Linux 7.4-rc2 Change Yields As Much As 162x Improvement For FAT32
In addition to a FAT32 optimization yielding as much as a 265x improvement that was merged for the Linux 7.4 cycle and separately another big FAT32 improvement expected for Linux 7.5, merged this week as part of the non-MM fixes for Linux 7.4-rc2 was another big FAT32 performance optimization… ⌘ Read more

Linux’x New Core MM Tree Ready With Numerous Fixes For “Nasty Long-Standing Bugs”
New to the Linux 7.4 kernel cycle is the Core MM tree as the route for herding some of the core memory management Linux kernel patches to the mainline kernel rather than it all going through Andrew Morton’s “MM” tree. As the second pull request from this new kernel tree, a number of fixes were sent out today to address “nasty long-standing bugs” within the kernel… ⌘ Read more

Graphics/NPU Driver Changes Already Begin Queuing Up For What Will Be Linux 7.5
Since last week drm-misc-next pull requests have already been sent out to DRM-Next to begin staging new feature code for what’s intended for the Linux 7.5 kernel cycle kicking off at the end of the year… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.4 Expands Sensor Monitoring For More ASUS & MSI Motherboards, New Minisforum Driver
With the Linux 7.4 kernel there are more MSI and ASUS motherboards with sensor monitoring support along with a variety of other additions to help broaden the selection of supported systems for hardware sensor monitoring under Linux. It’s another busy cycle for the HWMON subsystem… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.4 Preps CXL For Very Neat Dynamic Capacity Devices “DCD”
The Compute Express Link (CXL) subsystem changes were merged today for the Linux 7.4 kernel. The fun work this cycle is preparing to support Dynamic Capacity Devices… ⌘ Read more

Google’s C Binder Driver Removed With Rust Binder Ready For “Few Billion Devices”
Linus Torvalds merged the “char/misc” changes for the Linux 7.4 kernel driver on Saturday. Most notable this cycle for char/misc is what’s being removed: Google’s C-written Binder driver has left the kernel with the Rust-based modern Binder driver ready to take for the role of being used by all future Android devices… ⌘ Read more

539 MM Patches Merged For Linux 7.4 From Optimizations To More DAMON
Andrew Morton sent out the big set of memory management “MM” related patches for the Linux 7.4 merge window. This cycle it topped out at 539 total patches and a reviewed rate of 76%… ⌘ Read more

Singapore Boffins Weave a GUI Into Fabric
Researchers at the National University of Singapore have developed a machine-washable electronic fabric that can turn clothing into an interactive graphical user interface. The prototype reportedly survived 50 gentle machine washes and 1,000 bending cycles, though it still relies on external batteries and controllers. The Register reports: The development could lead - at some point - to a “f … ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.4 Features Very Exciting With Radeon HDMI 2.1 By Default, AMD PerfOpt, Apple M4
The Linux 7.3 kernel is expected to be released as stable later today and with that version there are many exciting changes and improvements. However, the Linux 7.4 kernel merge window will then open up and there are even more exciting changes expected to be merged for this follow-on kernel cycle. Here is a preview of some of the many exciting feature changes expected for Linux 7.4… ⌘ Read more

When I was cycling home: https://lyse.isobeef.org/2026-10-15-abendhimmel/

Linux Mint 27 Continues Working Toward Christmas Release With Many Features
Linux Mint developers continue enjoying their relaxed release schedule in moving from a six to twelve month release cycle. Linux Mint 27 “Adrien” continues tracking for a Christmas release… ⌘ Read more

NVIDIA’s Nova Driver Continues Leading The Way For Linux Rust GPU Drivers
The DRM Rust changes targeting the Linux 7.4 merge window have been submitted for pulling into DRM-Next ahead of that cycle kicking off (hopefully) next week. The NVIDIA Nova driver continues leading the way for the development of in-kernel Rust GPU drivers and in the process building out the Rust Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) infrastructure… ⌘ Read more

Firefox 158 Now Available With JPEG-XL Support By Default
With Mozilla’s bi-weekly release cycle for Firefox, the Firefox 158 release binaries are now available. Making Firefox 158 particularly notable is finally having JPEG-XL support enabled by default… ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Contributes Para-Virtualized IOMMU Hyper-V Driver For Linux
Microsoft is contributing a new kernel driver for the upcoming Linux 7.4 cycle. Queued up into the IOMMU subsystem’s “-next” branch is a new para-virtualized IOMMU driver for benefiting Linux guest VMs running on Microsoft’s Hyper-V virtualization platform… ⌘ Read more

