The first release candidate of systemd 261 is out today and it includes yet more features for this Linux init system and service manager.

Last month with the new AMD Zen 5 "Dual Edition" 3D V-Cache CPU, the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition showed great performance on Linux across a range of workloads. Curious if the operating system was playing into the greater benefit of Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 versus just the workloads tested, this article is looking at both the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D and Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 on Microsoft Windows 11 and Ubuntu 26.04 LTS Linux across a range of native benchmarks.

For those with a new Core Ultra Series 3 "Panther Lake" laptop from HP or considering one of these new systems, the Intel ISH firmware has now been upstreamed to linux-firmware.git for enhancing the out-of-the-box support.

The AMD SoC Power Management Controller Driver is the latest seeing patch activity now in preparing for next-gen Zen 6 processors.

A new proposal volleyed today among LLVM developers is for Multi-Thread Parallel Compilation "MTPC" for the ThinLTO link-time optimization code. This is great news for today's high core count CPUs when looking to compile very large LLVM modules.

A set of 42 patches were posted on Thursday for the AMDGPU kernel driver and associated AMDKFD compute driver code for enabling pipe reset capabilities for compute workloads.

It's not only the Linux networking subsystem where many fixes have been appearing -- including several notable security fixes for local privilege escalation issues -- leading to "craziness" from AI / LLMs. The Linux sound subsystem has also been seeing an uptick in activity with many "assisted-by" patches coming about in recent weeks.

Driven by AI/LLM bots like Shashiko uncovering new issues within the Linux kernel source tree, including various security vulnerabilities like Dirty Frag, the mailing list has been wild with bug reports and fixes. Today's networking fixes pull request for Linux 7.1 continues to highlight the ongoing craziness and fears that the worst may be yet to come.

CHUWI this week announced their UniBook laptop as a ~$449 USD laptop that aims to compete with Apple's MacBook Neo. While shipping with Microsoft Windows 11, it should be Linux-friendly and we'll soon be putting it to the test at Phoronix.

Open-source Intel software engineers today sent out their latest round of Xe kernel graphics driver updates to DRM-Next for queuing ahead of next month's Linux 7.2 merge window.

SUSE engineers continue working on their modern "Agama" operating system installer used by the latest SUSE Linux Enterprise and openSUSE Linux distributions. Out today is Agama 21 to incorporate their latest OS installer enhancements.

Recently I received the line-up of the NVIDIA RTX PRO "Blackwell" workstation graphics cards for seeing how these newest professional offerings from NVIDIA are performing on Linux and competing against the AMD Radeon AI PRO and Intel Arc Pro B-Series competition.

KMSCON 10.0 is out today as the newest feature release to this terminal emulator for Linux that can serve as an alternative to the in-kernel VT.

AMD engineers continue enhancing the AMDXDNA accelerator driver for supporting the Ryzen AI NPUs on Linux.

Wine developers have announced the release of VKD3D 2.0, the newest feature release for this Direct3D 12 API implementation built atop the Vulkan API. VKD3D is what's used by upstream Wine for D3D12 compared to Valve's downstream VKD3D-Proton within Steam Play (Proton).

AlmaLinux shared with us that they will be introducing a new version of their RHEL-derived Linux operating system that is built specifically for media and entertainment use-cases.

AMD is ready with more AMDKFD compute driver and AMDGPU kernel graphics driver changes for the upcoming Linux 7.2 merge window.

A new release of chipStar is now available as the open-source tool for compiling and running HIP/CUDA code in a vendor-neutral manner with the SPIR-V intermediate representation on OpenCL or even Intel Level Zero as the run-time alternative. This is part of the ambitious effort to allow NVIDIA CUDA and AMD HIP code to ultimately run on alternative vendors with increasing levels of success.

Back in 2024 there were Linux patches to enable a partially-working Microsoft Surface Pro 9 5G laptop that is powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8xc Gen 3 (SC8280XP) SoC. Now in 2026, there are new patches for making that ARM-powered Microsoft Surface laptop actually working more respectably under Linux... Like a working display and more.

One of the most exciting developments in recent times for the open-source AMDGPU kernel graphics driver is HDMI 2.1 FRL support for the AMDGPU driver along with Display Stream Compression support as they work toward providing full HDMI 2.1 support for this open-source AMD Radeon driver. The details how AMD managed to pull this feat off given prior resistance from the HDMI Forum remains to be confirmed, but it's moving ahead and out today is the latest iteration of the HDMI 2.1 FRL+DSC patches.