Shotcut 26.6 Released With HDR Improvements, Vulkan Display On Linux
Shotcut 26.6 is out today as the newest major feature release for this popular cross-platform, open-source video editing solution… ⌘ Read more

New Intel Linux Driver Patches Enable HDR Over DP MST Connections
One of the limitations of the Intel Linux driver’s high dynamic range (HDR) display support is that it currently doesn’t work for any DisplayPort Multi-Stream Transport “DP MST” connections, such as for daisy chaining monitors or multi-monitor docking stations. But the good news is patches are being worked on to address this Intel Linux kernel display driver shortcoming… ⌘ Read more

How NVIDIA GB10 CPU Performance Compares To Vera
Since delivering NVIDIA Vera CPU benchmarks one month ago and follow-ups like how the ARM Linux server performance has evolved in 8 years or how Vera compares to Ampere Altra that is still quite common in the marketplace, another frequent discussion point and inquiry is about the performance of NVIDIA Vera relative to NVIDIA’s GB10 chip. For those curious about the per-core performance and the like, here are some benchmarks of the GB10 up against those initial Vera resul … ⌘ Read more

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

Intel ANV Vulkan Driver Now Enables Descriptor Heaps By Default
Back in early May was the experimental enabling of Vulkan descriptor heaps for the Intel ANV open-source driver. After nearly two months of continued testing and improvements, the VK_EXT_descriptor_heap support for Intel graphics on Linux is now enabled by default… ⌘ 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

Linux Foundation & Others Launch “Akrites” To Defend Open-Source Software From AI-Enabled Exploits
The Linux Foundation along with others like Amazon, Anthropic, OpenAI, NVIDIA, Microsoft, Red Hat, and others have joined forces to launch Akrites. The Akrites project is aiming to help defend critical open-source software from the brisk pace of new AI/LLM-discovered software bugs and vulnerabilities in ensuring that said issues are effectively addressed before they can be exploited by bad actors… ⌘ Read more

Linux Foundation Launches Akrites To Coordinate AI-Driven Open Source Security
BrianFagioli writes: The Linux Foundation has announced Akrites, a new initiative to coordinate vulnerability disclosure and remediation for critical open source software as AI dramatically speeds up vulnerability discovery. Founding members include AWS, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, Red Hat, NVIDIA, IBM, Cisco, JPMorgan … ⌘ Read more

Updated Raspberry Pi OS With Linux 6.18 LTS Delivers Some Performance Benefits
Last week marked the release of an updated Raspberry Pi OS that moved to Linux 6.18 LTS from its former Linux 6.12 kernel base along with making a number of other package updates. Given the jump to the newer Long Term Support kernel and other improvements, I ran some fresh benchmarks on the Raspberry Pi 5 (Raspberry Pi 500+) to see the performance difference out of the updated operating system. ⌘ 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

“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

@prologic@twtxt.net post it on Hacker News: A tiny shared Linux system, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48652140

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

DeviceTree-ACPI Hybrid Mode Proposed For Improving Linux Support On Snapdragon Laptops
Over the years while working at Red Hat, Hans de Goede was known for driving many wonderful Linux laptop improvements benefiting AMD/Intel x86_64 hardware. Hans left Red Hat last year and ended up joining Qualcomm to advance their open-source/Linux support. Today he is out with a significant new patch series for consideration that has the potential of significantly improving the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Series laptop Linux suppo … ⌘ Read more

Open-Source Driver For ATI R300 Era GPUs Seeing Improved Power Mac Support In 2026
For those that happen to still be running a 22+ year old Apple Power Mac such as those from 2004 with an IBM PowerPC processor and ATI Radeon 9600 XT or 9800 XT graphics, there are open-source driver improvements for Linux still happening in 2026 to benefit this vintage hardware… ⌘ 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

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

Steam Machine Launches, Priced $1049 To $1428 USD
Valve today finally revealed pricing on their SteamOS Linux-powered Steam Machine living room PC. Given the ongoing RAM and storage pricing pressure, the Steam Machine pricing comes in at the high-end… ⌘ Read more

Linux Finally Lands Battery/Charger Driver For 14 Year Old Microsoft Surface RT Tablet
It’s been 14 years already since Microsoft announced the Surface RT hybrid tablet as their first-generation Surface device for going up against the Apple iPad. All these years later, this NVIDIA Tegra 3 powered device is finally seeing a mainline Linux kernel driver for supporting battery and charger status… ⌘ 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

Valve Creates The Ray-Tracing Inspector “RTI” To Help Further Optimize Linux GPU Drivers
Merged today to Mesa 26.1 is the Ray-Tracing Inspector “RTI” as a new GUI created by developers on Valve’s open-source Linux graphics team. The Ray-Tracing Inspector is designed to help in analyzing and optimizing the Vulkan ray-tracing performance as part of their continued work on further bettering the Radeon RADV RT performance for Steam Play / Linux gaming… ⌘ 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

Linux 7.2 sched_ext Continues Working Toward Sub-Scheduler Support
Merged last week for the Linux 7.2 kernel were all of the sched_ext changes for this extensible scheduler support that allows loading BPF programs from user-space for handling scheduling tasks. Linux 7.2 continues building out sched_ext’s sub-scheduler support… ⌘ Read more

Someone Forked systemd Over Its New Birth Date Field
The blog Linuxiac reports:
A new systemd fork has appeared with a specific purpose: removing systemd’s recently added support for storing a user’s birth date in JSON user records.

