[$] A FUSE implementation for famfs
The famfs
filesystem is meant to provide a shared-memory filesystem for large data
sets that are accessed for computations by multiple systems. It was
developed by John Groves, who led a combined filesystem and
memory-management session at
the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory
Management, and BPF Summit (LSFMM+BPF) to discuss it. The session was a
follow-up to [the famfs session at last year’s\
summit](https://lwn.net/Articles … ⌘ Read more

[$] Hash table memory usage and a BPF interpreter bug
Anton Protopopov led a short discussion at the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem,
Memory-Management, and BPF Summit about amount of memory used
by hash tables in BPF programs. He thinks that the current memory layout is
inefficient, and wants to split the structure that holds table entries into two
variants for different kinds of maps. When that proposal proved
uncontroversial, he also took the chance to talk about a bug in BPF’s call
instruction. ⌘ Read more

Security updates for Wednesday
Security updates have been issued by Fedora (incus and nodejs20), Red Hat (freetype, kernel, kernel-rt, libsoup, libtiff, redis, redis:6, and thunderbird), SUSE (apparmor, chromium, grafana, ImageMagick, java-11-openjdk, java-17-openjdk, libsoup, libsoup2, libxslt, opensaml, rabbitmq-server, rubygem-rack-1_6, sqlite3, and thunderbird), and Ubuntu (kernel, libfcgi, libraw, libsoup2.4, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-5.15, linux-gcp, linux-gke, linux-gkeop, linux-hwe-5.15, linux-ibm, linux-ib … ⌘ Read more

[$] Filtering fanotify events with BPF
Linux systems can have large filesystems; trying to keep up with the
stream of
fanotify filesystem-monitoring notifications for them can be a struggle.
Fanotify is one of a few ways to monitor accesses to filesystems provided by the kernel.
Song Liu led a discussion
on how to improve in-kernel filtering of fanotify events to a joint
session of the filesystem and BPF tracks at the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem,
Memo … ⌘ Read more

[$] Improving FUSE writeback performance
In a combined filesystem and memory-management session at
the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory
Management, and BPF Summit (LSFMM+BPF), Joanne Koong led a discussion on
improving the writeback performance for the Filesystem in\
Userspace (FUSE) layer. Writeback is how data that is written to the
filesystem is actually flushed to the disk; it is the process of writing
dirty pages from the page cache to storage. The current FUSE
imple … ⌘ Read more

also check out anlinux. using termux and PRoot can run multiple linux distros

If you have an android phone, you can download termux app from Google Apps. It is a linux terminal running on android. android is a kind of linux.

@andros@twtxt.andros.dev

You need break the routine.

I haven’t really done that lately. 🤔 Maybe have another go at Rust (given its increasing importance in the Linux kernel)? Or Elixir, yes, I only had some very, very brief contact with it. 🤔

I just came across an old forum posting of mine about Prolog. That brought up some memories. Prolog is pretty alien, but I do miss stuff like that because it’s so different.

Just thinking out loud here. 😅

@movq@www.uninformativ.de @kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz @quark@ferengi.one In 2014 one person created protocol ii. Later it forked in IDEC. Why i said this? Because it’s simple “federated” forum-like protocol where from your station fetch another every 5-10 minutes. Stations has topic-based channels like idec.talks, linux.16, haiku.os, zx.spectrum. In short it’s FIDO but.. more modern? Documentation: https://github.com/idec-net/new-docs (mostly Russian, but you can use translator, also protocol already translated to english)

[$] Flexible data placement
At
the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory
Management, and BPF Summit (LSFMM+BPF) Kanchan Joshi and Keith Busch led a
combined storage and filesystem session on data placement, which concerns
how the data on a storage device is actually written. In a discussion
that hearkened back to previous summits, the idea is to give hints to enterprise-class
SSDs to help them make better choices on where the data should go; hinting
was most recently [discussed at the summit in 2023](https://lwn.net/Articles/932900/ … ⌘ Read more

Confession:

I’ve never found microblogging like twtxt or the Fediverse or any other “modern” social media to be truly fulfilling/satisfying.

