Linux 7.1 Expected To See Nice Improvements For Reducing HRTICK Timer Overhead
A big set of kernel patches look like they will be submitted for the Linux 7.1 kernel cycle this spring to optimize the scheduler HRTICK timer and in turn allowing it to be enabled by default… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.0 Development & Intel Panther Lake Proved Most Popular In February
During the last month on Phoronix there were 289 original open-source/Linux-related news articles and another 20 featured articles as in Linux hardware reviews and multi-page benchmark articles. There was a lot of interesting software and hardware happenings the past month but standing out the most was the Linux 7.0 merge window developments and the ramp of Intel Panther Lake Linux testing… ⌘ Read more

AMD Prepares Linux For Instruction-Based Sampling Improvements With Zen 6
A set of patches recently posted to the Linux kernel mailing list have now been queued up to a tip/tip.git branch for planned introduction in Linux 7.1. These patches are for enhancing the Linux perf subsystem support for AMD Instruction-Based Sampling (IBS) improvements with next-gen Zen 6 processors… ⌘ Read more

Verisilicon DC8200 & Coreboot Framebuffer Drivers Sent To DRM-Next For Linux 7.1
The first DRM-Misc-Next pull request was submitted this week to DRM-Next as new kernel graphics/display driver features to begin queuing for the Linux 7.1 kernel that will release mid-year. Among the early code for DRM-Next are two new drivers… ⌘ Read more

KDE Plasma 6.7 Preps Rounded Style UI Enhancement For QtWidgets-Based Apps
KDE Plasma 6.7 development continues heating up following the Plasma 6.6 desktop release earlier this month… ⌘ Read more

Numerous AMDXDNA Ryzen AI Driver Fixes For Linux 7.0-rc2
Sent out today were all of the DRM/accel driver fixes for the week, ahead of the Linux 7.0-rc2 kernel release due out on Sunday… ⌘ Read more

LXD 6.7 Released With AMD GPU Passthrough Support
Canonical today released LXD 6.7 as the latest feature update to this system container and virtual machine manager commonly used in Ubuntu Linux environments… ⌘ Read more

HBO Max’s Password-Sharing Crackdown Will Expand Globally in 2026
HBO Max will be cracking down on password sharing around the world. From a report: The streamer first started cracking down on password sharing in the United States late last August. Subscribers are now able to add an additional out-of-household account for $7.99 a month. Before that August change, Warner Bros. Discovery had been testin … ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.1 Looks To Support Extended Attributes On Sockets For New GNOME & systemd Functionality
While the Linux 7.0 feature merge window ended this past weekend and that next kernel release won’t debut as stable until April, there are already features out on the horizon that are being positioned for likely merging into the Linux 7.1 kernel assuming no issues appear or objections raised by Linus Torvalds. One of the features already looking like it will be submitted for Linux 7.1 is supporting extended attri … ⌘ Read more

Americans Are Destroying Flock Surveillance Cameras
An anonymous reader shares a report: Brian Merchant, writing for Blood in the Machine, reports that people across the United States are dismantling and destroying Flock surveillance cameras, amid rising public anger that the license plate readers aid U.S. immigration authorities and deportations.

Flock is the Atlanta-based surveillance startup valued at $7.5 billion a yea … ⌘ Read more

Sub-Scheduler Support Could Be One Of The Most Exciting Features To Come For Linux 7.1
While there are many great Linux 7.0 features with that still-young development cycle, looking ahead to Linux 7.1 this summer there’s an interesting feature on track: cgroup sub-scheduler support for sched_ext… ⌘ Read more

D7VK 1.4 Released With More Improvements For Old Direct3D On Vulkan Under Linux
D7VK is the open-source project that began implementing the Direct3D 7 APIs atop Vulkan and with time the scope expanded to include Direct3D 6 support as well as Direct3D 5 support. Out today is D7VK 1.4 for continuing to enhance the support for these older D3D versions on Vulkan under Linux… ⌘ Read more

Viral Doomsday Report Lays Bare Wall Street’s Deep Anxiety About AI Future
A 7,000-word “doomsday” thought experiment from Citrini Research helped trigger an 800-point drop in the Dow, “painting a dark portrait of a future in which technological change inspires a race to the bottom in white-collar knowledge work,” reports the Wall Street Journal. From the report: Concerns of hyperscalers overspending are o … ⌘ Read more

