The Daily Brief — Tech Edition

Daily tech news, edited and dated.

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Tuesday, 07 July 2026

75 stories filed.

Vulkan Video H.264/H.265 Encode Now Working For Intel Alchemist GPUs On Linux

Phoronix ·

Earlier this year Vulkan Video encode was disabled on newer generations of Intel graphics hardware due to insufficient testing with the Intel ANV open-source driver. That impacted Gen12.5 graphics and newer - basically Alchemist and anything newer. Now at least Gen12.5 graphics with the likes of the Arc A-Series is seeing H.264 and H.265 encoding re-enabled...

Marek Olšák At Valve Lands RADV Code That Can "Double Performance" With Some VRS Cases

Phoronix ·

Longtime AMD Linux graphics driver expert Marek Olšák, who joined Valve earlier this year and now focusing more on RADV rather than the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver, has seen some of his latest work now merged for Mesa 26.2. Marek landed a big overhaul to the variable rate shading (VRS) code that in some cases can double the performance...

Should DayQuil Be Legal?

Hacker News ·

Article URL: https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/should-dayquil-be-legal Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48806289 Points: 150 # Comments: 194

Discussion: Hacker News thread →

Ryzen AI Developer Platform: AMD's Own Linux Distribution Built Atop Debian

Phoronix ·

With the AMD Ryzen AI Halo developer platform there is the option of ordering this Ryzen AI Max+ mini PC with either Microsoft Windows 11 or "Linux OS". When receiving a AMD Ryzen AI Halo review sample last month, I fully expected it to just be an Ubuntu LTS install with ROCm preloaded. I was quite surprised when powering it up to find that it's an OS called the AMD Ryzen AI Developer Platform 1…

AMD Ryzen AI Halo Is An Excellent & Powerful Mini PC With Fully Open-Source Software

Phoronix ·

Earlier this year AMD announced the Ryzen AI Halo as their in-house mini PC offering built around their leading Ryzen AI Max+ "Strix Halo" platform. After pre-orders began last month, the Ryzen AI Halo is officially beginning to ship this week and over the past few weeks we have been testing it out at Phoronix.

Resetting Xbox

Hacker News ·

Article URL: https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2026/07/06/resetting-xbox/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48804993 Points: 376 # Comments: 318

Discussion: Hacker News thread →

Aluminum foil (2021)

Hacker News ·

Article URL: https://dernocua.github.io/notes/aluminum-foil.html Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48804297 Points: 210 # Comments: 101

Discussion: Hacker News thread →

Linux 7.3 Expected To "Flatten The Pick" For Better Scheduling While Gaming & More

Phoronix ·

Going back to early May there were patches for improving the Linux scheduler to help with gaming performance on old "potato" hardware by providing better cgroup scheduling. Those patches, referred to as the "flatten the pick" patch series, are now slated for introduction in the Linux 7.3 kernel...

Intel i915 Driver Nearly Ready To "Work Well" With RT Linux Kernel Sans Display Support

Phoronix ·

When it comes to the real-time "RT" patches carried outside of the Linux kernel, a number of them pertain to adjustments around the Intel i915 kernel DRM graphics driver. The mainline Linux kernel and its RT support depend upon not building "PREEMPT_RT" for the i915 driver support while patches have been worked on recently for making this Intel kernel graphics driver code play nicely with…

Road to Elm 1.0

Hacker News ·

Article URL: https://elm-lang.org/news/faster-builds Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48803364 Points: 279 # Comments: 129

Discussion: Hacker News thread →

Pioneer DJM-S11 Professional DJ Mixer To Be Supported By Linux 7.3

Phoronix ·

The Pioneer DJM-S11 is a professional scratch style 2-channel DJ mixer that retails for $2,269 USD. But if currently connecting this expensive piece of kit to Linux, it does nothing and is unusable. With 87 new lines of code, it will begin to work with the Linux 7.3 kernel later this year...

Uniwill Laptop Driver Preparing A Number Of Features For Linux 7.3

Phoronix ·

The Unwill laptop driver on Linux for supporting various device-specific features by that major OEM/ODM will be seeing several new features with the Linux 7.3 cycle later this year. One of the most notable users of the Unwill driver is Bavarian Linux PC vendor TUXEDO Computers...

DXVK 3.0.1 Released With More Game Fixes, Other Improvements

Phoronix ·

Following the release of DXVK 3.0 from late June that brought several big changes, DXVK 3.0.1 is out today with shipping various game fixes and other improvements to this important piece of Valve's Steam Play (Proton) for Direct3D Windows games on Linux...

AMD Begins Staging Graphics Driver Changes For Linux 7.3

Phoronix ·

In addition to Intel beginning to volley graphics driver patches for Linux 7.3, this week AMD also began sending out their pull requests of "new stuff" to DRM-Next for the Linux 7.3 kernel cycle...

OpenRazer 3.12.4 Fixes Compatibility With Linux 7.2

Phoronix ·

OpenRazer 3.12.4 is now available as the newest update to these out-of-tree, unofficial Linux drivers for Razer devices. OpenRazer when paired with the likes of Polychromatic or other GUI options is what makes for a nice experience running Razer gaming peripherals under Linux...

FEX 2607 Optimizing For Yet-To-Be-Released ARM 256-bit SVE2 Hardware

Phoronix ·

The FEX Emulator that allows running Linux x86/x86_64 software on ARM64 (AArch64) systems, including the likes of Wine / Valve's Steam Play (Proton) for Windows gaming on ARM, is out with its newest monthly feature release. The Valve-backed project for running x86_64 games and other software on ARM for the upcoming Steam Frame and other more typical ARM Linux systems has been baking more…

4K @ 60 FPS USB Video Capture Finally Becomes Less Problematic On Linux

Phoronix ·

One area of Linux hardware testing I haven't explored much in many years has been modern USB video capture for the lack of said hardware. The last time I did much video capturing on Linux was during the Hauppauge PCI card days. It turns out though that USB video capture of 4K 60 FPS content has been a pain point under Linux but is finally smoothing out with newer versions of the Linux kernel...

Phoronix Premium Summer Sale To Help Support Linux Hardware Testing

Phoronix ·

For those that missed Phoronix turning 22 years old last month when running a special to help support the site, a few readers mentioned recently they missed out on seeing the deal in time. Paired with the US Independence Day holiday and summer sales elsewhere, now through 10 July is a Phoronix Premium summer sale if wishing to view the site ad-free while supporting the daily open-source/Linux…

Egypt Is Building a New Nile

Hacker News ·

Article URL: https://www.theb1m.com/video/egypt-is-building-a-new-nile Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48779274 Points: 103 # Comments: 34

Discussion: Hacker News thread →