In 2026 it's not too surprising when seeing old PCMCIA and ISA drivers being removed from the mainline Linux kernel source tree and old very low-speed network interfaces, with arguably the most surprising fact being how long they lasted in the mainline kernel. Meanwhile for the upcoming Linux 7.3 kernel, one of the first 10Gb Ethernet drivers is already set for retirement from the mainline Linux kernel.

The newest, unexpected addition to the Mesa codebase by Microsoft engineers is contributed accelerated AV1 video encoding on the GPU using a combination of DirectX 12 and the Hardware Media Foundation Transform (HMFT) support that is part of the Windows Media Foundation layer.

Earlier this year Vulkan Video encode was disabled on newer generations of Intel graphics hardware due to insufficient testing with the Intel ANV open-source driver. That impacted Gen12.5 graphics and newer - basically Alchemist and anything newer. Now at least Gen12.5 graphics with the likes of the Arc A-Series is seeing H.264 and H.265 encoding re-enabled.

Longtime AMD Linux graphics driver expert Marek Olšák, who joined Valve earlier this year and now focusing more on RADV rather than the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver, has seen some of his latest work now merged for Mesa 26.2. Marek landed a big overhaul to the variable rate shading (VRS) code that in some cases can double the performance.

Earlier this year AMD announced the Ryzen AI Halo as their in-house mini PC offering built around their leading Ryzen AI Max+ "Strix Halo" platform. After pre-orders began last month, the Ryzen AI Halo is officially beginning to ship this week and over the past few weeks we have been testing it out at Phoronix.

With the AMD Ryzen AI Halo developer platform there is the option of ordering this Ryzen AI Max+ mini PC with either Microsoft Windows 11 or "Linux OS". When receiving a AMD Ryzen AI Halo review sample last month, I fully expected it to just be an Ubuntu LTS install with ROCm preloaded. I was quite surprised when powering it up to find that it's an OS called the AMD Ryzen AI Developer Platform 1 "Rex" and is based on Debian Linux.

Going back to early May there were patches for improving the Linux scheduler to help with gaming performance on old "potato" hardware by providing better cgroup scheduling. Those patches, referred to as the "flatten the pick" patch series, are now slated for introduction in the Linux 7.3 kernel.

When it comes to the real-time "RT" patches carried outside of the Linux kernel, a number of them pertain to adjustments around the Intel i915 kernel DRM graphics driver. The mainline Linux kernel and its RT support depend upon not building "PREEMPT_RT" for the i915 driver support while patches have been worked on recently for making this Intel kernel graphics driver code play nicely with real-time Linux.

The Ubuntu Foundations Engineering Manager, Ravi Kant Sharma, with Canonical has provided an update regarding the current ARM64 state on Ubuntu Linux.

The Pioneer DJM-S11 is a professional scratch style 2-channel DJ mixer that retails for $2,269 USD. But if currently connecting this expensive piece of kit to Linux, it does nothing and is unusable. With 87 new lines of code, it will begin to work with the Linux 7.3 kernel later this year.

The Unwill laptop driver on Linux for supporting various device-specific features by that major OEM/ODM will be seeing several new features with the Linux 7.3 cycle later this year. One of the most notable users of the Unwill driver is Bavarian Linux PC vendor TUXEDO Computers.

In addition to Sunday's release of DXVK 3.0.1, D7VK 1.12 was separately released as the latest version of this implementation for Direct3D 7 and older atop the Vulkan API.

Linux 7.2-rc2 is now available for testing in working toward the stable Linux 7.2 release in August.

Following the release of DXVK 3.0 from late June that brought several big changes, DXVK 3.0.1 is out today with shipping various game fixes and other improvements to this important piece of Valve's Steam Play (Proton) for Direct3D Windows games on Linux.

One month ago it was exciting to see the open-source ReactOS operating system running Valve's Half-Life game. Little to realize less than 30 days later it would also be running Half-Life 2.

In addition to Intel beginning to volley graphics driver patches for Linux 7.3, this week AMD also began sending out their pull requests of "new stuff" to DRM-Next for the Linux 7.3 kernel cycle.

More Linux kernel patches have been surfacing that confirm next-gen, high-end Nova Lake laptops will feature IPU8 image processing capabilities.

OpenRazer 3.12.4 is now available as the newest update to these out-of-tree, unofficial Linux drivers for Razer devices. OpenRazer when paired with the likes of Polychromatic or other GUI options is what makes for a nice experience running Razer gaming peripherals under Linux.

The FEX Emulator that allows running Linux x86/x86_64 software on ARM64 (AArch64) systems, including the likes of Wine / Valve's Steam Play (Proton) for Windows gaming on ARM, is out with its newest monthly feature release. The Valve-backed project for running x86_64 games and other software on ARM for the upcoming Steam Frame and other more typical ARM Linux systems has been baking more optimizations and improvements.

A set of patches to the Linux kernel's Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) scheduler that is shared among different kernel graphics drivers is showing the potential of delivering much lower job submission latency when the system is loaded with many runnable CPU processes.