My initial testing of the Linux 7.1 development kernel on various systems in the lab continues going well. Aside from one main regression in a synthetic micro-benchmark appearing on multiple systems, not seeing much in the way of Linux 7.1 performance concerns thus far and seeing some nice performance gains in select workloads.

Last week I shared some early Linux 7.1 benchmarks on an EPYC server with wins for the likes of Pogocache, Memcached, Cockroach DB, and various networking tests. The main regression observed there

GCC 16.1 is now available as the first stable release of GCC 16 as this year's major open-source GNU compiler feature release.

GCC 16 ships improved error messages with experimental HTML output support , the new Algol 68 programming language front-end , support for using Picolibc , Arm AGI CPU target support , experimental AMD Instinct MI300 series support in the AMDGCN back-end, and initial AMD Zen 6 "znver6" CPU support .

GCC 16 is also using

There are two exciting initiatives taking place simultaneously by the 3mdeb consulting firm: the open-source developers are working on an open-source firmware stack for a Gigabyte EPYC server motherboard and they are also working on a similar Coreboot + AMD openSIL port to a Ryzen AM5 consumer motherboard , the MSI PRO B850-P WiFi. While not yet ready for end-users, 3mdeb published their latest blog post to highlight their latest milestone achieved with the openSIL + Coreboot bring-up on the MSI

Posted to the Linux kernel mailing list this week was the newest revision of a patch series originally started in early 2025 by a NVIDIA engineer for accelerating page migration. Now being worked on by AMD engineers, this accelerated page migration via batch copies and hardware offloading continues to show promising results.

AMD engineer Shivank Garg posted the latest request for comments (RFC) patches on speeding up page migration in the Linux kernel by batching folio-copy operations and providing accelerated hardware offloading using the DMA offload interface. The intent

Following the recent Servo 0.1 release , the Servo project has published their latest monthly status report to highlight recent development efforts around this modern open-source browser engine.

Some of the new web platform features now in place for Servo include supporting the input HTML element with the "range" type, the width and height attributes on SVG tags, and various new CSS features as well as new DOM APIs.

Servo's demo browser, the Servo Shell, is now installed with a binary name of servoshell or servoshell

Last year with the ACPI 6.6 specification release came revised Collaborative Processor Performance Control (CPPC) support for enhancing the capabilities around this standard for OS management of the performance of CPU cores using an abstract performance scale. That CPPC v4 support is now being worked on for the acpi_cppc Linux driver by NVIDIA engineers.

Multiple processor vendors continue leveraging ACPI CPPC for performance management. For those CPU vendors using the generic CPPC Linux driver, CPPC v4 support is being wired up by NVIDIA. NVIDIA engineer Sumit Gupta

Just days after the Linux 7.1-rc1 kernel release, the Linux kernel's extensible scheduler class " sched_ext " is seeing a lot of bug fixes. Many of these bug fixes aren't just from the Linux 7.1 merge window but a number date back many kernel cycles. This uptick in bug fixes for sched_ext is coming due to increased AI code review.

Sched_ext is the nifty Linux kernel feature for allowing custom CPU schedulers implemented as BPF programs. Recently it

Back in 2023 the Vulkan API introduced its initial Cooperative Matrix extension and necessary SPIR-V integration for helping with machine learning / AI inferencing use. Since then the cooperative matrix support has continued to be built upon for helping Vulkan in AI/ML areas. Now the OpenCL API is also introducing similar cooperative matrix extensions.

The OpenCL Working Group has published their initial cooperative matrix extensions work. Their first extension is cl_khr_cooperative_matrix and is now available in working draft form for enabling OpenCL implementations