Another round of AMDGPU/AMDKFD kernel driver improvements were sent out this week as feature development for DRM-Next ahead of Linux 7.1 begins to wind down.

Released today was wlroots 0.20 as this Wayland support library used by some Wayland compositors for doing much of the "heavy lifting" of compositor bring-up. Following wlroots 0.20, Sway 1.12-rc1 was released for testing as this closely-aligned Wayland compositor inspired by the i3 window manager.

Right on schedule the beta for Ubuntu 26.04 LTS is now available for testing. This is a great opportunity to help test this release ahead of the official Long Term Support release due out on 23 April.

Merged today was the very first step toward implementing Vulkan support within KDE's KWin compositor as an alternative to OpenGL rendering.

As a few months have passed since our prior round of testing the fully open-source NVIDIA Linux driver stack with the Nouveau kernel driver and Mesa NVK Vulkan driver plus Zink, here is a fresh round of benchmarks using Linux 7.0 and Mesa 26.1-dev compared to the open-source stack shipped by Ubuntu 25.10 (Linux 6.17 + Mesa 25.2) for showing how far the open-source NVIDIA driver has progressed the past few months. Plus testing against the NVIDIA official Linux graphics driver for putting that Nouveau/NVK performance into perspective.

Canonical engineers are planning a switch to ntpd-rs as the newest Rust-based system component for Ubuntu Linux for handling time synchronization.

AMD this morning finally announced the long-rumored Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 flagship processor with 3D V-Cache for both of the CCDs.

Sent out today was a new batch of "drm-xe-next" material of Intel Xe kernel graphics driver improvements ready for the upcoming Linux 7.1 kernel cycle. Standing out in this pull is enabling Transparent Hugepages (THP) support for drm_pagemap as a big win for those making use of Shared Virtual Memory (SVM) for GPU compute and the like.

One of the early features for Fedora 45 that was approved this week is enabling IPv6-mostly support within NetworkManager for a more modern out-of-the-box network experience.

Last month NXP posted open-source Linux kernel driver patches for their Neutron NPU accelerator. The NXP Neutron NPU aims to help with edge AI applications and this neural processing unit is found in their different SoCs. Unfortunately, their GitHub repository for the user-space software ends up containing a binary-only blob that will end up delaying plans on getting this driver into the mainline Linux kernel.

A new set of Linux kernel patches for batch TLB flushing for dirty folios within the kernel's vmscan path were recently floated on the Linux kernel mailing list. This batch TLB flushing optimization for dirty folios during memory reclaim can be a significant performance win with today's multi-core hardware.

Merged today was another round of platform-drivers-x86 changes for the ongoing Linux 7.0 cycle. There are bug fixes plus some new hardware support additions that make this merge notable. Due to the new hardware support amounting to just device IDs and not risking existing hardware support, it's fine for merging at this late stage of Linux 7.0 development.

With just a few weeks to go until the official Fedora 44 release, there is already feature planning and activity beginning for Fedora 45 that will be released toward the end of 2026. Among the early feature approvals is a new web front-end feature to the DRM Panic "Blue/Black Screen of Death" functionality with a specialized QR code for kernel errors.

Building off the release of ROCm 7.2 from January, ROCm 7.2.1 is now available with Ubuntu 24.04.4 LTS support as well as various bug fixes to this open-source AMD Radeon/Instinct GPU compute stack.

In testing thus far on Ubuntu 26.04, the KDE Plasma 6.6 desktop with the Wayland session is working pretty darn well and delivering a performance edge across many games/graphics workloads compared to the default GNOME 50 desktop. At least as far as AMD Radeon graphics are concerned, Plasma 6.6 is in quite impressive shape for the upcoming Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release.

Alongside announcing the new Intel Core Ultra Series 3 Panther Lake parts with vPro for commercial PCs and the Xeon 600 workstation processors, Intel finally announced their professional "big Battlemage" BMG-G31 graphics card with the Arc Pro B70 as well as the Arc Pro B65.

FreeCAD 1.1 is out today as the newest feature release for this leading open-source CAD application.

Earlier this month with the release of the Lemonade SDK 10.0 and FastFlowLM 0.9.35, using AMD Ryzen AI NPUs for running LLMs on Linux finally became feasible. AMD XDNA 2 NPUs can now run on Linux well for LLM workloads! Released on Tuesday was Lemonade 10.0.1 with a few improvements for the setup process of this local LLM open-source solution on Linux.

Ubuntu developers at Canonical are looking to strip the signed GRUB bootloader features to the bare minimum for the Ubuntu 26.10 release later this year. Dropping support for XFS, ZFS, Btrfs, LVM, md-raid (except RAID1), LUKS-encrypted disks, and other features is being looked at in the name of security.

With the recent Fedora 44 beta release, Mesa 25.3 graphics drivers were in use rather than the newest Mesa 26.0 series. The good news is that there is now approval for getting Mesa 26.0 drivers to land in time for next month's official Fedora 44 release.