KDE developer David Edmundson is out today with a blog post around improvements that have been ongoing for the Plasma 6.8 release in improving the KDE remote desktop experience. As part of ensuring a good Wayland experience and hitting all the needs fulfilled by X11, Plasma 6.8 is seeing improvements for its remote desktop functionality.

Linux sound subsystem maintainer Takashi Iwai of SUSE submitted all of the sound feature updates last week for the Linux 7.3 kernel. Besides the continued AI/LLM-generated patch churn, the sound code for Linux 7.3 sees a lot of new hardware support.

The HID subsystem updates were recently merged for the ongoing Linux 7.3 kernel merge window. Among other hardware additions, the 2026 Valve Steam Controller is seeing initial kernel driver support.

A patch series being worked on for the ath11k mainline wireless networking driver for Qualcomm WiFi 6 / 802.11ax chipsets is yielding 7x lower latency or 2.2x throughput at identical latency.

The past few Linux kernel cycles have chipped away at AF_ALG functionality for that interface for user-space programs to access the kernel's internal cryptography API. Linux has been dropping AF_ALG features like zero-copy support and offloading. AF_ALG was quickly deprecated in Linux 7.2 while now for Linux 7.3 it's being further restricted.

While Firefox 152+ already offers experimental JPEG-XL support, Mozilla formally announced today their plans for officially shipping JPEG-XL image format support in the Firefox web browser.

Being halfway through the Linux 7.3 kernel merge window and prior to wrapping up and sending back the HP Z4 G6i workstation powered by the Xeon 678X Granite Rapids WS processor, I decided to run some benchmarks to see how Linux 7.3 Git is performing relative to the prior stable kernel series. Here are the first benchmarks of this early state of Linux 7.3 with some performance improvements as well as some regressions.

GNU Emacs 31.1 is out today as the newest feature release to this popular text editor.

VKD3D 2.1 was released today by CodeWeavers' Henri Verbeet as the upstream Wine project for getting Direct3D 12 implemented over the Vulkan API.

Coincidentally just days after AMD posted their big UALink patch series for Linux, Intel engineers today announced a proposal called DRM Fabric.

With the in-development Linux 7.3 is support for discovering and enumerating support for several newer RISC-V ISA extensions. Plus there are improvements to its control flow integrity Shadow Stack handling, CPU context switch support for QoS tagging, using UEFI runtime services for restart and powering off, and other improvements.

Merged last week for the Linux 7.3 kernel were all the hardware monitoring (HWMON) driver updates for Linux 7.3, which included supporting several more ASUS desktop motherboards, a few AIO liquid cooling products, more Lenovo system support, and per-CCD temperature monitoring on AMD EPYC 9005 server processors.

Following the main set of memory management "MM" changes submitted for Linux 7.3, Andrew Morton sent in his "non-MM" pull request of the other patches he's been collecting from various developers for this next Linux kernel release. Standing out there were some improvements to the RAID 5/6 benchmark-based algorithm selection.

The EFI updates were merged today for the in-development Linux 7.3 kernel. Most notable with the EFI updates is now enforcing a timeout foe EFI runtime service completions rather than potentially hanging indefinitely.

The Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) subsystem updates have been merged for the ongoing Linux 7.3 merge window. There is a lot of exciting GPU kernel driver improvements this cycle ranging from some notable enhancements to old AMD Radeon graphics hardware up through enabling support for some next-generation AMD graphics IP blocks to over on the Intel side where Nova Lake S graphics are being enabled by default.

Merged yesterday to the ReactOS code-base is initial support for Job Objects, which is an important milestone in the road to being able to run more modern Windows software under this open-source operating system striving for Windows driver/application compatibility.

The NVDIMM and direct access (DAX) patches have been merged for the Linux 7.3 cycle. Most of the DAX/NVDIMM activity this cycle is on making preparations for the upcoming submission of Micron's FAMFS file-system.

An AMD compiler engineer posted a patch on Saturday for the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC). The two-line patch adjusts the misprediction cost for Zen 4 and Zen 5 processors, which ends up yielding a 12% improvement in one SPEC CPU benchmark on Zen 5 and a 9% improvement on Zen 4.

Eric Biggers of Google continues carrying out great work on the Linux kernel crypto code. For Linux 7.3 he's landed work on new library APIs for most of the AES encryption modes used within the kernel. Moving forward this will open the door to more performance optimizations, reducing code duplication, and other enhancements.

The big set of input subsystem updates were merged earlier this week for the Linux 7.3 cycle. It's a random assortment of different improvements as well as bug/security fixes driven in part by the flow of AI/LLM generated discoveries.