Desir AI Ops Briefing: Week of 2026-07-26
User Frustrations Over The “Tragic State of FreeBSD Audio/Sound” Support
Besides the FreeBSD graphics and WiFi drivers lagging behind Linux and other operating systems, the FreeBSD audio driver support and handling of audio streams with FreeBSD on the desktop can be problematic depending upon the hardware/system. One of the most active mailing list threads this week in the FreeBSD camp was over the “tragic state” of FreeBSD audio/sound support…
Source: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Tragic-FreeBSD-Audio-Support
Auto-CPUFreq 3.1 Adds Monitoring Mode To GUI, New Configuration Options & Fixes
Auto-CPUFreq is one of the open-source projects striving to be a CPU speed and power optimizer for Linux systems to improve battery life without making any real compromises to the user experience. Out today is v3.1 as the newest feature release of Auto-CPUFreq…
Source: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Auto-CPUFreq-3.1
Realtek RTL8723B/RTL8723BS Trying To Be Tacked On To The RTW88 Linux Driver
Since 2017 in Linux 4.12 has been the Realtek rtl8723bs WiFi driver where it was introduced into the staging area and remains there nearly a decade later. The rtl8723bs driver for this Realtek 802.11n WiFi SDIO driver has seen a lot of code cleaning over the years and all these years later still is needing lots of code clean-ups from unnecessary code abstractions to dealing with malicious WiFi APs for what Greg Kroah-Hartman has called a “beast of a driver”. The latest twist is there now being patches for adding Realtek RTL8723BS and RTL8723B onto the existing RTW88 driver…
Source: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Realtek-RTL8723B-RTW88-Patches
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
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.