As usual in recent years, there were many x86 platform driver changes merged this cycle for benefiting modern AMD Ryzen and Intel Core (Ultra) laptops. A variety of new features and laptop hardware support additions were merged for Linux 7.1.

The Linux kernel continues getting ready for AMD's upcoming Zen 6 processors.

Beyond Linux looking to remove old drivers due to the surge of AI/LLM bug reports, the Linux 7.1 kernel is also removing some old hardware drivers simply on the basis of long obsolete hardware. The input subsystem saw several drivers removed this week for decades old hardware.

Merged recently to the latest LLVM/Clang compiler development tree is the Arm C1-Ultra scheduling model for helping with delivering optimal binaries for that flagship next-gen Arm mobile CPU.

It was just days ago we reported on a proposal to drop old network drivers due to AI-driven bug reports becoming a burden on upstream kernel developers. Last night that culminated with an initial pull request to clear out some old, unused networking drivers plus also clearing out the entire ISDN subsystem and more.

While the AMDGPU open-source driver has struggled with HDMI 2.1 support due to the HDMI Forum blocking open-source implementations, HDMI Fixed Rate Link (FRL) as a feature of the HDMI 2.1 specification is enjoying success now with the open-source Nouveau graphics driver on Linux for NVIDIA GPUs.

Last month Opera released the Opera GX gaming-focused web browser for Linux. It rolled out in RPM and Debian package format support while now for those interested is also available via Flatpak and Snap sandboxed app formats.

In addition to some network drivers on the chopping block due to AI bug reports for obsolete hardware/drivers and Linux 7.1 dropping various drivers for Russia's Baikal CPUs, the Linux 7.1 kernel as of today also dropped some obsolete PCMCIA host controller drivers.

Oracle announced today they are going to be reducing the frequency of software updates for Solaris 11.4 and their ZFS Storage Appliance software.

The official release ISOs of Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, Ubuntu Server 26.04 LTS, and the various other Ubuntu flavors are now available for download.

The upcoming Godot 4.7 open-source, cross-platform game engine release is rolling out support for high dynamic range (HDR).

Ubuntu LTS releases on the desktop have automatically installed OEM vendor kernels where needed and hardware enablement "HWE" kernels in later point releases by default. This provides a better out-of-the-box experience for Ubuntu desktop users and one less chore post-install if desiring a newer/better kernel. With Ubuntu Server 26.04 LTS, the server installer is finally doing the same.

With this week's launch of the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition I've found some of the commentary quite surprising among those arguing it's really not a competitive or interesting product. While the cost may be hard to justify at $899 USD compared to the existing Ryzen 9000 series products or Intel's new Core Plus CPUs, particularly for developers, technical computing, etc the performance of the Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 is quite interesting. I've had much enjoyment benchmarking the Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 for technical use-cases. In this article is a complementary look to my launch day AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 review to better condense the 300+ benchmarks I've run to date on this flagship processor.

Following the recently-launched Thelio Mira redesign, System76 today announced the new Thelio Major workstation with improved thermals and more performance.

Canonical announced last year that in collaboration with AMD they would be bringing the ROCm software libraries into the Ubuntu archive for Ubuntu 26.04 LTS. The plan has been to ship AMD ROCm AI/ML and HPC libraries in the Ubuntu archive so it would be as easy as sudo apt install rocm for getting started with AMD's open-source GPU compute stack. With today being the Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release day, I decided to revisit the topic.

OpenBLAS 0.3.33 is out today as the latest update to this vendor-neutral, optimized Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms "BLAS" library.

Ready to go ahead of the Linux 7.1 merge window closing at week's end are numerous new USB device support additions and other USB subsystem enhancements.

The Linux Multi-Function Device "MFD" subsystem changes were merged this week for Linux 7.1 ahead of the merge window closing on Sunday.

FreeRDP as a leading open-source implementation of the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) has introduced experimental AV1 codec support.

All of the SoC updates were recently merged for the ongoing Linux 7.1 kernel cycle. Most of the activity as usual is on the Arm side but also with some RISC-V additions too for the Linux 7.1 kernel.