NVIDIA's Vera data center CPU isn't ramping up until later this year but I recently had the opportunity to try out this new ARM-based CPU designed for agentic AI workloads. NVIDIA's Vera CPU with its in-house-designed Olympus CPU cores ends up packing a heavy-hitting punch with competitiveness to Intel/AMD x86_64 CPUs that I have never seen out of any other ARM or non-x86_64 processors. Continue on with these early benchmarks of the NVIDIA Vera CPU on Linux.

GlobalPlatform announced today the launch of Pavona as an open-source silicon ecosystem backed by founding members such as Meta, Qualcomm, Tenstorrent, Winbond, and the University of Oxford, among others.

NVIDIA is kicking off the new week with their first Linux driver beta in the R610 driver series that is succeeding the current R595 release branch.

A set if 17 patches were posted today to the Linux kernel mailing list for introducing a new tool in the kernel source tree, pmtctl. This new pmtctl tool is for interfacing with Intel Platform Monitoring Technology.

The past few Linux kernel cycles there has been experimental support for large folios with Btrfs while for Linux 7.2 it looks like this modern file-system will be taking things further with huge folios.

Linux cryptography expert Eric Biggers of Google posted a set of patches on Monday for providing proof-of-concept support for ML-KEM and X-Wing for post-quantum cryptography.

Back in 2021 Facebook open-sourced CacheLib as a new caching engine. Back in 2021 it was done to help scale services with non-volatile memory caching to offset increasing DRAM costs at the time. Now in 2026, DRAM memory prices are astronomical compared to 2021 pricing given the AI surge. And, surprisingly, Meta is out with a new CacheLib release after being absent the past two years.

In addition to the release today of Sway 1.12 for that i3-inspired Wayland compositor, Labwc 0.20 is also out today as another wlroots-based Wayland compositor.

Sway 1.12 is out today as the newest feature release of this i3-inspired Wayland compositor powered by the wlroots library.

Merged today for what will become Mesa 26.2 next quarter is the Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" now supporting the VK_KHR_shader_fma extension.

An exciting Intel innovation expected to be added for the upcoming Linux 7.2 kernel is introducing the new USB4STREAM protocol for USB4/Thunderbolt as a "super simple" way to "basically just transfer raw packets from one host to another". This can be useful for quickly backing up a system from one host to another, sharing of web cameras or other peripherals across systems, or other environments where not having networking or wanting to avoid the traditional Linux networking stack.

With Linux 7.1 ISDN, ham radio, and other old network code was removed in lightening the kernel source tree by around 138 thousand lines of code. Some additional Linux networking code cleaning is expected for Linux 7.2 with the ISA and PCMCIA hardware around ARCnet set to be removed.

Redis 8.8 reached GA today for the Redis open-source project providing a high performance, in-memory data store.

While not as good as repealing AB 1043 outright for requiring operating system providers to ask for a user's age or birth date at device setup, open-source Linux distributions and other open-source OSes may end up seeing some reprieve before this law goes into effect at the start of 2027.

In the road to releasing Linux 7.1 in June, out today is Linux 7.1-rc5 that continues coming on heavy with fixes.

For those curious about the growing use of AI and coding agents within the Linux kernel, this week there was another large batch of new patches fixed that were generated or co-authored by agents like Claude Code and GitHub Copilot.

With FreeBSD having worked on improving its laptop support over the past two years with some big changes and ongoing efforts for making a nice KDE desktop experience on FreeBSD, FreeBSD Foundation's Executive Director has been trying to daily drive FreeBSD on laptops.

Following the process of phasing out Intel 486 CPU support and other old hardware drivers that were dropped in the Linux 7.1 kernel cycle for reducing the kernel maintenance burden, the upcoming Linux 7.2 cycle is continuing the trend of phasing out some of the old hardware support that is very obsolete, likely having no users on the latest upstream kernels, and no one formally maintaining the obsolete drivers.

Multikernel Technologies Inc has been working on a multi-kernel architecture for the Linux kernel while in addition to that they have been developing KernelScript as a domain-specific language for carrying out Linux kernel customizations and app-specific optimizations.

While in the past decade or so Linux desktop/laptop users likely have little to complain about boot times and there hasn't been much emphasis around trying to make boot times even faster on the Linux desktop especially in an era where many systems are always-on and suspend/resume working more reliably these days, boot times are still an important factor in the embedded Linux world. Boot-Time Wizard is one of the new efforts aiming to help embedded Linux makers cut-down on their boot times.