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.

Natalie Vock who is one of several Valve contractors working on the Linux graphics driver stack worked out these newest RADV ray-tracing optimizations.

The patch

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.

Ahead of the Linux 6.17 kernel merge window there are already patches queued for enabling Panther Lake's Xe3 graphics by default (effectively declaring it as stable ahead of the Panther Lake laptops debuting), multi

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.

Blender 4.5 LTS is a big release ahead of Blender 5.0 to succeed it. Blender 4.5 features much better Vulkan support and a plethora of other enhancements:

- Blender's Vulkan back-end is now considered to be on-par with OpenGL. The Vulkan code now has support for OpenXR,

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.

The Broadcom BCM5770X networking ASICs support 50 / 100 / 200 / 400 / 800 Gb/

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.

LLVM 21 is introducing the AMD GFX1250 target for what is expected to be an APU with an RDNA4 refresh (RDNA 4.5?) while the additions for the GFX1250 target remain ongoing. There are also other AMDGPU LLVM back-end

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.

Linux developer Masahiro Yamada took care of the work porting the gconfig code from GTK2 to GTK3 for those preferring this graphical user interface alternative to the TUI-based menuconfig or the xconfig that was ported to Qt6 in 2023 .

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.

Going back to last year was the initial Intel ANV Vulkan Video support for AV1 decode while a newly-merged patch-set extends the coverage to Gfx125 and Xe2 graphics compatibility.

Adds

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 engineers working on their Linux/open-source affairs have also been departing. In just the latest instance, one of the upstream Intel Linux kernel drivers is now "orphaned" due to the

Merged yesterday to the latest development code for the LibreOffice open-source office suite is now recognizing Bitcoin "BTC" as a supported currency for use within the Calc spreadsheet program and elsewhere within this cross-platform free software office suite.

Stemming from a recent bug report requesting Bitcoin as an official currency option within LibreOffice Calc, the necessary additions are now in place so it's a built-in preset like USD and EUR. Thus easier managing of Bitcoin transactions and the like from within LibreOffice Calc.