Linux 7.1 Lands Workaround For Arm C1-Pro Erratum
Merged yesterday to the Linux 7.1 kernel is a workaround for an Arm C1-Pro CPU hardware bug around its Scalable Matrix Extension implementation… ⌘ Read more

Initial Linux Driver Patches For Smart Data Accelerator Interface “SDXI”
Recently sent out on the Linux kernel mailing list was the initial patches for implementing the Smart Data Accelerator Interface (SDXI) as a vendor-neutral architecture for memory-to-memory data movement offload… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.1 Staging Ushered In More Developers To Make Their First Kernel Contributions
Over the weekend Greg Kroah-Hartman sent out his various pull requests for the areas of the kernel he oversees. Among those is the staging area where this time around the notable activity isn’t too much about feature work but many developers making some of their first contributions to the upstream kernel… ⌘ Read more

AMD’s GAIA Makes It Easier To Import/Export Custom AI Agents Across PCs
AMD on the software side continues investing heavily in GAIA “Generative AI Is Awesome” as their cross-platform solution built around the Lemonade SDK for running local AI agents on your AMD-powered hardware from CPUs to GPUs and NPUs. With today’s GAIA update, custom-generated AI agents are now portable with easy import and export support… ⌘ Read more

HarfBuzz Continues Improving Its New GPU-Accelerated Text Shaping Library
Released at the beginning of the month was a new version of HarfBuzz, a widely-used, open-source text shaping engine. With this HarfBuzz 14.0 release it introduced a GPU-based text rasterization library that supported GLSL shaders as well as HLSL, WGSL, and APple’s Metal MSL. Since then this GPU-accelerated library has been seeing more improvements… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.1 KVM Adds “Very Experimental” Support For pKVM Protected Guests
The Kernel-based Virtual Machine changes were recently merged for the Linux 7.1 merge window for further enhancing KVM as this important piece of the open-source virtualization stack… ⌘ Read more

While New NTFS Driver Merged, NTFS3 Driver Sees Fixes & Minor Changes For Linux 7.1
Last week saw the “NTFS resurrection” as Linux Torvalds put it with the new/overhauled NTFS driver having been merged for Linux 7.1. Even still, the NTFS3 driver that was contributed a few years ago by Paragon Software remains in the mainline kernel and today were some fixes/improvements merged for that existing driver… ⌘ Read more

Box64 0.4.2 Begins Working On POWER PPC64LE Backend, Support For SteamRT3 + Proton 11
While FEX-Emu has been garnering a lot of attention due to being sponsored by Valve and slated to be used by the Steam Frame for running Linux x86_64 binaries on AArch64, the Box64 project continues moving along with similar goals for x86_64 binaries on other CPU architectures… ⌘ Read more

Git 2.54 Released With New Experimental “git history” Command
Git developers continue working toward Git 3.0 while out today is Git 2.54 with a few interesting additions… ⌘ Read more

GNU Coreutils 9.11 Brings New Performance Improvements: Up To 15x Faster cat
It’s not only the uutil’s Rust Coreutils project seeing performance improvements but some increased healthy competition now from GNU Coreutils. With today’s release of GNU Coreutils 9.11 the wc command is up to multiple times faster and even cat can be up to 15 times faster… ⌘ Read more

Firefox 150 Available With GTK Emoji Picker, CSS Media Element Pseudo-Classes
Mozilla today published their Firefox 150 release binaries as the latest milestone for this open-source web browser with growing AI ambitions… ⌘ Read more

Intel Compute Runtime Promotes Support For Wildcat Lake, “Early” Crescent Island
Out today is the Intel Compute Runtime 26.14.37833.4 that now includes production support for the newly-launched Wildcat Lake cut-down Panther Lake SoCs that debuted last week as the Core Series 3… ⌘ Read more

A Lot Of Memory Management “MM” Improvements Merged For Linux 7.1
Andrew Morton recently sent out his various “MM” related pull requests for the ongoing Linux 7.1 kernel. There are a number of memory management optimizations in this next kernel version, which is always nice to see but all the more so these days with the inflated RAM pricing and other computer component prices… ⌘ Read more

Popular Rust-Based Database Turns To AI For Up To 1.5x Speedup, Other Improvements
Redb is one of the open-source, embed-friendly key-value databases written in the Rust programming language. Redb is ACID-compliant while known for being high performance and with its new Redb 4.1 release is even faster thanks to some improvements authored by Claude (AI)… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.1 Kernel Graphics Driver Changes Merged With Intel & AMD Leading The Way
The Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) kernel graphics driver and accelerator driver changes for Linux 7.1 were recently merged to Git. As usual, it’s the Intel and AMD kernel graphics drivers seeing a bulk of the interesting open-source GPU driver activity. Plus ongoing work to make Rust-based GPU drivers more viable… ⌘ Read more

