In addition to Intel beginning to volley graphics driver patches for Linux 7.3 , this week AMD also began sending out their pull requests of "new stuff" to DRM-Next for the Linux 7.3 kernel cycle.

On Thursday AMDGPU/AMDKFD maintainer Alex Deucher of AMD sent out the first pull request of new feature material of kernel graphics/compute driver changes intended for this kernel version later in 2026.

More Linux kernel patches have been surfacing that confirm next-gen, high-end Nova Lake laptops will feature IPU8 image processing capabilities.

Current Intel Panther Lake laptops can use a basic UVC compliant web camera or the higher-end models leverage the Intel image processing unit (IPU) that with Panther Lake features IPU 7.5 . The Intel IPU since the Alder Lake days is what had been a thorn for Linux support due to binary blobs in user-space and still remaining that way at least through IPU7

OpenRazer 3.12.4 is now available as the newest update to these out-of-tree, unofficial Linux drivers for Razer devices. OpenRazer when paired with the likes of Polychromatic or other GUI options is what makes for a nice experience running Razer gaming peripherals under Linux.

With OpenRazer 3.12.4 there aren't any shiny features or other Razer production additions to note, but the main change is enabling support for the latest Linux 7.2 Git kernel state.

Due to Linux 7

The FEX Emulator that allows running Linux x86/x86_64 software on ARM64 (AArch64) systems, including the likes of Wine / Valve's Steam Play (Proton) for Windows gaming on ARM, is out with its newest monthly feature release. The Valve-backed project for running x86_64 games and other software on ARM for the upcoming Steam Frame and other more typical ARM Linux systems has been baking more optimizations and improvements.

While no 2

A set of patches to the Linux kernel's Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) scheduler that is shared among different kernel graphics drivers is showing the potential of delivering much lower job submission latency when the system is loaded with many runnable CPU processes.

Tvrtko Ursulin of Igalia sent out the request for comments (RFC) on Thursday to deal with cases where a system is overloaded with runnable CPU processes and in turn a high priority DRM client ends up seeing latency injected into the GPU submission path due to the DRM scheduler's

One area of Linux hardware testing I haven't explored much in many years has been modern USB video capture for the lack of said hardware. The last time I did much video capturing on Linux was during the Hauppauge PCI card days. It turns out though that USB video capture of 4K 60 FPS content has been a pain point under Linux but is finally smoothing out with newer versions of the Linux kernel.

Phoronix reader Johannes Brüderl wrote in about the situation and how it's now changing due

For those that missed Phoronix turning 22 years old last month when running a special to help support the site , a few readers mentioned recently they missed out on seeing the deal in time. Paired with the US Independence Day holiday and summer sales elsewhere, now through 10 July is a Phoronix Premium summer sale if wishing to view the site ad-free while supporting the daily open-source/Linux news coverage and relentless Linux hardware testing.

Now through end of day on 10 July (any time zone,

Added to the Wayland Protocols repository back in May of 2025 was the ext-background-effect-v1 protocol for background blur that had been under discussion since early 2024. The initial focus is on being able to apply a blur effect on a window's background or otherwise a specified screen region. GNOME 51 has now merged support for ext-background-effect-v1 with the latest Mutter code.

Plasma 6.7 added ext-background-effect-v1

In addition to this week's drm-intel-next pull request beginning to lay out the Intel kernel graphics driver changes for Linux 7.3, the first drm-xe-next pull request was sent out on Friday. Intel Nova Lake enablement remains the hot area for the Intel GPU driver code.

The Intel Xe driver this week has added more Nova Lake S PCI device IDs for the integrated Xe3P graphics. The 0xD74A and 0xD74B device IDs are added as