Timur Kristóf of Valve's Linux graphics driver team is the one that worked on improving the old AMD Radeon GCN 1.0/1.1 graphics card support by making AMDGPU driver improvements so it could become the default for these Southern Islands and Sea Islands GPUs rather than the legacy Radeon kernel driver. That meant better performance, RADV Vulkan support out-of-the-box, and other benefits. More recently he finished AMDGPU improvements for Kaveri and other GCN 1.1 era APUs . Now Timur

The sound subsystem changes were merged this week for Linux 7.1 that include some new hardware support and other useful additions.

First up with the new sound code for Linxu 7.1 is on the ASoC side adding support for bus keepers, which will be used by Apple Silicon sound drivers in the future on Linux. Open-source developer James Calligero explained of this support for configuring bus keepers in the patch series :

"This series introduces some infrastructure to allow platform drivers to specify what a DAI should be doing when

The popular Arch Linux based CachyOS has now rolled out the Linux 7.0 kernel to its users. But beyond re-basing against the latest upstream kernel version it is also carrying some extra patches.

Beyond moving from Linux 6.19 to 7.0 for its upstream kernel base, the CachyOS build of Linux 7.0 did add in some extra patches. For those using an Intel Core Ultra Series 3 "Panther Lake" laptop, their Linux 7.0 kernel is enabling Intel FRED by default .

In addition to the notable libcrypto optimizations and improvements merged during this first week of the Linux 7.1 merge window, the main cryptography subsystem pull was also merged. Notable here are the Intel QuickAssist (QAT) improvements.

Most exciting of the Intel QAT crypto driver work is introducing Zstd offload support . There is basic QAT Zstandard crypto offload for QAT Gen4 and Gen5 accelerators while QAT Gen6 for Diamond Rapids is bringing a cleaner, native Zstd compression implementation as well as decompression offload too rather than just compression with

The block subsystem and IO_uring changes were merged this week for Linux 7.1 in continuing to enhance Linux storage capabilities.

With the merged block changes for Linux 7.1 is introducing shared memory zero-copy I/O support for ublk, the user-space block driver . This zero-copy I/O support bypasses per-I/O copies between kernel and user-space for a nice performance and efficiency win.

The block changes also include work to support file-system initiated integrity operations,

GhostBSD 26.1-R15.0p2 released today as a big upgrade for this desktop-focused, BSD operating system derived from FreeBSD.

GhostBSD 26.1-R15.0p2 provides the latest patches for this BSD distribution building off FreeBSD and making use of the MATE desktop environment. With GhostBSD 26.1, it's now based on FreeBSD 15.0-RELEASE in upgrading from the FreeBSD 14 series.

In addition to the big rebase

The AMD Machine Check Exception "mce_amd" driver as part of the Error Detection And Correction (EDAC) subsystem is introducing support for new SMCA bank types on AMD platforms. Given the timing these new bank types are presumably for AMD's upcoming Zen 6 / EPYC Venice hardware.

The patches merged this week for Linux 7.1 add a number of new SMCA bank types top the AMD MCE driver. The AMD Scalable Machine Check Architecture (SMCA) bank types are for representing different hardware units on modern AMD

For those making use of the WireGuard open-source, secure VPN tunnel software, WireGuard For Windows 1.0 is finally available.

WireGuard lead developer Jason Donenfeld announced the v1.0 release today of WireGuardNT and WireGuard For Windows. This comes with all the remaining "1.0 blockers" having been addressed.

The 1.0 release ships many bug fixes as well as making use of the NdisWdfGetAdapterContextFromAdapterHandle interface that should provide for better reliability into the future. The second big 1.0 change is now proper

The scheduler changes for Linux 7.1 are now in place and may bring performance benefits for at least some systems and workloads.

There isn't any single major overarching feature of the scheduler changes for Linux 7.1, but a lot of small changes. One of the patches that stands out to me is the more complex proportional newidle balance code by Intel's Peter Zijlstra. While more complex newidle balance code, it's been found that some workloads like the easyWave and FIO benchmarks "benefit greatly"