The reason is that it is focused so much on people. You follow this or that person, everybody spends time making a nice profile page, the posts are all very “ego-centric”. Seriously, it feels like everybody is on an ego-trip all the time (this is much worse on the Fediverse, not so much here on twtxt).

I miss the days of topic-based forums/groups. A Linux forum here, a forum about programming there, another one about a certain game. Stuff like that. That was really great – and it didn’t even suffer from the need to federate.

Sadly, most of these forums are dead now. Especially the nerds spend a lot of time on the Fediverse now and have abandoned forums almost completely.

On Mastodon, you can follow hashtags, which somewhat emulates a topic-based experience. But it’s not that great and the protocol isn’t meant to be used that way (just read the snac2 docs on this issue). And the concept of “likes” has eliminated lots of the actual user interaction. ☹️

Security updates for Friday
Security updates have been issued by Debian (chromium, nodejs, openjdk-17, and thunderbird), Fedora (firefox, golang-github-nvidia-container-toolkit, and thunderbird), Mageia (kernel), Oracle (ghostscript, glibc, kernel, libxslt, php:8.1, and thunderbird), SUSE (cmctl, firefox-esr, govulncheck-vulndb, java-21-openjdk, libxml2, poppler, python-h11, and redis), and Ubuntu (docker.io, ghostscript, linux-xilinx-zynqmp, and micropython). ⌘ Read more

[$] Custom out-of-memory killers in BPF
The out-of-memory (OOM) killer has long been a scary and controversial part
of the Linux kernel. It is summoned from some dark place when the system
as a whole (or, more recently, any given control group) is running so low
on memory that further allocations are not possible; its job is to kill off
processes until a sufficient amount of memory has been freed. Roman
Gushchin has found a way to make the OOM killer even scarier: adding the
ability to [load\
custom OOM killers in BPF](https://lwn.ne … ⌘ Read more

[$] LWN.net Weekly Edition for May 1, 2025
Inside this week’s LWN.net Weekly Edition:

• Front: Mailman 2 vulnerabilities; AI in Debian; __nonstring__; Cache-aware scheduling; Freezing filesystems; Socket-level storage; Debugging information; LWN in 2025.

• Briefs: Debian election; Kali Linux key; OpenBSD 7.7; Firefox 138.0; GCC 15.1; Meson 1.8.0; Valgrind 3.25.0; FSF review; OSI retrospective; Mastodon; Quotes; …

• [Announcements](https://lwn.net/Arti … ⌘ Read more

[$] Better debugging information for inlined kernel functions
Modern compilers perform a lot of optimizations, which can complicate debugging.
Song Liu and Thierry Treyer spoke about a potential improvement to
BPF Type Format (BTF) debugging information that could partially combat that
problem at the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem,
Memory-Management, and BPF Summit.
They want to add information on selectively inlined functions to BTF in order to
better support tracing tools.
Trey … ⌘ Read more

Or lynx on a linux/unix terminal .

Signing key change for Kali Linux
The Kali Linux distribution has announced
that software updates will soon start failing for all users:

This is not only you, this is for everyone, and this is entirely
our fault. We lost access to the signing key of the repository, so
we had to create a new one. At the same time, we froze the
repository (you might have noticed that there was no update since
Friday 18th), so nobody was impacted yet. But we’re going to
unfreez … ⌘ Read more

Security updates for Tuesday
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (glibc, php:8.1, and thunderbird), Debian (libreoffice), Fedora (caddy), Mageia (chromium-browser-stable), Red Hat (php:8.1), SUSE (glow), and Ubuntu (kicad, linux-aws-5.15, linux-azure-nvidia, linux-gcp-5.15, mistral, python-mistral-lib, tomcat8, and trafficserver). ⌘ Read more

Valgrind-3.25.0 is available
Version 3.25.0 of the Valgrind
dynamic-analysis tool has been released. It has lots of new features,
including initial support for RISC-V on Linux, handling zstd-compressed
debug sections, integration of the Linux Test\
Project test suite, support for lots more Linux system calls, and more.
It also has plenty of bug fixes, of course. ⌘ Read more

