Ahead of the Linux 7.0 merge window ending this weekend, the PHY updates were merged this week for this next major kernel release. There are some notable PHY additions particularly for Apple Silicon USB Type-C support as well as additions for Qualcomm's new Snapdragon X2 laptop SoCs.

Canonical engineer Utkarsh Gupta announced today on the behalf of the Ubuntu Release Team that the Ubuntu 26.04 "Resolute Raccoon" has entered its feature freeze.

Cloud Hypervisor 51 is now available for this Rust-based VMM focused on secure cloud computing. For what began as an Intel open-source project years ago is continuing to be largely led by Microsoft, Cyberus Tech, Tencent, Ant Group, and others.

Last year LunarG announced KosmicKrisp as a new Vulkan implementation atop Apple's Metal API. Initially targeting macOS, KosmicKrisp since was merged to Mesa and has evolved quite nicely as a modern implementation of Vulkan-on-Metal for Apple Silicon. It continues moving ahead with an eye for iOS, more performance optimizations, and completing Vulkan 1.4 support.

All of the Thunderbolt/USB driver changes were merged this week for the nearly-over Linux 7.0 merge window.

Vulkan 1.4.344 is out today as the latest routine spec update for this high performance graphics and compute API. Besides a handful of fixes and clarifications, Vulkan 1.4.344 brings a new extension courtesy of Valve engineers.

It's not too surprising but the upcoming Ubuntu 26.04 Long Term Support release will be transitioning to OpenJDK 25 as its default Java version.

Merged today to Mesa 26.1 Git is a one-line change to the Intel "ANV" Vulkan driver that is showing to deliver some slight performance benefits or up to 3% noted in some select games.

The Turbostat command-line utility for reporting processor frequency and idle statistics along with other useful information for AMD and Intel CPUs can now report some L2 cache stats for recent Intel CPUs beginning with Linux 7.0.

Linux block maintainer and IO_uring lead developer Jens Axboe recently was debugging some slowdowns in the AHCI/SCSI code with IO_uring usage. When turning to Claude AI to help in sorting through the issue, patches were devised that can deliver up to a "literally yield a 50-80x improvement on the io_uring side for idle systems." The code is on its way to QEMU.

The newest addition to AMD's ROCm/HIP portfolio is HIP Threads "hipThreads" as a C++ style concurrency library for AMD GPUs.

The Gigabyte MZ33-AR1 is a single socket AMD EPYC 9004/9005 E-ATX server motherboard for those wanting up to 24 RDIMMs, dual 10 Gigabit LAN, and plenty of storage potential via six MCIO connectors and four PCIe Gen5 x16 slots. Beyond offering nice capabilities for this modern AMD EPYC server motherboard at a ~$700 USD price point, it's uniquely positioned for an open-source firmware future thanks to ongoing work around AMD openSIL and hopefully followed by OpenBMC.

When searching for "MT7902" and "Linux" there is no shortage of users asking about Linux driver support for the Mediatek MT7902 WiFi chipset or users complaining about their MT7902 WiFi not working under Linux with that chipset found in numerous laptops in recent years. Fortunately, there is finally Linux driver support for the MT7902 surfacing for review on the Linux kernel mailing list.

After delays, Weston 15.0 shipped this morning as the latest feature release to this reference Wayland compositor. Weston 15.0 comes in heavy on new features - including a Vulkan renderer in experimental form.

Merged on Wednesday were some additional memory management "MM" updates for the Linux 7.0 merge window. Most interesting out of these latest three dozen patches is support for batched unmapping of file-backed large folios.

Simdjson is the open-source project for high performance JSON parsing by leveraging SIMD instructions for "parsing gigabytes of JSON per second." Notably it showed years ago the huge performance advantage to using AVX-512 in JSON parsing for surprisingly big benefits. Simdjson has continued advancing since then with various optimizations over the years and today is out with simdjson 4.3 that brings yet more SIMD optimizations.

PipeWire 1.6 is out today as the newest feature release for this software widely used by the Linux desktop for managing of audio and video streams while nicely integrating with sandboxed Flatpak apps and more.

Introduced to the Linux 4.12 kernel's staging area back in 2017 was the Realtek RTL8723BS WiFi driver. The Realtek RTL8723BS is an 802.11 b/g/ SDIO WLAN adapter with Bluetooth 4.0 connectivity too. In the nearly decade since this driver was added to the staging area, it's continued to be cleaned up and with the Linux 7.0 merge window there is yet again a lot of work on cleaning up this WiFi driver for the old Realtek hardware.

Earlier this month we spotted the addition of a new GFX1170 GPU target in the AMDGPU LLVM back-end. Making this GFX1170 target interesting is that its marked as an APU/SoC part with "RDNA 4m" while being part of the GFX11 series. The GFX11 series is for RDNA3, GFX115x is for RDNA 3.5, and GFX12 is RDNA4. More ISA changes have now been committed to the AMDGPU LLVM back-end that make a few more instruction differences better aligned with RDNA4.

With the Linux 7.0 merge window beginning to calm down ahead of the 7.0-rc1 release due out on Sunday, one of the areas I was most excited about benchmarking on Linux 7.0 was looking for any performance gains with the new Intel Core Ultra Series 3 "Panther Lake" given ongoing Intel Xe graphics driver improvements and other general kernel optimizations. Unfortunately, at large the Intel Panther Lake performance is moving in the wrong direction with the early Linux 7.0 benchmarking.