With Q2'2026 quickly coming to an end, here's a recap of the most popular Linux kernel news over the past three months on Phoronix.

A lot happened in Q2'2026 with many AI/LLM-detected security vulnerabilities coming to light, the Linux kernel moving forward in removing a number of old hardware drivers and platform support (most notably, i486 CPU support) in part due to AI/LLM noise, some exciting kernel performance optimizations,

Today marks the last day of the Linux 7.2 merge window with Linux 7.2-rc1 due out later today. With the many new features and improvements merged over the past week since the Linux 7.1 stable debut, the Linux kernel source tree now exceeds 43 million lines.

Via the cloc utility for counting the lines of code, I checked the current Linux Git state as of this morning considering with Linux 7.1 it was coming in just shy of 43 million...

For those using Vim with its GTK3 toolkit interface on Wayland, it soon should be delivering much better performance with pending patches.

Vim developer Dezza recently opened a Vim pull request to introduce deferred dirty redraw handling for its GTK3 Wayland back-end. The code reworks how the redraw process is handled for Vim's GTK3 Wayland back-end. Dezza explained in the pull request of the impact on end users:

"The result is that scrolling is fast, mostly smooth and cpu usage lowered significantly; because

The newest Wayland compositor on the block is Nourish, it's a Vulkan-powered and its unique selling point is offering "infinite" zooming and panning to in effect provide an infinite workspace.

Nourish is designed as " a linux desktop that doesn't limit you to your screen size. " It's modern-focused with using the Vulkan API for rendering but can still fallback to OpenGL ES for older hardware. This compositor has been tested across the open-source AMD and Intel GPU drivers as well as

Linux kernel developer and Bytedance engineer Qi Zheng sent out a request for comments (RFC) patch series on a new feature called Reserved THP to combine the best of HugeTLB and THP kernel functionality.

Bytedance has been working on Reserved THP as a potential stepping stone or goal of unifying HugeTLB and Transparent Huge Page (THP) support within the Linux kernel for kernel huge pages. HugeTLB brings nice elements like reservations and guaranteed allocation within reserved pools, but not supporting swap. Meanwhile, THP doesn't support reservations and allocations aren

Posted to the Linux kernel mailing list this week was a new patch series working on scalability enhancements to the MD RAID5 software RAID code. Up to a 10~17% improvement was observed in some configurations with these RAID5 scalability patches.

Hiroshi Nishida posted the eight patches that are "low risk" changes for enhancing MD RAID5, especially on systems with many CPU cores and many disks as part of the RAID array. One of the primary focuses was on reducing the per-stripe and stripe-

In development over the past three years has been Newelle as a GNOME-aligned AI virtual assistant . Out this week is Newelle 1.4.5 and it now adds AI image generation support and a redesigned chat interface.

Newelle 1.4.5 now offers integrated AI image generation support via Stable Diffusion via stablediffusion.cpp or cloud models if setup for Newelle. This integration also works for image editing capabilities too if desired. That cloud model support for image generation works with OpenAI, Pollinations, and OpenRouter.

While Plasma 6.7.1 was just released this week following the recent stable debut of Plasma 6.7, there are already a number of fixes piling up for Plasma 6.7.2 due out in July. Plus more feature work and fixes for Plasma 6.8 as the next desktop version going Wayland-only.

This Week in Plasma is out with its newest issue and some of the most interesting highlights for the week include:

Plasma 6.8 is introducing the ability to setup wallpaper slideshows that