Microsoft announced the Cobalt 200 processor as their next-generation cloud-native CPU for the Azure Cloud. The Cobalt 200 will feature 132 Arm Neoverse-V3 based cores.

When it comes to GPU virtualization we have seen AMD engineers carry out a lot of work in recent years around the Xen hypervisor even when it hasn't seen as much interest from other vendors. We found out that much of their interest in Xen for GPU virtualization is due to automotive / in-vehicle infotainment demands and it remains that way. They continue cooking some new features and they say "the best is yet to come" in a new presentation on their Xen virtualization efforts.

Alice Ryhl of Google sent out the main set of Rust language code changes for the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) graphics/display driver subsystem ahead of Linux 6.19. Notable is continued DRM core infrastructure work for Rust plus the open-source NVIDIA "Nova" driver continues taking shape albeit isn't yet ready for end-user usage.

Intel's ISA documentation was updated last week to confirm Nova Lake processors will support AVX10.2 and APX extensions after they were not officially acknowledged in prior versions of the spec and the initial open-source compiler enablement with -march=novalake also left them without those prominent ISA capabilities. Following that documentation update, a few days ago LLVM Clang updated their Nova Lake compiler support for the new ISA capabilities and now the GCC compiler has received similar treatment.

Sent out today was likely the last batch of HID subsystem fixes ahead of the Linux 6.18 kernel releasing as stable around the end of the month. With it are some new device-specific quirks for fixing hardware support for a mouse and keyboard.

Last week's Vulkan 1.4.333 brought a new ray-tracing extension with VK_EXT_ray_tracing_invocation_reorder that was derived from a prior NVIDIA vendor extension (VK_NV_ray_tracing_invocation_reorder). This new extension for Shader Execution Reordering "SER" is showing to deliver some nice performance potential for Vulkan ray-tracing performance.

For the past several months a Uniwill laptop driver for the Linux kernel has been in development to expose extra platform capabilities for laptops manufactured by this Taiwanese OEM/ODM manufacturer. Assuming no last minute issues, this driver is now set to premiere in Linux 6.19 for helping Uniwill laptops and hardware from other brands relying on Uniwill as the device manufacturer.

Intel's LASS functionality was queued today into tip/tip.git's "x86/cpu" Git branch. With LASS now making it into a TIP branch, it looks like it will be submitted for the upcoming Linux 6.19 merge window barring any last minute issues or objections from Linus Torvalds.

It's the Blender 5.0 release day! Blender 5.0 is a big step forward for this open-source 3D modeling software with better Vulkan viewport support across different GPUs/drivers, HDR support when using Vulkan and Wayland on Linux, and other very nice refinements for this popular cross-platform software package.

In the past we have seen Llama.cpp with Vulkan outperforming AMD's ROCm compute stack in some of the large language model (LLM) AI benchmarks. Curious if anything has changed given the recent ROCm 7.1 release, I ran some benchmarks of an up-to-date Llama.cpp using the AMD ROCm back-end compared to the Vulkan back-end with the latest RADV driver. For this round of testing the Radeon AI PRO R9700 graphics card was used.

In addition to the RADV driver status update shared recently in Vienna at XDC2025, there was also a presentation on the current status of the NVK driver as the open-source NVIDIA Vulkan driver within Mesa that currently targets the Nouveau kernel driver and the Rust-based Nova kernel driver in the future.

Qualcomm upstreamed new Cloud AI 100 "AIC100" firmware today to linux-firmware.git to fix a rather significant power/performance issue for these AI accelerators.

A proposal has been raised by two CPython core developers to introduce the Rust programming language to CPython. Initially the focus is on allowing Rust to be used for developing optional extension modules for CPython but ultimately their goal is for Rust to become a hard dependency of CPython and used throughout its codebase.

SUSE developers working on their modern Agama operating system installer used by SUSE Linux Enterprise 16 and openSUSE is out with a new release. With Agama 18 they have officially dropped support for 32-bit / i586 processors.

In addition to talking about the Valve-backed open-source driver work for old AMD Radeon GPUs, Timur Kristóf also presented at the XDC2025 conference on the state of the RADV Vulkan driver. Timur was joined by Daniel Schürmann to talk about the great Linux gaming experience now possible on the RADV driver with the work done by Valve, AMD, Red Hat, Google, and the open-source community. RADV ray-tracing is much better today than in the past, the ACO compiler back-end has turned out very well, and RADV is all-around a great example of an open-source Vulkan API driver.

MLPerf Client as MLCommons' machine language inferencing benchmark for client form factors / PCs now has a Linux build. MLPerf Client 1.5 was released yesterday with an experimental Linux build but for now at least is not nearly as full-featured as this AI benchmark on Windows and macOS.

Following OpenZFS 2.4-rc3 from nearly one month ago is now a fourth release candidate for the upcoming OpenZFS 2.4. A few more features and improvements have been squeezed into this release in nearing the stable milestone.

Last year GIMP developers expressed a goal of releasing GIMP 3.2 within one year of GIMP 3.0. With GIMP 3.0 having released in March, it looks like their GIMP 3.2 release goal will become a reality with the GIMP 3.2-RC1 debuting today.

FreeBSD 15.0-RC1 is available today for testing as this leading BSD operating system works toward the stable release in early December.

At the start of the year developers behind the Budgie desktop environment hoped for shipping Budgie 10.10 in Q1-2025. We are now in Q4 without a stable release but at long last a preview version is at least available. Budgie 10.10 is the point at which Budgie is going all-in on Wayland in leaving behind the X11 desktop session support.