Desir AI Ops Briefing: Week of 2026-07-24

Qualcomm QCE Driver On The Chopping Block With ~48x Slower Than Armv8 Crypto Extensions

A few days back I wrote about upstream Linux kernel developers marking the Qualcomm crypto accelerator driver as “broken” and “harmful” due to its slow performance, history of bugs, and other limitations. Now this Qualcomm Crypto Engine “QCE” driver might be removed outright from the Linux kernel source tree after discovering it’s even worse than anticipated…

Source: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Qualcomm-QCE-48x-Slower

Imagination PowerVR Driver Marking BXM-4-64 MC1 GPU As Supported In Linux 7.3

Sent out today was the weekly round of drm-misc-next patches of new Direct Rendering Manager feature material ready to be queued in DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 7.3 merge window…

Source: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Imagination-BXM-4-64-Linux-7.3

7.1.5: stable

Version:7.1.5 (stable) Released:2026-07-24 Source:linux-7.1.5.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-7.1.5.tar.sign Patch:full (incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-7.1.5

Source: https://www.kernel.org/

6.18.40: longterm

Version:6.18.40 (longterm) Released:2026-07-24 Source:linux-6.18.40.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-6.18.40.tar.sign Patch:full (incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-6.18.40

Source: https://www.kernel.org/

6.12.97: longterm

Version:6.12.97 (longterm) Released:2026-07-24 Source:linux-6.12.97.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-6.12.97.tar.sign Patch:full (incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-6.12.97

Source: https://www.kernel.org/

FAQ

What changed this week?

ai accounted for 6 high-signal items this week.

How should operators respond?

Prioritize reliability runbooks before adding new tooling layers.