JFS Sees Data Integrity Hardening With Linux 7.1
It’s pretty rare nowadays seeing any real changes to the JFS file-system on Linux when there are multiple far superior solutions available. But in any event, the JFS file-system driver has seen a few fixes in Linux 7.1… ⌘ Read more

LXQt 2.4 Released With More Wayland Fixes/Improvements
The LXQt 2.4 desktop released today for joining the modern open-source desktop party alongside the likes of the recently debuted GNOME 50, KDE Plasma 6.6, and others… ⌘ Read more

New Lenovo Legion Go Drivers & More Sony HID Device Support In Linux 7.1
The HID subsystem updates landed this week for the in-development Linux 7.1 kernel that includes new hardware support and other changes… ⌘ Read more

GIMP 3.2.4 Released With A Fix For Its XCF Code That Has Existed Since 1999
Following last month’s GIMP 3.2 feature release that was followed by the GIMP 3.2.2 point release at the end of March, out now is GIMP 3.2.4 to ship more fixes to users of this open-source alternative to Adobe Photoshop and other imaging applications… ⌘ Read more

New Debian Project Leader Elected For 2026
Sruthi Chandran has been elected the new Debian Project Leader “DPL” after running unopposed in this year’s elections… ⌘ Read more

GNOME Fixes Screencasting Issue With H.264 Recordings Being ~18x Larger Than VP8
A fix today for GNOME Shell’s screen casting/recording service was merged after it was reported that H.264 recordings using the Video Acceleration API (VA-API) are around 18x larger than they should be like when using the VP8 software fallback… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.1 Adds Some New PCIe Drivers While Nuking Some PCI Drivers
The PCI subsystem updates were merged this week for the Linux 7.1 kernel with a wide assortment of PCI(e) changes from new to old hardware… ⌘ Read more

Valve Developer Further Improves Old AMD GPUs: HD 7870 XT Finally Working On Linux
Timur Kristóf of Valve’s Linux graphics driver team is the one that worked on improving the old AMD Radeon GCN 1.0/1.1 graphics card support by making AMDGPU driver improvements so it could become the default for these Southern Islands and Sea Islands GPUs rather than the legacy Radeon kernel driver. That meant better performance, RADV Vulkan support out-of-the-box, and other benefits. More recently he finished AMDGPU improvements … ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.1 Sound Code Adds Bus Keepers: Aiming For Better Apple Silicon Support
The sound subsystem changes were merged this week for Linux 7.1 that include some new hardware support and other useful additions… ⌘ Read more

CachyOS Rolls Out A Super-Charged Linux 7.0 Kernel
The popular Arch Linux based CachyOS has now rolled out the Linux 7.0 kernel to its users. But beyond re-basing against the latest upstream kernel version it is also carrying some extra patches… ⌘ Read more

Intel QAT Zstd, QAT Gen6 Improvements Merged For Linux 7.1
In addition to the notable libcrypto optimizations and improvements merged during this first week of the Linux 7.1 merge window, the main cryptography subsystem pull was also merged. Notable here are the Intel QuickAssist (QAT) improvements… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.1 Sees RAID Fixes, IO_uring Enhancements
The block subsystem and IO_uring changes were merged this week for Linux 7.1 in continuing to enhance Linux storage capabilities… ⌘ Read more

GhostBSD 26.1 Now Based On FreeBSD 15.0, Switches to XLibre X Server
GhostBSD 26.1-R15.0p2 released today as a big upgrade for this desktop-focused, BSD operating system derived from FreeBSD… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.1 Adds New AMD SMCA Bank Types, Presumably For Upcoming EPYC Venice
The AMD Machine Check Exception “mce_amd” driver as part of the Error Detection And Correction (EDAC) subsystem is introducing support for new SMCA bank types on AMD platforms. Given the timing these new bank types are presumably for AMD’s upcoming Zen 6 / EPYC Venice hardware… ⌘ Read more

WireGuard For Windows Reaches v1.0
For those making use of the WireGuard open-source, secure VPN tunnel software, WireGuard For Windows 1.0 is finally available… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.1 Scheduler Changes May Benefit Some Workloads
The scheduler changes for Linux 7.1 are now in place and may bring performance benefits for at least some systems and workloads… ⌘ Read more

GNOME’s Maps, Graphs, RustConn & Other App Improvements
For pairing nicely with the GNOME 50 desktop release last month, a number of GNOME-associated apps have been seeing new features and refinements… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.1 Lands High Resolution Timer “HRTIMER” Overhaul
Merged this week for Linux 7.1 was a rework of the high resolution timer “HRTIMER” subsystem for reducing the overhead of frequently-armed timers, such as the HRTICK scheduler timer. The HRTICK scheduler timer is useful for enhancing system responsiveness and fairness… ⌘ Read more

