ARM Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life (Terry Pratchett, Jingo)

Imagination PowerVR BXM-4-64 GPU Firmware Upstreamed For The T-Head TH1520

([Hardware] 16 July 05:51 AM EDT PowerVR Rogue BXM-4-64)

Now in the upstream linux-firmware.git centralized repository is the firmware binary needed for enabling the Imagination Tech PowerVR BXM-4-64 Rogue GPU found with the Alibaba T-Head TH1520 SoC.



AMD ROCm 7.14 Announced As New Production Release, Ryzen AI 400 Series Support

([AMD] 15 July 10:49 PM EDT AMD ROCm 7.14)

As a follow-up to the article over ROCm 7.14 being tagged, AMD has formally announced the availability of ROCm 7.14 and it's their new production release rather than being a tech preview.



AMD ROCm 7.14 "TheRock" Tech Preview Tagged For Latest AMD GPU Compute Stack

([AMD] 15 July 08:21 PM EDT AMD ROCm 7.14)

AMD's software team appears to be busy getting ready for next week's Advancing AI event happening next week in San Francisco. In addition to the release today of the Lemonade 11.0 local AI server, TheRock 7.14 was also tagged as the modern build system for ROCm working on the latest tech preview releases of this open-source AMD GPU compute stack.



Mesa 26.2-rc1 Released In Ending Feature Work For This Quarter's 3D Graphics Stack

([Mesa] 15 July 05:10 PM EDT Mesa 26.2)

Mesa 26.2 was branched today from Mesa Git and in turn Mesa 26.3-devel is now open on mainline.



AMD Releases Lemonade 11.0 Local AI Server With Text-To-Speech, Other New Features

([AMD] 15 July 03:51 PM EDT Lemonade 11.0)

Ahead of the AMD Advancing AI event next week, today AMD released Lemonade 11.0 as the latest feature release of their local AI server supporting AMD Ryzen CPUs, AMD Radeon GPUs, and AMD Ryzen AI NPU acceleration.



Ubuntu 26.04 LTS vs. Windows 11 vs. CachyOS Performance On A $5399 Laptop

([Operating Systems] 15 July 12:15 PM EDT 29 Comments)

Earlier this month on Phoronix I reviewed the Razer Blade 18 RZ09-0582 as the first laptop Razer is certifying for Linux use via Canonical's hardware certification program for Linux. It offered very nice performance with the Intel Core Ultra 9 290HX Plus and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 graphics albeit costly with a configured price of $5399 USD. That review featured benchmarks on Ubuntu 26.04 LTS but for those wondering about the performance of Ubuntu against Windows 11 on this gaming/AI developer laptop, here are comparison benchmarks plus also tossing in the rolling-release CachyOS distribution.



Linux Patches Finally Allow Apple Magic Keyboard/Mouse Battery Monitoring Via Bluetooth

([Apple] 15 July 08:54 AM EDT Apple Magic Keyboard + Mouse)

Besides the ongoing challenges of enabling newer Apple Silicon SoC support on Linux, Apple peripheral support on Linux remains a mixed bag depending on the product as well. The latest functionality now being addressed is for having battery reporting work for the Apple Magic Mouse and Magic Keyboard when connected via Bluetooth.



Linus Torvalds Reaffirms That Linux Is Not "Anti-AI" & Not A "Social Warrior" Project

([Linux Kernel] 15 July 06:35 AM EDT Linux Kernel + AI)

Overnight Linux creator Linus Torvalds wrote another well crafted message that reaffirms the Linux kernel position of not being against AI and lashing back against some kernel developers that are against AI/LLM usage within the kernel project.



Vocalinux 0.14 Beta Released For Offline Voice Dictation / Speech-To-Text On Linux

([Desktop] 15 July 06:10 AM EDT Offline Speech-To-Text)

Ubuntu 26.10 is notably working on laying the foundation for a context-aware desktop and their initial deliverable being worked on is Myna as a speech-to-text solution for the Linux desktop. Interestingly there is already a promising voice dictation / speech-to-text solution for the Linux desktop called Vocalinux that continues advancing and is usable right now for those looking at their own speech-to-text desktop solution.



