NVIDIA GeForce GTX 600/700 "Kepler" GPUs Now Vulkan 1.2 Conformant With NVK

Yet more feature code continues piling in for the Mesa 25.2 release due out next month and days ahead of the feature freeze. Hitting Mesa Git this evening is now treating NVIDIA Kepler GPUs as Vulkan 1.2 conformant following the Vulkan 1.2 CTS passing with the NVK open-source driver paired with the Nouveau kernel driver...
phoronix.com/news/NVK-Kepler-V…

Additional AMD RDNA3 & RDNA4 Ray-Tracing Improvements For Mesa 25.2 RADV

Ahead of the Mesa 25.2 feature freeze and code branching expected later this week, some additional ray-tracing optimizations were merged today for the Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver. These latest RADV ray-tracing improvements benefit the latest Radeon RX 9000 series "RDNA4" the most but there are also some optimizations too for RDNA3 class GPUs...
phoronix.com/news/RADV-More-RT…

Intel Enabling SR-IOV For Battlemage Graphics Cards With Linux 6.17

The upcoming Linux 6.17 kernel is going to be an especially nice release for users of modern Intel graphics hardware on Linux. The very latest feature being enabled for this next Linux kernel version is SR-IOV for Battlemage GPUs to vastly enhance the Intel Linux graphics experience in virtualized environments...
phoronix.com/news/Intel-Enable…

Blender 4.5 LTS Released With Vulkan & Wayland Improvements, Some Optimizations

Blender 4.5 is now officially available today as the newest feature release and one that is a Long Term Support (LTS) for this popular, cross-platform 3D modeling software...
phoronix.com/news/Blender-4.5-…

Broadcom BCM5770X Networking Driver Support Heading To Linux 6.17

One month ago there was the report on Phoronix of the Broadcom "BNGE" open-source driver being published for forthcoming BCM5770X networking chipsets. That new Broadcom BNGE driver is now set to be introduced in the upcoming Linux 6.17 kernel for supporting the new Broadcom wired networking hardware at up to 800 Gigabit speeds...
phoronix.com/news/Broadcom-BCM…

LLVM 22 Compiler Enters Development With LLVM 21 Now Branched

The LLVM 21 compiler stack was branched today as release preparations get underway for shipping this next half-year compiler release as stable in late August or early September. In turn that now opens up LLVM 22 for development...
phoronix.com/news/LLVM-22-Star…

GTK3 Port Of The Kernel's gconfig Utility Appears Ready For Linux 6.17

Last month patches were posted for porting the Linux kernel's "gconfig" graphical kernel configuration utility from GTK2 to GTK3. It looks like those patches for the GTK3-ified gconfig are ready for upstreaming come Linux 6.17...
phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.17-g…

Intel ANV Driver Now Exposes Vulkan Video AV1 Decode On Battlemage & Lunar Lake

While the Intel Media SDK with VA-API has long supported accelerated video decoding, the latest Mesa 25.2 development code has now landed support for AV1 decoding using the Vulkan Video API with the Intel ANV driver for Xe2 Battlemage / Lunar Lake graphics and Gfx125 Xe graphics too...
phoronix.com/news/Intel-ANV-Vu…

Latest Intel Engineering Layoffs Lead To An Intel Linux Driver Being Orphaned

The latest round of cost-cutting at Intel seems to be having a larger impact on their software engineering efforts than some of their previous rounds of layoffs. In addition to a prominent Linux kernel developer veteran leaving Intel last week where he worked for the past 14 years and responsible for many great upstream improvements, other Intel software enginee…
phoronix.com/news/Intel-SLM-Dr…

Google Publishes Updated Proposal For Standardizing Haptic Touchpads On Linux

As part of work going back to 2019, an engineer on Google's Chromium OS team submitted an updated proposal on Monday for seeking to standardize the haptic touchpad support within the Linux kernel...
phoronix.com/news/Google-Hapti…

RADV Lands Experimental Host Image Copy Support (VK_EXT_host_image_copy)

Making it into the RADV Vulkan driver ahead of this week's Mesa 25.2 feature freeze is experimental support for the VK_EXT_host_image_copy extension. The Vulkan host image copy extension was worked on by Valve and others for letting applications/games copy data between the host memory and images on the host processor without having to first stage via a GPU-accessible buf…
phoronix.com/news/RADV-Experim…

New Effort To Upstream LTTng In The Linux Kernel Draws Criticism From Torvalds

The LTTng tracing toolkit is twenty years old this year and it's seen significant adoption by different hyperscalers and other notable organizations like IBM and Sony and Siemens beyond basic end-users and administrators for system tracing/debugging. While having many successes over the past two decades, the kernel modules remain outside of the kernel tree. Eve…
phoronix.com/news/LTTng-Kernel…

Intel Xe3 Panther Lake OpenGL & Vulkan Support Now Enabled By Default On Linux

With the upcoming Linux 6.17 kernel the Intel Xe kernel graphics driver is enabling Panther Lake graphics out-of-the-box. Now going along with that Linux 6.17+ support out-of-the-box, the Mesa OpenGL and Vulkan user-space drivers are also ready to declare their Xe3 Panther Lake graphics support by default...
phoronix.com/news/Intel-Panthe…

New Linux Patches Enable Support For The Snapdragon X1 Powered Microsoft Surface Pro 11

Posted today to the Linux kernel mailing list are a set of nine patches for bringing up support for the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite/Plus powered Microsoft Surface Pro 11 2-in-1 laptop...
phoronix.com/news/MS-Surface-P…

Mesa 25.2 NVK vs. NVIDIA R575 Linux Graphics Performance For GeForce RTX 40 Series

A number of Phoronix readers have been interested in seeing some fresh benchmarks of Mesa's NVK Vulkan driver in providing open-source Vulkan API support on NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards as well as the modern OpenGL approach of using Zink for layering OpenGL atop Vulkan. Here are some fresh benchmarks using the very latest Mesa 25.2 code for NVK on the latest u…
phoronix.com/review/mesa-252-n…

SFrame Support Upstreamed To GNU C Library For Glibc 2.42

Merged today into the upstream GNU C Library code ahead of next month's Glibc 2.42 release is support for SFrame stack tracing with ELF binaries on x86 and AArch64 architectures...
phoronix.com/news/SFrame-Merge…