DXVK-NVAPI 0.9.1 is out today as this NVIDIA NVAPI implementation that is used by Valve's Steam Play (Proton) with DXVK and VKD3D-Proton. This is the important piece of the Steam Play puzzle to allow for NVIDIA DLSS, NVIDIA Reflex, PhysX, and other features for Windows games running on Linux.

With the upcoming Linux 6.20~7.0 kernel cycle it looks like the time slice extension work could finally been merged, which has seen various attempts over the past decade. Time slice extension for the Linux kernel implemented using Restartable Sequences "RSEQ" allows user-space processes to request a temporary, opportunistic extension of their CPU time slice without being preempted.

In addition to AMD releasing the Ryzen AI Software 1.7 release on Friday, they also published a new version of their MLIR-AIE compiler toolchain for targeting AMD Ryzen AI NPU devices with this LLVM-based MLIR-focused stack.

Merged on Friday as part of this week's DRM kernel graphics driver fixes for the week is addressing a regression affecting many different users with the Linux 6.19 development kernel.

Newlle as a virtual AI assistant for the GNOME desktop with API integration for Google Gemini, OpenAI, Groq, and also local LLMs is out with a new release. Newelle has been steadily expanding its AI integration and capabilities and with the new Newelle 1.2 are yet more capabilities for those wanting AI on the GNOME desktop.

A new driver in the Linux 6.19 kernel is the ASUS Armoury driver for supporting additional functionality with the ROG Ally gaming handhelds and other ASUS ROG gaming hardware like their laptops.

KDE Plasma 6.6 feature development work continues winding down while Plasma 6.7 has begun seeing more feature work. This week also saw at least nine different crash fixes affecting Plasma/KWin.

Version 2.43 of the GNU C Library "glibc" was released on Friday evening as the newest half-year feature update. This is a very feature packed update and even managed to be released ahead of the 1 February release plan.

Following the release of Wine 11.0 stable just under two weeks ago, Wine 11.1 is now available as the first of the bi-weekly development snapshots for Wine in leading toward the Wine 12.0 release next January.

Similar to the new Intel IPU 7.5 firmware upstreamed for Panther Lake this week, Cirrus has upstreamed their CS42L45 codec firmware for upcoming Dell and Lenovo laptops making use of this audio codec.

Queued into tip/tip.git's "sched/urgent" Git branch today is a patch to disable the kernel scheduler's NEXT_BUDDY functionality that was re-implemented back during the Linux 6.19 merge window. It turns out to cause some performance regressions that have yet to be otherwise addressed.

Fraunhofer HHI this week released a new version of VVenC, their open-source H.266 video encoder. Among the changes this release are more performance optimizations for ARM and I have run some comparison benchmarks using a NVIDIA GB10 SoC with the Dell Pro Max GB10.

In addition to the release today of Vulkan 1.4.340 with the new descriptor heap "VK_EXT_descriptor_heap" extension and three other new extensions, The Khronos Group's Vulkan Working Group has also published the Vulkan Roadmap 2026 Milestone.

AMD today released a new version of Ryzen AI Software, the user-space packages for Microsoft Windows and Linux for making use of the Ryzen AI NPUs for various AI software tasks like Stable Diffusion, ONNX, and more.

GNU Guix 1.5 is out today as the latest major release for this platform built around its functional package manager. This is a big upgrade with it having been three years since the GNU Guix 1.4 release.

Merged today for the Linux 6.19 Git kernel and then in turn for back-porting to prior Linux kernel series is making the x86 page fault handling code disable interrupts properly. Since 2020 it turns out the handling was subtly wrong but now corrected by Intel.

Zlib-rs is the effort out of the Trifecta Tech Foundation to provide a Zlib compression implementation written in the Rust programming language that can serve as a C dynamic library and Rust crate. The intent here being that zlib-rs is potentially safer than the classic C-based implementation of Zlib.

KMSCON as a KMS/DRM-based virtual console emulator in user-space has been released. KMSCON is one of the leading solutions for potentially replacing the in-kernel Virtual Terminal (VT) implementation.

Vulkan 1.4.340 is out today as the first significant new Vulkan API update following the end of year holidays. With Vulkan 1.4.340 comes four new extensions worth talking about.

Servo 0.0.4 is out today as the newest monthly update to this open-source, Rust-based web browser engine. Building off recent Servo embedding API additions, Servo 0.0.4 introduces support for multiple browser windows.