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)

GNU Hurd Makes Progress On AArch64, Writing Translators In Rust

([GNU] 18 July 08:53 PM EDT GNU Hurd)

The GNU Hurd project recently issued their Q2'2026 status report to outline recently development efforts. The Hurd is still happening!



NVK Vulkan Performance Improving With Mesa 26.2 Against NVIDIA Proprietary Driver

([Nouveau] 18 July 03:57 PM EDT NVK Mesa 26.2 Performance)

The performance of the Nouveau kernel driver with the Mesa NVK Vulkan driver continues to improve each feature release in its quest toward better competing with NVIDIA's official Linux graphics driver with its proprietary Vulkan driver.



AMD Linux Graphics Driver Preps Fix For Apple Studio Display

([Radeon] 18 July 08:05 AM EDT AMDGPU DC Updates)

This week's batch of AMDGPU Display Core "DC" updates arrived heavy with 70 new patches for improving that open-source display support for Radeon graphics on the Linux desktop.



GNOME OS Safe Mode Improving The System Reliability

([GNOME] 18 July 07:24 AM EDT GNOME OS Safe Mode)

At GNOME's annual GUADEC conference happening this week in Spain, an update was shared on the current state of GNOME OS.



KDE Plasma 6.8 System Monitor Making It Easier Assigning Processes To CPU Cores

([KDE] 18 July 06:57 AM EDT CPU Affinity)

Nate Graham and John Veness are out with the latest issue of This Week in Plasma to highlight all of the interesting developments taking place in the KDE Plasma desktop space.



UXL's oneDNN 3.13 Preps For Intel Nova Lake With AVX10.2, More Intel Optimizations

([Intel] 18 July 06:38 AM EDT oneDNN 3.13)

Following the release of AMD's ZenDNN 6.0 earlier this month, there is a new feature release of the oneDNN neural network library that used to be developed by Intel as part of oneAPI and is now under the UXL Foundation umbrella. Even so, oneDNN feature releases continue to be heavy on new Intel optimizations and future hardware support.



D7VK 2.0 Released With Some Nice Performance Improvements: Up To 2x Or More

([Linux Gaming] 18 July 06:32 AM EDT D7VK 2.0)

In addition to Friday night's release of DXVK 3.0.2, debuting separately a short time later was D7VK 2.0 as the latest major feature release for this implementation of Direct3D 7 and earlier built off the Vulkan API.



DXVK 3.0.2 Released With Improved Hang Debugging, Handful Of Game Fixes

([Valve] 17 July 08:46 PM EDT DXVK 3.0.2)

In addition to the initial build of Holo Core as AArch64 Arch Linux for the Steam Frame, another software milestone today in Valve's Linux gaming space is the release of DXVK 3.0.2 for Direct3D 8 / 9 / 10 / 11 APIs implemented over the Vulkan API for running Windows games.



Noctua NL-LC1-36 All-In-One Liquid Cooler

([Cooling] 17 July 01:45 PM EDT 21 Comments)

With reviewing hardware for more than 22 years, when it comes to cooling products there are few brands that can still get me intrigued like Noctua. With their recent launch of the NL-LC1 all-in-one liquid coolers, I decided to try out the Noctua NL-LC1-36 360mm AIO cooler that is working out well for cooling high-end desktop CPUs like the recently launched Ryzen 9 9950X3D2.



FastFlowLM Developers Join AMD To Help Push Open-Source NPU Software

([AMD] 17 July 01:20 PM EDT FastFlowLM + AMD)

On top of releasing ROCm 7.14 as the new production release of ROCm now built offTheRock, rolling out the Lemonade 11.0 local AI server, and GAIA 0.22, AMD has some more open-source news in the lead up to next week's AMD Advancing AI event.