Linus Torvalds Drops Old Linux Kconfig Option To Address Tiresome Kernel Log Spam
Following yesterday’s Linux 7.0-rc1 release, Linus Torvalds authored and merged a patch to get rid of the Linux kernel’s WARN_ALL_UNSEEDED_RANDOM Kconfig option. While that option was added with good intentions, on some systems it can yield a lot of unnecessary kernel log spam… ⌘ Read more

Linus Torvalds: Someone ‘More Competent Who Isn’t Afraid of Numbers Past the Teens’ Will Take Over Linux One Day
Linus Torvalds has pondered his professional mortality in a self-deprecating post to mark the release of the first release candidate for version 7.0 of the Linux kernel. From a report: “You all know the drill by now: two weeks have passed, and the kernel … ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.0 Features Include More Preparations For AMD Zen 6 & Intel Nova Lake
While the version bump to 7.0 is driven solely by Linus Torvalds’ versioning preferences, with Linux 7.0 there are many great changes to be found in this upcoming stable kernel version to power the likes of Ubuntu 26.04 LTS. Here is a recap of all the interesting changes with Linux 7.0. ⌘ Read more

Modern AMD Graphics Driver Surpasses Six Million Lines Of Code In Linux 7.0
It was less than four years ago that the modern AMDGPU/AMDKFD open-source driver stack was at four million lines of C code and header files. Now with the Linux 7.0 kernel it has surpassed six million lines. Or put another way, by the same calculations Linux 7.0-rc1 is at 39.2 million with the modern AMD kernel graphics driver now making up 15% of the kernel’s entire codebase as the single largest driver… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.0 Credits Now Honor The Creator Of Linux-Next
There’s the usual flurry of last minute fixes and other items being herded into the Linux 7.0 codebase today right ahead of the merge window being closed with the imminent Linux 7.0-rc1 release. Among that last minute work is now recognizing Stephen Rothwell’s contributions to creating and maintaining Linux-Next over the past eighteen years… ⌘ Read more

Man Accidentally Gains Control of 7,000 Robot Vacuums
A software engineer tried steering his robot vacuum with a videogame controller, reports Popular Science — but ended up with “a sneak peak into thousands of people’s homes.”

While building his own remote-control app, Sammy Azdoufal reportedly used an AI coding assistant to help reverse-engineer how the robot communicated with DJI’s remote cloud servers. But he soo … ⌘ Read more

AMD Zen 6 Performance Events & Metrics Merged For Linux 7.0
Ahead of the Linux 7.0 merge window closing later today with the Linux 7.0-rc1 release, the performance “perf” subsystem tooling changes were merged on Saturday. Among the notable changes here are the performance events and metrics handling for upcoming AMD Zen 6 processors… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.0 Further Prepares For Intel Diamond Rapids With NTB Driver Support
The upstream Linux kernel appears largely ready for Intel’s next-generation Xeon Diamond Rapids processors as the successor to Granite Rapids. Most of the driver support appears to have been settled for a while with just some stragglers remaining. With the ongoing Linux 7.0 kernel one new addition for Diamond Rapids is NTB driver support… ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Hyper-V Lands Some Useful Improvements In Linux 7.0
For those dealing with Microsoft Hyper-V for virtualization, the Linux 7.0 mainline kernel has seen a number of improvements there. This work follows KVM also bringing some nice improvements in Linux 7.0… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.0 Makes Preparations For Rust 1.95
Last week was the main feature pull of Rust programming language updates for the Linux 7.0 kernel merge window. Most notable with that pull was Rust officially concluding its “experimental” in now treating Rust for Linux kernel/driver programming as stable and here to stay. Sent out today was a round of Rust fixes for Linux 7.0 that includes preparations for the upcoming Rust 1.95 release… ⌘ Read more

