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.

Wild Linker 0.9 was released today as the latest version of this very fast linker for Linux systems that is written in the Rust programming language.

The Linux Mint project today published their May 2026 status report to outline recent work done to this Ubuntu/Debian-based Linux platform and much of their focus in recent weeks on enhancements to their Cinnamon desktop environment.

With Intel having been one of the most dominant open-source contributors for years across the software ecosystem, months after they began sunsetting various software projects no longer aligned with today's Intel, they continue formally sunsetting/archiving different open-source projects.

For years already AV2 has been in development as the successor to AV1 for this wonderful open-source, royalty-free video codec. While there was talk about releasing AV2 by the end of 2025, that didn't happen but now latest indicators are pointing toward its formal debut next week.

KDE developers continue to be quite busy in preparing for next month's Plasma 6.7 stable desktop release due out in mid-June while also beginning more feature work toward Plasma 6.8.

This week's x86 platform driver fixes include not only a handful of bug fixes but also enabling some additional laptops within existing drivers for HP and ASUS devices.

Back in 2022 it was announced DreamWorks Animation was open-sourcing their MoonRay renderer that has been used in production feature films. It ended up being published as open-source in March 2023 as OpenMoonRay and since then has continued advancing with new feature releases and improvements. Now it's being contributed to the Academy Software Foundation as the newest project.

In addition to the recent influx of Linux security vulnerabilities affecting Linux, FreeBSD has also begun receiving security reports via AI/LLM-driven discovery tools. FreeBSD 15.1-RC1 is out today ahead of the planned official release in June and it brings a handful of security fixes out of this new AI-driven security research space.

GNOME Commander, the orthodox file manager for the GNOME desktop that was inspired by Norton Commander, has been rewritten in the Rust programming language and also now using the GTK4 toolkit.