StreamOS source code republished 15 years later
Way, way, way back in 2009, we reported on a small hobby operating system called StreamOS – version 0.21-RC1 had just been released that day. StreamOS was a 32-bit operating system written in Object Pascal using the Free Pascal Compiler, running on top of FreeDOS. It turns out that its creator, Oleksandr Natalenko (yes, the same person), recovered the old code, and republished it on Codeberg for posterity. It’s not a complete history, r … ⌘ Read more

Doom for SNES full source code released by former Sculptured Software employees
The complete source code for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) version of Doom has been released on archive.org. Although some of the code was partially released a few years ago, this is the first time the full source code has been made publicly available. ↫ Shaun James at GBAtemp The code was very close to being lost forever, down to a corrupted disk that had … ⌘ Read more

A brief history of Mac enclaves and exclaves
Howard Oakley has written an interesting history of secure enclaves on the Mac, and when he touches upon “exclaves”, a new concept that doesn’t have a proper term yet, he mentions something interesting. While an enclave is a territory entirely surrounded by the territory of another state, an exclave is an isolated fragment of a state that exists separately from the main part of that state. Although exclave isn’t a term normally used in comput … ⌘ Read more

Can you blow a PC speaker with a Linux kernel module?
Sometimes you come across a story that’s equally weird and delightful, and this is definitely one of them. Oleksandr Natalenko posted a link on Mastodon to a curious email sent to the Linux Kernel Mailing List, which apparently gets sent to the LKML every single year. The message is very straightforward. Is it possible to write a kernel module which, when loaded, will blow the PC speaker? ↫ R.F. Burns on the LKML Since this g … ⌘ Read more

Apple set to be first big yech group to face charges under EU digital law
Brussels is set to charge Apple over allegedly stifling competition on its mobile app store, the first time EU regulators have used new digital rules to target a Big Tech group. The European Commission has determined that the iPhone maker is not complying with obligations to allow app developers to “steer” users to offers outside its App Store without imposing fees on them, according t … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft chose profit over security and left US government vulnerable to Russian hack, whistleblower says
Former employee says software giant dismissed his warnings about a critical flaw because it feared losing government business. Russian hackers later used the weakness to breach the National Nuclear Security Administration, among others. ↫ Renee Dudley at ProPublica In light of Recall, a very dangerous game. ⌘ Read more

Driving forward in Android drivers
Google’s own Project Zero security research effort, which often finds and publishes vulnerabilities in both other companies’ and its own products, set its sights on Android once more, this time focusing on third-party kernel drivers. Android’s open-source ecosystem has led to an incredible diversity of manufacturers and vendors developing software that runs on a broad variety of hardware. This hardware requires supporting drivers, meaning that many different cod … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft delays Recall feature
After initially announcing it was going to change its Recall feature and then pulling the preview Windows release containing the feature, Microsoft has now given in almost entirely and is delaying Recall altogether. Instead of shipping it on every new Copilot+ PC, they’re going to release it as an optional feature for Windows Insiders. Today, we are communicating an additional update on the Recall (preview) feature for Copilot+ PCs. Recall will now shift from a previe … ⌘ Read more

Canonical and DeepComputing announce new RISC-V laptop shipping with Ubuntu
Speaking of PCs that don’t use x86 chips, Canonical and DeepComputing today announced a new RISC-V laptop running Ubuntu, available for pre-order in a few days. It’s the successor to the DC-ROMA, which shipped last year. Adding to a long list of firsts, the new DC-ROMA laptop II is the first to feature SpacemiT’s SoC K1 – with its 8-cores RISC-V CPU running at up to 2.0GHz with 16G … ⌘ Read more

The Qualcomm Snapdragon X architecture deep dive: getting to know Oryon and Adreno X1
In the last 8 months Qualcomm has made a lot of interesting claims for their high-performance Windows-on-Arm SoC – many of which will be put to the test in the coming weeks. But beyond all the performance claims and bluster amidst what is shaping up to be a highly competitive environment for PC CPUs, there’s an even more fundamental question about the Snapdragon … ⌘ Read more