AppArmor Enhancements Merged For Linux 7.0
The AppArmour security module for the Linux kernel, which most notably is backed by Canonical for Ubuntu, has some small improvements and fixes for Linux 7.0… ⌘ Read more

eCryptfs Sees Renewed Patch Activity With Linux 7.0
We haven’t heard much about eCryptfs in recent years for that stackable in-tree Linux file-system providing per-directory encryption support. The FSCRYPT framework has shown its strong capabilities in recent years with various file-systems, Canonical hasn’t been pursuing its user home directory encryption like it did years ago for the Ubuntu desktop, and full disk encryption is the most secure approach for ensuring data security on your system. But to some surprise wi … ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.0 Lands More AMDGPU Fixes For Old Radeon Hardware
Following last week’s main set of DRM kernel graphics driver feature updates for Linux 7.0, merged on Friday to Linux 7.0 Git was the first round of fixes to these Direct Rendering Manager drivers. Dominating most of the code changes in this latest pull were AMDGPU fixes, including more enhancements for aging Radeon graphics processors… ⌘ Read more

Ceph In Linux 7.0 Lands Support For AES256K Keys
For those making use of the Ceph open-source, distributed storage platform, with the upcoming Linux 7.0 kernel they are introducing support for the AES256K key type… ⌘ Read more

US Particle Accelerators Turn Nuclear Waste Into Electricity, Cut Radioactive Life By 99.7%
Researchers at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility are advancing Accelerator-Driven Systems (ADS) that use high-energy proton beams to transmute long-lived nuclear waste into shorter-lived isotopes. “The process also generates significant heat, which can be harnessed to produce … ⌘ Read more

KDE Plasma 6.7 Preps More Improvements While Plasma 6.6.1 Fixes Begin Accumulating
This week marked the release of KDE’s Plasma 6.6 desktop as a very successful release that overall is in very robust shape and performing well. While Plasma 6.6 overall is in great shape, there are various bugs - including crash fixes - that have already been queued for the upcoming Plasma 6.6.1. KDE developers are also quite busy on the trek toward Plasma 6.7… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.0 Shows Significant PostgreSQL Performance Gains On AMD EPYC
When beginning some early Linux 7.0 kernel benchmarking this week for looking at its performance in its early development state, I started off testing on Core Ultra X7 “Panther Lake” in being hopeful for better performance with the maturing Arc B390 Xe3 graphics and the like. But I ended up finding Intel Panther Lake seeing some performance regressions on Linux 7.0. So next up I turned to an AMD EPYC Turin server since if regressions existed th … ⌘ Read more

Linux Begins Seeing Early Preparations For PCIe 7.0
While we are on the horizon of seeing PCI Express 6.0 devices, there are already early Linux kernel patches beginning to surface for PCI Express 7.0… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.0 Brings Apple Type-C PHY, Snapdragon X2 & Rockchip HDMI 2.1 FRL Additions
Ahead of the Linux 7.0 merge window ending this weekend, the PHY updates were merged this week for this next major kernel release. There are some notable PHY additions particularly for Apple Silicon USB Type-C support as well as additions for Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon X2 laptop SoCs… ⌘ Read more

USB Driver For Google Tensor SoCs, UCSI Thunderbolt Alt Mode In Linux 7.0
All of the Thunderbolt/USB driver changes were merged this week for the nearly-over Linux 7.0 merge window… ⌘ Read more

Turbostat With Linux 7.0 Can Report New L2 Cache Statistics
The Turbostat command-line utility for reporting processor frequency and idle statistics along with other useful information for AMD and Intel CPUs can now report some L2 cache stats for recent Intel CPUs beginning with Linux 7.0… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.0 Speeds Up Reclaiming File-Backed Large Folios By 50~75%
Merged on Wednesday were some additional memory management “MM” updates for the Linux 7.0 merge window. Most interesting out of these latest three dozen patches is support for batched unmapping of file-backed large folios… ⌘ Read more

