Well this is a hell of a surprise... Microsoft announced today that DirectX will be adopting SPIR-V as the interchange format of the future. Microsoft's DirectX 12 will accept shaders compiled to SPIR-V, the intermediate representation defined by The Khronos Group and commonly associated with Vulkan / OpenGL / OpenCL drivers...

After several weeks of testing Valve has released Proton 9.0-3 as the newest version of this Wine downstream that powers Steam Play for being able to enjoy Windows games on Linux...

Oliver Smith as the Interim Engineering Director for Ubuntu Desktop at Canonical is out with a new status update on Ubuntu 24.10 development and related ambitions. This also includes more details about bringing the KDE Plasma desktop to Ubuntu Core Desktop in Snap form...

There has been a lot of talk the past few days over the AMD AGESA PI 1.2.0.2 update that has begun rolling out to AMD AM5 motherboards with BIOS updates. The AGESA 1.2.0.2 is said to improve inter-core latency for Ryzen 9000 "Zen 5" processors when cores from different CCDs are cross-communicating. Some -- at least under Windows -- have reported performance improvements and thus several Phoronix readers have requested I run some of my tests with AGESA 1.2.0.2. Here are said comparison benchmarks using an AMD Ryzen 9 9950X on Ubuntu Linux.

The Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) kernel graphics/display driver updates have been submitted and already merged for the in-development Linux 6.12 kernel...

The core perf subsystem updates have been merged for the in-development Linux 6.12 kernel...

Intel engineers today released OpenVINO 2024.4 as the newest version of their open-source AI toolkit. OpenVINO 2024.4 prepares for upcoming Intel Core Ultra Series 2 "Lunar Lake" processors, supports newer Gen AI models, now supports Python 3.12, and finally adds official support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9...

The scheduler updates have been submitted for the Linux 6.12 kernel and come with several notable enhancements...

The Microsoft Hyper-V updates have been submitted for the Linux 6.12 kernel. They are mostly small changes but does bring work to optimize the boot time for large Hyper-V VMs...

The XFS file-system changes have been merged for the Linux 6.12 kernel and introduce new ioctls for being able to exchange the contents of two files...

For anyone still relying upon virtual reality (VR) applications written for the OpenGL API rather than the Vulkan API that has been dominant among VR apps (and other modern games / software) for years, the Mesa code and in particular the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver now supports the OpenGL VR (OVR) extensions...

An interesting merge request opened this week and already merged for Mesa 24.3 comes from an Autodesk engineer adding Vulkan Windowing System Integration (WSI) around Apple's Metal API for use on macOS...

The FFmpeg multimedia library continues to enhance its support around the Vulkan Video APIs with the latest commits seeing H.264 and H.265/HEVC Vulkan encode support merged...

GNOME 47 is out today as the latest major update to this popular open-source desktop environment...

For those wondering about the performance of the NVIDIA RTX 6000 Ada Generation workstation performance on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS with the up-to-date NVIDIA Linux graphics drivers now relying on the open-source kernel modules, this article is for you in looking at the performance of this high-end workstation graphics card on the up-to-date Linux software stack. The NVIDIA RTX 6000 Ada Generation is tested alongside the RTX 2000 / 4000 Ada Generation graphics cards and also the AMD Radeon PRO W7000 series competition atop Ubuntu 24.04 LTS.

Not to be confused with the proposal a few days ago by an AMD engineer for Attack Vector Controls for broader control over CPU security mitigation handling, the in-development Linux 6.12 kernel is adding new Kconfig options to allow for more build-time control over what CPU security mitigation code is compiled for the kernel...

The big set of power management updates for Linux 6.12 have landed...

Intel Compute Runtime 24.35.30872.22 released today as the newest tagged version of this open-source GPU compute stack providing oneAPI Level Zero and OpenCL support for Linux and Windows systems...

Merged as part of the Linux Security Modules (LSM) updates for the Linux 6.12 kernel is the new Integrity Policy Enforcement (IPE) module that has been years in the making. Integrity Policy Enforcement is an alternative to access controls...

The Btrfs file-system continues marching ahead with the Linux 6.12 kernel...