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.

Succeeding the Intel Arc Graphics discrete graphics cards that launched two years ago as the DG2/Alchemist series, the next-gen Battlemage graphics cards are being announced today. The embargo lifts today on the new Intel Arc B-Series graphics cards with initial availability next week. Like the prior generation Intel graphics and as discussed already in many Phoronix articles, Battlemage is still treated to fully open-source graphics driver support on Linux.

After an exciting day yesterday of Vulkan 1.4 driver support arriving in Mesa 25.0 drivers, there is more exciting code that was merged today for Mesa 25.0: the AMDGPU code now allows for user queue support on the latest Linux kernels for submitting rendering work directly to the GPU hardware.

With the AMDXDNA kernel driver for Ryzen AI NPU support on Linux now ready for merging and is queued in drm-misc-next for the Linux 6.14 kernel early next year, the AMD NPU firmware binaries have also now been upstreamed to linux-firmware.git for having the necessary firmware support in place.

The Rustls project as a modern TLS library written in the Rust programming language and an alternative to the likes of the widely-used OpenSSL and Google's BoringSSL has published some new performance figures. When looking at the multi-threaded server performance of Rustls, its performance is typically outperforming BoringSSL by a significant margin and downright dominating over OpenSSL.

While long overdue, the PostgreSQL database server has finally deprecated MD5 password support with its latest code.

NVIDIA's RTX Remix software for remastering DirectX 8 and DirectX 9 era games is out with the newest version of the RTX-Remix runtime that is powered in part by DXVK for Direct3D to Vulkan mapping.