[$] Inline socket-local storage for BPF
Martin Lau gave a talk in the BPF track of the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem,
Memory-Management, and BPF Summit about a performance problem
plaguing the networking subsystem, and some potential ways to fix it. He works on
BPF programs that need to store socket-local data; amid other improvements to
the networking and BPF subsystems, retrieving that data has become a noticeable
bottleneck for his use case. His proposed fix prompted a good deal of discussion
about how the data should be laid out … ⌘ Read more

Golang 日誌實時告警實現方案（Windows-Linux-Debian）
在 Golang 中實現跨平臺的日誌實時告警，可以通過以下幾種方式實現：通用實現方案1. 使用日誌監控庫package mainimport(“log”“os”“time”“github.com/hpcloud/tail”// 跨平臺文件跟蹤”github.com/robfig/cron”// 定時任務)funcsetupLogMonitor(logPath string){ t, err := ⌘ Read more

Golang 日誌實時告警實現方案（Windows-Linux-Debian）
在 Golang 中實現跨平臺的日誌實時告警，可以通過以下幾種方式實現：通用實現方案1. 使用日誌監控庫package mainimport(“log”“os”“time”“github.com/hpcloud/tail”// 跨平臺文件跟蹤”github.com/robfig/cron”// 定時任務)funcsetupLogMonitor(logPath string){ t, err := ⌘ Read more

Security updates for Friday
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (thunderbird), Debian (libbpf), Fedora (golang-github-openprinting-ipp-usb, ImageMagick, mingw-libsoup, mingw-poppler, and pgbouncer), SUSE (glib2, govulncheck-vulndb, libsoup-2_4-1, libxml2-2, mozjs60, ruby2.5, and thunderbird), and Ubuntu (linux, linux-azure, linux-azure-5.4, linux-bluefield, linux-gcp, linux-hwe-5.4, linux-ibm, linux-kvm, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-5.4, linux-aws, linux-aws-5.4, linux-gcp-5.4, linux-iot, linux-aws-fips, … ⌘ Read more

[$] Freezing filesystems for suspend
Sometimes worms have a tendency to multiply once their can is opened.
James Bottomley recently encountered that situation; he led a session in
the filesystem track at the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory
Management, and BPF Summit (LSFMM+BPF) to discuss filesystem behavior with
respect to suspending and resuming the system. As he noted in his topic\
proposal, he came at the problem because he need … ⌘ Read more

Security updates for Thursday
Security updates have been issued by Debian (haproxy and openrazer), Fedora (c-ares and mingw-poppler), Red Hat (thunderbird), SUSE (epiphany, ffmpeg-6, gopass, and libsoup-3_0-0), and Ubuntu (erlang, haproxy, libapache2-mod-auth-openidc, libarchive, linux, linux-aws, linux-azure, linux-azure-5.15, linux-azure-fde, linux-azure-fde-5.15, linux-gcp, linux-gke, linux-gkeop, linux-hwe-5.15, linux-ibm, linux-intel-iotg, linux-kvm, linux-lowlatency, linux-lowlatency-hwe-5.15, linux-nvidia, … ⌘ Read more

[$] VFS write barriers
In the filesystem track at the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory
Management, and BPF Summit (LSFMM+BPF), Amir Goldstein wanted to resume
discussing
a feature that he had briefly introduced at the end of a 2023 summit session: filesystem “write
barriers”. The idea is to have an operation that would wait for any
in-flight write()
system calls, but not block any new write() calls as bigger
hammers, such as freezi … ⌘ Read more

Security updates for Wednesday
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (bluez, expat, and postgresql:12), Fedora (chromium, golang, LibRaw, moodle, openiked, ruby, and trafficserver), Red Hat (bluez, expat, gnutls, libtasn1, libxslt, mod_auth_openidc, mod_auth_openidc:2.3, ruby:3.1, thunderbird, and xmlrpc-c), and Ubuntu (linux, linux-aws, linux-gcp, linux-hwe-6.11, linux-lowlatency, linux-lowlatency-hwe-6.11, linux-oem-6.11, linux-oracle, linux-raspi, linux-realtime, linux-azure, linux-azure-6.11, linux-gc … ⌘ Read more

