Svobodný software

Introduced at the end of March was Vulkan 1.4.311 with VK_KHR_shader_bfloat16 for allowing BFloat16 "BF16" operations within SPIR-V shaders with SPV_KHR_bfloat16. This BFloat16 support can be beneficial for Vulkan machine learning / AI workloads and other use cases moving forward. Now the Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" is the newest wiring up support for VK_KHR_shader_bfloat16...

The past year we've been looking forward to a RISC-V motherboard option coming to the Framework Laptop 13 via Framework's partnership with DeepComputing. There was early access in late 2024 while this week DeepComputing has formally announced the DC-ROMA RISC-V AI PC Mainboard II now available at $349 USD...

Out this morning is the Intel NPU Linux Driver 1.17 release as the newest version of their user-space Neural Processing Unit (NPU) driver code that interfaces with the IVPU accelerator kernel driver...

Newly re-elected Debian Project Leader Andreas Tille posted today to the project's mailing list a few updates about different happenings in the Debian world ahead of the Debian 13 "Trixie" release due out in the coming months and also with DebConf 25 happening this July in Brest, France...

In addition to the Intel LOBF feature and some other last minute Intel fixes going into the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) tree ahead of Linux 6.16, a final batch of material for the newer Xe kernel graphics driver was also sent out this week...

Mesa developer Konstantin Seurer has been adding more features to the Lavapipe Vulkan driver for functionality needed by VKD3D-Proton for mapping Direct3D 12 APIs atop Vulkan...

Hyprland 0.49 released on Thursday as the newest version of this unique Wayland compositor project...

After being speculated that such a feature would surface the past few months, today's updated Steam Deck Client Beta from Valve introduces a battery charge limit control to help preserve the longevity of your Steam Deck's battery...

While there have been many Linux kernel patches being worked on for months now for Intel's upcoming Panther Lake SoCs, only seeing the first Linux kernel patches today is their Wildcat Lake platform...

A new Intel graphics/display driver feature being enabled for Linux 6.16 is LOBF: Link-Off Between Frames...

June 2024 marked the launch of the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite to much initial fanfare for finally some compelling ARM laptop designs. While initially -- and still to this day with the likes of the TUXEDO X Elite laptop not materializing yet -- being focused on Windows 11 on ARM, there was hope among Linux users this would lead to a nice ARM Linux laptop experience, since after all Qualcomm and Linaro were working on enhancing the support for Linux. Now approaching the one year point, the overall state of the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite support and performance is rather disappointing. Here's a look at where things currently are and performance relative to AMD Ryzen and Intel Core Ultra when making use of the latest Ubuntu Linux support.

Sven Peter has mailed out the Device Tree "DT" updates for benefiting Apple Silicon hardware with the upcoming Linux 6.16 merge window...

OpenRazer 3.10.3 was released on Wednesday as the newest update to this set of open-source, community-maintained and out-of-tree drivers for Razer hardware on Linux...

With the Linux 6.15-rc6 kernel release due out on Sunday, we're hitting the transition point where the focus on DRM kernel graphics drivers for Linux 6.16 is shifting from feature work to bug-fixing ahead of this next merge window. As such sent out today were drm-misc-next and drm-intel-gt-next pull requests focused on preparing various kernel graphics/display driver fixes for the new code coming to Linux 6.16. The Intel pull request today even contains a fix for aging Intel Haswell graphics...

For those with a common USB Video Class "UVC" web camera, it could soon finally see support under the DragonFlyBSD operating system...

Going along with new AMDGPU kernel driver patches on their way to the mainline kernel with Linux 6.16, the Mesa 25.2 user-space driver code has landed the infrastructure for being able to set queue priorities as well as secure queues...

Python 3.14 Beta 1 is now available in working toward this next major Python release due out in early October...

Intel is teasing new Arc Pro graphics cards coming to market...

Last July it was announced Holly Million was stepping down as the GNOME Foundation's Exeuctive Director after less than a year at the helm. Richard Littauer took over as interim Executive Director while this week a new GNOME Foundation Executive Director was hired...

Mesa 25.1 is out today as the new quarterly feature release for this set of open-source user-space graphics drivers primarily consisting of OpenGL and Vulkan driver support on Linux systems...