Intel today for Patch Tuesday released several generations worth of CPU microcode updates for addressing multiple security issues and functional issues.

The various SoC and platform Device Tree additions were sent out today for the Linux 7.0 kernel. Easily most exciting on the SoC side this cycle among the ARM and RISC-V changes is getting support ready for the SpacemiT K3 RVA23 SoC.

In addition to introducing nullfs and the OPEN_TREE_NAMESPACE support for containers, there were also a number of other interesting VFS updates merged on Monday for the Linux 7.0 kernel.

CodeWeavers just announced CrossOver 26, the newest version of their commercial software built atop Wine for running Windows games and applications under Apple macOS and Linux.

With recently having carried out benchmarks and finding the Intel Xeon 6780E "Sierra Forest" performance has improved ~14% since launch day thanks to open-source/Linux software improvements plus also recently having carried out Xeon 6980P Granite Rapids vs. EPYC 9755 128-core benchmarks using the latest upstream software, here is a look at how the Xeon 6780E "Sierra Forest" dual socket server is comparing up against the AMD EPYC 9965 Turin Dense flagship when both are running up-to-date software.

The open-source Redis 8.6 release is now available and this GA release has brought "substantial" performance improvements and to memory reduction too. Plus various new features like TLS certificate-based automatic client authentication, time series enhancements, and new eviction policies.

In addition to the BPF filtering support for IO_uring that was merged on Monday, the other block device changes and IO_uring updates were also merged for the newly-opened Linux 7.0 merge window.

After the merge request was opened back in 2023 and after going through 628 comments/activity, merged now to Wayland Protocols is the experimental zones "xx-zones" implementation for area-limited window positioning.

The wonderful IO_uring for the Linux kernel for high performance asnyc I/O has picked up a new capability with Linux 7.0: BPF filtering.

Microsoft overnight released Azure Linux 3.0.20260204 as the latest release of their in-house Linux distribution widely used within their Azure environment and elsewhere.

The many power management, thermal, and ACPI updates have been merged for the Linux 7.0 kernel. As usual there are many changes coming from fixes to new hardware support and more expansive thermal control capabilities under Linux.

MythTV 36 is now available for this long-time open-source digital video recorder "DVR" software that has been around now for more than two decades as the leading choice for those wishing to watch and/or record live TV under Linux especially as an HTPC.

We are nearing the stable release of LLVM 22 in hopefully two weeks. Out today is the third release candidate of LLVM 22.1 for soliciting more testing of this open-source compiler stack.

The EFI subsystem updates have been merged for the in-development Linux 7.0 kernel. Worth mentioning here is a new quirk for helping Valve's Steam Deck handheld.

Christian Brauner sent in a dozen VFS pull requests that are now-merged today for the Linux 7.0 kernel. The VFS pull requests worth noting right away in this article are the introduction of the NULLFS and OPEN_TREE_NAMESPACE features.

Among the pull requests merged today on this first day of the Linux 7.0 merge window are the many Btrfs file-system feature updates.

The Rust-written Redox OS open-source operating system is now able to leverage Cargo and the Rust compiler "rustc" itself running within this platform. Plus they also made a heck of a lot of other improvements too over the course of the past month. Today they published a status update to outline all of the promising advancements made to this independent OS so far in 2026.

While we are very eager for the AMD openSIL open-source CPU silicon initialization project to achieve production readiness with Zen 6 platforms for ultimately replacing AGESA, there is some experimental excitement on the way for open-source firmware enthusiasts... OpenSIL and Coreboot are being brought to an AM5 motherboard you can buy retail.

Last week I began publishing the many exciting Panther Lake benchmarks under Linux from the interesting CPU performance and efficiency to the much anticipated Xe3 graphics with the Intel Arc B390 graphics. Up today is a look at how the out-of-the-box performance for the Intel Core Ultra X7 358H compares under Microsoft Windows 11 and the current Ubuntu Linux 26.04 development state.

Two interesting bits of Blender news this week for those fond of this leading open-source 3D modeling software.