[$] Code signing for BPF programs
The Linux kernel can be configured so that
kernel modules must be signed or
otherwise authenticated to be loaded
into the kernel. Some BPF developers want that to be an option for BPF programs
as well — after all, if those are going to run as part of the kernel,
they should be subject to the same code-signing requirements. Blaise Boscaccy
and Cong Wang presented two different visions for how BPF code signing could
work at the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory … ⌘ Read more

[$] Indirect calls in BPF
Anton Protopopov kicked off the BPF track on
the second day of the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem,
Memory-Management, and BPF Summit with a discussion about permitting
indirect calls in BPF. He also spoke about his continuing work on
static keys, a topic which is related because the implementation of indirect
jumps and static keys in the verifier use some of the same mechanisms for
tracking indirect control-flow.
Although some design work remains to be done, it may soon be … ⌘ Read more

How to Customize Your Mac Mouse Cursor with Mousescape
Have you ever wanted to customize the cursor in MacOS? Perhaps you want to use a Windows-style white cursor on your Mac, or a grey 3d looking Linux style cursor, or even cursors from the Wii interface on your Mac? You can do all of that and more with a free app called Mousescape for … Read More ⌘ Read more

RISC-V images for Fedora Linux 42
The Fedora Project’s RISC-V\
special-interest group (SIG) has announced
the availability of Fedora Linux 42 images for supported\
RISC-V boards, as well as QEMU
and container images. The SIG is working toward making RISC-V a
primary arc … ⌘ Read more

[$] Owen Le Blanc: creator of the first Linux distribution
Ask a Linux enthusiast who created the Linux kernel, and odds are they will have
no trouble naming Linus Torvalds—but many would be stumped if asked what the
first Linux distribution was, and who created it. Some might guess Slackware, or its predecessor, Softlanding Linux\
System (SLS); both were arguably more influential but arrived just a bit
later. The first honest-to-goodness distribut … ⌘ Read more

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz At the core, you need an ngircd.conf like this:

[Global]
    Name = your.irc.server.com
    Password = yourfancypassword
    Listen = 0.0.0.0
    Ports = 6667

    AdminInfo1 = Well, me.
    AdminInfo2 = Over here!
    AdminEMail = forget.it@example.invalid

[Options]
    Ident = no
    PAM = no

[SSL]
    CertFile = /etc/ssl/acme/your.irc.server.com.fullchain.pem
    KeyFile = /etc/ssl/acme/private/your.irc.server.com.key
    DHFile = /etc/ngircd/dhparam.pem
    Ports = 6669

Start it and then you can connect on port 6667. (The SSL cert/key must be managed by an external tool, probably something like certbot or acme-client.)

I’m assuming OpenBSD here. Haven’t tried it on Linux lately, let alone Docker. 😅

@prologic@twtxt.net Since you have to check and double check everything it spits out (without providing sources), I don’t find any of this helpful. It’s like someone’s in the room with you and that person is saying random stuff that might or might not be correct. At best, it might spark some new idea in your head and then you follow that idea the traditional way.

Information published on the internet (or anywhere, for that matter) was never guaranteed to be correct. But at least you had a “frame of reference”: “Ah, I read this information about Linux on a blog that usually posts about Windows, so this one single Linux post might not necessarily be correct.” That is completely lost with LLMs. It’s literally all mushed together. 🤷

Linux equivalents of SketchyVim, for vim modal editing in any text box? ⌘ Read more

EU OS: A European Proposal for a Public Sector Linux Desktop (The New Stack)
The New Stack looks\
at EU OS, an attempt to create a desktop system for the European public
sector.

