The Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) is rolling out a "fair use" quota where they will be asking the major hardware vendors (OEMs) to sponsor the project or contribute developer resources for the biggest users that rely on LVFS/Fwupd for serving system and device firmware to customers.

As of last year LVFS has served over 100 million firmware files to Linux users. Making LVFS/Fwupd possible has been Red Hat employing the lead developer Richard Hughes while the Linux Foundation has most recently been covering the hosting

The latest Radeon RADV driver ray-tracing optimization being merged to Mesa 25.3 is support for triangle pair compression with RDNA4 (GFX12) graphics processors.

Konstantin Seurer who has worked for Valve as one of the RADV developers the past few years worked out the newest RADV ray-tracing improvement. Basic support for triangle pair compression on GFX12 (RDNA4) graphics processors was merged yesterday to Mesa 25.3-devel after being under review the past month.

This compression technique groups

The PCI changes were merged last week for the Linux 6.17 merge window. There is new PCIe controller support and some other additions worth mentioning with the new PCI feature code.

The PCI/PCIe changes for the Linux 6.17 kernel weren't the most exciting round of updates in recent history but still a few items jumped out worth pointing out here on Phoronix:

- Intel Panther Lake H / P / U support was added to the Intel VMD host bridge driver with just needing the new device

Ahead of the upcoming FFmpeg 8.0 release for this widely-used, open-source multimedia library some more last minute features continue to land. Hitting FFmpeg Git today are some Vulkan Video additions.

First and foremost, FFmpeg has merged Vulkan Video support for AV1 video encoding. This commit landed the Vulkan Video AV1 encoder "av1_vulkan" using that cross-GPU, cross-OS video acceleration API.

This commit meanwhile added Vulkan Video VP9 video decoding support to FFmpeg.

Following the release of GCC 15.1 at the end of April as the first stable version of the GCC 15 compiler, GCC 15.2 is now available with a variety of bug fixes back-ported.

GCC 16 remains in feature development on main while GCC 15.2 is to ship all of the stable bug-fixes and back-ports from the past 3+ months. GCC 15.2 is coming in time for making it into many of the H2'2

LACT 0.8.1 is out with a few important changes for this open-source Linux GPU control application that is written in Rust and rendered using GTK.

LACT is a Linux GPU control application that makes up for the lack of the AMD and Intel drivers having any official graphics driver control panel for Linux (as well as the open-source NVIDIA/Nouveau driver code). While the NVIDIA official Linux driver has the NVIDIA-Settings UI, LACT also supports NVIDIA GPUs too for those preferring a unified control

MariaDB today announced the general availability "GA" release of the MariaDB Community Server 12.0 release. This first MariaDB 12 release brings many exciting enhancements over MariaDB 11 for this open-source database originally derived from MySQL.

MariaDB Community Server 12.0 GA ships with greater Oracle database compatibility to help in easing the migration from that proprietary but common database solution. MariaDB 12.0 brings native support for Oracle's SYS_REFCURSOR, more efficient triggers, and other changes to enhance compatibility

Following the recent Linux kernel patch adding the AMD Zen 6 synthetic feature flag I suspected more AMD Zen 6 kernel patches would begin flowing... Sure enough, two new patches today noting some new model IDs in the Family 1Ah family as well as confirming rumors that next-gen EPYC Venice processors would support 16 channel memory.

The new patches are simply described as:

"This patchset adds support for newer AMD's Family 1Ah-based SOCs."

But with the Zen 5 parts in Family 1

With the input subsystem updates for Linux 6.17 in addition to now mapping ther F13 to F24 keys by default for PS/2 keyboards, the "performance boost" key beginning to be found on some laptops now has a standardized keycode. With standardizing that keycode, Linux desktop/user-space software will be able to more easily and uniformly set the intended behavior should your laptop/system have such a performance key.

Some relatively recent Dell/Alienware gaming laptops have featured a G-