Similar to the new Intel IPU 7.5 firmware upstreamed for Panther Lake this week, Cirrus has upstreamed their CS42L45 codec firmware for upcoming Dell and Lenovo laptops making use of this audio codec.

Ahead of Intel Panther Lake laptops officially beginning to ship next week, Cirrus today contributed their CS42L45 codec firmware to the upstream linux-firmware.git repository. This commit was for Lenovo laptops with the CS42L45 SDCA codec with SSIDs of 0x23

Queued into tip/tip.git's "sched/urgent" Git branch today is a patch to disable the kernel scheduler's NEXT_BUDDY functionality that was re-implemented back during the Linux 6.19 merge window. It turns out to cause some performance regressions that have yet to be otherwise addressed.

Linux 6.19 back during the merge window re-introduced the NEXT_BUDDY feature after being adapted for EEVDF . But it turns out there are some performance regressions from this code and

Fraunhofer HHI this week released a new version of VVenC, their open-source H.266 video encoder. Among the changes this release are more performance optimizations for ARM and I have run some comparison benchmarks using a NVIDIA GB10 SoC with the Dell Pro Max GB10.

This isn't the first release of VVenc to feature targeted ARM performance optimizations but simply the latest in continuing to strive for better ARM64 video encode performance. The VVenC 1.14 release brings "many"

In addition to the release today of Vulkan 1.4.340 with the new descriptor heap "VK_EXT_descriptor_heap" extension and three other new extensions, The Khronos Group's Vulkan Working Group has also published the Vulkan Roadmap 2026 Milestone.

The Vulkan Roadmap 2026 Milestone represents the latest extensions and specification increases beyond the Vulkan 1.4 baseline and prior annual milestones.

The Vulkan Roadmap 2026 Milestone now mandates drivers support additional features such as Variable

AMD today released a new version of Ryzen AI Software, the user-space packages for Microsoft Windows and Linux for making use of the Ryzen AI NPUs for various AI software tasks like Stable Diffusion, ONNX, and more.

Ryzen AI Software 1.7 brings some hearty performance improvements when it comes to its CNN/Transformer compiler with much better performance and quicker compile times. There is also support for various new large language models (LLMs) on Ryzen AI NPUs like Qwen-2.5-14b-

GNU Guix 1.5 is out today as the latest major release for this platform built around its functional package manager. This is a big upgrade with it having been three years since the GNU Guix 1.4 release.

GNU Guix 1.5 brings the KDE Plasma 6.5 desktop as well as more than 12.5k new packages and 29.9k package updates. Those using GNOME on Guix will now find Wayland is used, GNU Shepherd 1.0 provides the init system, and

Merged today for the Linux 6.19 Git kernel and then in turn for back-porting to prior Linux kernel series is making the x86 page fault handling code disable interrupts properly. Since 2020 it turns out the handling was subtly wrong but now corrected by Intel.

Cedric Xing of Intel tracked down the issue and fix to the page fault handling code for properly disabling interrupts. Cedric explained in the now-merged patch :

"There's a big comment in the x86 do

Zlib-rs is the effort out of the Trifecta Tech Foundation to provide a Zlib compression implementation written in the Rust programming language that can serve as a C dynamic library and Rust crate. The intent here being that zlib-rs is potentially safer than the classic C-based implementation of Zlib.

With today's release of zlib-rs 0.6 there are changes to zlib-rs-sys for how the dynamic C library is handled. Plus zlib-rs is modified so its internals are no longer publicly

Vulkan 1.4.340 is out today as the first significant new Vulkan API update following the end of year holidays. With Vulkan 1.4.340 comes four new extensions worth talking about.

New to Vulkan 1.4.340 are bug fixes plus a few notable extensions:

VK_EXT_descriptor_heap - This is a big one. VK_EXT_descriptor_heap was worked on by NVIDIA, AMD, Arm, Nintendo, Valve, Google, and