Perhaps unsurprisingly, last night’s Magic games were dominated by the new Marvel set.

In game 1, I was running my new (unlisted) 5-color tribal Super Heroes deck (led by Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD) against a lightly-modified Avengers Assemble deck, a tribal Super Villains deck (fronted by Thanos, the Mad Titan), and 2 “classic” magic decks (Fractals and Artifacts). The heroes held their own quite well, but that game went way too long (thanks to Thanos snapping away half the board every other turn). It finally ended when everyone quit after yet another board wipe (giving the wiper her first win).

ReactOS “Open-Source Windows” Project Now Capable Of Running Half-Life 2
One month ago it was exciting to see the open-source ReactOS operating system running Valve’s Half-Life game. Little to realize less than 30 days later it would also be running Half-Life 2… ⌘ Read more

OpenRazer 3.12.4 Fixes Compatibility With Linux 7.2
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… ⌘ Read more

AOL’s Owner Bending Spoons Hits Wall Street with $1.7 billion IPO
“The owner of AOL and other tech businesses hit Wall Street with a $1.7 billion initial public offering Wednesday,” reports the Associated Press:

The company is getting $1 billion in proceeds, while the rest is going to shareholders. The stock surged 39.7% in its first day of trading under the symbol “BSP” on the Nasdaq, giving it a market value of $2 … ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.2-rc2 Raising The Default RISC-V 64-bit CPU Limit To 256 Cores
A post merge-window change that landed in Linux Git overnight ahead of tomorrow’s Linux 7.2-rc2 release is bumping the default limit on the number of supported CPU cores for RISC-V 64-bit. Now by default Linux will support up to 256 cores with RISC-V 64-bit kernel builds… ⌘ Read more

KWin Compositor In KDE Plasma 6.8 Drops Support For Desktop OpenGL
Along with releasing Plasma 6.7.2 this week, KDE developers continue to be quite busy working on new features and improvements for the Plasma 6.8 release while also furthering along fixes for future Plasma 6.7 point releases… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.2-rc2 BPF Code Being Hardened Against JIT Spraying Attacks
Some post-merge-window code changes merged overnight ahead of Linux 7.2-rc2 this weekend is hardening the kernel’s BPF code against JIT spraying attacks… ⌘ Read more

ReactOS Implements First Windows NT6 System Call In Step Toward Vista Compatibility
The ReactOS project that is striving to be the “open-source Windows” with Windows driver and software binary compatibility hit another milestone today. ReactOS to date has primarily targeted Windows NT 5.2 as the architecture from Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 but with an eye toward Windows NT 6.0 for Windows Vista and later compatibility with software. ReactOS has now landed their first NT6 system call… ⌘ Read more

COSMIC Epoch 1.2 Desktop Fixes Flickering Issues For Intel Graphics
Just a week after the COSMIC Epoch 1.1 release with its slick new system monitor, COSMIC Epoch 1.2 is now available for this Rust-based desktop developed by System76… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.2 Features: Cache Aware Scheduling, USB4STREAM, AMD ISP4, AMDGPU HDMI 2.1 FRL
Linux 7.2 is working toward release in August with its more than 43 million lines in the codebase. With Linux 7.2 there are many new changes in tow as summed up in today’s feature overview. ⌘ Read more

New Linux Driver Posted To Enable Keyboard Support On M3 MacBooks
While Linux 7.2 introduces the ability to boot on Apple M3 Macs, it’s not yet remotely useful for end-users wanting to use an Apple Mac/MacBook as their daily system. As it stands now, the M3 Macs boot to a simple console and that’s about it with the lack of proper GPU acceleration and functionality like the keyboard on MacBooks not working either. Posted to the kernel mailing list today was the new driver patches for enabling the internal key … ⌘ Read more

KDE Plasma 6.7.2 Brings Fix For Most Common KWin Crash, Better Chromium Video Playback
KDE Plasma 6.7.2 is out today as the latest point release to deliver bug fixes for the Plasma 6.7 desktop that debuted earlier this month… ⌘ Read more

AMDGPU HDMI 2.1 FRL, Improvements For Old GPUs & Other AMD Linux Highlights In Q2
With Q2’2026 drawing to a close, as part of the different quarterly recaps of popular areas on Phoronix, here is a look back at the most popular AMD Linux/open-source news of the quarter… ⌘ Read more

