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As covered recently on Phoronix there has been several exciting improvements for aging AMD Radeon GCN 1.0 and GCN 1.1 era graphics cards for the open-source AMD Linux graphics driver stack. This work has been led by Timur Kristóf of Valve's Linux Open-Source Graphics Driver Group with an ultimate goal of shifting the GCN 1.0/1.1 open-source Linux driver hardware support from the aging "Radeon" kernel graphics driver over to the "AMDGPU" kernel driver already used by default for all AMD GPUs/accelerators from GCN 1.2 and newer.

Timur Kristóf over the past several months worked out analog video connector support for AMDGPU DC as one of the missing features when using GCN 1.0/1.1 GPUs on the AMDGPU kernel driver. He's also been working on other fixes and improvements for allowing the Radeon Southern Islands and Sea Islands GPUs to play nicely with this driver. By going with the AMDGPU driver, these first two generation Graphics Core Next GPUs can enjoy RADV Vulkan driver support out-of-the-box, better performance, and all around a more well rounded and better maintained open-source driver than using the legacy Radeon driver.

As covered recently on Phoronix there has been several exciting improvements for aging AMD Radeon GCN 1.0 and GCN 1.1 era graphics cards for the open-source AMD Linux graphics driver stack. This work has been led by Timur Kristóf of Valve's Linux Open-Source Graphics Driver Group with an ultimate goal of shifting the GCN 1.0/1.1 open-source Linux driver hardware support from the aging "Radeon" kernel graphics driver over to the "AMDGPU" kernel driver already used by default for all AMD GPUs/accelerators from GCN 1.2 and newer.

Timur Kristóf over the past several months worked out analog video connector support for AMDGPU DC as one of the missing features when using GCN 1.0/1.1 GPUs on the AMDGPU kernel driver. He's also been working on other fixes and improvements for allowing the Radeon Southern Islands and Sea Islands GPUs to play nicely with this driver. By going with the AMDGPU driver, these first two generation Graphics Core Next GPUs can enjoy RADV Vulkan driver support out-of-the-box, better performance, and all around a more well rounded and better maintained open-source driver than using the legacy Radeon driver.

Longtime LWN readers will have encountered the concept of "stable pages" before; it was first covered here nearly 15 years ago. For the most part, the problem that stable pages were meant to solve — preventing errors when user space modifies a buffer that is under I/O — has been dealt with. But recent discussions show that there is one area where problems remain: direct I/O. There is some disagreement, though, over whether those problems are the result of user-space bugs and how much of a performance price should be paid to address them.

Writing a page of data to a block storage device takes time. If a process tells the kernel to perform a write, some time will thus pass before the operation is complete. Should that process modify the under-I/O data while it is being written, the result is a sort of data race with the usual unpredictable results. Either the old or the new data could end up being written; in the worst case, a combination of the old and new data could be written, corrupting the file.

Plant, grow and harvest in the farming roguelite deckbuilder Cropdeck, with a demo out now that you definitely need to put on your list to try.

It's all about clearing fields while planting crops strategically, as you build up a deck of plants, and use items like scarecrows to make some fun synergies to pay off your tax. I played a previous early version of it, and came away pretty impressed by it. A wholesome spin on deck building, while a bit more laid back than others it's still challenging and interesting to play through.

With the upcoming release of Weston 15.0, this Wayland reference compositor will finally feature a Vulkan renderer. For those curious about its potential, a presentation recently outlined the current state of this Vulkan code path.

Erico Nunes of Red Hat led the work on this Vulkan renderer for Weston that was based on the existing OpenGL renderer. This renderer targets the basic Vulkan 1.0 specification so that it can work on as many Vulkan implementations as possible. The renderer was merged a few months back and will be part of the upcoming Weston 15.0 release.

Just hours ago Valve announced the new Steam Controller along with the Steam Frame VR headset and new Steam Machine. While these new Steam hardware products won't be available until early 2026, Valve has just-now upstreamed support for the new Steam Controller to the SDL3 library.

The Simple DirectMedia Library (SDL) is important to Valve's Steam runtime and used by many games for cross-platform hardware/software abstractions. In ensuring good support ahead of the new Steam Controller's retail availability and seeing that it makes it into the next SDL3 update, today that new Steam Controller support is already upstreamed to SDL Git.

Just hours ago Valve announced the new Steam Controller along with the Steam Frame VR headset and new Steam Machine. While these new Steam hardware products won't be available until early 2026, Valve has just-now upstreamed support for the new Steam Controller to the SDL3 library.

The Simple DirectMedia Library (SDL) is important to Valve's Steam runtime and used by many games for cross-platform hardware/software abstractions. In ensuring good support ahead of the new Steam Controller's retail availability and seeing that it makes it into the next SDL3 update, today that new Steam Controller support is already upstreamed to SDL Git.

Despite this not being FOSS like GIMP, I think it's great that there is at least some very viable alternative that can run on Linux even with some workaround, for free (besides Photopea).

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