When it comes to GPU virtualization we have seen AMD engineers carry out a lot of work in recent years around the Xen hypervisor even when it hasn't seen as much interest from other vendors. We found out that much of their interest in Xen for GPU virtualization is due to automotive / in-vehicle infotainment demands and it remains that way. They continue cooking some new features and they say "the best is yet to come" in a new presentation on their Xen virtualization efforts.

AMD software engineer Ray Huang who

Alice Ryhl of Google sent out the main set of Rust language code changes for the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) graphics/display driver subsystem ahead of Linux 6.19. Notable is continued DRM core infrastructure work for Rust plus the open-source NVIDIA "Nova" driver continues taking shape albeit isn't yet ready for end-user usage.

This DRM Rust pull for Linux 6.19 brings a few core Rust changes for furthering the build-out of the infrastructure for enabling kernel graphics drivers to

Intel's ISA documentation was updated last week to confirm Nova Lake processors will support AVX10.2 and APX extensions after they were not officially acknowledged in prior versions of the spec and the initial open-source compiler enablement with -march=novalake also left them without those prominent ISA capabilities. Following that documentation update, a few days ago LLVM Clang updated their Nova Lake compiler support for the new ISA capabilities and now the GCC compiler has received similar treatment.

Merged last night to GCC Git ahead of the GCC

Sent out today was likely the last batch of HID subsystem fixes ahead of the Linux 6.18 kernel releasing as stable around the end of the month. With it are some new device-specific quirks for fixing hardware support for a mouse and keyboard.

The ELECOM M-XT3URBK as a wired trackball mouse with six programmable buttons should see all the buttons now working under Linux. This ~$40 USD mouse (Amazon.com, affiliate link) should be playing nicely with Linux 6.1

Last week's Vulkan 1.4.333 brought a new ray-tracing extension with VK_EXT_ray_tracing_invocation_reorder that was derived from a prior NVIDIA vendor extension (VK_NV_ray_tracing_invocation_reorder). This new extension for Shader Execution Reordering "SER" is showing to deliver some nice performance potential for Vulkan ray-tracing performance.

The Khronos Blog today published more details on the VK_EXT_ray_tracing_invocation_reorder extension

For the past several months a Uniwill laptop driver for the Linux kernel has been in development to expose extra platform capabilities for laptops manufactured by this Taiwanese OEM/ODM manufacturer. Assuming no last minute issues, this driver is now set to premiere in Linux 6.19 for helping Uniwill laptops and hardware from other brands relying on Uniwill as the device manufacturer.

This x86 platform driver for Uniwill laptops allows for features such as battery charge rate limiting, RGB light-bar controls, hardware monitoring (HWMON subsystem)

Intel's LASS functionality was queued today into tip/tip.git's "x86/cpu" Git branch. With LASS now making it into a TIP branch, it looks like it will be submitted for the upcoming Linux 6.19 merge window barring any last minute issues or objections from Linus Torvalds.

LASS is short for Linear Address Space Separation and is a security feature that Intel software engineers have been working on for the Linux kernel for the past nearly three years. It was back in

It's the Blender 5.0 release day! Blender 5.0 is a big step forward for this open-source 3D modeling software with better Vulkan viewport support across different GPUs/drivers, HDR support when using Vulkan and Wayland on Linux, and other very nice refinements for this popular cross-platform software package.

The Blender 5.0 release day is a bit of a mess due to the Cloudflare outage happening today. While much of the Cloudflare outage has since been addressed and services restored (including