FreeBSD Laptop Support Continues Improving With WiFi, GPU & Audio Driver Work

([BSD] 15 July 05:56 AM EDT FreeBSD On Laptops)

The FreeBSD Foundation's Laptop Support and Usability Project, which has received more than $750k USD in funding to improve the experience of FreeBSD on laptops, is out with its newest monthly progress report. A lot continues to happen for improving the FreeBSD laptop story, which in many aspects also benefits FreeBSD on the desktop too.



Mesa's Native Vulkan-To-Metal Driver Now Advertises Vulkan 1.4

([Mesa] 15 July 05:39 AM EDT Vulkan 1.4 For KosmicKrisp)

KosmicKrisp as the Vulkan API driver built atop Apple's Metal API in Mesa for macOS and iOS systems is now advertising Vulkan 1.4 compatibility.



Khronos Lists First Conformant OpenCL 3.1 Implementation: Apple M1/M2 On Asahi Linux With Rusticl

([Standards] 14 July 09:14 PM EDT OpenCL 3.1 Conformance)

Back in May OpenCL 3.1 was announced with a focus on AI and HPC workloads. Just over two months later, this incremental update over OpenCL 3.0 now has its first listed conformant OpenCL 3.1 implementation for passing the OpenCL 3.1 conformance test suite cases. It's Apple Silicon M1/M2 graphics running on Asahi Linux with the Mesa Rusticl driver.



COSMIC Epoch 1.3 Released With New Frosted Glass Option

([Desktop] 14 July 06:41 PM EDT COSMIC Epoch 1.3)

For those that were intrigued by the COSMIC desktop's "Frosted Glass" effect, it's now available in released form with today's COSMIC Epoch 1.3 release.



FreeBSD 16 Retires The Last Of Its GPL Code From Its Base System

([BSD] 14 July 03:38 PM EDT FreeBSD 16 GPLFree)

As of this past week in the FreeBSD source tree for FreeBSD 16, the last of the GNU GPL licensed code from the base system has been retired.



BOSGAME VTA-439: A Great, Linux-Friendly Mini PC Powered By AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 470

([Computers] 14 July 02:57 PM EDT 9 Comments)

For those that were intrigued by the recent launch of the AMD Ryzen AI Halo developer platform with a very capable mini PC but looking for something more affordable and not needing quite as much horsepower or AI focus, BOSGAME recently launched their VTA-439 mini PC. The BOSGAME VTA-439 is powered by the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 470 with Radeon 890M graphics for those wanting still quite a capable mini PC that retails for around $1,049 USD while sporting 32GB of RAM and 1TB NVMe SSD storage.



Blender 5.2 LTS Released With Many Great Enhancements

([Free Software] 14 July 12:11 PM EDT Blender 5.2)

Blender 5.2 is out today as the newest Long Term Support release for this leading, open-source 3D modeling software.



System76 Launches New Adder Pro Laptop With NVIDIA GPU, 2K OLED & Up To 96GB RAM

([Hardware] 14 July 11:25 AM EDT System76 Adder Pro)

System76 today announced their new Adder Pro laptop that they are promoting as the "gamer's dream machine" with its NVIDIA graphics, 2K OLED 500 nit display, up to 96GB RAM, and 3.37 lb weight.



Linux Foundation's Latest Foray Is To Standardize Internet-Native Payments For AI Agents

([Free Software] 14 July 09:22 AM EDT x402 Foundation)

There is yet-another-foundation being stewarded by the Linux Foundation that further broadens its scope outside of the typical Linux/open-source umbrella. Today the Linux Foundation announced the launch of the x402 Foundation for aiming to standardize Internet-native payments for AI agents and applications.



Linux Kernel Graphics Driver Proposed For GlandaGPU: An Open-Source Soft GPU Core

([Hardware] 14 July 09:08 AM EDT GlandaGPU DRM Kernel Driver)

A new Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) kernel graphics driver has been sent out for GlandaGPU, an open-source custom 3D graphics core designed in VHDL and running on FPGA hardware.



Intel IGC 2.38.2 Brings Latest Round Of Graphics Compiler Improvements

([Intel] 14 July 08:50 AM EDT Intel Graphics Compiler 2.38.2)

Ahead of the next Intel Compute Runtime release, IGC 2.38.2 was released today as the newest feature update to this open-source graphics compiler used by Intel iGPU/dGPU hardware on both Windows and Linux.



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