When booting the Linux kernel using UEFI SecureBoot, the kernel is put in the lockdown mode to restrict the ability to modify the running kernel image or leaking data from kernel memory. Kernel lockdown mode can also be manually enabled by the user/administrator. Among the limitations imposed in Linux's lockdown mode is no hibernation support. But that soon may be relieved with new patches proposed.

Over the past few months NVIDIA has been developing Boro as a new AI-assisted kernel development CLI written in Rust and focused on local AI for enhancing efficiency for kernel development.

AMD on Thursday sent out a final pull request of their feature work aiming to be submitted for the upcoming Linux 7.4 merge window. This round of "few last odds and ends" is mostly about landing some bug fixes but of which there are a few worth mentioning.

For those making use of Qualcomm Snapdragon X laptops on Linux, one of the features coming to the MSM DRM kernel driver is static HDR support for DisplayPort outputs and eDP panels.

The latest proposal for the upstream Linux kernel is introducing infrastructure for AI agent resources. Initially these agent resources would be for a skill so AI agents can automatically add a "Fixes: " tag on relevant patches for noting the first problematic Git commit automatically that a patch fixes.

There is yet another feature to get excited about for this quarter's Mesa 26.3 release. Months in the making, the Valve-contributed VK_AMD_anti_lag support for the Radeon RADV driver was merged today for benefiting AMD Linux gamers as a nice improvement over the former implementation.

The EXT4 file-system today deprecated its journaled mode of the "data=journal" mount option. Following its deprecation, this mode is planned for removal in the year 2028.

System76 today released COSMIC Epoch 1.10 as the newest incremental update to this Rust-based desktop developed in-step with their Pop!_OS Linux distribution.

Those trying to access the Ubuntu website, ISO downloads, and similar Ubuntu resources today are finding the site inoperable amid what's now confirmed as an ongoing distributed denial of service attack.

While Ubuntu 26.10 is not a Long-Term Support (LTS) release and thus will see limited enterprise deployments compared to Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, for those not after that long-term deployment support and preferring to live more on the leading-edge, Ubuntu 26.10 is delivering some nice performance gains on current 5th Gen AMD EPYC "Turin" hardware.

The curiosity into secretive semiconductor startup Rosaic Labs builds. Earlier this year it was noted that Intel was providing Rosaic Labs with access to its Atom technology with RTL code. There have also been rather mysterious x86 additions not from Intel or AMD (or Zhaoxin / Hygon) that given the timing may pertain to Rosaic Labs. News today is that Rosaic recently hired a long-time, Linux x86 developer veteran.

NVIDIA engineer John Hubbard and Red Hat's Danilo Krummrich presented at this week's LPC2026 conference in Prague on the open-source and upstream Nova driver stack that continues forming as a Rust-based open-source NVIDIA Linux kernel driver.

Linux developers are once again considering the removal of the Linux x32 ABI.

Sashiko that was built by Google engineers for agentic review of the Linux kernel code changes and powered by Google's AI models continues proving very valuable to kernel developers. In less than one year since they launched Sashiko for agentic AI code review, their results are quite fascinating.

For those interested in the SpacemiT K3 as one of the few RVA23 RISC-V SoCs readily available so far and in the likes of the K3 Pico-ITX system, more improvements for its upstream kernel support are coming in Linux 7.4.

While Linus Torvalds previously shot down plans for Profile Guided Optimizations (PGO) in the mainline Linux kernel, Google engineers are hoping still to get that out-of-tree functionality upstream. They also would like to see PGO supported for Linux kernel modules rather than just the main Linux kernel image. Additionally, they hope to see limitations overcome around AutoFDO and Propeller optimizations of kernel modules.

Valve released tonight a new Steam client beta that includes some notable improvements for Linux users.

Back in February we featured LiteBox as a new Microsoft open-source project building out a Rust-based sandboxing Library OS. LiteBox leverages Linux virtualization security features and Rust language inherent benefits to provide the ability for sandboxing Linux apps on Linux, Linux programs on Windows, and other security-oriented deployments. Out today is the first tagged release of LiteBox for this open-source library operating system.

As an interesting demonstrator for the power of AI and potentially pressing legal challenges, Claude Code and AI agents have created "open-source, clean-room reimplementation" versions of Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Premier, and Adobe Lightroom. These new creations from the ArtCraft project are implemented in the Rust programming language.

FEX 2610 released today as the newest monthly release of this open-source emulator for running x86_64 games/apps on AArch64 for ARM64 Linux systems, including most notably by Valve's Steam Frame headset.