The Linux 7.1 development kernel that amounts to nearly 40 million lines has a lot of new features and changes in tow. While Linux 7.1 stable won't be out until mid-June, here is a look at the interesting changes coming with this next stable version of the Linux kernel.

Merged to the Intel Xe kernel graphics driver with Linux 7.1 is an addition to improve the video RAM memory pressure or out-of-memory behavior for Intel graphics with dedicated video memory. Introduced is support for purgeable buffer objects via a new user-space API to provide usage hints for enhancing what is purged under vRAM pressure. Merged this week to Mesa 26.2-devel is support for the Intel Mesa drivers to make use of this new interface...

The preview release of the Arch Linux powered Manjaro 26.1 is now available for testing...

An improvement on the way for the AMD P-State Linux CPU frequency scaling driver and the Linux ACPI Collaborative Processor Performance Control (CPPC) code at large is supporting a new "HighestFreq" register to be standardized by a future revision of the ACPI specification...

Six years after the debut of OpenCL 3.0 in provisional form, OpenCL 3.1 was announced today by The Khronos Group...

The Qt Group announced today the QML Profiler Skill for Agentic Development. This new "skill" can delegate code performance profiling to AI agents for 2D Qt Quick applications...

AlmaLinux 10.2 Beta released today as their next AlmaLinux 10 release coming down the pipe and derived from the upstream Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10.2 state. Plus this AlmaLinux release continues adding more changes on their own...

NVIDIA compiler engineers are looking to develop a standalone tool that could be upstreamed into the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) codebase for generating AutoFDO profiles for consumption by GCC in turn for better benefiting from automatic feedback directed optimizations (FDO) in the name of better performance...

Less than one month after releasing ROCm 7.2.2, the ROCm 7.2.3 is now available with some minor improvements to this open-source AMD GPU compute and AI stack...

For those eager to get their hands on Valve's new Steam Controller, the gaming controller is now shipping...

Omarchy as the Arch Linux based desktop distribution using the Hyprland compositor and led by David Heinemeier Hansson "DHH" is out with a big OS update...

With the GCC 16.1 compiler released last Thursday, I have begun running more compiler benchmarks on this first GCC 16 stable feature release. GCC 16 comes heavy on new changes in being the annual feature release and delivering changes from AMD Zen 6 and Arm AGI CPU support to new C++ features and even the Algol 68 programming language front-end. It's also looking quite good in the performance department relative to the GCC 15 compiler from last year.

CachyOS is a very fast out-of-the-box Linux distribution and for those concerned about Python performance, the newest updates to this Arch Linux based distribution will provide even better performance...

The growing number of file-systems within the Linux kernel source tree is causing an ongoing burden for upstream developers maintaining the virtual file-system (VFS) code around it and associated code. As a result of the continuing rise of new file-systems being proposed for the Linux kernel, documentation is being introduced to establish clear guidelines for getting new file-systems accepted into the mainline kernel...

Since last November we've begun seeing new open-source driver activity for their next-gen GPU IP with their GFX12.1 graphics engine. GFX12 (12.0) was for the Radeon RX 9000 series RDNA4 hardware while GFX 12.1 is some new revision for yet-to-be-known products while there is also GFX13 bring-up and GFX12.5 too...

Linux 7.1-rc2 is out for testing with its accumulation of initial bug and regression fixes that have been collected over the past week since the Linux 7.1 merge window was capped off...

Brush v0.4 debuted today for this "Bourne Rusty Shell" as a Bash/POSIX-compatible shell written in the Rust programming language...

ReactOS as the "open-source Windows" operating system project striving for binary compatibility with Microsoft Windows has seen some exciting improvements this week...

This week Google announced the selected Google Summer of Code "GSoC" 2026 projects for providing stipends to student developers for engaging in different open-source projects. This year a lot of open-source projects involve AI/LLM adoption but there are also a number of other interesting student projects at large from GNOME Mutter GPU reset recovery to adding new features to FreeBSD...

It's been an interesting 2026 in Linux development with beginning to phase out i486 CPU support, dropping ISDN and amateur "ham" radio support, and other code cleaning in the name of a diminishing user base -- or perhaps even no users left -- for those running such vintage hardware with a modern, up-to-date kernel. Yet ISA sound card drivers have seen an uptick in activity...