FFmpeg 7.1 Released With VVC Decoder Promoted To Stable, Vulkan H.264/H.265 Encode FFmpeg 7.1 is out today as the newest update to this widely-used open-source multimedia library. With FFmpeg 7.1 the VVC video decoder has been promoted to stable, there are a number of Vulkan Video improvements, and an assortment of other exciting enhancements... https://www.phoronix.com/news/FFmpeg-7.1-Released

Linux 6.12 Features Are Super Exciting With Real-Time, Sched_ext, Intel Xe2 & Raspberry Pi 5 The Linux 6.12 merge window is wrapping up today with the release of Linux 6.12-rc1 in the coming hours. This is going to be a heck of an exciting kernel. There's real-time PREEMPT_RT finally in mainline, the much anticipated sched_ext code also was merged, QR codes for DRM panic messages, initial out-of-the-box support for Intel Xe2 graphics with Luna… https://www.phoronix.com/review/linux-612-features

Systemd Looking At A Future With More Varlink & Less D-Bus For IPC Taking place this week in Berlin was systemd's annual "All Systems Go" developer conference. Among the interesting talks was Lennart Poettering talking about the ongoing challenges of D-Bus for inter-process communication (IPC) with systemd and how they are looking at Varlink for IPC needs moving forward... https://www.phoronix.com/news/Systemd-Varlink-D-Bus-Future

FreeBSD To See Better Laptop Support With Investment Backed By AMD, Dell & Framework Following AMD and FreeBSD Foundation collaborations and the Sovereign Tech Fund making a big investment into FreeBSD, the FreeBSD Foundation and Quantum Leap Research have announced a $750,000 USD commitment to improve laptop support on this BSD operating system with backing by Dell, AMD, and Framework Computer... https://www.phoronix.com/news/FreeBSD-Better-Laptops

Blumenkrantz Proposes Workflow Improvements For Wayland Protocols It's been a busy week for Valve Linux graphics software engineer Mike Blumenkrantz. Besides hacking on Mesa's Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver implementation, this week his latest target was working to help accelerate the pace of Wayland protocol development. He's been working through a few proposals like addressing NACK usage for how Wayland protocols can be rejected and i… https://www.phoronix.com/news/Blumenkrantz-Wayland-Workflow

Linux 6.12 Adds Driver For PixArt PS/2 Touchpad Found In Some Laptops The input subsystem updates merged this week bring a number of improvements to existing drivers while adding one new input driver... https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.12-Input

Unauthenticated RCE Flaw With CVSS 9.9 Rating For Linux Systems Affects CUPS There's been much speculation since this morning over a reported "severe" unauthenticated remote code execution (RCE) flaw affecting Linux systems that carries a CVSS 9.9.9 score... The embargo has now lifted with the details on this nasty issue... https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-CVSS-9.9-Rating

Vulkan 1.3.296 Released With VK_EXT_device_generated_commands Vulkan 1.3.296 is out as the first spec update in nearly one month. Given the time that has passed there are more bug fixes than usual but there is also a prominent new extension: VK_EXT_device_generated_commands... https://www.phoronix.com/news/Vulkan-1.3.296-Released

Valve Engineer Mike Blumenkrantz Hoping To Accelerate Wayland Protocol Development Valve open-source graphics software engineer Mike Blumenkrantz is well known in the Linux community for his work on the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver code, various Mesa driver optimizations, and creative writing on his blog. He's also taken up a new task: further accelerating Wayland protocol development... https://www.phoronix.com/news/Blumenkrantz-Faster-Wayland

Firewire Maintainer Is Looking For Help Testing IEEE-1394 Devices On Linux 6.12 While not as exciting as some of the shiny new features for Linux 6.12 like real-time going mainline and Lunar Lake and Battlemage graphics by default, the Firewire (IEEE-1394) subsystem has seen some significant alterations this cycle. With Firewire hardware increasingly rare, the maintainer is hoping to get this Linux 6.12 code better tested by the community... https://www.phoronix.com/news/Firewire-Linux-6.12