For those that have been very eager to hear about the Intel Core Ultra Series 3 “Panther Lake” performance on Linux, today’s the day! Last Thursday the MSI Prestige 14 Flip AI+ Evo laptop arrived that is powered by the Core Ultra X7 358H. Here is a look at how that Intel Core Ultra X7 358H competes for performance and power efficiency against a wide range of other laptops on an up-to-date Linux software stack in with around 300 benchmarks.

The

team behind

Tyr started 2025 with little to show in our quest to
produce a Rust GPU driver for Arm Mali hardware, and by the end of the
year, we were able to play SuperTuxKart (a 3D open-source racing
game) at the Linux Plumbers Conference (LPC). Our prototype was a joint
effort between Arm, Collabora, and Google; it ran well for the duration
of the event, and the performance was more than adequate for players.
Thankfully, we picked up steam at precisely the right moment: Dave
Airlie just

announced in the Maintainers Summit that the DRM subsystem
is only “about a year away” from disallowing new drivers written in C
and requiring the use of Rust. Now it is time to lay out a
possible roadmap for 2026 in order to upstream all of this work.

Merged four years ago to the Linux kernel networking subsystem’s Shared Memory Communications (SMC) code was TCP Upper Layer Protocol (ULP) support for allowing applications to replace TCP with the SMC protocol in-place as a transparent replacement. Except for the next kernel cycle it’s set to be reverted after realizing it’s “fundamentally broken.”..

OpenIndiana as the open-source project built atop Illumos that is continuing to maintain and advance the former OpenSolaris code is working on a big ambitions of modernizing the Image Packaging System (IPS) package management solution. As part of that they are working to move from a C and Python codebase over to Rust…

Announced back in October was NTFS Plus as a new Linux driver for NTFS based on the former NTFS kernel driver prior to Paragon Software contributing the NTFS3 driver code. The intent with this new driver is for better performance. more features, public user-space utilities around it, and all-around a nice step forward for those reliant on this Microsoft file-system. Out this week is the sixth iteration of this remade NTFS driver…

The X.Org Foundation has announced that this year’s X.Org Developers Conference will be taking place in Toronto, Canada and hosted by Arm…

Git 2.53 has been released today as the latest stable update to this free and open-source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency.

Linux From Scratch reluctantly confirms a systemd-only future, ending System V init development due to mounting maintenance pressure and upstream changes.

Following the Rust Coreutils presentation from FOSDEM this weekend, Rust Coreutils 0.6 is now available as the latest feature release for this Rust programming language re-implementation of GNU Coreutils…

With the concerns raised over comments by Mozilla’s new CEO with wanting to evolve Firefox into a “modern AI browser”, the Firefox 148 release due out later this month aims to address some of those concerns by having a new AI controls area within the web browser’s settings…

Remember when Napster meant free music and trouble with the labels? Now it means glossy AI therapists, fake experts, and generative “content” on tap.

Microsoft in Windows 11 22H2 introduced a new ACPI Device Specific Method (DSM) “Turn On Display” notification that the Linux 7.0 kernel will be adding support for in dealing with some otherwise problematic laptop behavior…

A little memory leak each day is the road to Hell

While we might see Git 3.0 released around the end of 2026, Git 2.53 is out today as the latest feature release and continuing to make changes with an eye toward that big Git 3.0 milestone…

While many open-source enthusiasts like to flaunt RISC-V as not having the security challenges as x86_64 CPUs have seen over the past several years with various speculative execution / side-channel attacks and arguing for the benefits of an open-source ISA in stronger security, in practice it’s not so clear-cut. Security researchers at Germany’s CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security have found current RISC-V CPU implementations coming up short for their actual security…

Origami Linux is a new experimental Fedora Atomic–based distribution using rpm-ostree and the COSMIC desktop.

The kernel’s swap subsystem is a complex and often unloved beast. It is
also a critical component in the memory-management subsystem and has a
significant impact on the performance of the system as a whole. At the
2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management and BPF Summit, Kairui
Song outlined a plan to simplify and
optimize the kernel’s swap code. A first installment
of that work, written with help from Chris Li, was merged for the 6.18
release. This article will catch up with the 6.18 work, setting the stage
for a future look at the changes that are yet to be merged.

Recently I finally got my hands on a LoongArch processor, the ISA developed by China’s Loongson Technology as an evolution from their earlier use of the MIPS64 ISA and inspired by RISC-V and other modern ISAs. The Loongson-3B6000 features 12 cores / 24 threads with dual channel DDR4 ECC memory support. Here is a look at how that latest-generation LoongArch desktop processor compares to the current generation AMD Zen 5 and Intel Arrow Lake desktop processors under Linux. Plus also tossing in the Raspberry Pi 5 (Raspberry Pi 500+) for an ARM reference point.

The 277th installment of the 9to5Linux Weekly Roundup is here for the week ending February 1st, 2026, keeping you updated on the most important developments in the Linux world.