Linux developer Qais Yousef with Google has announced the alpha release of Sched QoS as a new initiative for user-space assisted scheduling. The scheduling model in turn is based in part on Apple's quality of service classes used by iOS for classifying software as user interactive, user initiative, utility, or background tasks.

The clone3() system call in Linux 7.1 is adding three new flags for greater control over the creation of child processes.

The Error Detection And Correction "EDAC" subsystem updates have been merged for Linux 7.1 that deal with reporting of ECC memory errors and the like from various hardware drivers.

The x86/asm changes merged yesterday for the Linux 7.1 kernel with a few low-level improvements.

The exFAT file-system changes have landed for the in-development Linux 7.1 kernel.

As a follow-up to the news first-covered on Phoronix earlier this month about Linux 7.1 expected to begin removing i486 CPU support: it indeed happened. Linus Torvalds took the initial removal bits today without any fuss today for beginning the phase out of M486 / M486SX / ELAN kernel support.

ROCm 7.2.2 is out today as a small point release to this open-source AMD GPU compute stack. There are a few code changes but most notable is arguably on the documentation side.

Code now merged for the Linux 7.1 kernel may provide some negative performance implications for those still running modern Linux kernels on 32-bit hardware. A fundamental change can present cache line alignment and slab sizing implications for 32-bit Linux OS users but will provide for cleaner code with modern 64-bit computing.

While a lot of interesting new features and changes have been merged already for the Linux 7.1 merge window, two pull requests stand out so far for being rejected by Linus Torvalds and complete with his to-the-point commentary.

As part of my ongoing testing around the upcoming Ubuntu 26.04 release I have been running a lot of benchmarks. After recently showing some nice performance gains for AMD Ryzen AI Max "Strix Halo" with Ubuntu 26.04, several Phoronix readers inquired about any performance uplift from the more modest but still powerful Strix Point laptops like the popular Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 SKU. Here are benchmarks showing the performance of Ubuntu 26.04 in its near final state compared to Ubuntu 24.04.4 LTS with its HWE stack on an ASUS Zenbook S16.

Nginx 1.30 was just released as the newest stable version of this popular web server. Nginx 1.30 incorporates all of the changes from the Nginx 1.29.x mainline branch to provide a lot of new functionality like Multipath TCP (MPTCP).

GNOME Shell 50.1 and Mutter 50.1 were released today as the first point releases in the GNOME 50 series.

X.Org Server 21.1.22 is out today and driven by five new security vulnerabilities being disclosed for the aging codebase. In turn these vulnerabilities also impact XWayland too and thus necessitating the XWayland 24.1.10 release.

Sunshine v2026.413.143228 released this week as a new feature release for this self-hosted game stream host for Moonlight, an open-source game streaming client that is an implementation of the NVIDIA GameStream protocol. Notable with this Sunshine release is Vulkan Video encode support as an alternative to using the Video Acceleration API (VA-API) for game streaming.

OpenSSL 4.0 was just released as a big update for this widely-used SSL/TLS and crypto library.

Merged yesterday for the Linux 7.1 kernel is overhauling the T10 PI code for generating and verifying data integrity information. In turn the new code is cleaner while also allowing for better read storage performance.

As a big helper for Valve's Steam Play with DXVK and VKD3D-Proton, the Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" has merged its initial support for the VK_EXT_descriptor_heap Vulkan extension.

A request made a KDE user all the way back in June 2005 on KDE 3.3.2 is finally resolved. After being sought after for 21 years, the latest KWin code now has support for per-screen virtual desktops.

All of the power management subsystem feature updates have been merged for the Linux 7.1 kernel.

Over the course of March there was much progress made on the ARM64 port of Haiku OS, the open-source operating system serving as the spiritual successor to BeOS.