Old network maintenance drivers are becoming a maintenance burden in the era of fuzzing and predominantly AI-driven bug detection causing an uptick in possible bug/security reports to upstream Linux kernel developers but with these drivers potentially having no actual users.

Linux is well known for maintaining old hardware support where it makes sense and doesn't pose a maintenance burden to the Linux kernel developers and they maintain some interest/support. But with AI-generated bug reports as well as fuzzing at large uncovering more code defects, Linux kernel developers

At Framework Computer's next-gen hardware launch event today they announced the Framework Laptop 13 Pro as a ground-up redesign of their 13-inch modular laptop.

The Framework Laptop 13 Pro is a complete redesign of the Framework Laptop 13 that features a much larger (74Wh) battery, LPCAMM2 memory support, a new full-CNC aluminum chassis, a power-optimized display with touch support, a haptics touchpad, and initially is targeting the new Intel Core Ultra Series 3

In addition to announcing the Framework Laptop 13 Pro today, Framework Computer at their next-gen hardware event also previewed the OCuLink Dev Kit for attaching high throughput peripherals like external GPUs (eGPUs) to Framework Laptops.

The Framework OCuLink Dev Kit is a modular bridge between the Framework Laptop 16 with its PCIe connectivity from the Expansion Bay to allow for direct, high-speed communication between the CPU and external hardware like an eGPU setup via OCuLink.

The RHEL-derived AlmaLinux is the latest Linux distribution commenting on the recent age verification laws led by California with their Digital Age Assurance Act.

AlmaLinux as most in the open-source/Linux world do not like California's DAAA legislation that is set to begin in 2027. As for how they plan to deal with this law in California and progressing in other US states too, they say: " we are going to wait and see how this plays out. "

They are planning to wait and

Coming today as a big surprise -- one week after the new NTFS file-system driver was merged for Linux 7.1 and separately the existing NTFS3 kernel driver seeing some fixes -- is a new release of the NTFS-3G driver providing a FUSE-based user-space driver for NTFS on Linux and other platforms.

Besides coming just days after the "NTFS resurrection" in Linux 7.1 as Linus Torvalds called it, making this new NTFS-3G release all the more notable is

The IRDMA driver as Intel's modern Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) Linux driver for their high-end Ethernet network controllers is preparing support for new hardware.

Last year the IRDMA driver tacked on Intel's GEN3 hardware support that ended up being for the IPU E2000 product line. Now merged for Linux 7.1 is supporting GEN4 hardware.

The enablement patch simply notes that Intel's GEN4 hardware is "similar to GEN3" and indeed from the driver side it

Introduced back in 2023 with Vulkan 1.3.258 was VK_EXT_host_image_copy to copy data between host memory and images on the host processor without needing to stage the data through a CPU-accessible buffer. This direct CPU-to-GPU image data transfer path can reduce memory usage during asset loads and all around more efficiency and performance. Finally now the RADV open-source Radeon driver is enabling support by default.

Last year RADV landed experimental support for https

Merged yesterday to the Linux 7.1 kernel is a workaround for an Arm C1-Pro CPU hardware bug around its Scalable Matrix Extension implementation.

Back in September Arm announced the C1 CPUs with the C1-Pro being their new high-end core but a step below the C1-Ultra and C1-Premium.