Kernel Space: Linux 7.0 and Graphics in Linux

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Feb 16, 2026

• Kernel Space / File Systems / Virtualization

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Linux kernel 7.0 finally abandons the 28-year-old defective chip maker Intel 440BX chipset's EDAC driver — removal marks goodbye to the legendary motherboard chipset

    Linux kernel 7.0 does away with 440BX EDAC driver

  • Jack Baty ☛ Testing Capture One on Linux via WinBoat

    Having to buy a Windows license would be gross, but if it solved my problem I'd jump on it. I'm not sure it solves the problem, yet, though.

    Still, the bear dances! Maybe a higher-spec machine and the final 1.0 release of WinBoat will make it happen.

  • XDA ☛ Linux 7.0 is adding mainline kernel support for... Rock Band 4 guitars

    Look, okay, I know I've gone on record for betting on 2026 being the year of gaming on Linux, and I still stand by that prediction. But if you asked me to make a guess as to how the Linux kernel will evolve to help gamers move to the open-source platform, "adding support for a plastic guitar controller for the PS4 and PS5" would be way down the list. And yet, the open-source community has delivered. A recent git pull has revealed that someone has been working hard to add Rock Band 4 support to the Linux 7.0 kernel, and the best bit is that the pull has already been merged.

  • Tiny Core Linux 17.0 updates kernel and toolchain while remaining radically minimalistic

    With version 17.0, Tiny Core Linux updates its technical basis to the latest standard and demonstrates that a modern Linux system does not necessarily have to take up hundreds of megabytes or even gigabytes of storage space. The new edition is based on Linux kernel 6.18.2 and comprehensively updates the entire toolchain, including GCC 15.2.0, glibc 2.42, Binutils 2.45.1, util-linux 2.41.2, and e2fsprogs 1.47.3. Despite this extensive modernization, the distribution remains true to its principle of providing an extremely lean and modular system that focuses on the essentials and loads extensions only when needed.

• Graphics Stack

  • Fabian Sanglard ☛ How Michael Abrash doubled Quake framerate

    With the 1999 release of the Quake source code, came a readme.txt written by John Carmack. There is a particular sentence in that text that piqued my curiosity.

    Masm is also required to build the assembly language files. It is possible to change a #define and build with only C code, but the software rendering versions lose almost half its speed.

    Quake would be twice as fast thanks to its hand-crafted assembly? Let's find out if that is true, how it works, and what are the most important optimizations.

  • Daniël de Kok ☛ Nix CUDA on non-NixOS systems

    Suppose that we have a CUDA application like llama.cpp outside Nix. How does it get its library dependencies such as the required CUDA libraries on Linux? ELF binaries contains dynamic section with information for the dynamic linker. It encodes, among other things, the required dynamic libraries. For instance, we can use patchelf or readelf to get the CUDA libraries that are used: [...]