Exclusive: Mozilla reverses course, re-lists extensions it removed in Russia
Two days ago, I broke the news that Mozilla removed several Firefox extensions from the add-on store in Russia, after pressure from Russian censors. Mozilla provided me with an official statement, which seemed to highlight that the decision was not final, and it seems I was right – today, probably helped by the outcry our story caused, Mozilla has announced it’s reversing the decis … ⌘ Read more

Chrome OS switching to the Android Linux kernel and related Android subsystems
Surprisingly quietly, in the middle of Apple’s WWDC, Google’s ChromeOS team has made a rather massive announcement that seems to be staying a bit under the radar. Google is announcing today that it is replacing many of ChromeOS’ current relatively standard Linux-based subsystems with the comparable subsystems from Android. To continue rolling out new Google AI features to use … ⌘ Read more

Arm, Qualcomm legal battle seen disrupting AI-powered PC wave
The new Windows on ARM Copilot+ PC thing, running on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite and Pro chips, isn’t even out the door yet, and we’re already dealing with legal proceedings. But the main conversation among conference attendees was over how a contract dispute between Arm Holdings and Qualcomm, which work together to make the chips powering these new laptops, could abruptly halt the shipment of new PCs that i … ⌘ Read more

Linus Torvalds: extensible scheduler “sched_ext” in Linux 6.11
The extensible scheduler “sched_ext” code has proven quite versatile for opening up better Linux gaming performance, more quickly prototyping new scheduler changes, Ubuntu/Canonical has been evaluating it for pursuing a more micro-kernel like design, and many other interesting approaches with it. Yet it’s remained out of tree but that is now changing with the upcoming Linux 6.11 cycle. Linus Torvalds as the b … ⌘ Read more

OpenBSD extreme privacy setup
This is an attempt to turn OpenBSD into a Whonix or Tails alternative, although if you really need that level of privacy, use a system from this list and not the present guide. It is easy to spot OpenBSD using network fingerprinting, this can not be defeated, you can not hide the fact you use OpenBSD to network operators. I did this guide as a challenge for fun, but I also know some users have a use for this level of privacy. ↫ Solène Rapenne Written by OpenBSD developer … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft pulls release preview build of Windows 11 24H2 after Recall controversy
Microsoft recently announced some big changes to the Recall feature in Windows, and now it’s pulled the Release Preview version which contained Recall entirely. It’s likely not a coincidence that Microsoft also quietly pulled the build of the Windows 11 24H2 update that it had been testing in its Release Preview channel for Windows Insiders. It’s not unheard of for Micr … ⌘ Read more

Under pressure from Russian censors, Mozilla removes anti-censorship extensions
A few days ago, I was pointed to a post on the Mozilla forums, in which developers of Firefox extensions designed to circumvent Russian censorship were surprised to find that their extensions were suddenly no longer available within Russia. The extension developers and other users in the thread were obviously not amused, and since they had received no warning or any other fo … ⌘ Read more

Apple WWDC 2024: the 13 biggest announcements
Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference keynote has come to a close — and the company had a whole lot to share. We got our first look at the AI features coming to Apple’s devices and some major updates across the company’s operating systems. If you missed out on watching the keynote live, we’ve gathered all the biggest announcements that you can check out below. ↫ Emma Roth at The Verge Most of the stuff Apple announced aren’t particularly i … ⌘ Read more

Tuxedo showcases prototype Linux laptop with Snapdragon X Elite
I’ve long been waiting for a powerful ARM laptop that can run Linux comfortably, and it seems that with Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon X Elite SoC, that’s finally going to happen. We talked earlier about how for once, Qualcomm is taking Linux support for their new laptop-focused processors very seriously, and that promise and associated effort is paying dividend. Tuxedo, a popular Linux OEM from Germany, has a … ⌘ Read more

NetBSD 10 with disk encryption on UEFI, and NetBSD 10 on the Pinebook Pro
NetBSD 10 was released recently, so a lot of people are experimenting with it and writing down their thoughts. I’ve got two of those for you today, to help you in case you, too, want to install NetBSD 10 and play around with, or just use, it. First, what if you want to install NetBSD 10 on a UEFI system, but with full disk encryption in case your device gets stolen? It turns out there a … ⌘ Read more

