For the past month and a half the NVIDIA R565 Linux driver series has been in public beta with a number of (X)Wayland improvements, DMA-BUF enhancements, VKD3D fixes, and a variety of other enhancements. Today the NVIDIA 565.77 Linux driver was released as the first stable build in the series.

Alpine Linux 3.21 is out today as the newest version of this simple, lightweight, and security-minded Linux distribution that is popular for use within containerized environments, embedded systems, and more.

With the new Linux kernel patches posted yesterday for cleaning up x86 32-bit kernels on x86_64 CPUs as part of that patch series was introducing new Kconfig build options around the x86_64 micro-architecture feature levels. It turns out though that Torvalds is completely against how the x86_64 feature levels are handled by the compiler toolchain folks and doesn't want to see it invading the kernel.

The Linux 6.8 kernel merged the Imagination PowerVR driver as a new open-source driver for supporting the PowerVR "Rogue" graphics architecture and being developed in tandem by Imagination Tech with their upstream Mesa Vulkan driver. Initially this PowerVR driver was catering to ARM SoCs with the Rogue graphics while now the open-source driver is being extended to work on RISC-V too.

The "AMDXDNA" accelerator driver for supporting the Ryzen AI NPU is set to be introduced in the Linux 6.14 kernel next year. Ahead of that debut, a new set of patches from AMD surfaced on Wednesday to provide fixes and code improvements as well as introducing support for newer Ryzen AI "NPU6" IP.

Patches from a Bytedance engineer for the Linux kernel allow for overcoming the current 4K page size limitation of RISC-V and introduce a new 64K page size option.

Building off the Mesa 24.3 release from two weeks ago is now Mesa 24.3.1 as the first stable point release following their usual bi-weekly release regiment.

The DRM Panic infrastructure has been in the Linux kernel for several releases now and allows for a kernel-based experience similar to Windows' "Blue Screen of Death as well as more recently allowing QR code kernel error messages and other features. The Intel kernel DRM driver has seen some patches for enabling DRM Panic support.

With the recent release of Blender 4.3 for this leading open-source 3D modeling software, I've been carrying out some fresh NVIDIA vs. AMD GPU benchmarks for accelerated rendering across several different popular benchmark scenes.

As a follow-up to last month's article around the Debian 13 release processes continuing and desktop artwork voting underway for Debian 13 "Trixie", the winning desktop theme/artwork was announced today.

In development for several years has been the OpenVPN DCO Linux kernel module for data channel offload (DCO) capabilities to provide for much faster virtual private networking (VPN) performance. It's looking like the lengthy review process on OpenVPN DCO is about wrapping up and leaving hope that it will be ready to premiere in next year's Linux 6.14 kernel.

AMDVLK 2024.Q4.2 is out today as the newest official open-source AMD Radeon Vulkan driver release for Linux systems.

Fedora stakeholders are evaluating supporting an Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX) software stack with next year's Fedora 42 release.

As we approach 2025, hopefully none of you are still running x86 32-bit kernels / 32-bit OS software on x86_64 processors, but should you still be into that, there are improvements on the way.

The Intel Compute Runtime 24.45.31740.9 is out as the newest monthly-ish update to this open-source GPU compute stack used on Linux and Windows for the OpenCL and Level Zero support. This Compute Runtime 24.45.31740.9 is also the last update ahead of next week's Battlemage availability with the Arc B580 graphics card.

Merged for Mesa 25.0 yesterday to the Intel "ANV" open-source Vulkan Linux driver is enabling more storage compression on Tigerlake graphics hardware and newer.

VTE-based terminals on Linux like Ptyxis are now seeing support introduced to better display progress state for long-running processes with a more visually pleasing progress bar. Microsoft's Windows Terminal has already supported this feature while now with systemd beginning to support using these Operating System Command escape sequences, Linux terminal support is on the rise.

Longtime Linux game porter Ryan Gordon has introduced initial asynchronous I/O APIs for the in-development SDL3 library. On Linux these async I/O APIs allow making use of the modern kernel IO_uring functionality.

Last week ROCm 6.3 was announced on the AMD Community Blog with a set of nice enhancements to this open-source GPU compute stack. While some good additions, when the announcement went live ROCm 6.2 software was still showing up as the latest and the open-source code via GitHub wasn't yet reflecting ROCm 6.3... That changed today.

A new feature proposal seeks to improve the Fedora Linux experience when running under Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) on Windows 11.