Fraunhofer HHI this week released a new version of VVenC, their open-source H.266 video encoder. Among the changes this release are more performance optimizations for ARM and I have run some comparison benchmarks using a NVIDIA GB10 SoC with the Dell Pro Max GB10.

In addition to the release today of Vulkan 1.4.340 with the new descriptor heap "VK_EXT_descriptor_heap" extension and three other new extensions, The Khronos Group's Vulkan Working Group has also published the Vulkan Roadmap 2026 Milestone.

AMD today released a new version of Ryzen AI Software, the user-space packages for Microsoft Windows and Linux for making use of the Ryzen AI NPUs for various AI software tasks like Stable Diffusion, ONNX, and more.

GNU Guix 1.5 is out today as the latest major release for this platform built around its functional package manager. This is a big upgrade with it having been three years since the GNU Guix 1.4 release.

Merged today for the Linux 6.19 Git kernel and then in turn for back-porting to prior Linux kernel series is making the x86 page fault handling code disable interrupts properly. Since 2020 it turns out the handling was subtly wrong but now corrected by Intel.

Zlib-rs is the effort out of the Trifecta Tech Foundation to provide a Zlib compression implementation written in the Rust programming language that can serve as a C dynamic library and Rust crate. The intent here being that zlib-rs is potentially safer than the classic C-based implementation of Zlib.

KMSCON as a KMS/DRM-based virtual console emulator in user-space has been released. KMSCON is one of the leading solutions for potentially replacing the in-kernel Virtual Terminal (VT) implementation.

Vulkan 1.4.340 is out today as the first significant new Vulkan API update following the end of year holidays. With Vulkan 1.4.340 comes four new extensions worth talking about.

Servo 0.0.4 is out today as the newest monthly update to this open-source, Rust-based web browser engine. Building off recent Servo embedding API additions, Servo 0.0.4 introduces support for multiple browser windows.

While slightly too late for making it into the Mesa 26.0 release that branched yesterday, merged now to Mesa Git for Q2's Mesa 26.1 release are some new RadeonSI Gallium3D (OpenGL) driver optimizations for the latest AMD Radeon RDNA4 graphics cards.

An oversight in the Linux kernel's Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) graphics driver common code could allow unprivileged users to trigger unbounded kernel memory consumption for a potential system-wide out-of-memory "OOM" situation.

As part of my end-of-year 2025 benchmarking I looked at how the Intel Xeon 6980P Granite Rapids performance evolved in the year since launch and seeing some nice open-source/Linux optimizations during that time. On the other side of the table were also benchmarks of how AMD EPYC 8004 Sienna evolved in its two years, Ubuntu 24.04 vs. 26.04 development for AMD EPYC Turin, the AMD EPYC Milan-X in its four years since launch, and also a look at the performance evolution lower down the stack with the likes of sub-$500 laptop hardware. Out today is a fresh look at how the Intel Xeon 6780E Sierra Forest has evolved in its one and a half years since its launch.

Back at CES AMD announced the Ryen 7 9850X3D as a faster sibling to the Ryzen 7 9800X3D. Today they have announced the suggested price for this 3D V-Cache desktop processor and confirmation of its availability starting on 29 January.

Ahead of the first Intel Core Ultra Series 3 Panther Lake laptops expected to hit retail channels next week, Intel has published updated IPU7 (IPU 7.5) firmware for the image processing unit used by the web cameras on the higher-end Panther Lake laptops.

Rust 1.93 is out today as the first feature release for this programming lanugage of 2026.

Yesterday along with releasing ROCm 7.2 there was also the release of AOMP 22.0-2 as the newest version of their open-source downstream of LLVM/Clang/Flang that is focused on offering the best OpenMP/OpenACC offloading support to Instinct/Radeon hardware.

James Brodman worked for the last 15 years at Intel on their ISPC SIMD compiler and then in more recent years on the Intel DPC++ compiler and SYCL support as part of Intel's oneAPI initiative. Rather interestingly, this compiler expert has now joined AMD.

The ReactOS project is celebrating today that it marks 30 years since their first code commit in the ReactOS source tree. During the past 30 years now the project has seen more than 88k commits from more than 300 developers as it seeks to be a robust open-source Windows implementation. In their 30 year birthday blog post they also provide a look ahead at what they're working on.

While the Linux kernel has been seeing preparations from NVIDIA for 1.6 Tb/s networking in preparing for next-generation super-computing, the kernel has still retained support to now for the High Performance Parallel Interface. HIPPI was the standard for connecting supercomputers in the late 1980s and a portion of the 1990s with being the first networking standard for near-Gigabit connectivity at 800 Mb/s over distances up to 25 meters. But HIPPI looks like it will be retired from the mainline kernel with Linux 7.0.

Sent out to the Linux kernel mailing list this afternoon were a set of 19 patches in preparing for some new CPU features presumably to be found with AMD's next-generation EPYC "Venice" processors.