Vulkan 1.4.350 released earlier today as the newest routine spec update. Beyond the usual minor fixes/clarifications, Vulkan 1.4.350 tacks on three more extensions.

It's not complete HDMI 2.1 support but to much surprise hitting the mailing list today were official patches from AMD for implementing HDMI Fixed Rate Link "FRL" support for their kernel graphics driver. HDMI FRL as part of HDMI 2.1+ allows for higher bandwidth to support higher refresh rates and resolutions.

The ASUS ROG RAIKIRI II is a recently-launched wireless gaming controller for both PC and Xbox gaming. This is a premium controller priced at $160 USD and has been receiving positive reviews under Windows while now it will soon be seeing mainline Linux support.

Intel's upcoming Crescent Island product as a reminder is a new inference-optimized Xe3P graphics card with 160GB of vRAM and targeting enterprise AI workloads. Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver engineers continue to be very busy enabling the driver support for Crescent Island as well as making broader Xe3P improvements.

Mike Blumenkrantz of Valve's Linux graphics team has ignited a discussion over potentially shifting some of Mesa's older GPU drivers into a new legacy Git branch in order to better support the more modern OpenGL and Vulkan drivers without having to worry about breaking the legacy drivers and to allow for better cleaning of the Mesa codebase. Among the drivers that could be impacted are the ATI/AMD R300 and R600 drivers and many smaller drivers.

A lot happened in the Linux and open-source world during the month of April. Ubuntu 26.04 LTS and Fedora 44 shipped, a lot of news around age attestation/verification laws, the Linux 7.0 kernel was released, Linux 7.1 is bringing many exciting changes as well as removing of old hardware drivers, the Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition CPU was released, we began testing the Intel Arc Pro B70 "BMG-G31", and much more software and hardware content that made the month interesting. Last month on Phoronix were 303 original news articles and 16 Linux hardware reviews / multi-page featured benchmark articles.

Even while the Linux 7.1 merge window was still ongoing this month, the initial "drm-misc-next" pull request to DRM-Next was sent out for beginning to queue new feature material toward the Linux 7.2 kernel coming this summer.

Shotcut 26.4.30 shipped today as the latest and greatest version of this open-source, cross-platform video editor.

Due to Linux Mint moving to a longer development cycle with their next release not due until December, Linux Mint developers have decided to begin regularly publishing hardware enablement "HWE" ISOs with newer Linux kernel versions to provide better support for new hardware.

It's not too entirely surprising given the aggressive stance that the CachyOS Linux distribution has taken on out-of-the-box performance, but for those curious, it continues largely leading over the newly-released Ubuntu 26.04 LTS and Fedora Workstation 44 distributions for the leading performance on modern hardware.

AerynOS, the Linux distribution formerly known as Serpent OS, is out with a new monthly ISO refresh and details on other recent improvements to this original, from-scratch Linux distribution.

My initial testing of the Linux 7.1 development kernel on various systems in the lab continues going well. Aside from one main regression in a synthetic micro-benchmark appearing on multiple systems, not seeing much in the way of Linux 7.1 performance concerns thus far and seeing some nice performance gains in select workloads.

GCC 16.1 is now available as the first stable release of GCC 16 as this year's major open-source GNU compiler feature release.

There are two exciting initiatives taking place simultaneously by the 3mdeb consulting firm: the open-source developers are working on an open-source firmware stack for a Gigabyte EPYC server motherboard and they are also working on a similar Coreboot + AMD openSIL port to a Ryzen AM5 consumer motherboard, the MSI PRO B850-P WiFi. While not yet ready for end-users, 3mdeb published their latest blog post to highlight their latest milestone achieved with the openSIL + Coreboot bring-up on the MSI PRO B850-P motherboard.

Posted to the Linux kernel mailing list this week was the newest revision of a patch series originally started in early 2025 by a NVIDIA engineer for accelerating page migration. Now being worked on by AMD engineers, this accelerated page migration via batch copies and hardware offloading continues to show promising results.

Last year with the ACPI 6.6 specification release came revised Collaborative Processor Performance Control (CPPC) support for enhancing the capabilities around this standard for OS management of the performance of CPU cores using an abstract performance scale. That CPPC v4 support is now being worked on for the acpi_cppc Linux driver by NVIDIA engineers.

Following the recent Servo 0.1 release, the Servo project has published their latest monthly status report to highlight recent development efforts around this modern open-source browser engine.

Recently I ran benchmarks looking at the Xe2 graphics performance gains on Intel Lunar Lake over the past year with what's shipped by Ubuntu and comparing against our original tests of the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition. With those Lunar Lake iGPU benchmarks out of the way, here is a look at how the Lunar Lake CPU performance has evolved on Linux since April 2025.

Just days after the Linux 7.1-rc1 kernel release, the Linux kernel's extensible scheduler class "sched_ext" is seeing a lot of bug fixes. Many of these bug fixes aren't just from the Linux 7.1 merge window but a number date back many kernel cycles. This uptick in bug fixes for sched_ext is coming due to increased AI code review.

Back in 2023 the Vulkan API introduced its initial Cooperative Matrix extension and necessary SPIR-V integration for helping with machine learning / AI inferencing use. Since then the cooperative matrix support has continued to be built upon for helping Vulkan in AI/ML areas. Now the OpenCL API is also introducing similar cooperative matrix extensions.