AMD's RadeonSI Gallium3D driver for next quarter's Mesa 26.1 release is introducing a new low-latency video decode mode. This lower-latency video decoding comes with a trade-off of increased GPU power consumption.

Valve and CodeWeavers today released Proton 10.0-4 as their newest update to this downstream of Wine that powers Steam Play for running Windows games on Linux.

Compiler profile guided optimization (PGO) techniques have paid off well for increasing CPU performance via application/workload-specific profiles fed back to the compiler to make more informed decisions. AMD compiler engineers have been working on crafting device-side PGO for their AMDGPU LLVM back-end for allowing ROCm/HIP workloads to achieve greater GPU performance. An initial merge request is now open for upstream LLVM.

The latest Firefox Nightly builds have now enabled the Split View mode by default to easily view two web pages at once within a single window.

Godot 4.6 is officially out today as the newest feature release for this leading open-source, cross-platform game engine.

Ahead of tomorrow's official availability of new Intel Core Ultra Series 3 "Panther Lake" laptops, the review embargo lifted on Panther Lake and its much anticipated Arc B390 graphics. There have been several Windows 11 reviews of Panther Lake out today, but what about Linux?

Back at the start of the Linux 6.19 kernel cycle I ran benchmarks showing some scheduler performance regressions with the new kernel. Fortunately, two weeks out from the Linux 6.19 stable release, merged this weekend was disabling the scheduler's NEXT_BUDDY feature due to performance regressions. Here are some fresh benchmarks looking at the latest Linux 6.19 Git state with/without NEXT_BUDDY and comparing it to Linux 6.18 stable for reference.

A patch causing a healthy technical debate today on the Linux kernel mailing list would allow the kernel virtual terminal "VT" support to be enabled/disabled at boot time rather than being limited to the current CONFIG_VT build-time option.

Added to the LLVM 23 Git codebase minutes ago is a pull request adding the initial AMDGPU GFX13 target for their next-generation graphics core IP. AMD GFX13 is presumably for RDNA5.

A patch series posted last week for the open-source AMDGPU kernel driver implements HDMI Variable Rate Refresh "VRR" and other gaming features for HDMI displays. With the HDMI Forum blocking HDMI 2.1 open-source support, these HDMI gaming features for the AMDGPU driver were developed via trial-and-error and the limited public knowledge available. A second iteration of these patches are now available for testing.

For the Intel-powered LG Gram Style 14 laptop one of the Linux support caveats is the internal speakers not working properly under Linux, but with a patch expected for the upcoming Linux 6.20~7.0 kernel cycle it will finally fix the laptop speaker support for one of the laptop models in this series.

ASRock Rack's PAUL is a low-profile PCIe IPMI card built around the widely-used ASPEED AST2500 controller for providing IPMI/BMC capabilities for any platform. New patches provide mainline Linux kernel support for ASRock Rack PAUL with the necessary Device Tree bits.

Kairui Song of Tencent sent out a new patch series overnight working on enhancing the Linux kernel's swap code. With the patches there are some memory savings -- and more on the way -- while also providing for slightly faster performance.

While we wait to see what comes of the new X.Org Server Git branch plans and a possible X.Org Server 26.1 release, several X.Org libraries saw new point releases this weekend. These seldom-updated libraries saw new releases to ship various build fixes and other minor improvements.

The Linux 6.19 kernel remains on track for its official release two weeks from today, with the extra RC being baked in due to the end of year holidays. Out today is Linux 6.19-rc7 with a few changes worth highlighting for the week.

In the absence of any official GUI control panel from AMD or Intel for their graphics cards on Linux, LACT remains a popular choice particularly for AMD Radeon Linux gamers/enthusiasts to manage various aspects of their GPU from a convenient UI. LACT also supports Intel GPUs and some features on NVIDIA GPUs too. Out today is LACT 0.8.4 for further enhancing this third-party GPU driver user interface.

This week's batch of AMDGPU and AMDKFD changes queued up ahead of the next kernel merge window is focused on delivering a variety of driver fixes.

Following discussions from the 2025 Linux Maintainer Summit, merged overnight for the Linux 6.19 kernel is documentation concerning the Linux kernel project's continuity in the event that Linus Torvalds' official Git repository were to disappear or otherwise be inaccessible for continuing the upstream development of the Linux kernel.

The Focusrite Forte 2-in, 4-out USB audio interface as a portable audio recording solution will be supported by the mainline Linux 7.0 kernel. The patches are queued in the Linux kernel's sound subsystem development tree. While a convenient little device, the Focusrite Forte is no longer manufactured but can still be found used online.

Rob Clark this week sent out the latest MSM DRM kernel driver updates for the latest Qualcomm display/graphics enhancements ahead of next month's Linux 7.0 merge window.