The media subsystem updates have been merged for the ongoing Linux 7.1 merge window and includes new hardware support.

Last month Intel began shipping the Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus "Arrow Lake Refresh" desktop processor. This is a mighty interesting processor for the $349 USD price point with more cores and a larger cache compared to the Core Ultra 7 265K and capable of delivering much of the performance of the flagship Core Ultra 9 285K Arrow Lake processor. In today's article is a look at how well the Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus performs under Linux with more than 340 different benchmarks representing a range of Linux workloads from gaming to creator to developer and technical computing uses.

The community-based AlmaLinux OS alternative to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) continues exploring ways to better differentiate it from upstream RHEL and other derivatives. The latest difference is AlmaLinux OS Kitten 10 adding i686 user-space packages for those wanting to run on a RHEL 10 based platform but still needing x86 32-bit user-space software compatibility.

Intel today formally announced the Core Series 3 low-end mobile processors previously known as Wildcat Lake. These are the new Intel 18A offerings that are a step below the Core Ultra Series 3 "Panther Lake" SoCs that began shipping earlier this year.

Rust 1.95 was released to the wild today as the latest feature update to this popular programming language.

The Linux Mint project published their March 2026 monthly status update where they note the ongoing work toward Mint 23 "Alfa" that will be released under their new longer development lifecycle. Linux Mint 23 will be out for Christmas (December) 2026 atop an Ubuntu 26.04 LTS base.

Mozilla today announced "Thunderbolt" as an open-source AI client built for control and independence. Mozilla Thunderbolt, while having the worst possible name, is built for organizations and others wanting to deploy self-hosted AI infrastructure.

In addition to Linux 7.1 supporting FRED by default for Flexible Return and Event Delivery, another Intel CPU feature now in good shape for this next kernel version is Linear Address Space Separation (LASS).

Beyond Linux 7.1 beginning to phase out Intel 486 CPU support, this next Linux kernel version is also beginning to remove driver code for supporting Russia's Baikal CPUs.

Back during the Linux 7.0 merge window the MMC changes were rejected by Linus Torvalds as "complete garbage" that wasn't building properly and not vetted through linux-next. He went without pulling any MMC changes for the v7.0 cycle while now for Linux 7.1 the code has been better tested and successfully merged.

Following the recent KDE Plasma 6.6 desktop release, KDE Gear 26.04 is out today for shipping all the latest updated KDE desktop applications.

With the set of today's AMDGPU kernel graphics driver Display Core (DC) patches is a rather curious addition with wiring up the Linux code to a "power module" that looks like it will better match Microsoft Windows behavior with the AMD Radeon driver around display-related power savings features.

The Linux 7.1 kernel is bringing performance improvements for Sheaves, the per-CPU caching layer introduced several kernel cycles ago (Linux 6.18) for better efficiency on today's high core count hardware. Sheaves began as an opt-in feature but since Linux 7.0 is now being used for all caches.

The SDL library widely used by cross-platform games and part of the Steam Runtime has now established a policy to block code contributions made using AI / Large Language Models (LLMs).

The workqueue changes merged today for the Linux 7.1 kernel are significant for today's modern high-end processors where there can be many CPU cores per last level cache (LLC / L3 cache). The new WQ_AFFN_CACHE_SHARD affinity scope can reduce some contention on such systems and help achieve greater performance.

Archinstall 4.2 is now available as the latest update to this very convenient, text-based Arch Linux OS installer.

Last month I ran benchmarks showing the very positive performance impact FRED has on Intel's new Panther Lake processors while wondering why Flexible Return and Event Deliver wasn't enabled by default yet on Linux. Hours after that story was published, an Intel engineer posted the patch to enable FRED by default with the rationale they were waiting for hardware to be publicly released in order to evaluate the performance benefit. Days after that the FRED-by-default patch hit tip/tip.git and now as of yesterday that patch is merged for Linux 7.1.

Last week after receiving the Intel Arc Pro B70 review hardware I began with some benchmarks looking at how the Arc Pro B70 compared to existing Intel GPUs on Linux with their fully open-source driver stack. Today's article features the latest Arc Pro B70 benchmarks under Linux in looking at how the performance and value compares to other NVIDIA RTX and AMD Radeon (AI) PRO workstation graphics cards in the lab.

Eric Engestrom stepped up again to serve as Mesa release manager for this quarter's Mesa 26.1 feature release. Mesa 26.1-rc1 was just released in kicking off the weekly release candidate dance until Mesa 26.1 stable is ready for debut in May.

A change proposal has been filed to build x86_64-v3 micro-architecture feature level packages alongside the existing x86_64-v1 packages for Fedora Linux.