Since earlier this month AMD has begun staging graphics driver changes for Linux 7.3 ahead of the merge window opening in late July. That's brought some interesting changes so far while there still are a few weeks to land any additional features in DRM-Next. This week another batch of AMDGPU graphics driver and AMDKFD compute driver feature code was sent out for this next kernel version.

Mozilla AI developers have released a new version of Llamafile, their solution for easy-to-use LLMs as a single file that work across hardware and operating systems. With Llamafile 0.10.4 is now Transcribefile, as a new piece built off their recently announced Transcribe.cpp project.

OpenBLAS 0.3.34 released on Thursday as this popular, open-source BLAS library providing optimized support for a variety of CPUs/architectures. OpenBLAS 0.3.34 continues working on squeezing more performance out of today's processors as well as delivering other new features.

Previously we covered YSERVER as an X11 server written in the Rust programming language with the help of Claude Code. A Phoronix reader wrote in today to share an even more esoteric X11 server implementation that has come about and again written in large part by AI/LLM usage: Frame is an X11 server written in pure x86_64 Assembly.

The KDE Plasma 6.8 will be introducing support for server-side drop shadows with the feature recently having been merged to KWin.

Yesterday saw the release of AMD's Lemonade 11.0 local AI server as well as ROCm 7.14 as the first production release built using TheRock. Out today is AMD's GAIA 0.22 software as their latest AI software release in working toward the AMD Advancing AI event next week in California.

An intern with the FreeBSD Foundation is working on porting AMD's ROCm compute stack to run on this popular BSD environment.

Simon Ser just announced the stable release of the Wayland 1.26 release.

Introduced in 1996 with Internet Explorer 3.0, Microsoft Comic Chat provided comic-like avatars driven IRC chat client. After 30 years, this proprietary IRC chat client that was removed in Internet Explorer 6.0, is now open-source software.

Today the AMD Ryzen 7 7700X3D goes on sale as the lowest-price AMD 3D V-Cache processor being marketed for gamers. This 8-core / 16-thread processor features a 4.5GHz boost clock and a total of 104MB of cache while being based on the older Zen 4 architecture and coming in at about $329 USD. Here is a look at how the AMD Ryzen 7 7700X3D is performing on Linux.

This is quite unexpected and was not on my bingo card for this year or even decade... The Linux driver for the floppy disk controller in Apple's legacy Super Woz Integrated Machine (SWIM) saw a large set of patches today for improving its performance and delivering various fixes.

GETAC manufactures a line of rugged/semi-rugged laptops for use in the public safety, defense, industrial manufacturing, oil and gas, and other industries. While shipping with Microsoft Windows out-of-the-box, a new driver has been proposed as GETAC MPMD as a minimal ACPI driver for improving support for these GETAC rugged laptops. In particular, the driver will allow the various programmable buttons on these laptops to work under Linux.

The Ubuntu Kernel Team issued a statement this morning to proactively warn Ubuntu Linux users on Ubuntu 26.04 and Ubuntu 24.04 LTS HWE users that the next kernel point release will contain a performance regression for AMD GPUs in compute-heavy workloads with up to a 42x performance hit. The positive news is that due to this being an upstream regression in a Linux 7.0 point release, upstream stakeholders and other Linux distributions that more quickly shipped the problematic code already have a fix coming down the pipe.