Last week marked the release of GCC 16.1 as the first GCC 16 stable release. While that release introduces initial AMD Zen 6 "znver6" support well in advance of those next-generation AMD processors debuting, it's not yet in perfect shape with just today two missing optimizations around AVX-512 having been merged.

This commit today added two missing AVX-512 optimiztions for the AMD Zen 6 path for enabling avx512_two_epilogues and avx5

Last month a Fedora Linux change proposal was shared proposing that Fedora 45 be built with x86_64-v3 packages to complement the generic x86_64 (v1) packages currently being compiled. This has the possibility of providing greater performance out of packaged Fedora software but comes with the cost of greater burdens on web mirrors, QA / testing, and related infrastructure impact. The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee "FESCo" decided today to wait on coming to a decision over this

Flatpak 1.17.7 is now available for continuing to advance open-source app sandboxing and distribution on the Linux desktop. Some interesting new features are in tow with this Flatpak update plus there is also an updated XDG-Desktop-Portal release too.

One of the interesting changes with Flatpak 1.17.7 is being able to report the age of the configuration was added to libflatpak. Yes, at first when seeing "age" in the release notes, thoughts immediately went to all the recent

After the merge request was open the past three months for code originally authored eight months ago, the Intel "ANV" open-source Vulkan driver for Linux systems is now advertising support for descriptor heaps with the VK_EXT_descriptor_heap extension. But for the moment at least it's treated as experimental.

VK_EXT_descriptor_heap was formally introduced back in January with Vulkan 1.4.340 . VK_EXT_descriptor_heap allows for the explicit management of descriptors and

The Khronos Group today announced OpenCL 3.1 as the first major spec update in six years and incorporating various features into the core spec for enhancing AI and HPC capabilities. As a very exciting development, Rusticl as Mesa's lead OpenCL driver implementation is ready to go with same-day OpenCL 3.1 support pending.

Karol Herbst, Red Hat engineer and lead Rusticl developer, opened the merge request today for landing OpenCL 3.1 support into Mesa. It's not yet been merged but will likely soon

Merged to the Intel Xe kernel graphics driver with Linux 7.1 is an addition to improve the video RAM memory pressure or out-of-memory behavior for Intel graphics with dedicated video memory. Introduced is support for purgeable buffer objects via a new user-space API to provide usage hints for enhancing what is purged under vRAM pressure. Merged this week to Mesa 26.2-devel is support for the Intel Mesa drivers to make use of this new interface.

The Intel driver code in Mesa 26.

The preview release of the Arch Linux powered Manjaro 26.1 is now available for testing.

Manjaro 26.1 Preview is now available for testing in preparations for their first new version since January. In the months since that prior release, GNOME 50 has been released with a multitude of improvements. As well, KDE Plasma 6.6 is now available too for delivering all those latest and greatest KDE innovations. If GNOME 50 or KDE Plasma 6.6 don't suit your fancy, Xfce

An improvement on the way for the AMD P-State Linux CPU frequency scaling driver and the Linux ACPI Collaborative Processor Performance Control ( CPPC ) code at large is supporting a new "HighestFreq" register to be standardized by a future revision of the ACPI specification.

The CPPC HighestFreq register that is likely to be introduced in the next ACPI spec, ACPI 6.7, is for dealing with systems where the boost ratio cannot be accurately calculated using linear interpolation due to differences between CPU cores on the system where the performance-