When it comes to Linux pre-loaded laptops, I have looked at hardware from most of these vendors over the past 22+ years of Phoronix. One vendor I haven't had the chance to personally test until now is the UK-based Star Labs. That changed recently and over the past few weeks I have been testing out their new StarFighter laptop that offers great Linux support and comes pre-loaded with Coreboot and streamlined firmware updates via LVFS. For those after a high-end mobile workstation, the Star Labs StarFighter offers a lot of performance potential while being open-source friendly and with Coreboot in tow.

NVIDIA today released their 615.78.08 Linux driver build with a useful improvement for gamers using Steam Play (Proton) with Direct3D 12 games via VKD3D-Proton along with a variety of other fixes.

Google engineers are experimenting with Linux kernel device driver isolation using in-kernel sandboxes leveraging LLVM's Lightweight Fault Isolation (LFI) functionality.

Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 "Hawi" SoC features the Qualcomm Page Compression Engine "QPaCE" hardware accelerator. Linux patches posted recently provide a QPaCE driver for accelerating page compression and decompression for the ZRAM block device.

Huawei engineers are experimenting with a new file-system called XMFS. XMFS was presented this week at LPC 2026 in Czechia as a file-system for modern Linux servers with CXL 3.0 or Huawei United Bus connectivity.

Following the Windows Subsystem for Linux 3.0.2 release with support for running WSL2 now on very large servers and also experimental sparse VHD storage support, Microsoft has now released a new version of the WSL2 Linux kernel as their downstream kernel configuration tailored for WSL2 usage.

One of the AMD Zen 6 CPU features that hasn't been talked about too widely beyond appearing in a public AMD tech doc is the IBS Memory Profiler. This week in Prague at LPC 2026 an AMD engineer talked up Zen 6's IBS Memory Profiler and its benefits for hot page detection and promotion on Linux systems.

With the assistance of AI, another dozen security vulnerabilities affecting both the conventional X.Org Server as well as XWayland were made public this evening.

Amid multiple ongoing innovations being pursued in the Linux memory management space amid sky high RAM prices, a new patch series posted on Monday aim to enhance the Zswap performance for this compressed RAM cache for swap pages.

Back in March Canonical announced switching to ntpd-rs was its next target as part of transitioning more Ubuntu Linux system components to Rust-based implementations. This time synchronization package is available for testing in the upcoming Ubuntu 26.10 release while it aims to be the default for Ubuntu 27.04.

Back in July I wrote about AMD P-State driver patches boosting 1%-low frame rates for gaming by as much as 31%. That work was done by David Vernet who is a Linux kernel engineer/hacker at Meta. This week Vernet presented on the topic at the Linux Plumbers Conference happening in Prague.

While most everyone understandably likes to talk about AI these days, one of the areas of NVIDIA's Vera CPU I have been most eager to test has been for conventional high performance computing (HPC) workloads. HPC was talked up as one of Vera's strengths thanks to its 1.2TB/s LPDDR5x memory bandwidth and custom Olympus cores. Vera is seeing deployments at HPC labs like Los Alamos. With recently having unfettered remote access to a dual NVIDIA Vera server, I ran through a variety of HPC workloads and similar performance benchmarks. Here is a look at how NVIDIA Vera performs against AMD EPYC and Intel Xeon, including with CPU power and frequency metrics.

Timur Kristóf of Valve's Linux graphics team has done an incredible job improving older AMD GPU support under Linux with migrating GCN 1.0/1.1 era hardware to the modern AMDGPU kernel driver and an assortment of other improvements for various older Radeon GPUs. The newest work is on enhancing the RADV Vulkan driver support for old Radeon RX 400/500 "Polaris" graphics cards.

IBM and Red Hat announced today they have identified and remediated more than 400 previously unknown vulnerabilities across popular Java libraries.

Intel's LPMD project as the Low Power Mode Daemon for modern Intel Core Ultra desktops and laptops is quite important for achieving peak performance and optimal power efficiency. Here are some of Intel's own findings on the importance of LPMD for Linux gaming

With Blender 5.0 having nice Vulkan API support that's now grown mature, Blender developers are contemplating on potentially removing OpenGL support in Blender 6.0.

With today's memory shortages, high prices, and ever increasing memory capacity needs, Meta engineers have been working on Compressed RAM "CRAM" for Linux. This hardware-offloaded compression still allows cacheline/byte access to compressed memory and in turn a better implementation than the likes of ZRAM and Zswap. Very promising is that there is near-native performance to raw DRAM speeds with CRAM.

Microsoft yesterday released WSL 3.0.2 as their latest WSL update since last week's WSL3 release with "WSLC" for promoting Linux containers on Windows to general availability. Some notable changes in WSL 3.0.2 include automatic virtual NUMA support and experimental support for sparse VHD storage.

Last week at the GNU Tools Cauldron 2026 conference in Prague there was an x86 BOF with presentations both by AMD and Intel compiler engineers. There are a few interesting nuggets out of that with both Advanced Performance Extensions (APX) and AI Compute Extensions (ACE) talked about as part of their ongoing enablement in the GCC compiler.

YSERVER continues seeing a lot of activity for this vibe coded X11 server written in the Rust programming language. YSERVER has been seeing many apps and desktops working fine on this creation crafted in large part by Claude Code and continues chipping away at more X11 features. YSERVER 1.7 is out today with the latest fixes and improvements.