Git 2.55 Released With Rust Support Enabled By Default, git history fixup
Git 2.55 is out today as the latest stable update to this distributed version control system… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.2 On Threadripper Shows Some Nice I/O Improvements & Faster Poll, Some Regressions
I have begun testing out Linux 7.2 on more hardware following the winding down of the merge window and culminating with yesterday’s Linux 7.2-rc1 release. Today’s tests are looking at how Linux 7.2 in its early development state is comparing to Linux 7.1 stable on AMD Ryzen Threadripper. ⌘ Read more

IBM Says It Can Fit Nearly 100 Billion Transistors On a Chip
IBM has unveiled “what it says is the world’s first sub-1-nanometer chip technology,” reports ZDNet, “designed to pack nearly 100 billion transistors on a fingernail-size die, roughly doubling the density of IBM’s earlier 2-nm test chip, first shown in 2021… Today, the smallest, most powerful chips top out at about 80 billion transistors.”

At the … ⌘ Read more

RADV Enables Vulkan Descriptor Heap Support By Default
In time for the Mesa 26.2 stable release expected out in August, the Radeon RADV Vulkan driver is now exposing the VK_EXT_descriptor_heap descriptor heap support by default… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.2-rc1 Released: “Things Look Reasonably Normal” While Landing AMDGPU HDMI 2.1 FRL, AMD ISP4 & CAS
As expected, Linux 7.2-rc1 was released a brief time ago to cap off the Linux 7.2 merge window. Now it’s off for eight weeks or so of testing before Linux 7.2 stable is released that will in turn go on to power the likes of Fedora 45 and Ubuntu 26.10… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.3 To Introduce DRM “Color Format” Property With AMD GPU Driver Support
While the Linux 7.2 kernel merge window is only ending later today to cap off the feature work on this next version of the Linux kernel, already for the Linux 7.3 kernel cycle later in the year there is one notable feature on the way: the DRM color format property is being introduced and being first supported by the AMDGPU kernel graphics driver… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.2 Surpasses More Than 43 Million Lines In The Kernel Tree
Today marks the last day of the Linux 7.2 merge window with Linux 7.2-rc1 due out later today. With the many new features and improvements merged over the past week since the Linux 7.1 stable debut, the Linux kernel source tree now exceeds 43 million lines… ⌘ Read more

KDE Plasma 6.7.2 To Fix KWin’s Most Common Crash, Plasma 6.8 To Not Crash When Ejecting CDs
While Plasma 6.7.1 was just released this week following the recent stable debut of Plasma 6.7, there are already a number of fixes piling up for Plasma 6.7.2 due out in July. Plus more feature work and fixes for Plasma 6.8 as the next desktop version going Wayland-only… ⌘ Read more

Interesting, HTTPS is almost twice as slow as plain HTTP on my server (~72 ms vs. ~135 ms):

$ hyperfine -r 50 "curl -so /dev/null 'http://movq.de/blog/postings/2024-05-23/0/t/word11a.jpg.jpg'"
Benchmark 1: curl -so /dev/null 'http://movq.de/blog/postings/2024-05-23/0/t/word11a.jpg.jpg'
  Time (mean ± σ):      72.7 ms ±  17.2 ms    [User: 6.2 ms, System: 4.8 ms]
  Range (min … max):    49.5 ms …  99.7 ms    50 runs

$ hyperfine -r 50 "curl -so /dev/null 'https://movq.de/blog/postings/2024-05-23/0/t/word11a.jpg.jpg'"
Benchmark 1: curl -so /dev/null 'https://movq.de/blog/postings/2024-05-23/0/t/word11a.jpg.jpg'
  Time (mean ± σ):     135.5 ms ±  28.9 ms    [User: 17.8 ms, System: 5.6 ms]
  Range (min … max):    93.2 ms … 198.5 ms    50 runs

More AMD Zen 6 Prepping, Many ASUS / Lenovo / HP Laptop Improvements For Linux 7.2
The many x86 platform driver changes have now been merged for the in-development Linux 7.2 kernel. As usual it’s mostly made up of driver enhancements for benefiting modern AMD Ryzen (AI) and Intel Core (Ultra) laptops… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.2 Fixes Where PCIe Devices Could Be Inadvertently Restricted To 2.5 GT/s
The PCI/PCIe subsystem changes have been merged this week as we approach the end of the Linux 7.2 merge window… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.2 Adds New Driver For Wacom W9000 Pen-Enabled Touchscreens
The input subsystem changes were merged this week for Linux 7.2, which is seeing its merge window wrap up on Sunday. Most notable with the input updates is the introduction of the “wacom_w9000” for supporting newer, pen-enabled touchscreens… ⌘ Read more