EU OS is not a brand-new Linux distribution in the traditional
sense. Instead, it is a proof-of-concept built atop Fedora’s
immutable KDE Plasma spin (Kinoite). EU OS takes a layered approach
to customization. The project’s vision is to provide a standard,
ad … ⌘ Read more

[$] The problem of unnecessary readahead
The final session in the memory-management track of the 2025 Linux Storage,
Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit was a brief, last-minute
addition run by Kalesh Singh. The kernel’s readahead mechanism is
generally good for performance; it ensures that data is present by the time
an application gets around to asking for it. Sometimes, though, readahead
can go a little too far. ⌘ Read more

[$] Tracepoints for the VFS?
Adding tracepoints to some kernel subsystems has been controversial—or
disallowed—due to concerns about the user-space\
ABI that they might create. The virtual filesystem (VFS) layer has
long been one of the subsystems that has not allowed any tracepoints, but
that may be changing. At the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory
Management, and BPF Summit (LSFMM+BPF), Ted Ts’o led a discussion about
whether the ABI concerns are outweighed by the utility of tracepoints for … ⌘ Read more

Ubuntu 25.04 released
Version\
25.04 (“Plucky Puffin”) of the Ubuntu Linux distribution has been
released. This release includes Linux 6.14, GNOME 48, APT 3.0, and introduces a
Arm64\
desktop ISO to install Ubuntu Desktop on Arm64 systems. This is an
interim release, with support through January 2026. See the [release\
notes](h … ⌘ Read more

[$] Parallel directory operations
Allowing directories to be modified in parallel was the topic of Jeff
Layton’s filesystem-track session at the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem,
Memory Management, and BPF Summit (LSFMM+BPF). There are certain use
cases, including for the NFS and Lustre filesystems, as mentioned in a patch set
referenced in the topic\
proposal, where contention in cre … ⌘ Read more

[$] Improvements for the contiguous memory allocator
As a system runs, its memory becomes fragmented; it does not take long
before the allocation of large, physically contiguous memory ranges becomes
difficult or impossible. The contiguous memory\
allocator (CMA) is a kernel subsystem that attempts to address this
problem, but it has never worked as well as some would like. Two sessions
in the memory-management track at the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem,
Memory-Management, and BPF Summit looked at … ⌘ Read more

Security updates for Wednesday
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (gvisor-tap-vsock, kernel, and kernel-rt), Fedora (chromium, dnf, dotnet9.0, golang, lemonldap-ng, mariadb10.11, perl-Crypt-URandom-Token, perl-DBIx-Class-EncodedColumn, php-tcpdf, podman-tui, and trunk), Red Hat (java-17-openjdk and kernel), Slackware (mozilla), SUSE (apache2-mod_auth_openidc, cosign, etcd, expat, flannel, kernel, libsqlite3-0, libvarnishapi3, mozjs52, Multi-Linux Manager 4.3: Server, Multi-Linux Manager 5.0: Server, … ⌘ Read more

[$] Topics from the virtual filesystem layer
In the first filesystem-track session at the 2025 Linux Storage,
Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit (LSFMM+BPF), virtual
filesystem (VFS) layer co-maintainer Christian Brauner had a few different
topics he wanted to talk about. Issues on the agenda
included iterating through anonymous mount namespaces, a needed feature
for ID-mapped mounts, the perennial unprivileged mounts topic, potentially
using hazard pointers for file reference counting, and Rust bindings. He
did not expect … ⌘ Read more

Manjaro Linux 25.0 released
Version\
25.0 (“Zetar”) of the Arch-based Manjaro Linux
distribution is now available. This release includes Linux kernel 6.12,
GNOME 48, KDE 6.3, Xfce 4.18, and more. ⌘ Read more

Fedora Linux 42 released (Fedora Magazine)
The Fedora Project has announced
the release of Fedora Linux 42, with “what’s new” articles for Fedora Workstation
and Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop. There
is also a last-minute warning about the live media for the release:

We discovered a problem with the Live boot media at the last
minute, and sin … ⌘ Read more

