Imagination's open-source PowerVR Vulkan driver within Mesa now is able to generate its different internal shaders required by the driver to forego shipping old hard-coded shaders.

Intel announced this week that its moving its graphics driver support for integrated graphics on 11th Gen through 14th Gen processors over to their legacy driver model on Microsoft Windows. While this is a setback for those using Raptor Lake processors on Windows as well as the few Xe DG1 discrete graphics out there, Linux users don't have much to worry about.

Function Multi-Versioning (FMV) is the compiler feature that allows developers to specify multiple versions of the same function that can be used for optimizing execution for specific target features. For example, FMV can allow optimized functions to be called if the CPU supports AVX, AVX-512, SSE4.2, or other differing ISA capabilities. With the GCC 16 compiler release, AArch64/ARM64 now considers its FMV support to be stable and complete.

The widely-used FFmpeg open-source multimedia library has merged support for MPEG-H 3D Audio decoding.

In addition to the patches providing haptic touchpad support for Linux 6.18, another notable HID addition queued into the "hid-next" tree ahead of the imminent Linux 6.18 merge window is proper audio jack handling with the Sony PlayStation DualSense controller.

SquashFS developer Phillip Lougher posted a patch today just over one hundred lines of code yielding an outright massive performance gain for some operations with this compressed read-only file-system.

The upcoming Linux 6.18 kernel is expected to land initial haptic touchpad support as part of the HID subsystem updates.

It was just a few days ago that a multi-kernel architecture was proposed for the Linux kernel. Separate from that proposal from Multikernel Technologies, it turns out Bytedance has been working on their own similar solution called Parker. Today Bytedance lifted the lid on Parker as their solution for running multiple kernels simultaneously on the same hardware/system.

With DKMS packages now being available for Ubuntu and Debian Linux distributions for running the latest out-of-tree Bcachefs file-system driver support with ease and reproducibility, I decided to try out the updated Bcachefs driver on Ubuntu Linux to see how the performance is relative to the upstream Linux 6.17 kernel with its now-frozen Bcachefs support.

Two pull requests were submitted this weekend of new Apple Silicon material ready for upstreaming with the soon-to-start Linux 6.18 kernel cycle.

For further enhancing the upstream Linux kernel support for the AMD (Xilinx) Versal SoCs, a new Error Detection And Correction (EDAC) driver is set to premiere in the upcoming Linux 6.18 kernel for the Versal NET SoCs with DDR memory.

Merged to Mesa 25.3-devel on Monday is SPIR-V shader replacement support as a new feature for helping Mesa's Vulkan drivers in testing and debugging issues.

A set of 13 patches were posted today to the Linux kernel mailing list for optimizing the online defragmentation handling by the EXT4 kernel driver. The online defragmentation improvements for EXT4 can net a nice performance win with a very significant improvement in a variety of scenarios.

Beyond the continued flow of new performance optimizations via hand-written Assembly, with the FFmpeg project it's also interesting to monitor their ever-expanding scope of supported audio/video formats. The newest to land in FFmpeg Git is support for AHX audio files.

Out today is the Qt 6.10 release candidate for this forthcoming toolkit release.

OBS Studio 32.0 stable is now available for this popular cross-platform desktop recording and screencasting software popular with game streamers and for a variety of other recording/casting purposes.

While the Rust Coreutils project has been generating a lot of interest recently from the uutils initiative, the upstream GNU Coreutils project isn't slowing down and today is out with GNU Coreutils 9.8 for shipping the newest features.

RPM 6.0 is out today as the newest major update to the RPM Package Manager as the package management system most commonly associated with Red Hat / Fedora, openSUSE, Mageia / OpenMandriva, and others.

With last week's official release of ROCm 7.0 failing to mention the AMD Ryzen AI Max "Strix Halo" SoCs on the supported GPU list, a number of Phoronix readers and from elsewhere were inquiring whether or not Strix Halo works with the new ROCm release. Various AMD folks have mentioned Strix Halo with ROCm, so I decided to run some benchmarks for myself of ROCm 7.0 on Ubuntu Linux with the AMD Ryzen AI Max 395 with Radeon 8060S Graphics on the Framework Desktop.

XTX Markets as one of the largest algorithmic trading firms that handles $250 billion in daily traded volume and relies on around 650+ petabytes of storage for its price forecasts and other algorithmic trading data has open-sourced its Linux file-system. XTX developed TernFS for distributed storage after they outgrew their original NFS usage and other file-system alternatives.