Ubuntu 26.10 Snapshot 2 Released For Monthly Testing
Daily ISOs of Ubuntu 26.10 “Stonking Stingray” continue to be published, but for those preferring something a bit more regulated, out today is Ubuntu 26.10 Snapshot 2 as the second monthly ISO image… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.2 Drops Ancient PROFIBUS Driver: Ported From SCO Unix In 1998, Unused For Years
Linux 7.2 is continuing the trend of removing obsolete hardware drivers for which the code hasn’t seen any maintenance in years and there are no believed users left of said drivers, especially those that would be running modern mainline versions of the Linux kernel. The char/misc changes merged dropped two more obsolete drivers from the Linux source tree… ⌘ Read more

Linux Cache Aware Scheduling Extended For Even Better Performance: Up To 360% In MySQL
Cache Aware Scheduling is one of the most exciting kernel innovations to land in Linux this year. While it was finally merged last week to Linux 7.2, a new patch series today is already working to extend Cache Aware Scheduling and is showing some exciting performance improvements… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.2 Staging Still Working To Tame The Realtek RTL8723BS “Beast Of A Driver”
Way back in 2017 for the Linux 4.12 kernel the Realtek rtl8723bs WiFi driver was added to the kernel’s staging area. Nearly a decade later, it’s still being cleaned-up to suit the more rigorous non-staging area of the kernel in the formal networking subsystem. For Linux 7.2, the staging pull request is once again dominated by clean-ups to this Realtek WiFi driver… ⌘ Read more

KSMBD Adds SMB2 Compression Support In Linux 7.2
Merged back in Linux 5.15 in 2021 was KSMBD as an in-kernel SMB3 file server. There hasn’t been much KSMBD news to report on recently but for Linux 7.2 there is now SMB2 compression support… ⌘ Read more

MGLRU Improvement Yielding Nice Gains On Linux 7.2: MongoDB 30~100% Higher Throughput
The many memory management “MM” related improvements were recently merged to Git for the Linux 7.2 kernel. As typical most kernel cycles, some of the low-level improvements can yield nice efficiency wins and better performance in different areas… ⌘ Read more

NTFS3 Driver Sees Bug Fixes & Minor Improvements With Linux 7.2
While the new NTFS file-system driver merged for Linux 7.1 and has seen more improvements for Linux 7.2, for now at least the NTFS3 kernel driver continues to be maintained with new fixes and improvements. NTFS3 is the driver that was upstreamed to the Linux kernel a few years ago back during the pandemic by Paragon Software… ⌘ Read more

F2FS Integrates FSERROR Reporting, Reduces Memory Footprint In Linux 7.2
The Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) have landed for Linux 7.2… ⌘ Read more

New AMD Linux Patches Expose Gamma 2.4 + Gamma 2.6 Curves
In addition to AMD engineers being busy rolling out HDMI 2.1 for their open-source Linux driver at long last, another notable display-related improvement on the way to their AMDGPU kernel graphics driver is exposing the Gamma 2.4 and Gamma 2.6 curves support… ⌘ Read more

“So Many AI-Fueled Fixes” Means No New ARM64 KVM Features For Linux 7.2
The KVM virtualization-related changes were merged a few days ago for the ongoing Linux 7.2 kernel merge window. While there are a number of features/improvements for AMD and Intel virtualization as well as the likes of s390 and RISC-V, there aren’t any new features on ARM64. The lack of ARM64 feature work this cycle is being attributed to “so many AI-fueled fixes” swamping the ARM Linux developers… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.2 Protects Against Crafted Perf Data From Going Rogue
With the help of Claude Opus 4.6, the Linux 7.2 kernel added protections to fend off specially crafted or corrupted perf data for the perf tool that could cause a number of issues for the running system… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.2 Ready With IMA and EVM Post-Quantum ML-DSA Signature Support
The integrity subsystem changes merged last week for the Linux 7.2 kernel include support now for IMA and EVM post-quantum ML-DSA signature support… ⌘ Read more

US AI Stock Sell-Off Shakes Markets From Wall Street To Asia
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: A tech sell-off shook global markets on Tuesday as attention turned away from developments in the US war with Iran and toward the future of AI companies and chipmakers that have driven stock markets to record highs. The tech-heavy Nasdaq index closed 2.2% lower on Tuesday. The S&P 500 was also down b … ⌘ Read more

