The media subsystem changes were merged tonight for the Linux 7.2 merge window and it includes the long-awaited AMD ISP4 driver now in the mainline kernel.. This ISP4 driver is what completes the loop for enabling the web camera on the HP ZBook Ultra G1a and other future high-end AMD Ryzen laptops.

It's taken longer than expected and in the interim the Ubuntu OEM kernel and the like have carried the AMD ISP4 driver for enabling web camera support on the likes of the

The Linux kernel has dropped the last of its architecture-specific optimized MD5 hashing algorithm implementations.

While MD5 had been widely-used for checksums for data integrity purposes, its known collision vulnerabilities have existed for many years. Or rather, decades. Thankfully most software has moved on from using MD5 in favor of more secure algorithms. For legacy uses of MD5, the generic code paths these days on modern processors have proven more than adequate that architecture-specific implementations aren't really worthwhile.

Last year

Godot 4.7 is out today as the newest feature release for this leading open-source, cross-platform game engine.

For those with modern high dynamic range displays, most exciting with Godot 4.7 is finally offering HDR output support that under Linux is supported when using Wayland. Godot 4.7 supports HDR output for 2D and 3D scenes and works across all major Windows, macOS / iOS / visionOS, and Linux platforms with the Linux desktop HDR support only working under Wayland.

The EXT4 file-system improvements were merged today for Linux 7.2 with some enticing optimizations.

EXT4 in Linux 7.2 brings a significant rework to its fast commit mechanism to avoid locking contention and deadlocks. EXT4 fast commits are the file-system's hybrid journaling functionality to speed up operations by recording specific delta changes to the metadata in order to avoid full metadata writes. Fast commits can be useful for lowering fsync latency and more efficient performance overall.

Li Chen reworked the fast commit code for

The Rust PNG crate, image-png, for PNG image encoding and decoding was already claimed to be the fastest PNG decoder in the world for the past year. Now with the latest optimizations, it's even faster.

The Rust PNG create has been seeing use by the likes of Google Chrome/Chromium and the GNOME desktop. These projects picked up Rust PNG for its memory safety guarantees and features while still delivering good performance. Interestingly though the project has a new blog post out today to outline their latest performance

A bug in the AMDGPU Linux kernel graphics driver leading to some laptop displays freezing after periods of use may finally be close to being resolved. Given the length and quantity of bug reports and one of the problematic commits being tracked back to 2017, it's a heavy hitting issue for some Linux users. With the help of Claude Code, it looks like a fix is on the way to the Linux kernel.

A Phoronix reader who has a Lenovo ThinkPad T14 Gen1 AMD laptop where its

The cryptographic subsystem updates have been merged for the ongoing Linux 7.2 kernel merge window.

Headlining the Linux 7.2 crypto changes is the deprecation of the AF_ALG interface. As reported about at the beginning of the month, Linux kernel developers have been planning to deprecate AF_ALG due to its massive attack surface<./a>. In particular, recent AI/LLM security tools have been poking holes into it and there has been little work to improve AF_ALG. Most notably, the

Canonical and the Ubuntu Release Team have implemented an important policy change for Ubuntu flavors moving forward. If they are to have an official release, they must now successfully submit a beta release.

Ubuntu flavors like Ubuntu Kylin, Ubuntu Studio, Ubuntu MATE, etc, must now submit successful beta releases per the scheduled timeline if they are looking to have an official release for a given Ubuntu Linux cycle.