The integrity subsystem changes merged last week for the Linux 7.2 kernel include support now for IMA and EVM post-quantum ML-DSA signature support.

Linux's Integrity Measurement Architecture (IMA) and Extended Verification Module (EVM) for verifying file and system integrity now is able to validate using post-quantum ML-DSA signatures for better security. ML-DSA is a modern replacement to the likes of RSA and ECC. This addition allows for more future-proof integrity of Linux systems around signatures, kernel

Last week the main set of sched_ext changes were merged for Linux 7.2 that included continued work on sub-scheduler support. While Linus Torvalds didn't object to any of the features being worked on for this extensible scheduler framework that relies on user-space BPF programs, he was frustrated by the layout of the new C source files and remarked, " please don't do this disgusting thing...proper hierarchical filesystems have been available since 1965. "

Linus Torvalds did not

System76 today released COSMIC Epoch 1.1 as the newest feature release as well as being their first time bumping the minor version number since the December release of COSMIC 1.0.

The developers behind this Rust-based open-source desktop environment now plan to regularly increment the minor version number to allow for mid-release patch versions as needed. New to COSMIC Epoch 1.1 is COSMIC-Monitor as their intended replacement to GNOME System Monitor, which will soon be replaced within the Pop!_OS

The 46-year-old BASIC09 programming language has new compiler support with a front-end having been developed for the LLVM compiler stack. BASIC09 was developed in 1980 for the Motorola 6809 CPU running with the OS-9 operating system. With this LLVM compiler front-end, you can write BASIC09 code for modern software and hardware.

Open-source developer Boisy Gene Pitre announced his BASIC09 front-end today to LLVM developers and inquiring over

While the Linux 7.2 merge window doesn't wrap up until this weekend as the feature cut-off for new material, I have already begun some early benchmarks of the code currently staged for this next version of the Linux kernel. Linux 7.2 already was looking quite exciting with cache aware scheduling and other exciting new features while an unexpected surprise in my early testing this week was seeing some local network/socket performance improvements.

The first system I used for evaluating the early performance of the Linux 7.

Over the years while working at Red Hat, Hans de Goede was known for driving many wonderful Linux laptop improvements benefiting AMD/Intel x86_64 hardware. Hans left Red Hat last year and ended up joining Qualcomm to advance their open-source/Linux support. Today he is out with a significant new patch series for consideration that has the potential of significantly improving the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Series laptop Linux support and also important indicators for better Snapdragon laptop support on Linux moving forward.

Hans de Goede posted a

For those that happen to still be running a 22+ year old Apple Power Mac such as those from 2004 with an IBM PowerPC processor and ATI Radeon 9600 XT or 9800 XT graphics, there are open-source driver improvements for Linux still happening in 2026 to benefit this vintage hardware.

Open-source developer Pavel Ondračka remains one of the few contributors left to the Radeon R300 Gallium3D open-source driver within the Mesa

The EROFS open-source read-only file-system has some nice enhancements in place for the Linux 7.2 kernel.

First up, EROFS now has optimized mapping of requests for chunk-based inodes. The new EROFS chunk mapping code has been optimized for more efficient I/O performance. There are no performance numbers indicated with the erofs_map_chunks() patch but the I/O performance is simply reported to be more efficient without quantifying.

The other big EROFS change is that sparsee support has

While the Fwupd 2.1 series is the latest stable channel for this open-source firmware updating solution, Fwupd 2.0.21 was released today to backport fixes for more than 250 potential security issues recently uncovered in the codebase.

The Fwupd 2.1 series has been seeing a lot of security fixes uncovered by Anthropic's Mythos and other AI/LLM security research. Now Fwupd 2.0.21 incorporates many of those security fixes for those still relying on the Fwupd 2.