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Mesa 26.1 Released With Many Improvements For Open-Source Vulkan Drivers

Phoronix | May 6, 2026, 4:03 p.m. | Original

Eric Engestrom just announced another timely feature release of the Mesa drivers. Mesa 26.1 is out today for this collection of predominantly OpenGL and Vulkan drivers for a variety of hardware as well as the likes of Rusticl for OpenCL, Zink for OpenGL-on-Vulkan, various Windows acceleration components, and more.

Mesa 26.1 brings many new Vulkan driver extensions, various performance optimizations, and other improvements for gaming especially on Intel and AMD RadeonSI/RADV hardware as well as some nice improvements to NVK and

PCIe 8.0 Spec Draft 0.5 Released For 1TB/s Bi-Directional x16 Bandwidth

Phoronix | May 6, 2026, 3:53 p.m. | Original

The PCI-SIG today held a briefing around PCIe 8.0 that follows the PCIe 7.0 specification that was released to members last June.

While PCIe 7.0 allows for 512 GB/s bi-directionally in an x16 configuration, PCIe 8.0 will once agian double that bandwidth. PCIe 8.0 will deliver a 256 GT/s raw bit-rate and up to 1.0 TB/s bi-directionally in an x16 configuration. Each

Linux 7.2 To Integrate The AMDGPU "Power Module" To Better Align With Windows

Phoronix | May 6, 2026, 1:30 p.m. | Original

Sent out today was a batch of "new stuff" for the AMDGPU graphics and AMDKFD compute kernel drivers that are ready for DRM-Next to queue until the Linux 7.2 merge window happens in June. Most notable is the introduction of the AMDGPU DC power module to better align with the Radeon power management behavior under Microsoft Windows.

Today's pull request includes introducing the new power module to the AMDGPU Display Core "DC". As covered on Phoronix when this power module was first presented in patch form,

Nouveau vs. NVIDIA R595 Linux Driver For Workstation Graphics Performance

Phoronix | May 6, 2026, noon | Original

When having the HP Z6 G5 A workstation in the lab for benchmarking, one of the curiosity-driven tests was seeing how well the latest open-source and upstream Nouveau driver stack is competing against the latest official NVIDIA R595 driver for workstations. The official NVIDIA Linux driver stack remains the best positioned software solution for RTX (PRO) hardware but Nouveau continues evolving while awaiting the Nova kernel driver to reach the limelight.

The Nouveau driver continues to provide open-source, out-of-the

Intel's Vulkan Linux Driver Now Supports Device Generated Commands "DGC"

Phoronix | May 6, 2026, 9:53 a.m. | Original

Exciting yesterday in the land of Intel's open-source Vulkan driver "ANV" for Linux systems was introducing experimental support for descriptor heaps with the VK_EXT_descriptor_heap extension. Today there is another separate exciting development for this open-source Intel driver: Vulkan device generated commands are finally merged!

Back in September 2024 was VK_EXT_device_generated_commands with Vulkan 1.3.296 . The Vulkan device generated commands "DGC" functionality was worked on

Vulkan SC SDK Released For Safety-Critical Graphics / Compute

Phoronix | May 6, 2026, 9:22 a.m. | Original

Yesterday was the OpenCL 3.1 release and today is another exciting development for The Khronos Group standards: the debut of the Vulkan SC SDK for safety-critical applications.

The Vulkan SC SDK makes it simpler for developers to leverage the Vulkan SC ecosystem for safety-critical applications on Windows and Linux. RasterGrid has been developing the tooling over the past three years for Vulkan SC development, which is now open-sourced on GitHub thanks to the funding from Khronos.

Vulkan SC has been years in the making but until now

Dell & Lenovo Now Sponsoring The Linux Vendor Firmware Service

Phoronix | May 6, 2026, 9:10 a.m. | Original

Dell and Lenovo have stepped up to become premier sponsors for the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) that provides for seamless system firmware and device/component firmware updating under Linux with the Fwupd client.

Dell and Lenovo are the first two premier sponsors for the LVFS, complementing start-up sponsors of Framework Computer and Open Source Firmware Foundation. The Linux Foundation and Red Hat remain engineering support sponsors.

VKD3D-Proton 3.0.1 Brings More Improvements For Direct3D 12 On Vulkan

Phoronix | May 6, 2026, 8:30 a.m. | Original

Hans-Kristian Arntzen of Valve's Linux graphics driver team announced the release today of VKD3D-Proton 3.0.1 for Direct3D 12 over the Vulkan API.

Arntzen noted right away in the v3.0.1 release announcement that this is likely the last version to be released prior to introducing the much anticipated Vulkan descriptor heap support. What there is new to VKD3D-Proton 3.0.1 includes D3D12 view instancing is now experimentally supported

AMD Expands ROCm Support On Windows WSL To More Ryzen Hardware

Phoronix | May 6, 2026, 7:43 a.m. | Original

Back in March AMD announced the open-source ROCDXG library for improved ROCm support on WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux). The ROCDXG-based solution provides better ROCm compatibility within these Linux confines atop Windows 11 compared to their prior, now-legacy-based WSL support. A new ROCDXG release now available further expands the ROCm WSL2 support to more Ryzen hardware.

The librocdxg 1.2 release was issued this morning with the main feature being expanding support to more Ryzen hardware. AMD GFX11.0

AMD Geode CPU Support Being Orphaned By Linux

Phoronix | May 6, 2026, 6:35 a.m. | Original

For those with fond memories of the AMD Geode x86 embedded processors, the Linux kernel is set to orphan these since discontinued and obsolete CPUs.

Following Linux beginning to phase out Intel 486 CPU support , the next on the chopping block could be the AMD Geode processor support but for now it's being just treated as "orphaned" code without anyone actively maintaining the support. If it falls further into disrepair it could ultimately be marked as deprecated and removed from the mainline Linux kernel. There is already

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