KDE Plasma 6.7 Ready With Wayland Session Management, Other New Improvements
KDE Plasma 6.7 enjoyed a lot of recent feature development work thanks to a developer sprint in Graz, Austria. Also because of that developer sprint, This Week In Plasma wasn’t published last week and so in turn a new issue is now available to highlight the changes over the past two weeks… ⌘ Read more

The “NTFS Resurrection” Has Occurred For Linux 7.1
As a very exciting follow-up to the recent article around the new NTFS driver being submitted for Linux 7.1 to address the shortcomings of the current Paragon NTFS3 driver and the prior read-only NTFS kernel driver, that work has been merged!.. ⌘ Read more

New/Overhauled NTFS Driver Merged For Linux 7.1
As a very exciting follow-up to the recent article around the new NTFS driver being submitted for Linux 7.1 to address the shortcomings of the current Paragon NTFS3 driver and the prior read-only NTFS kernel driver, that work has been merged!.. ⌘ Read more

Wine 11.7 Brings VBScript Fixes, DirectSound 7.1 Channel Support
For those using upstream Wine for running your Windows games/apps on Linux rather than the likes of the Proton 11.0 beta, out today is Wine 11.7 as the newest bi-weekly development release… ⌘ Read more

Intel Xe2 Lunar Lake Linux Graphics Performance Up ~17% Over Past Year
Given the Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release being imminent and also realizing it’s been nearly one year to the day since reviewing the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition laptop under Linux, I ran some fresh benchmarks for seeing how the integrated Xe2 graphics have evolved on Linux over the past year. ⌘ Read more

Valve Developer Lands RADV/ACO Changes For AMD’s GFX11.7 / RDNA 4m
The open-source Linux graphics driver work continues around AMD’s GFX11.7 GPU target for some yet-to-be-launched APUs/SoCs and to be branded as “RDNA 4m”… ⌘ Read more

Glibc Lands A Big Optimization For LoongArch CPUs
Loongson’s LoongArch processors are running decent in our recent Loongson 3B6000 benchmarks but even better performance is on the way with the next GNU C Library “glibc” release… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.1 Crypto Code Rework Enables More Optimizations By Default
Linux libcrypto cryptography subsystem changes for the v7.1 kernel are enabling more optimizations by default and in turn helping to achieve better crypto/hashing performance on this next kernel version… ⌘ Read more

Fedora 44 Will Not Be Released Next Week
Fedora 44 final had been aiming for an early release target of 21 April, but due to outstanding blocker bugs, it’s now revised to target a release on 28 April… ⌘ Read more

GCC Compiler Adds Arm AGI CPU Target
The GCC open-source compiler has landed initial targeting support for Arm’s newly-announced AGI CPU… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.1 x86/x86_64 Aligns With Other Architectures Now For Supporting Custom Restart Handlers
With the vast majority of x86/x86_64 systems supporting restarting the system using ACPi, BIOS, or even the KBD keyboard controller, with Linux 7.1 is now support in place for using custom restart handlers registered by drivers, such as in place for other CPU architectures… ⌘ Read more

New Lenovo Fan Driver, More ASUS Motherboards With Sensor Monitoring For Linux 7.1
All of the hardware monitoring “HWMON” subsystem updates were merged this week for the Linux 7.1 kernel… ⌘ Read more

New NTFS File-System Driver Submitted For Linux 7.1
Making today very exciting in Linux 7.1 merge window land was a pull request being sent out for introducing the new, modern NTFS file-system driver. Linus Torvalds has yet to comment if he’s going to merge the new driver but it looks like it’s ready for providing a better Linux NTFS experience over the current NTFS3 driver that was upstreamed by Paragon Software a few years ago and hasn’t seen too much feature progress… ⌘ Read more

Proton 11.0 Beta Released With More Games Playable On Steam Play
Valve and CodeWeavers have just released Proton 11.0 Beta as their first beta milestone for this software that powers Steam Play now rebased against upstream Wine 11.0… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.1 sched_ext Brings cgroup Sub-Scheduler Groundwork, Idle SMT Sibling Improvement
The extensible scheduler “sched_ext” code for allowing Linux scheduling behavior to be defined via BPF programs is seeing some useful improvements with the in-development Linux 7.1 kernel… ⌘ Read more

Mir 2.26 Begins Working On Rust-Based Input Platform
Canonical today released Mir 2.26 as the newest feature release for this compositor for building Wayland-based shells. Notable with Mir 2.26 is a Rust-based input platform is in development as part of their broader effort for bringing Rust code into Mir… ⌘ Read more

New Media Drivers Merged For Linux 7.1
The media subsystem updates have been merged for the ongoing Linux 7.1 merge window and includes new hardware support… ⌘ Read more