A big set of kernel patches look like they will be submitted for the Linux 7.1 kernel cycle this spring to optimize the scheduler HRTICK timer and in turn allowing it to be enabled by default.

Thomas Gleixner and Peter Zijlstra have been tackling some optimizations to the HRTIMER subsystem for reducing the HRTICK timer overhead so it can be enabled by default. The high resolution tick "HRTICK" is part of the scheduler code for leveraging high precision hardware timers in contrast to the lower-frequency fixed-interval system tick. Opting

There's been a recent lull in activity around the open-source Linux driver for ASUS devices with the HID interface used for supporting various features. But developer Denis Benato who has worked on the ASUS Armoury Linux driver and the like is working on advancing the ASUS HID driver for Linux systems.

The Italian Linux developer wrote this weekend on the kernel mailing list about working to pick-up the ASUS HID driver development:

"Previous asus-wmi maintainer and asus-linux developer has become less active in the project and

During the last month on Phoronix there were 289 original open-source/Linux-related news articles and another 20 featured articles as in Linux hardware reviews and multi-page benchmark articles. There was a lot of interesting software and hardware happenings the past month but standing out the most was the Linux 7.0 merge window developments and the ramp of Intel Panther Lake Linux testing.

For those that missed some of the content on Phoronix each and every day of the year, below is the monthly recap of

After hearing last month that GNU Hurd is "almost there" with x86_64 support , it was exciting to kickoff today by seeing a developer headline " The 64-bit Hurd is Here! " GNU Hurd 64-bit support is now said to be ready but SMP support for multiple processor cores and the like remain still in development.

The GNU Guix developer blog announced the headline today of 64-bit support. The GNU Guix distribution with Hurd rather than the Linux kernel is now

Last July Intel sadly ended their Clear Linux distribution amid cost-cutting measures at the company. Clear Linux for a decade served at the forefront of Linux performance innovations and was consistently the fastest out-of-the-box Linux x86_64 distribution until Intel ended the Linux distribution without any advanced notice for its users. Intel had kept up the ClearLinux.org website online to download the final releases and access other technical content and forum discussions, etc. Sadly, that too was recently taken offline.

AerynOS 2026.02 was released for closing out February as the newest alpha release for this Linux distribution formerly known as Serpent OS. In AerynOS 2026.02 are many package updates plus continued work on the tooling and other innovations around this Linux distribution.

AerynOS has continued making progress on its build tooling. AerynOS' Moss is now quicker in usage, Boulder has seen work to help automate package recipe creation, and more.

Some of the recent package updates in AerynOS include GNOME 4

A set of patches recently posted to the Linux kernel mailing list have now been queued up to a tip/tip.git branch for planned introduction in Linux 7.1. These patches are for enhancing the Linux perf subsystem support for AMD Instruction-Based Sampling (IBS) improvements with next-gen Zen 6 processors.

The AMD IBS improvements for the "future" processors (given the timing, expected to be Zen 6) include :

"Add support for new capabilities that will appear in future AMD CPUs:

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The first DRM-Misc-Next pull request was submitted this week to DRM-Next as new kernel graphics/display driver features to begin queuing for the Linux 7.1 kernel that will release mid-year. Among the early code for DRM-Next are two new drivers.

The first new driver is the Verisilicon DC8200 display driver that initially is being used by the T-Head TH1520 RISC-V SoC for HDMI display output support. This display IP is also used

The Servo project has issued their January 2026 development report that highlights all the interesting changes they made to this open-source browser layout engine last month. With Servo 0.0.5 they have landed many improvements to this engine and also continuing to enhance its ability to embed Servo inside other applications.

Some of the recent improvements to Servo include:

- Support for playing Ogg audio files via the audio HTML tag.

- Support for cursor-color, content: image, and other CSS features.

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