Experimental Build Of Holo Core Published: Arch Linux AArch64 For Valve's Steam Frame

([Valve] 17 July 11:59 AM EDT Valve's Arch Linux ARM64 Base)

As part of Valve's upcoming Qualcomm-powered Steam Frame headset, Valve has been collaborating with Collabora on the Arch Linux AArch64 base for their platform. Published today are the initial sources and binaries of this "Holo Core" base of Arch Linux AArch64 to be used by the Steam Frame.



Linux WMI Driver Gets Ready To Support ACPI-Based ARM64 Laptops

([Arm] 17 July 09:45 AM EDT ACPI WMI Driver)

Linux developer Armin Wolf sent out a set of patches today for enabling AArch64 support for the ACPI Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) driver to work on AArch64 in no longer being bound to x86/x86_64. This is a step toward the long goal of being able to support modern Windows on ARM laptops via ACPI on Linux.



Arm Core Local Accelerator Driver Posted For Linux As Agnostic Interface For Accelerators

([Arm] 17 July 08:35 AM EDT Arm Core Local Accelerator)

A new open-source Linux driver announced today by Arm is the Arm Core Local Accelerator "CLA" driver as a CPU-local interface for programming attached accelerators. This is an agnostic interface for attached accelerators with the initial target focusing on an attached compute engine.



AMD Preps More Graphics Driver Improvements For Linux 7.3

([Radeon] 17 July 06:21 AM EDT AMDGPU + Linux 7.3)

Since earlier this month AMD has begun staging graphics driver changes for Linux 7.3 ahead of the merge window opening in late July. That's brought some interesting changes so far while there still are a few weeks to land any additional features in DRM-Next. This week another batch of AMDGPU graphics driver and AMDKFD compute driver feature code was sent out for this next kernel version.



Mozilla AI Releases Llamafile 0.10.4 With New Transcribefile Built On Transcribe.cpp

([Mozilla] 17 July 06:07 AM EDT Llamafile 0.10.4)

Mozilla AI developers have released a new version of Llamafile, their solution for easy-to-use LLMs as a single file that work across hardware and operating systems. With Llamafile 0.10.4 is now Transcribefile, as a new piece built off their recently announced Transcribe.cpp project.



OpenBLAS 0.3.34 Improves Multi-Threading, Support For A Memory-Safe C Toolchain

([Programming] 17 July 05:58 AM EDT OpenBLAS 0.3.34)

OpenBLAS 0.3.34 released on Thursday as this popular, open-source BLAS library providing optimized support for a variety of CPUs/architectures. OpenBLAS 0.3.34 continues working on squeezing more performance out of today's processors as well as delivering other new features.



Frame: A New X11 Server Implementation Written Entirely In x86_64 Assembly

([X.Org] 16 July 08:50 PM EDT X11 Server In Assembly)

Previously we covered YSERVER as an X11 server written in the Rust programming language with the help of Claude Code. A Phoronix reader wrote in today to share an even more esoteric X11 server implementation that has come about and again written in large part by AI/LLM usage: Frame is an X11 server written in pure x86_64 Assembly.



KDE KWin Introduces Support For Server-Side Drop Shadows

([KDE] 16 July 05:10 PM EDT Server-Side Drop Shadows)

The KDE Plasma 6.8 will be introducing support for server-side drop shadows with the feature recently having been merged to KWin.



AMD's GAIA Continues Striving To Be Your Ultimate AI Companion For Emails

([AMD] 16 July 04:46 PM EDT AMD GAIA 0.22)

Yesterday saw the release of AMD's Lemonade 11.0 local AI server as well as ROCm 7.14 as the first production release built using TheRock. Out today is AMD's GAIA 0.22 software as their latest AI software release in working toward the AMD Advancing AI event next week in California.



FreeBSD Intern Working On Porting AMD ROCm To The BSD World

([BSD] 16 July 02:00 PM EDT FreeBSD + AMD ROCm)

An intern with the FreeBSD Foundation is working on porting AMD's ROCm compute stack to run on this popular BSD environment.



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