The Linux MultiMediaCard "MMC" subsystem was set to see some new hardware support, optimized support for secure erase/trim on some eMMCs, and a variety of other improvements. But all of the MMC changes are rejected and will be for the duration of the Linux 7.0 cycle due to an apparent lack of testing and vetting via linux-next that led Linus Torvalds to calling it "complete garbage" and "untested crap".

There were some interesting MMC changes queued up ahead of Linux 7.0 like

Well known open-source Linux graphics driver developer David Airlie of Red Hat, who is the co-maintainer of the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) kernel graphics/display drivers and accelerator "accel" drivers, announced experimental work on AI-drive code/patch review for these open-source kernel drivers.

Following discussions at last year's Kernel Maintainers Summit, David Airlie has been working to demonstrate useful AI patch review. For now at least these AI patch reviews are being sent to their own dedicated mailing list

Longtime Linux users may recall the Sabayon Linux distribution that was Gentoo-based and focused on a nice out-of-the-box experience from the mid 2000s through 2019 before fading away after 2018. Sabayon Linux creator Fabio Erculiani wrote in to Phoronix today to announce he's begun working on a new Linux distribution called matrixOS.

Like Sabayon Linux, matrixOS is also based on Gentoo Linux but this "gaming ready" distribution is an immutable, atomic distribution.

Mesa 26.0 was just officially released as this quarter's new feature release for these open-source OpenGL / Gallium3D and Vulkan drivers used commonly on Linux systems and elsewhere like within the confines of Microsoft's WSL.

Mesa 26.0 is a pretty great release with a lot of performance improvements around Vulkan ray-tracing for the RADV driver. Thanks to Valve's team in particular there are many significant ray-tracing optimizations with this new version. There are also various new Vulkan

Following yesterday's Chrome 145 release with JPEG-XL support , Chrome 146 today was promoted to the beta channel to help facilitate broader testing of the next round of Chrome/Chromium browser improvements.

Chrome 146 has promoted WebNN to an origin trial in this release. WebNN is the Neural Network API for leveraging inference hardware acceleration of the client system where available. WebNN aims to let web applications and frameworks tap the underlying NPUs and/or other machine learning / hardware capabilities of the client system

Two useful bits of ROCm news today for those interested in AMD's open-source GPU compute stack.

First up, ROCm's TheRock 7.11 is now available. This is an experimental release in the road to what will presumably be called ROCm 8.0... For those that missed it last October, AMD released ROCm 7.9 as a "technology preview" paired with TheRock build system . ROCm 7.9+ are technology preview releases while the ROCm 7.0 to less

The Linux Mint developers have been hard at work continuing to develop new features following their recent Mint 22.3 release. There is continued enhancements around keyboard support, a new administration tool for users, and there are also considerations being made around moving to a longer development cycle between Linux Mint releases.

The Linux Mint project today published their January 2026 development report where they went into more detail on these different ambitions for this desktop-focused OS. Also worth noting is a new development effort around a screensaver

The x86/cpu changes have been merged for Linux 7.0 and include finally setting the default Intel TSX mode to "auto" rather than being off by default.

Intel Transactional Synchronization Extensions (TSX) has the potential of being a big help to some workloads for greater performance via optimized locking protocols through lock elision. But the various security vulnerabilities affecting TSX over the years have given it a bad reputation even though newer Intel Xeon processors have TSX without those earlier vulnerabilities like TSX Async Abort. Thus a patch