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.

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.

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.

The Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) changes have landed for Linux 7.2.

For those with limited rack space and wanting to assemble a high-end server/workstation, the SilverStone RM32 provides a lot of opportunities in being a 3U rackmount chassis that can accommodate an E-ATX or SSI-EEB motherboard, up to a 360mm liquid cooling radiator, and up to four full-size expansion cards all within 3U height requirements. Paired with the SilverStone Extreme 1000Rz Platinum 1000W PSU, you can patch a lot into 5.25 inches.

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.

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.

A one line code change to the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) for its generic x86 tuning is benefiting modern Intel and AMD processors.

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.

QSOE 0.1 has made its debut as a QNX-inspired, dual kernel architecture open-source operating system just targeting RISC-V.

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.

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 filesystems have been available since 1965."

System76 today released COSMIC Epoch 1.1 as the newest feature release as well as being their first time bumping the minor version number since the December release of COSMIC 1.0.

The 46-year-old BASIC09 programming language has new compiler support with a front-end having been developed for the LLVM compiler stack. BASIC09 was developed in 1980 for the Motorola 6809 CPU running with the OS-9 operating system. With this LLVM compiler front-end, you can write BASIC09 code for modern software and hardware.

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 performance improvements.

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 support and also important indicators for better Snapdragon laptop support on Linux moving forward.

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.

The EROFS open-source read-only file-system has some nice enhancements in place for the

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.

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.