Linux Still Working To Clean Up The Realtek RTL8723BS 802.11b/g/n WiFi Driver In 2026
Introduced to the Linux 4.12 kernel’s staging area back in 2017 was the Realtek RTL8723BS WiFi driver. The Realtek RTL8723BS is an 802.11 b/g/ SDIO WLAN adapter with Bluetooth 4.0 connectivity too. In the nearly decade since this driver was added to the staging area, it’s continued to be cleaned up and with the Linux 7.0 merge window there is yet again a lot of work on cleaning up this WiFi driver for the old Realtek hardware… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.0 Showing Some Early Performance Regressions On Intel Panther Lake
With the Linux 7.0 merge window beginning to calm down ahead of the 7.0-rc1 release due out on Sunday, one of the areas I was most excited about benchmarking on Linux 7.0 was looking for any performance gains with the new Intel Core Ultra Series 3 “Panther Lake” given ongoing Intel Xe graphics driver improvements and other general kernel optimizations. Unfortunately, at large the Intel Panther Lake performance is moving in the wrong directio … ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.0 Retires The IBM Mwave ACP Modem Driver Used By Some 1990s ThinkPads
Long past due for retirement, the Linux 7.0 kernel has removed the obsolete Mwave driver for the 3780i ACP Modem found in some Pentium II era IBM ThinkPads from the 1990s… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.0 Brings Several Enhancements For Modern Laptops
The x86 platform driver updates were merged recently for the ongoing Linux 7.0 merge window. As is a common theme for platform-drivers-x86, a lot of the feature work is around Linux laptop drivers for enhancing the support on modern hardware… ⌘ Read more

LoongArch Ready With New Features In Linux 7.0
The Linux 7.0 kernel is shipping improvements for LoongArch, the Chinese CPU architecture inspired by MIPS64 and RISC-V and has been showing much potential for their domestic PC manufacturing… ⌘ Read more

Intel Lands Initial Preparations For DSA 3.0 Accelerators In Linux 7.0
Last year we began seeing Linux patches preparing the kernel for Intel Data Streaming Accelerator “DSA” 3.0 IP. Finally with the Linux 7.0 kernel those patches in updated form have now been merged… ⌘ Read more

KVM In Linux 7.0 Adds Support For Virtualizing AMD ERAPS
All of the KVM virtualization feature changes were recently merged for the in-development Linux 7.0 kernel… ⌘ Read more

Bayer Agrees To $7.25 Billion Proposed Settlement Over Thousands of Roundup Cancer Lawsuits
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: Agrochemical maker Bayer and attorneys for cancer patients announced a proposed $7.25 billion settlement Tuesday to resolve thousands of U.S. lawsuits alleging the company failed to warn people that its popular weedkiller Roundup coul … ⌘ Read more

NTFS3 Driver Sees Improvements In Linux 7.0 While “NTFS Remake” Driver Bakes
The NTFS3 driver maintained by Paragon Software for Microsoft NTFS file-systems today saw a batch of improvements merged for Linux 7.0 This comes as there is also the competing “NTFS Remake” driver that began a few months ago as the “NTFSPLUS” driver. That NTFS Remake driver isn’t looking like it will be submitted for the Linux 7.0 merge window so at least for now the NTFS3 driver continues seeing improvements with the latest mainline kernel code … ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.0 Lands New TI RGB LED Driver With “Autonomous Animation Engine” Control
The LED subsystem updates for the Linux kernel typically aren’t too noteworthy each kernel cycle but with Linux 7.0 is a new TI RGB LED driver that captured my attention in being curious over its “autonomous animation engine” integration… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.0 Merges “Significant Improvement” For close_range System Call
The close_range system call for closing all file descriptors “FDs” in a given range should enjoy a nice speed boost with the in-development Linux 7.0 kernel… ⌘ Read more

Nova Lake S Support Added To Intel LPSS Driver In Linux 7.0
The latest Nova Lake enablement work for the Linux kernel to land is adding support for Nova Lake S platforms to the Intel LPSS driver in the upcoming Linux 7.0 kernel… ⌘ Read more

Secondhand Laptop Market Goes ‘Mainstream’ Amid Memory Crunch
Sales of refurbished PCs are on the up amid shortages of key components, including memory chips, that are making brand new devices more expensive. From a report: Stats compiled by market watcher Context show sales of refurbished PCs via distribution climbed 7 percent in calendar Q4 across five of the biggest European markets – Italy, the UK, Germany, Spai … ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.0 CXL Enables AMD Zen 5 Address Translation Feature
A long-in-development feature for AMD EPYC Zen 5 server platforms now merged for the Linux 7.0 kernel is ACPI PRMT-based address translation for the Compute Express Link (CXL) subsystem… ⌘ Read more

RISC-V In Linux 7.0 Brings User-Space CFI & Optimized strlen Assembly
The RISC-V architecture updates have been merged for Linux 7.0 with a few items to note… ⌘ Read more