Void Linux on ZFS
Last night, I ran through the ZFSBootMenu documentation guide for Void and followed it both on a VM and then on an external SATA HDD plugged through a USB case, taking some notes and getting a general idea of the process. The Void installer does not support ZFS out of the box, so the Void Handbook itself recommends the ZFSBootMenu documentation before its own (a manual chroot installation) when it comes to doing a ZFS-on-root install. This guide from ZFSBootMenu is what we’ll be following throug … ⌘ Read more

Reverse-engineering MenuetOS 64: primary boot loader
Now that we have the MenuetOS 64 disk image file (M6414490.IMG), it is time to analyze! We will analyze the image file both statically and dynamically. Static analysis is reading and analyzing code without running it, whereas dynamic analysis is running the code and watching how it changes registers and memory during execution. Each analysis mode compliments the other; there are some things that can only be discerned through co … ⌘ Read more

What is PID 0?
The very short version: Unix PIDs do start at 0! PID 0 just isn’t shown to userspace through traditional APIs. PID 0 starts the kernel, then retires to a quiet life of helping a bit with process scheduling and power management. Also the entire web is mostly wrong about PID 0, because of one sentence on Wikipedia from 16 years ago. There’s a slightly longer short version right at the end, or you can stick with me for the extremely long middle bit! But surely you could just google what PID 0 is, right? W … ⌘ Read more

Adobe terms clarified: will never own your work, or use it for AI training
Adobe Creative Cloud users opened their apps yesterday to find that they were forced to agree to new terms, which included some frightening-sounding language. It seemed to suggest Adobe was claiming rights over their work. Worse, there was no way to continue using the apps, to request support to clarify the terms, or even uninstall the apps, without agreeing to the terms. ↫ Ben Lovejoy … ⌘ Read more

Initial Fuchsia support upstreamed to Mesa 3D
We haven’t been hearing much out of the Fuchsia team anymore after said team was hit hard by the Google layoffs, but we’ve got some news so my fancy Fuchsia database category doesn’t go entirely to waste. As Phoronix highlights, Fuchsia support is being upstreamed to Mesa 3D, indicating that no, Fuchsia is not entirely dead. This adds fairly standard support for Fuchsia in src/util. It’s being used in downstream forks of Lavapipe and it’s u … ⌘ Read more

US agencies to probe AI dominance of Nvidia, Microsoft, and OpenAI
The US Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission reportedly plan investigations into whether Nvidia, Microsoft, and OpenAI are snuffing out competition in artificial intelligence technology. The agencies struck a deal on how to divide up the investigations, The New York Times reported yesterday. Under this deal, the Justice Department will take the lead role in investigating Nvidia’s behavior wh … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft implements drastic changes to Recall after criticism
It turns out that the storm of criticism Microsoft’s recently unveiled Recall feature has actually pushed Microsoft to change its mind and make some very significant changes to the feature. Today, after over a week of sustained criticism and worries, Redmond announced it’s going to implement Recall very differently. First and foremost, instead of Recall being enabled by default and only configurable after i … ⌘ Read more

Quick out-of-the-box BSD support for the Topton GM1
I bought a Topton GM1 Industrial Mini PC for my HomeLab. It is aimed at running Slackware Linux but I wanted to have a quick look at how well BSD OSes support it out-of-the-box. ↫ Joel Carnat That’s really all there’s to this story. I just really, really love tiny industrial and office computers and thin clients, and every time I see another one for sale I really have to stop myself from buying one I have absolutely no use for. … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft blocks Windows 11 workaround that enabled local accounts
Before PC users can enjoy everything Windows 11 has on tap, they must first enter an e-mail address that’s linked to a Microsoft account. If you don’t have one, you’ll be asked to create one before you can start setting it up. A frequently used trick to circumvent this block is a small but ingenious step. By entering a random e-mail address and password, which doesn’t exist and causes the link to fa … ⌘ Read more

OSNews needs your help to stay alive
As some of you will know, I recently started working on OSNews as my full-time job, and that means I sometimes need to be annoying and remind you all that I need your help in keeping the website going. Ad income has been going down the drain for years and years now, so your support is crucial in keeping OSNews online. We’ve been providing you with the latest technology news for over 25 years now, and I’d really like to keep things going for another 25 years. … ⌘ Read more