AMD ROCm 10.1 Released With Many Improvements
Following the ROCm 10.0 release from late August, ROCm 10.1 is now available in continuing with the ROCm six week release cycle… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.4 Continues Preparing For Intel’s Rugged Panther Lake
Back in May we spotted a Linux patch adding “Panther Lake R” as a rugged version of Panther Lake intended for “use in harsh environments”. Since Linux 7.2 we have seen some bits of Panther Lake R driver support added while for the upcoming Linux 7.4 cycle there is additional enablement happening for this Panther Lake derivative… ⌘ Read more

Intel Ready With A Big Improvement For Battlemage With Linux 7.4
Sent out on Thursday was the last round of planned Intel Xe kernel driver improvements targeting the upcoming Linux 7.4 cycle. There is one big improvement that is set to benefit Intel discrete GPUs with at least Battlemage benefiting nicely… ⌘ Read more

BPF-Based Display Panel Drivers Being Explored For Linux
BPF-based HID drivers have helped to deliver quirks/fixes for different HID devices more quickly than being bound by the conventional kernel cycle. Loading these eBPF programs from user-space have shown a lot of potential for innovating and iterating more quickly with BPF drivers for different subsystems. The latest area now seeing the BPF treatment are display panel drivers… ⌘ Read more

AI Finds So Many Linux Bugs, Canonical Changes to a Two-Week Stable Release Update Cycle
“Finding vulnerabilities faster also puts pressure on Linux distributions to fix and deliver patches faster,” writes Slashdot reader BrianFagioli

AI has transformed bug discovery from “a manual, time-intensive process into a highly automated engine,” notes Canonical’s blog, leading to a “recent expl … ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.3 Reverting Logitech Bolt Receiver HID++ After Too Many Bugs Encountered
Merged at the start of the Linux 7.3 kernel cycle was adding Logitech Bolt USB receiver support for Logitech HID++ devices to the hid-logitech-dj driver code. That has resulted in too many bug reports of early Linux 7.3 users encountering varying issues with their Logitech mice that the functionality is now being reverted until it can be better developed… ⌘ Read more

Intel Xe Driver For Linux 7.4 Adds vRAM Health Check, Degraded Memory Handling
Sent out this week were more Intel Xe kernel graphics driver changes targeting the upcoming Linux 7.4 kernel cycle. The theme this week was around dealing with video memory health and also being able to better deal with hardware degraded video RAM… ⌘ Read more

Google’s “Painful To Maintain” Binder C Linux Driver Being Removed In Favor Of Rust
Google’s Binder driver written in the C programming language has long been part of the mainline kernel as the inter-process communication (IPC) mechanism used on Android. The past few years the Binder driver was rewritten in Rust as one of the first “real” drivers in the Rust programming language. The Rust Binder driver was upstreamed in Linux 6.18 and now for the upcoming Linux 7.4 kernel cycle, the old Binder C-based driver is se … ⌘ Read more

Ubuntu 26.10 amd64v3 Can Provide A Nice Boost For Low-End/Budget Hardware
Canonical recently began producing Ubuntu 26.10 amd64v3 daily ISOs to complement their experimental amd64v3 package archive that they have been trialing the past few release cycles. While we still don’t know what any official plans are for amd64v3 with Ubuntu 26.10, the performance gains can be very worthwhile over the generic amd64 binaries even for low-end/budget hardware. ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.4 Slated To Land The AVX-512 Optimized xor_gen For A Big Performance Win
Over the past few months there have been patches floating around for an AVX-512 optimized xor_gen() for the Linux kernel for that functuon used by the Linux software RAID code. It’s been shhowing very nice performance gains with this function being used for generating and validating parity blocks such as for RAID5 and RAID6. The upcoming Linux 7.4 cycle is slated to merge this nice enhancement for benefiting AMD Zen 4 and new … ⌘ Read more

New Cache Aware Scheduling Fixes Out For Testing
Since being merged back during the Linux 7.2 cycle, the Cache Aware Scheduling code continues seeing more fixes as users test out this scheduling enhancement on different processors and system configurations… ⌘ Read more

Patches Ready For AMDGPU HDMI 2.1 Enabled By Default With Linux 7.4 With FreeSync, VRR & ALLM
Linux 7.4 is now set to reach the elusive milestone of HDMI 2.1 support for the AMDGPU kernel graphics driver. After the HDMI Forum previously rejected HDMI 2.1 for the AMDGPU open-source driver implementation going back years, earlier this year something changed – widely speculated to be with Valve’s involvement – that HDMI 2.1 patches began appearing for the AMDGPU driver. With the upcoming Linux 7.4 cycle, the b … ⌘ Read more

