Merged for the current Linux 7.1 cycle was beginning to phase out the Intel 486 processor support from the mainline kernel moving forward. That initial step with Linux 7.1 was dropping the various Kconfig options to allow compiling Linux kernel builds for targeting various i486 platforms. As part of that, the AMD Elan SoC configuration patches were dropped. The next step is proceeding on the AMD Elan side with beginning to remove the actual driver code.

One week ago FFmpeg merged decode support for Samsung's Advanced Professional Video "APV" codec. APV is designed for professional-grade video recording purposes and is a royalty-free video codec geared for prosumers. Now arriving within FFmpeg Git is APV video encode support.

Announced today from the PyTorch Conference EU in Paris is word that Hugging Face has contributed their Safetensors project to the PyTorch Foundation, which is an umbrella organization under the Linux Foundation for hosting AI initiatives. Safetensors aims to help mitigate arbitrary code execution risks and more.

One week after the Copy Fail vulnerability, a new Linux local privilege escalation bug has been made public. This time around there are no patches or CVEs yet for this "Dirty Frag" vulnerability as the embargo was broken early and thus the security researcher went ahead and published earlier than anticipated.

Following Linux 7.1 beginning to phase out i486 CPU support and in turn drivers like those for the old AMD Elan SoCs now being removed, for Linux 7.2 the processor support removal is going further to now include some i586 and i686 class processors.

The Realtek RTL8159 has been appearing in some 10G-rated USB network adapters at online retailers, some for less than $100 USD. But currently the RTL8159 is only supported by Realtek's out-of-tree Linux kernel driver, but fortunately there will be mainline support coming with the Linux 7.2 kernel this summer.

Merged today to Mesa 26.2-devel was a reorganization of the AMD RadeonSI Gallium3D driver code to better separate the graphics and multimedia acceleration code from the rest of the driver.

The Flattened Image Tree "FIT" 1.0 specification was recently finalized for this container format used by U-Boot on embedded systems for providing various boot components like DTBs, the Linux kernel image, and more into a single file.

While there is the AMD Instinct MI400 series coming this year, today AMD announced an interesting and arguably overdue offering for the Instinct MI350 series: the MI350P. The AMD Instinct MI350P is a PCIe add-in-card to add Instinct MI350 compute capabilities to existing PCIe 5.0 air-cooled servers as an alternative to the Open Accelerator Module (OAM) currently used by the Instinct MI350 series.

KDE developer Xaver Hugl has whipped up another nice improvement for the upcoming Plasma 6.7 desktop release. Due to QtWidgets still relying on CPU-based rendering and finding the performance subpar with Wayland shared memory "wl_shm" usage, Xaver has leveraged UDMABUF for avoiding excess buffer copies to provide a much more fluid experience when dealing with CPU-based rendering / shared memory usage on KDE under Wayland.

When it comes to compiling C/C++ code to WebAssembly (WASM), LLVM/Clang and other LLVM-based tooling has dominated the space. Nearly a decade ago was a proposal for a GCC WebAssembly back-end that ultimately never ended up being merged while now there is a new proposal for a WebAssembly back-end for the GNU toolchain.

AMD recently upstreamed Linux support for their next-gen AIE4 NPU. That next-gen AMD NPU support is expected to premiere in Linux 7.2 while this week an interesting new patch series has surfaced for SR-IOV support with those upcoming neural processing units.

Redox OS is out with its status report for April 2026. During the past month this open-source, Rust-based operating system written from scratch has seen improvements for running on real hardware as well as a wide variety of other improvements for bettering this original OS project.

D7VK continues advancing for this Vulkan-based implementation of Direct3D 7 that also supports D3D 6 / 5 / 3 APIs too for vintage games ultimately rendered using the modern Vulkan API.

Eric Engestrom just announced another timely feature release of the Mesa drivers. Mesa 26.1 is out today for this collection of predominantly OpenGL and Vulkan drivers for a variety of hardware as well as the likes of Rusticl for OpenCL, Zink for OpenGL-on-Vulkan, various Windows acceleration components, and more.

The PCI-SIG today held a briefing around PCIe 8.0 that follows the PCIe 7.0 specification that was released to members last June.

Sent out today was a batch of "new stuff" for the AMDGPU graphics and AMDKFD compute kernel drivers that are ready for DRM-Next to queue until the Linux 7.2 merge window happens in June. Most notable is the introduction of the AMDGPU DC power module to better align with the Radeon power management behavior under Microsoft Windows.

When having the HP Z6 G5 A workstation in the lab for benchmarking, one of the curiosity-driven tests was seeing how well the latest open-source and upstream Nouveau driver stack is competing against the latest official NVIDIA R595 driver for workstations. The official NVIDIA Linux driver stack remains the best positioned software solution for RTX (PRO) hardware but Nouveau continues evolving while awaiting the Nova kernel driver to reach the limelight.

Exciting yesterday in the land of Intel's open-source Vulkan driver "ANV" for Linux systems was introducing experimental support for descriptor heaps with the VK_EXT_descriptor_heap extension. Today there is another separate exciting development for this open-source Intel driver: Vulkan device generated commands are finally merged!

Yesterday was the OpenCL 3.1 release and today is another exciting development for The Khronos Group standards: the debut of the Vulkan SC SDK for safety-critical applications.