AlmaLinux shared with us that they will be introducing a new version of their RHEL-derived Linux operating system that is built specifically for media and entertainment use-cases.

Ahead of SIGGRAPH coming up in July, the AlmaLinux OS Foundation will be hosting AlmaLinux Day LA on 18 July as a free event catering to the VFX and enterprise Linux space. From there, they are set to introduce a new AlmaLinux edition for media and entertainment. Details on this new edition are limited ahead of the full unveil in July.

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AMD is ready with more AMDKFD compute driver and AMDGPU kernel graphics driver changes for the upcoming Linux 7.2 merge window.

Pull requests in recent weeks have introduced the new AMDGPU power module component for the open-source AMD Linux driver to better match the display power handling seen with Microsoft Windows. They have also continued working on enabling new hardware IP in the AMDGPU and AMDKFD kernel drivers for upcoming AMD hardware. This week another batch of AMDGPU/AMDKFD changes were sent to DRM-Next of new material ahead of Linux

A new release of chipStar is now available as the open-source tool for compiling and running HIP/CUDA code in a vendor-neutral manner with the SPIR-V intermediate representation on OpenCL or even Intel Level Zero as the run-time alternative. This is part of the ambitious effort to allow NVIDIA CUDA and AMD HIP code to ultimately run on alternative vendors with increasing levels of success.

The new release is chipStar 1.3 and comes with around 700 commits over the prior version. There is now

Back in 2024 there were Linux patches to enable a partially-working Microsoft Surface Pro 9 5G laptop that is powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8xc Gen 3 (SC8280XP) SoC. Now in 2026, there are new patches for making that ARM-powered Microsoft Surface laptop actually working more respectably under Linux... Like a working display and more.

The Linux patches back in 2024 provided the basic support for the Surface Pro 9 5G

One of the most exciting developments in recent times for the open-source AMDGPU kernel graphics driver is HDMI 2.1 FRL support for the AMDGPU driver along with Display Stream Compression support as they work toward providing full HDMI 2.1 support for this open-source AMD Radeon driver. The details how AMD managed to pull this feat off given prior resistance from the HDMI Forum remains to be confirmed, but it's moving ahead and out today is the latest iteration of the HDMI 2.1 FRL+DSC patches

As a very exciting development ahead of the Linux 7.2 kernel merge window opening in about one month's time, it looks like the long-awaited Cache Aware Scheduling support will finally be merged! CONFIG_SCHED_CACHE has made it into a TIP branch with all the Cache Aware Scheduling code for helping with Linux performance on modern CPUs sporting multiple last level caches.

Cache Aware Scheduling has been led by Intel software engineers for more than one year and has shown significant benefits on at least modern Intel and AMD

The latest nightly builds of Firefox 153 have rolled out a new appearance for the browser's settings area.

Mozilla announced today that the redesigned Firefox Settings is now enabled by default in the Firefox Nightly channel.

While it has been nearly seven years since Apple acquired the Intel Mobile Communications' smartphone modem business and fifteen years since Intel acquired the wireless solutions division of Infineon, in 2026 we might see mainline Linux kernel support for the out-of-date XMM6260 modem.

The Intel XMM6260 W-CDMA slim modem launched back in 2011 during the 40nm days and was promoted for 3G smartphones with "true 21 Mbps downlink performance". It