The Linux Kernel Planning To Remove Around ~55k Lines Of Old ARM Platform Code
For the current Linux 7.3 kernel many older 32-bit ARM platforms are deprecated and in turn orphaning hundreds of drivers only relevant to those out-of-date ARM platforms. The removal of that now deprecated code is planned for the next kernel cycle or two… ⌘ Read more

Nouveau Preparations For HDMI 2.1 DSC, AMD HDMI FreeSync Fixes For Linux 7.4
Last week’s set of DRM-Misc-Next changes submitted to DRM-Next with targeting the upcoming Linux 7.4 kernel cycle features HDMI 2.1 related work for both the AMDGPU kernel driver as well as the Nouveau open-source NVIDIA driver… ⌘ Read more

How US Campaigns Are Already Using AI to Try to Sway Voters
39 U.S. congressional candidates “reported paying for an OpenAI subscription this election cycle,” writes the Washington Post, citing campaign finance disclosures.

This means the campaigns “are using the technology to court voters — despite limits imposed by leading AI companies to protect elections from the technology’s risks.”

Two [candidates] sai … ⌘ Read more

Greg KH Forewarns Of “Rough” Linux 7.3 Kernel Cycle Due To Continued AI Churn
While Linux 7.3-rc1 only released this week and there are another roughly seven weeks to go until the official kernel release, Linux’s second-in-command Greg Kroah-Hartman is already warning that it’s likely to be another “rough” kernel cycle given the ongoing noise caused by AI/LLM with the increase in bug reports and kernel patches… ⌘ Read more

AI’s ‘Creepy’ Crawlers Criticized by Linux Foundation’s IT Infrastructure Director
The Linux Foundation’s director of IT infrastructure says they now spend more CPU cycles “rendering commits for scrapers than we spend on all other kinds of legitimate access.”

At any one time, across 5 geo-distributed nodes, there are 14 CPU cores doing nothing but rendering git commits as html….

[W]hen a s … ⌘ Read more

Old IBM Driver Joins Insecure SGI Drivers In Being Removed For Linux 7.3
The char/misc changes were merged this week for the Linux 7.3 cycle. While there is a lot of IIO driver churn as usual and updates to the likes of the Google Binder drivers, there continues to be the 2026 trend of removing old hardware drivers that are rarely updated these days and likely have no active users left on the mainline Linux kernel. This trend is further pushed along by the surplus of AI/LLM-generated bug reports and patches … ⌘ Read more

AppArmor In Linux 7.3 Adds Support For User-Space Compressed Policies
The AppArmor improvements have been merged for Linux 7.3 for this kernel security module providing per-program Linux application security controls around system resources. Most notable this cycle is being able to load user-space compressed policies… ⌘ Read more

The Modern NTFS Linux Driver Adds Read Support For Windows System Compression (WOF)
The pull requests for the existing Paragon NTFS3 kernel driver as well as the new modern “NTFS” drivers have been submitted for the ongoing Linux 7.3 kernel cycle. Besides bug fixes, most notable among these NTFS file-system drivers are Windows System Compression “WOF” read support for the modern NTFS driver… ⌘ Read more

New AF_ALG Restrictions With Linux 7.3 Due To The Security & Maintenance Nightmare
The past few Linux kernel cycles have chipped away at AF_ALG functionality for that interface for user-space programs to access the kernel’s internal cryptography API. Linux has been dropping AF_ALG features like zero-copy support and offloading. AF_ALG was quickly deprecated in Linux 7.2 while now for Linux 7.3 it’s being further restricted… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.3 Delivers Graphics Driver Improvements From Old GPUs To Next-Gen Hardware
The Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) subsystem updates have been merged for the ongoing Linux 7.3 merge window. There is a lot of exciting GPU kernel driver improvements this cycle ranging from some notable enhancements to old AMD Radeon graphics hardware up through enabling support for some next-generation AMD graphics IP blocks to over on the Intel side where Nova Lake S graphics are being enabled by default… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.3 Makes Preparations Toward Upstreaming FAMFS File-System
The NVDIMM and direct access (DAX) patches have been merged for the Linux 7.3 cycle. Most of the DAX/NVDIMM activity this cycle is on making preparations for the upcoming submission of Micron’s FAMFS file-system… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.3 Input Subsystem Updates Merged With Security Fixes, Other Improvements
The big set of input subsystem updates were merged earlier this week for the Linux 7.3 cycle. It’s a random assortment of different improvements as well as bug/security fixes driven in part by the flow of AI/LLM generated discoveries… ⌘ Read more