“Disgusting” Linux sched_ext Source Code Restructured Following Complaint By Linus Torvalds
Last week the main set of sched_ext changes were merged for Linux 7.2 that included continued work on sub-scheduler support. While Linus Torvalds didn’t object to any of the features being worked on for this extensible scheduler framework that relies on user-space BPF programs, he was frustrated by the layout of the new C source files and remarked, “please don’t do this disgusting thing…proper hierarchical filesyste … ⌘ Read more

China Reclaims Fastest Supercomputer At 2 Exaflops
Longtime Slashdot reader hackingbear shares a report from TOP500: The 67th edition of the TOP500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers was announced today at the ISC 2026 conference in Hamburg, Germany. LineShine, a previously unlisted system installed in China, debuts at No. 1, displacing El Capitan as the world’s most powerful supercomputer as measured by the H … ⌘ Read more

Meta Launches Cheaper Smart Glasses Without Ray-Ban
Meta has launched its first smart glasses without Ray-Ban branding. Starting at $299, they’re cheaper than the Ray-Ban Meta Gen 2 while retaining EssilorLuxottica as a design and manufacturing partner. The Verge reports: As far as style and specs, the Meta Glasses aren’t that different from Ray-Bans. The internal specs are the same as the recently released Ray-Ban Meta Op … ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.2 Showing Some Unexpected & Nice Performance Gains On AMD EPYC Sorano
While the Linux 7.2 merge window doesn’t wrap up until this weekend as the feature cut-off for new material, I have already begun some early benchmarks of the code currently staged for this next version of the Linux kernel. Linux 7.2 already was looking quite exciting with cache aware scheduling and other exciting new features while an unexpected surprise in my early testing this week was seeing some local network/socket performan … ⌘ Read more

EROFS With Linux 7.2 Better Handles Large Sparse AI Datasets, More Efficient I/O
The EROFS open-source read-only file-system has some nice enhancements in place for the ⌘ Read more

Fwupd 2.0.21 Brings Fixes For More Than 250 Potential Security Issues Found Via AI
While the Fwupd 2.1 series is the latest stable channel for this open-source firmware updating solution, Fwupd 2.0.21 was released today to backport fixes for more than 250 potential security issues recently uncovered in the codebase… ⌘ Read more

Linux 8250/16550 UART Serial Driver Seeing Some Modernization Work In 2026
The Linux 8250 serial driver as the universal/legacy driver for 8250 and 16550 type serial ports has been seeing some modernization work recently with a number of 8250 serial patches having now been merged for the Linux 7.2 kernel… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.2 RISC-V Reduces Kernel Startup Overhead, Eswin SoC Support By Default
Along with the many x86/x86_64 improvements and some ARM64 architecture improvements (albeit slowed down by the AI/LLM noise affecting the development pace), the RISC-V architecture changes were merged last week for the ongoing Linux 7.2 kernel development… ⌘ Read more

USB4STREAM Merged For Linux 7.2 To Quickly Send Data Between USB4 Connected Systems
As part of today’s USB/Thunderbolt subsystem updates for the ongoing Linux 7.2 kernel merge window, USB4STREAM was merged as a nifty and exciting addition to opening up some interesting USB4 connnectivity use-cases for high speed, low latency data transfers… ⌘ Read more

2,000 Retired Google Pixel Phones Get a Second Life As a Private Cloud
UC San Diego researchers are working with Google to build a private cloud from 2,000 retired Pixel Fold motherboards, demonstrating how discarded smartphones could provide useful, low-cost computing capacity. “The full smartphone cluster is expected to launch this fall,” reports The Register. “Depending on how well the initial phas … ⌘ Read more

AMD Updates ROCDXG To Deliver Better ROCm Experience On WSL
Back in March AMD introduced ROCDXG to improve their Windows Subsystem for Linux support. This improved Windows Subsystem for Linux “WSL” support with the ROCm compute stack is a cleaneer architecture, open-source compared to their legacy WSL code having closed bits, and more robust handling. Today they issued a new ROCDXG library release to further enhance their WSL support… ⌘ Read more

OneXPlayer Configuration Driver Merged For Linux 7.2 Along With Other New Hardware
The HID subsystem updates have landed in the Linux 7.2 kernel with some treats that will excite Linux gamers and other desktop users… ⌘ Read more