Ahead of the Linux 7.0 merge window ending this weekend, the PHY updates were merged this week for this next major kernel release. There are some notable PHY additions particularly for Apple Silicon USB Type-C support as well as additions for Qualcomm's new Snapdragon X2 laptop SoCs.

For the Qualcomm Snapdragon X2 "Glymur" there is now mainline support for the PCIe Gen4 2-lanes PCIe PHY, DP and eDP (Embedded DisplayPort) PHY, USB UNI PHY support and SMB237

Canonical engineer Utkarsh Gupta announced today on the behalf of the Ubuntu Release Team that the Ubuntu 26.04 "Resolute Raccoon" has entered its feature freeze.

This signals the shift from feature development to bug fixing. But as usual, feature freeze exceptions can be granted and typically do occur especially for features that Canonical is interested in getting into this next Long Term Support (LTS) Release. The announcement of the Ubuntu 26.04 feature freeze can be found on the ubuntu-devel-announce list

Cloud Hypervisor 51 is now available for this Rust-based VMM focused on secure cloud computing. For what began as an Intel open-source project years ago is continuing to be largely led by Microsoft, Cyberus Tech, Tencent, Ant Group, and others.

The Cloud Hypervisor 51 release delivers on better performance with now supporting Transparent Huge Pages for anonymous shared memory and the vhost-user-net device should be operating faster. The new Cloud Hypervisor release also has many QCOW2 v3 improvements for that virtual

Last year LunarG announced KosmicKrisp as a new Vulkan implementation atop Apple's Metal API. Initially targeting macOS, KosmicKrisp since was merged to Mesa and has evolved quite nicely as a modern implementation of Vulkan-on-Metal for Apple Silicon. It continues moving ahead with an eye for iOS, more performance optimizations, and completing Vulkan 1.4 support.

LunarG's Richard S. Wright Jr presented at this month's Vulkanised conference in San Diego. His presentation was focused on KosmicKrisp for Vulkan on Apple hardware with

All of the Thunderbolt/USB driver changes were merged this week for the nearly-over Linux 7.0 merge window.

The dwc3 Linux driver for the Synopsys DesignWare USB 3 controller continues seeing a lot of activity each kernel cycle with that USB IP being widely used by different vendors. With Linux 7.0 there is now a Google Tensor SoC glue driver that builds off that DWC3 driver code. This work merged for Linux 7.0 enables the DWC3-based USB controller found on Google Tensor SoCs

Vulkan 1.4.344 is out today as the latest routine spec update for this high performance graphics and compute API. Besides a handful of fixes and clarifications, Vulkan 1.4.344 brings a new extension courtesy of Valve engineers.

The new extension introduced by Vulkan 1.4.344 is VK_VALVE_shader_mixed_float_dot_product . Valve's Mike Blumenkrantz and Georg Lehmann worked on the VK_VALVE_shader_mixed_float_

It's not too surprising but the upcoming Ubuntu 26.04 Long Term Support release will be transitioning to OpenJDK 25 as its default Java version.

Ubuntu 24.04 LTS and newer have been using OpenJDK 21 as their default version with the default-jdk package. OpenJDK 21 is a Long Term Support release on the Java side. Released back in September though was OpenJDK 25 as the newest LTS release.

Given OpenJDL 25 is the new LTS version, it's

Merged today to Mesa 26.1 Git is a one-line change to the Intel "ANV" Vulkan driver that is showing to deliver some slight performance benefits or up to 3% noted in some select games.

The Intel ANV driver is now enabling compute BTI prefetch by default. The merge request simply notes that this is a performance regression as opposed to what the Intel hardware documentation recommends.

The Turbostat command-line utility for reporting processor frequency and idle statistics along with other useful information for AMD and Intel CPUs can now report some L2 cache stats for recent Intel CPUs beginning with Linux 7.0.

The Turbostat utility lives within the kernel source tree and for the Linux 7.0 merge window has landed some new L2 cache reporting functionality.

With the now-merged code, there are now L2 statistics of L2MRPS for indicating the L2 Cache M-References Per Second and L