A BSD person tries Alpine Linux
I’ve barely scratched the surface, but there’s enough here for me to seriously consider a switch to it as my primary Linux distro for testing and servers. I love that htop(1) and lsof(1) only shows a small list of recognisable processes, that it uses OpenRC, that package management seems straight forward, and that it’s so simple to configure. I’ve wondered what a modern, functional “Occam’s Linux” would look like. This is it. ↫ Ruben Schade Alpine is very popular am … ⌘ Read more

They’re putting “AI” in your BIOS
You know what could really use a dose of “AI”? Your BIOS. aiBIOS leverages an LLM to integrate AI capabilities into Insyde Software’s flagship firmware solution, InsydeH2O® UEFI BIOS. It provides the ability to interpret the PC user’s request, analyze their specific hardware, and parse through the LLM’s extensive knowledge base of BIOS and computer terminology to make the appropriate changes to the BIOS Setup. This breakthrough technology helps address a major hurdle … ⌘ Read more

An overview of the Starlark language
Starlark is a small programming language, designed as a simple dialect of Python and intended primarily for embedded use in applications. Some people might say it’s a bit like Lua with Python syntax, but I think there are many interesting bits to discuss. The language is now open-source and used in many other applications and companies. As I led the design and implementation of Starlark, I’d like to write a bit more about it. ↫ Laurent Le Brun I’m sure there … ⌘ Read more

Windows Recall demands an extraordinary level of trust that Microsoft hasn’t earned
The short version is this: In its current form, Recall takes screenshots and uses OCR to grab the information on your screen; it then writes the contents of windows plus records of different user interactions in a locally stored SQLite database to track your activity. Data is stored on a per-app basis, presumably to make it easier for Microsoft’s app-exclusion featur … ⌘ Read more

EU data protection board says ChatGPT still not meeting data accuracy standards
OpenAI’s efforts to produce less factually false output from its ChatGPT chatbot are not enough to ensure full compliance with European Union data rules, a task force at the EU’s privacy watchdog said. “Although the measures taken in order to comply with the transparency principle are beneficial to avoid misinterpretation of the output of ChatGPT, they are not sufficient to … ⌘ Read more

GNU Nano gains optional modern keybindings
GNU Nano, by far my favourite text editor when using the command line, released version 8.0 recently – and by recently I mean a month ago – and in it, there’s a pretty interesting additional feature that should make using Nano a little bit more straightforward for those not used to its key combinations. Command-line option –modernbindings (-/) makes ^Q quit, ^X cut, ^C copy, ^V paste, ^Z undo, ^Y redo, ^O open a file, ^W write a file, ^R replace, … ⌘ Read more

AMD drops Windows 10 support for new chipsets and processors, while Microsoft expands testing efforts for new Windows 10 features
Remember when I said the honeymoon with AMD’s consumer-friendly chipset and socket support policy would eventually end? Well, while this is not exactly that, it will make a lot of people very unhappy. While AMD, as does any other company, was boastful about its product touting … ⌘ Read more

FreeBSD 14.1 released
A new point release in the FreeBSD 14 series – the first one, in fact, not counting 14.0. FreeBSD 14.1 adds SIMD implementations of string and memory operations on amd64 in the C library to improve performance, improvements to the sound system, such as device hotplug support, and the latest versions of OpenZFS, clang/llvm, and OpenSSH. FreeBSD 14.0 users can just upgrade to FreeBSD 14.1, or you can do a fresh install, of course. ⌘ Read more

Intel unveils Lunar Lake architecture, moves RAM on-die
Hot on the heels of AMD, here’s Intel’s next-generation processor, this time for the laptop market. Overall, Lunar Lake represents their second generation of disaggregated SoC architecture for the mobile market, replacing the Meteor Lake architecture in the lower-end space. At this time, Intel has disclosed that it uses a 4P+4E (8 core) design, with hyper-threading/SMT disabled, so the total thread count supported by the … ⌘ Read more

A brief look at the 3DS cartridge protocol
About a week ago, there has been a little addition to the 3dbrew wiki page about 3DS cartridges (carts) that outlines the technical details of how the 3DS cartridge controller and a 3DS cartridge talk to each other. I would like to take this opportunity to also include the 3DS itself in the conversation to illuminate which part of which device performs which step. I will then proceed to outline where I think the corresponding design decisions ori … ⌘ Read more

