It's finally time: a patch queued into one of the development branches ahead of the upcoming Linux 7.1 merge window is set to finally begin the process of phasing out and ultimately removing Intel 486 CPU support from the Linux kernel. Anyone still using an i486 CPU with an upstream Linux kernel would be incredibly rare and no known Linux distribution vendors are still shipping with i486 CPU support, but in case you are, you can continue to be running one of the existing

A nice Easter surprise are some last minute updates submitted to DRM-Next of the final planned AMDGPU/AMDKFD feature changes for the upcoming Linux 7.1 feature cycle.

Most notable with this pull request to DRM-Next that was sent on Friday is enabling the AMDGPU driver by default for GCN 1.1 "Sea Islands" APUs. These GCN 1.1 APUs like Kaveri, Kabini, and Mullins is now set to use the AMDGPU driver by default in place of the legacy Radeon DRM driver. This means

For helping with the increase of AI tools scouring the Linux kernel source tree and sending security bug reports, a pull request sent today ahead of the Linux 7.0-rc7 improves the documentation to better guide AI agents -- and anyone reading the documentation -- how to send better quality bug reports.

Greg Kroah-Hartman sent out the char/misc pull request today of fixes for the Linux 7.0-rc7 kernel release due out later today. Most notable this time around isn't code

Zubeyr Almaho has been leading work on a new HID driver named hid-omg-detect with an intent on passive monitoring to watch out for any malicious HID devices being connected to the system.

The hid-omg-detect kernel module attempts to detect any malicious HID devices like specially crafted keyboards and mice . Detection is currently based on factors like low keystroke timing entropy, immediate post-enumeration typing, and known suspicious vendor/product IDs and HID descriptor anomalies.

With this driver there is a configurable threshold and if such

Seeing new Linux patches for benefiting Sega Dreamcast devices wasn't on my bingo card for 2026. A patch series was sent out today for fixing the Linux kernel's GD-ROM driver for accessing media using the drivers on "real" Sega Dreamcast devices.

GD-ROM is the proprietary optical disc format used on the Dreamcast and a few other Sega devices for storing more data than CD-ROM at the time. To much surprise, this morning on the Linux kernel mailing list were a set

As a small but interesting addition coming for this quarter's Mesa 26.1 release is making it easy to simulate a GPU reset with the LLVMpipe software driver. While seemingly mundane, this can be quite handy for compositor developers and other app/software developers wanting to more easily test how their code behaves when encountering a GPU reset.

Wayland developer Robert Mader added support to LLVMpipe for being able to simulate a GPU reset. LLVMpipe provides a CPU-based a software OpenGL implementation and typically wouldn't need any

With age verification/attestation laws down to the OS level enacted by California and being decided upon by other US states, it's been a hot topic of discussion in the open-source world. For the Debian project that is strictly volunteer/community-driven unlike various commercial Linux platforms, they are figuring out how such laws will impact them.

Current Debian Project Leader Andreas Tille touched on this topic in his latest mailing list update. With many of the soon-to-be-enacted or proposed laws requiring

Ahead of tomorrow's Linux 7.0-rc7 kernel release, this week's batch of input fixes were sent in and merged. Besides a few small input fixes are also some new device IDs and quirks for hardware now to be handled by Linux 7.0 .

The Razer Wolverine V3 Pro is one of the newly-supported devices added to the upstream XPad controller driver. The Razer Wolverine V3 Pro is supported in both its wired and 2.4GHz wireless dongle modes. This Razer

A small but important patch that looks like it will be merged for the upcoming Linux 7.1 kernel is for enumerating AVX-512 BMM support for KVM virtualized guests. AVX-512 BMM is one of the exciting ISA additions with next-gen AMD Zen 6 processors.

Last year AMD sent out the Zen 6 ISA patch for GNU Binutils that confirmed the new ISA capabilities. The most notable ISA addition with Zen 6 is the new AVX-512 BMM bit manipulation instructions for matrix multiply