Intel today released IGC 1.0.17193.4 as the newest version of the Intel Graphics Compiler that is used for their compute stack on Windows/Linux as well as by their Windows graphics driver for shader compilation.

As a follow-up to last week's AMD Zen 5 overview with the Ryzen 9000 series and Ryzen AI 300 series, today the embargo has lifted on some additional Zen 5 CPU core details.

While not as notable as the nice EXT4 performance optimization making it into Linux 6.11 or features like XFS real-time FITRIM and self-healing Bcachefs on read I/O errors, the Bcachefs, F2FS, and Btrfs file-systems saw smaller updates for the Linux 6.11 kernel cycle.

The latest video acceleration improvements to report on with the open-source AMD Radeon driver front is support in Mesa 24.3-devel for passing HDR metadata in the AV1 encoder.

It's not too often that the ATA pull request for a new Linux kernel merge window has much worth mentioning. With Linux 6.11 there is a change to the kernel defaults worth noting over the default SATA link power management policy. In this case most Linux distributions have been setting a better default themselves and is now a case of the upstream kernel defaults catching up.

Intel's OSPRay ray-tracing engine as part of their oneAPI rendering toolkit continues to serve as a great, scalable and portable RT engine for high fidelity visualizations. With OSPRay 3.2 released today, they continue advancing this open-source engine further.

The upstream Linux 6.11 kernel is making it easier to build a Pacman package of the kernel for use on Arch Linux and other Arch derived distributions relying on Pacman.

Ahead of launch for new discrete/integrated graphics backed by open-source Linux drivers, it can often be difficult to ascertain the level of support pre-launch given the complexity of today's GPUs, we are past the days of long monolithic patch series for new hardware enablement, and also not knowing about what features may be added for the next-generation hardware. But if latest Mesa developer comments hold, it looks like for Intel Xe2 graphics the open-source Vulkan driver at least has "most" of the code now in place.

DRM subsystem lead maintainer David Airlie recently submitted the DRM-Next pull request for merging into Linux 6.11. All of that Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) feature code has landed for the many kernel graphics/display driver updates along with changes to the few AI accelerator "accel" drivers also part of the tree. As usual, the Intel Xe/i915 and AMD AMDGPU/AMDKFD kernel drivers see a bulk of the upstream open-source graphics improvements.

NVIDIA today released their first Linux beta driver in the new R560 driver release branch. Coming days after their NVIDIA 560 Windows driver, out this morning is the NVIDIA 560.28.03 beta Linux driver.

Following up on the previously noted proposal around Fedora Workstation 42 looking at adding opt-in user metrics, the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has now granted approval for this somewhat controversial feature.

As scheduled, LLVM Clang 19 was branched from mainline Git this morning and is now considered feature frozen ahead of its planned September release. LLVM Clang 20 in turn is now in development with the main Git branch.

Greg Kroah-Hartman described the char/misc pull request for the Linux 6.11 merge window as having "just loads of new drivers and updates." Among the new drivers is beginning to enable support for the KEBA CP500 as the latest FPGA seeing upstream kernel support.

We appear to be on the heels of the AMD ROCm 6.2 software release for advancing the open-source AMD Radeon/Instinct GPU compute stack with new features.

The BSDs unfortunately continue to lag behind Linux in their GPU driver support. The latest example of this is OpenBSD only days ago seeing initial support for the Video Acceleration API (VA-API) merged for GPU-accelerated video playback on that BSD platform.

Coming just a day after posting a big set of patches for improving VRR display support under the X.Org Server, Enrico Weigelt today announced the release of the X.Org Testing Ground v0.0.4 software that now supports OpenIndiana / Illumos (OpenSolaris) in addition to its Linux and BSD platform support.

The LoongArch CPU architecture changes were submitted and subsequently merged on Monday for the ongoing Linux 6.11 merge window. With the new kernel these Chinese processors support more kernel features for this MIPS-derived and RISC-V-inspired architecture.

Released this weekend was a new version of WPA_Supplicant along with hostapd for this WiFI Protected Access client and IEEEE-802.1x supplicant. WPA_Supplicant 2.11 is the first major release of this software since early 2022 and as a result comes packing many changes.

We have been eagerly awaiting the end of July for the planned alpha release of System76's Rust-written COSMIC desktop. For those awaiting COSMIC in the form of a new Pop!_OS development release, that at least will be coming in early August.

All of the "perf" performance events feature updates were merged last week for the ongoing Linux 6.11 merge window.