Vulkan 1.3.296 is out as the first spec update in nearly one month. Given the time that has passed there are more bug fixes than usual but there is also a prominent new extension: VK_EXT_device_generated_commands.

Valve open-source graphics software engineer Mike Blumenkrantz is well known in the Linux community for his work on the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver code, various Mesa driver optimizations, and creative writing on his blog. He's also taken up a new task: further accelerating Wayland protocol development.

ChipStar 1.2 has been released as the open-source software enabling HIP/CUDA programs to be compiled and run atop SPIR-V whether it be OpenCL or Vulkan drivers.

While Intel has been making steady progress around enhancing the Linux kernel handling for CPUs with a mix of P and E cores for proper task placement and power optimizations, one area that still is less than desirable for these hybrid Intel Core processors is around virtualization. But Intel engineers are now actively working on improving the Linux virtualization infrastructure for being able to convey the P/E core differences among vCPUs so that the guest VMs can better behave in such environments.

Miguel Ojeda has submitted all of the Rust toolchain and infrastructure changes for the in-development Linux 6.12 kernel.

Cloudflare's always-interesting technical blog laid out their details today concerning their next-gen "12th Generation" in-house servers that will be powering their vast web infrastructure. With these next-gen Cloudflare servers they are going with AMD EPYC 9684X Genoa-X processors.

Timothy Arceri with the Valve Linux graphics team has merged the code for Mesa GLSL to convert to NIR at compile-time and in turn dropping the old GLSL IR linker with this being a multi-year effort now wrapped up for Mesa 24.3.

The Network File System (NFS) changes have been merged for the ongoing Linux 6.12 development cycle. Notable this time with NFS is adding LOCALIO protocol extension support that can lead to fairly "extreme" performance improvements in scenarios where the NFS client and server are on the same host.

The high performance open-source Mold linker has released version 2.34 with various improvements while also deciding to throw in the towel on DEC Alpha processor support.

Red Hat engineer Richard Hughes this morning released Fwupd 1.9.25 as the newest feature release to this open-source solution paired with the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) for making firmware updates on Linux a breeze for an increasing number of systems and peripherals. With Fwupd 1.9.25, the supported device list has grown a little bit longer.

Joshua Ashton of Valve's Linux graphics team has opened a Mesa merge request to support a proposed "frog-fifo-v1" protocol for Wayland to address the matter of "FIFO is fundamentally broken under Mesa's Wayland WSI right now."

While there were many Windows reviews/benchmarks out Tuesday for Intel Core Ultra 200 Series "Lunar Lake" laptops on various websites, Linux tests are still awaiting due to having resorted to pre-ordering a Lunar Lake laptop myself for delivering Linux support/compatibility information and performance benchmarks. But hopefully by this time next week will be the initial data set.

While open-source enthusiasts like to criticize NVIDIA for not maintaining upstream, in-tree kernel graphics driver support (though things have been changing there), for other areas of their vast hardware portfolio they are much better upstream Linux kernel citizens and often at the forefront of new driver innovations. One of the leading examples of that is around the NVIDIA Mellanox networking driver support. With Linux 6.12 they've landed a new feature that has been described as "a sign of things to come, I think we will see more of this in the next 10 years."

NVIDIA engineers have sent out an exciting set of Linux kernel patches for enabling NVIDIA vGPU software support for virtual GPU support among multiple virtual machines (VMs). In aiming for upstream-focused Linux support, this NVIDIA vGPU support is built around the adapted Nouveau driver with the code previously posted for splitting up the Nouveau/NVKM driver components.

Intel used their Enterprise Tech Tour last week in Oregon to not only provide insight into the new Xeon 6900 "Granite Rapids" server processors (and Xeon 6980P benchmarks) but also to shed more light on their Gaudi 3 AI inference accelerator. The question I was most curious about with Gaudi 3: where's the Linux driver support?

Building off the launch earlier this year of the first Xeon 6 processors with the Xeon 6700E "Sierra Forest" processors, today Intel is lifting the wraps on the much anticipated Xeon 6900P "Granite Rapids" processors. Where as Sierra Forest is optimized for power efficiency and core density, the Intel Xeon 6 P-core processors are optimized for per-core performance and have shown some very strong generational uplift -- and against the AMD competition -- as we'll show today in the first Xeon 6980P Linux benchmarks.

With the Intel Xeon 6900P "Granite Rapids" launch today the review embargo has now expired. I began with my Intel Granite Rapids Linux benchmarking a few days ago and have initial benchmarks to share for the flagship Xeon 6980P processors paired with MRDIMM 8800MT/s memory. This is just the beginning of a lot of Granite Rapids benchmarks to come on Phoronix. Compared to the existing AMD EPYC competition and prior generation Intel Xeon processors, the Xeon 6900P series performance surpassed my expectations and has debuted as an incredibly strong performer. In some areas of HPC and other workloads, Intel is able to regain leadership performance with Granite Rapids paired with MRDIMMs. In AI workloads where the software is optimized for AMX, the new Xeon 6900P CPUs can showcase staggering leads.

Merged as part of the memory management "MM" changes for the Linux 6.12 kernel is a kernel stack usage histogram to help developers in better optimizing the kernel stack sizes and minimizing memory waste.

Going along with other early Linux kernel driver additions for enabling Panther Lake, the intel-lpss driver in Linux 6.12 has made its device ID additions for supporting Panther Lake H and Panther Lake P processors.

The Intel LPMD open-source project is a user-space daemon for optimizing active idle power handling on Linux and can be useful particularly for modern Intel Core hybrid processors. LPMD is short for the "Low Power Mode Daemon" while with today's v0.0.7 release it's now re-identified itself as the "Energy Optimizer" instead.