Sched_ext’s Sub-Scheduler Support Now “Feature Complete” With Linux 7.3
The extensible scheduler framework “sched_ext” that allows for custom schedulers as BPF programs has been working on sub-scheduler support in recent kernel cycles. With Linux 7.3, sub-scheduler support is now deemed feature complete… ⌘ Read more

Intel Computer Vision Sensing Driver Now Ready For Nova Lake
The main set of media subsystem updates have been merged for the ongoing Linux 7.3 merge window. Notable this round is the Intel Computer Vision Sensing “CVS” driver merged the previous cycle now supporting next-gen Nova Lake platforms… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.3 Network Changes Merged But Developers “Completely Overwhelmed” Due To AI/LLMs
All of the networking subsystem feature updates were merged today for the Linux 7.3 kernel’s merge window. There are a lot of wired and wireless networking improvements this cycle but also a ton of bug fixes – including many not so important fixes spun up by AI/LLM agents. The networking subsystem maintainers admit now they are “completely overwhelmed” due to this code churn from the output of AI large language models… ⌘ Read more

Two Very Exciting Memory Management Optimizations Going Into Linux 7.3
Andrew Morton on Tuesday sent out all of the memory management “MM” updates for the Linux 7.3 merge window. The MM pull was particularly heavy as he noted 1,250 “added-to-MM” emails were sent out this cycle compared to 920 the prior cycle. With a lot of patch churn, he also turned to Google’s Gemini AI for writing his patch summaries. In going through the very verbose AI-generated summary, there are two patch series that get me excited on the performance … ⌘ Read more

EFS & FreeVxFS File-Systems Get Booted While FailFS Merged For Linux 7.3
Among the early pull requests merged today by Linus Torvalds for the Linux 7.3 kernel cycle were removal of some ancient file-systems while adding in a new pseudo file-system… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.3 On PowerPC Now Supports In-Kernel Rust, Initial Power12 Enablement Begins
The PowerPC pull request has already been sent in for the now open Linux 7.3 merge window. The headline feature this cycle on the POWER side is Rust kernel support for PowerPC 32-bit PPC32BE big endian and PowerPC 64-bit PPC64LE little endian architectures… ⌘ Read more

ARM64 BBML3 Feature Ready With Linux 7.3, NVIDIA Olympus Workarounds
AI/LLM patch craziness hurt ARM64 development for the Linux 7.2 cycle that no real features landed for that kernel version on AArch64. Fortunately, the ARM Linux developers are more prepared now and for Linux 7.3 are introducing some new ARM64 features… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.2 Released With Faster I/O, New AMD & Intel Driver Improvements
Linus Torvalds just released Linux 7.2 as stable! After a very busy kernel cycle due to the increased patch and reporting churn due to AI/LLM ages, Linux 7.2 managed to make it out today on-schedule for this feature-packed kernel. Linux 7.2 is going on to power Ubuntu 26.10 and other upcoming Linux distribution releases… ⌘ Read more

GNOME 51 Beta Released With Many Minor Improvements
The beta release of GNOME 51 is now available for testing. This cycle for the beta milestone is mostly a wide collection of minor improvements throughout the vast package set… ⌘ Read more

USB4STREAM Adding Busy Poll Option For Lower Latency At The Cost Of Increased CPU Cycles
One of the nifty new features of Linux 7.2 is USB4STREAM as an Intel-developed solution for quickly sending data between USB4 connected systems. Now for the upcoming Linux 7.3 cycle, a busy poll mode is being added to provide lower-latency data transfers at the expense of increased CPU activity… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.3 Will Treat Intel Nova Lake S Graphics As Stable
Ahead of the next-generation Intel Nova Lake processors expected to begin rolling out around the start of 2027, the upcoming Linux 7.3 kernel cycle is going to begin treating Nova Lake S processors with their integrated graphics as stable… ⌘ Read more

Earth’s Biggest Disasters Strike In a Hidden Pattern Every 27 Million Years
A new analysis of 89 major geological events over the past 260 million years found evidence that mass extinctions, volcanic eruptions, ocean crises, and other upheavals may cluster around a roughly 27.5-million-year cycle. The cause remains unknown, with possibilities ranging from mantle activity and orbital changes to spe … ⌘ Read more