Andreas Kling steps down from SerenityOS to focus entirely on the Ladybird browser
We’ve got some possibly sad, possibly great news. Today, Andreas Kling, the amazing developer who started SerenityOS as a way to regain a sense or normalcy after completing his drug rehab program, has announced he’s stepping down as the ‘big dictator for life’ of the SerenityOS project, handing leadership over the maintainer group. The other half of the coin, however, … ⌘ Read more

Redox replaces core applications with COSMIC applications
Another month, another Redox progress report. The Rust-based operating system, headed by system76 engineer Jeremy Soller, has made a big move by replacing Redox’ Orbital file manager, text editor and terminal by their COSMIC counterparts, COSMIC Files, COSMIC Editor and COSMIC Terminal, in the default Redox installation. COSMIC is the Rust-based desktop environment system76 is currently developing for their Linux dis … ⌘ Read more

Libadwaita: splitting GTK and design language
There’s no denying that not everyone is happy with the state of the GTK world, and I, too, have argued that GNOME’s massive presence and seeming unwillingness to cooperate with or even consider the existence of other GTK-based desktop environments is doing real, measurable harm to the likes of Xfce, Cinnamon, and others. A major root cause is a feeling that GTK is nothing but a vessel for GNOME, and that the project doesn’t really seem to ca … ⌘ Read more

AMD unveils Ryzen 9000 CPUs for desktop, Zen 5 takes center stage at Computex 2024
In regards to performance, AMD is touting an average (geomean) IPC increase in desktop workloads for Zen 5 of 16%. And with the new desktop Ryzen chips’ turbo clockspeeds remaining largely identical to their Ryzen 7000 predecessors, this should translate into similar performance expectations for the new chips. The AMD Ryzen 9000 series will also launch on the AM5 socke … ⌘ Read more

Tock: a secure embedded operating system for microcontrollers
Tock is an embedded operating system designed for running multiple concurrent, mutually distrustful applications on Cortex-M and RISC-V based embedded platforms. Tock’s design centers around protection, both from potentially malicious applications and from device drivers. Tock uses two mechanisms to protect different components of the operating system. First, the kernel and device drivers are written in Rust, … ⌘ Read more

This message does not exist
The act of discarding a message that does not exist must therefore do one of two things. It may cause the message contents to also cease to exist. Alternately, it might not affect the existence but only the accessibility of message contents. Perhaps they continue to exist, but discarding the message (which already did not exist) causes the copy operation to cease being invokable on the message contents (even though they do continue to exist). The story of existence has many m … ⌘ Read more

Chrome begins limiting ad blockers
If, for some reason, you’re still using Chrome or one of the browsers that put a little hat on Chrome and call it a different browser, the time you’re going to want to consider switching to the only real alternative – Firefox – is getting closer and closer. Yesterday, Google has announced that the end of Manifest V2 is now truly here. Starting on June 3 on the Chrome Beta, Dev and Canary channels, if users still have Manifest V2 extensions installed, some will s … ⌘ Read more

Wayland adds OpenBSD support
Wayland 1.23.0 has been released. This new release includes the usual bugfixes and protocol clarifications, a number of new features few of us will really understand because we lack the expertise, and most importantly of all: OpenBSD support. That’s it. That’s the news. ⌘ Read more

Canonical releases Real-time Ubuntu 24.04 LTS
Real-time Ubuntu 24.04 LTS integrates the PREEMPT_RT patch on AMD64 and ARM64. As the de-facto Linux real-time implementation, PREEMPT_RT increases predictability by modifying the existing kernel code. With time-bound responses for mission-critical latency requirements, Real-time Ubuntu 24.04 LTS provides deterministic processing to the most demanding workloads across industries, from manufacturing and automotive to the critical infrastru … ⌘ Read more

Servo sees another month full of improvements
Servo, the Rust-based browser engine originally started by Mozilla but since spun off into an entity under the umbrella of the Linux Foundation, has published another monthly update. As almost every month, there’s been a lot of progress on rendering tech I don’t quite understand, and further improved support for various standards. Another major focus is the ongoing font system rework, which is yielding not only vastly improved support for f … ⌘ Read more