The fork, called Liberated systemd, published its first tagged release as v261 shortly after the official systemd 261 release. In other words, the fork follows upstream systemd while reverti … ⌘ Read more

Early AMD GCN GPUs Seeing Improved GPU Recovery - Another Valve-Led Linux Improvement
Early AMD Radeon Graphics Core Next “GCN” GPUs are seeing work to improve the GPU recovery process in the event of hangs. This work is yet another improvement for older AMD GPUs being led by Valve’s open-source Linux graphics driver team… ⌘ Read more

After Six Years Of Work and Over 360 Patches, Linux 7.2 Finally Removes Bug-Prone strncpy
Tech Times reports:

Linux 7.2’s merge window closed out a cleanup campaign on Friday that most kernel developers had stopped expecting to see end: the complete removal of strncpy(), a C string-copy function that the kernel’s own documentation labels “actively dangerous,” from every subsystem, driv … ⌘ Read more

Qualcomm Posts Linux Patches For HP EliteBook X G2q X2 Elite Laptop
Last month Qualcomm engineers posted patches bringing up the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x Gen11 Snapdragon X2 laptop on Linux. Sent out this weekend were a new set of patches from Qualcomm for bringing up the HP EliteBook X G2q laptop model powered by the Snapdragon X2 Elite SoC… ⌘ Read more

Google’s Gemini Partially Figures Out A Lengthy Linux Boot Time On Modern ASUS Laptop
Google Antigravity with the Gemini 3.5 Flash model helped a Linux user sort out a situation where his laptop was taking around 36 seconds to boot the kernel, which shouldn’t be the case for the high-end laptop with AMD Ryzen 9 processor and 32GB of RAM. It ended up being yet another case of device firmware issues, but now a Linux kernel patch is pending for working around the issue on the ASUS ROG Strix G16 G614 laptop while … ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.2 Begins Making Preparations For NVIDIA “Blackwell-Next”
When going through the VFIO subsystem patches for the ongoing Linux 7.2 merge window, there isn’t too much to get excited about for end users with these changes. But there is the first time mentioning “Blackwell-Next” enablement by NVIDIA for the Linux kernel… ⌘ Read more

Broadcom Working On VMware Zero-Copy Buffer Sharing Between VMs And Hypervisor
Interesting feature work for VMware virtualization on Linux now being pursued by Broadcom is to support zero-copy buffer sharing between the VM(s) and host hypervisor, which would equate to an efficiency and performance win… ⌘ Read more

Linux Finally Eliminates The strncpy API After Six Years Of Work, 360+ Patches
Linux 7.2 has finally eliminated the strncpy API from the Linux kernel. The strncpy() function for copying up to a specified number of bytes has long been deprecated and after six years of work and hundreds of patches, no more users of the strncpy within the Linux kernel remained that it has now been eliminated… ⌘ Read more

Linux’s ARM64 NEON Intrinsics CRC64 Code Adapted To Work On 32-bit ARM
Merged for Linux 7.1 was ARMM64 NEON-accelerated CRC64-NVMe support for around 6x the performance out of that checksumming algorithm. The generic code had been a bottleneck in NVMe and other storage subsystem code of the Linux kernel with CRC64-NVMe being used to help verify against data corruption. Now for Linux 7.2, the NEON-accelerated code will also work for those still relying on 32-bit ARM… ⌘ Read more

GIMP v0.54 From 1996 With Motif Toolkit Now Flatpak’ed For Modern Linux Desktops
The open-source world waited long enough for the GIMP 3.0 release that finally came last year with its GTK3 port and more, but for those with time on their hands this weekend and want to relive GIMP’s past from long ago, GIMP 0.54 has been adapted for Flatpak to work on modern Linux desktops. What makes this version of GIMP from 1996 notable is that it was the last to use the Motif toolkit… ⌘ Read more

New NTFS Driver Sees Hardening & Fixes, Windows Native Symlinks With Linux 7.2
Happening back in Linux 7.1 was the “NTFS resurrection” with landing a new NTFS driver into the Linux kernel that had been years in the making and began as the former NTFS read-only kernel driver many years back before the stint of the Paragon NTFS3 driver in the Linux kernel. For Linux 7.2 that new/modern NTFS driver has seen more hardening work, some fixes, and Windows native symbolic links support… ⌘ Read more

Open-Source NVIDIA NVK Vulkan Driver Now Supports DLSS
With the code merged today to Mesa 26.2-devel, the open-source NVIDIA “NVK” Vulkan driver is capable of handling Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) with modern game titles running on Linux / Steam Play… ⌘ Read more

AMD-Powered Barco MXRT Graphics Cards Finally Seeing Linux Driver Support Patches
Barco, the Europeean technology company that manufactures the AMD GPU based MXRT graphics cards for for multi-display medical imaging systems (and also MXRV for their NVIDIA based graphics cards), have to date only seen Windows drivers published for their professional-grade graphics cards even with using Radeon Pro derived GPUs. But a patch published today to the AMD graphics mailing list is opening the door for Linux support… ⌘ Read more

systemd 261 Released With New systemd-sysinstall OS Installer, IMDSD & Storagectl
Systemd 261 is out as stable today with a number of new features and ready to coincide with H2’2026 Linux distributions… ⌘ Read more