The slab memory allocator feature updates have been merged for the Linux 7.0 kernel. Most notable this cycle is expanded use of the recently-introduced Sheaves functionality.

Merged back in Linux 6.19 was Sheaves as what began as an opt-in, per-CPU array-based caching layer with the potential of further helping Linux performance . Now with Linux 7.0 the Sheaves functionality is taking on a much bigger role.

Beginning with Linux 7.0, Sheaves is replacing more of the Linux kernel

Merged for the Linux 6.19 kernel was initial Nova Lake S audio support . Now merged this week for the Linux 7.0 kernel is enabling sound support for additional Nova Lake platforms.

Among the sound subsystem changes for Linux 7.0 are merging support for Intel Nova Lake (non-S) models. The commit adding the Nova Lake SOF driver integration simply reads:

"Add support for Nova Lake (NVL).
The core count for NVL is different compared to NVL-S (4 vs 2

Red Hat's leading input expert Peter Hutterer announced the release overnight of libinput 1.31, the input handling library used by the Linux desktop on both X.Org and Wayland desktop sessions.

With Libinput 1.31 comes support for utilizing fast three-finger swipes when three-finger drags are enabled. Up to now the three-finger swipes were disabled when three-finger drag was enabled, due to closeness in their behavior, but now improvements have been made to try to accommodate both. Peter

All of the hardware monitoring "HWMON" subsystem updates have been merged for the ongoing Linux 7.0 merge window.

When it comes to temperature / voltage / fan motherboard sensors, ASUS motherboards have typically found the most support under Linux thanks to the work of numerous developers. With Linux 7.0 there are several more ASUS desktop motherboards now seeing working sensor support under Linux. It's too bad more of this work isn't done punctually and directly by ASUS but at least for those interested in system sensor

The Haiku open-source operating system project inspired by BeOS kicked off 2026 by making many improvements to its kernel, device drivers, and user-space software.

Haiku published their January 2026 status report to highlight the improvements they made to their open-source OS over the past month. Some of the January highlights for Haiku include:

- Completing the work around new touchpad functionality for Haiku. This work now allows for two-finger scrolling, edge motion, software button areas, and click

All of the memory management "MM" related patches have now been merged for the ongoing Linux 7.0 merge window.

Andrew Morton sent out all of the "MM" patches earlier today and they have since been merged by Linus Torvalds for Linux 7.0. Below is a look at some of the patches catching my eye this cycle, which as usual mostly revolve around performance improvements to the Linux kernel.

The XFS file-system has some interesting new feature work and performance tuning with the Linux 7.0 kernel that will be used by the likes of Fedora 44 and Ubuntu 26.04 LTS this spring.

First up is a new autonomous self-healing capability being introduced with XFS in Linux 7.0. This health monitoring feature is described by Darrick Wong in its patch series as:

"This patchset builds new functionality to deliver live information about filesystem health events to userspace. This is done by creating

Not in time for the current Linux 7.0 cycle but posted for another round of review is Intel's latest work around Cache Aware Scheduling for enhancing the performance of modern CPUs with multiple cache domains. This is the first set of updates to Cache Aware Scheduling for the new year and succeed the v2 patches from early December. This work not only benefits modern Intel CPUs but our testing has shown can also provide some very nice gains too for AMD EPYC processors.

Cache Aware Scheduling works to colocate tasks sharing data

Sent out and already merged today for the Linux 7.0 kernel are the EXT4 file-system updates.

One of the changes for EXT4 in this next kernel version that stands out for me is improving write performance when dealing with concurrent direct I/O writes to multiple files. This performance improvement comes by deferring the splitting of unwritten extents to I/O completion.

EXT4 in Linux 7.0 also now avoids unnecessary cache invalidation in the extent status cache, avoids unnecessary forced ordered writes when appending to