Sent out yesterday were the DRM Rust feature changes for DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 7.1 merge window coming in April. The Rust graphics/display driver code for Linux 7.1 includes more programming language abstractions and other Rust infrastructure work to make graphics drivers written in Rust more capable.

With Q1 wrapping up, here is a look back at the most popular news and reviews for the quarter that excited Linux readers the most. During this quarter on Phoronix were 881 original news articles thus far and 61 featured Linux hardware reviews / multi-page benchmark articles.

One of the latest Linux kernel optimizations being worked on by Meta's large kernel engineering team is making reading of /proc/interrupts less costly. Due to monitoring of their servers frequently reading /proc/interrupts, it's actually become a noticeable cost over time with their massive fleet of systems.

Servo 0.0.6 is out today to round out the month with many great improvements made in recent weeks to this Rust-based browser engine advancing with its servoshell implementation and many prospects around using it for embedded browser use cases.

Ubuntu 26.04 LTS is just three weeks out for release with many great features in tow from the GNOME 50 desktop to the very leading-edge Linux 7.0 kernel and many other package updates. One feature that many had been looking forward to is Canonical's plans to ship AMD ROCm directly in the Ubuntu archive for a much cleaner experience for those wanting to make use of AMD's open-source GPU compute stack. As a common question in recent weeks from readers, it remains to be seen if that milestone will be achieved for the Ubuntu 26.04 launch day.

Last year the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) announced plans for major vendors to pay or contribute code to this project that makes it easy for deploying new system and device firmware on Linux systems. They are asking those with less than 99 employees to contribute $10k USD annually or those larger organizations to contribute $100k USD annually or to be employing engineer(s) to work full-time on LVFS/Fwupd. Beginning tomorrow the next phase of their transition to encourage vendors to support the open-source project goes into effect.

In addition to the MediaTek MT7902 WiFI Linux support emerging in recent months, the Linux support for the MediaTek MT7927 is also coming together for WiFi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4 support for the upstream Linux kernel.

Intel today formally announced the Optimization Zone as a new initiative at the company that began last October and is building up a centralized repository for maximizing performance and software optimizations around Intel hardware.

Archinstall 4.0 is out today and just in time for the April 1 monthly refresh to the Arch Linux installer. With Archinstall 4.0, this Arch Linux OS installer is now using the Textual TUI library rather than the Curses library.

For those wanting to make use of Linux GPU compute software under Windows 11 by way of Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2), AMD's ROCDXG "librocdxg" library is now deemed production-ready for delivering open-source ROCm compatibility with WSL.

Hitting the mailing list today are patches providing initial support for AMD's next-gen NPU "AIE4" platform, complete with SR-IOV support.

While having the new System76 Thelio Mira in the lab I ran some benchmarks of Ubuntu 24.04 LTS vs. 26.04 development on that AMD Ryzen 9000 series powered desktop. Those results were interesting for how the Ubuntu performance has changed over the past two years, but even if drilling down to just the past six months there have been some nice gains on the AMD Zen 5 desktop. In this article is a look at how Ubuntu 26.04 in its near-final state is performing relative to Ubuntu 25.10 with this Ryzen 9 9950X desktop.

Coreboot 26.03 was christened today as the newest quarterly feature release for this open-source system firmware implementation that strives to replace proprietary BIOS/firmware. Most notable with Coreboot 26.03 is full support for Intel Core Ultra Series 3 Panther Lake SoCs.

The open-source RadeonSI Gallium3D driver with Rusticl for modern Rust-based OpenCL is nearing formal OpenCL 3.0 conformance with all necessary OpenCL test cases passing. Making this all the more interesting is that this is the first modern AMD graphics hardware in a decade likely to see formal recognition for OpenCL conformance with AMD having not submitted any of their own OpenCL conformance results since 2015.

Last week I ran benchmarks quantify the performance benefit to Intel FRED for Flexible Return and Event Delivery initially found with the new Core Ultra Series 3 "Panther Lake" processors and also for upcoming Nova Lake and Diamond Rapids CPUs. The FRED performance impact was very beneficial across a variety of workloads but rather strangely was not enabled by default. Mere hours after publishing that article, an Intel engineer posted a patch to enable FRED by default. Now this week that patch appears all-set for merging with the upcoming Linux 7.1 merge window.

A proposal was submitted today for launching the RISC-V Compiler Collaboration "RVCC" as an LLVM Incubator project to focus on compiler optimizations for better performance on RISC-V. But before getting too excited, there is already some opposition to the proposal.

After starting and leading the Ubuntu MATE flavor since 2014, Martin Wimpress announced he's looking to step down from leading this flavor of Ubuntu Linux with the MATE desktop environment. He's hoping for new passionate contributors to keep it going.

Rspamd 4.0 is out today as a big update to this powerful open-source spam filtering system.

The Mesa Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver has added new low-latency Vulkan Video encode/decode options for those seeking better performance.

Sent out today was the latest batch of drm-intel-next changes as feature work toward DRM-Next for Linux 7.1 winds down. This week's drm-intel-next pull is mostly fixes and some low-level code refactoring. The only item really standing out is some new quirk infrastructure for dealing with laptop display panels that may have buggy Panel Replay handling.