[$] Don’t panic: Fedora 42 is here
Fedora Linux 42 has been released with many
incremental improvements and updates. In this development cycle, the KDE Plasma Desktop
has finally gotten a promotion from a spin to an\
edition, the new web-based\
user interface for the Anaconda installer makes its debut, and the
Wayland-ification of Fedora continues ap … ⌘ Read more

[$] Automatic tuning for weighted interleaving
It is common, on NUMA systems, to try to allocate all memory on the local
node, since it will be the fastest. That is not the only possible policy,
though; another is weighted interleaving,
which seeks to distribute allocations across memory controllers to maximize
the bandwidth utilization on each. Configuring such policies can be
challenging, though. At the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem,
Memory-Management, and BPF Summit, Joshua Hahn ran a session i … ⌘ Read more

Armbian Introduces Optimized Cloud Images for x86 and aarch64 Deployments
Armbian has expanded its support for cloud infrastructure with a new line of dedicated cloud images designed for generic x86 and aarch64 platforms. These images are tailored for performance, efficiency, and streamlined deployment in virtualized and cloud-native environments. The new Armbian cloud image set aims to meet the growing demand for lightweight and reliable Linux […] ⌘ Read more

[$] In search of a stable BPF verifier
BPF is, famously, not part of the kernel’s promises of user-space stability. New
kernels can and do break existing BPF programs; the BPF developers try to
fix unintentional regressions as they happen, but the whole thing can be something of a bumpy
ride for users trying to deploy BPF programs across multiple kernel versions.
Shung-Hsi Yu and Daniel Xu had two different approaches to fixing the problem
that they presented at the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem,
Memory-Management, and BPF Summit. ⌘ Read more

[$] The state of the memory-management development process, 2025 edition
Andrew Morton, the lead maintainer for the kernel’s memory-management
subsystem, tends to be quiet during the Linux Storage, Filesystem,
Memory-Management, and BPF Summit, preferring to let the developers work
things out on their own. That changes, though, when he leads the
traditional development-process session in the memory-management track. At
the 2025 gathering, this discussion covered a number of ways in which the
process could be improved, but did not une … ⌘ Read more

[$] Managing multiple sources of page-hotness data
Knowing how frequently accessed a page of memory is (its “hotness”) is a
key input to many memory-management heuristics. Jonathan Cameron, in a
memory-management track at the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem,
Memory-Management, and BPF Summit, pointed out that the number of sources
of that kind of data is growing over time. He wanted to explore the
questions of what commonality exists between data from those sources, and
whether it makes sense to aggregate them all somehow. ⌘ Read more

[$] Inlining kfuncs into BPF programs
Eduard Zingerman presented a daring proposal that “makes sense if you think
about it a bit” at the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem,
Memory-Management, and BPF Summit. He wants to inline
performance-sensitive kernel functions
into the BPF programs that call them. His
prototype does not yet address all of the design problems inherent in that idea,
but it did spark a lengthy discussion about the feasibility of his proposal. ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I still have a photo taken by @prologic@twtxt.net as wallpaper on my laptop (Linux)! 😀

[$] Atomic writes for ext4
Building on the discussion in the two previous sessions on untorn (or
atomic) writes, for buffered I/O and for XFS using direct I/O, Ojaswin Mujoo
remotely led a
session on support for the feature on ext4. That took place in the combined storage and
filesystem track at the
2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit. Part of
the support for the feature is already in the upstream kernel, with more
coming. But
ther … ⌘ Read more

[$] Management of volatile CXL devices
Compute\
Express Link (CXL) memory is not like the ordinary RAM that one might
install into a computer; it can come and go at any time and is often not
present when the kernel is booting. That complicates the management of
this memory. During the memory-management track of the 2025 Linux Storage,
Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit, Gregory Price ran a session
on the challenges posed by CXL and how they might be addressed. ⌘ Read more

[$] Preparing DAMON for future memory-management problems
The Data Access\
MONitor (DAMON) subsystem provides access to detailed memory-management
statistics, along with a set of tools for implementing policies based on
those statistics. An update on DAMON by its primary author, SeongJae Park,
has been a fixture of the Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and
BPF Summit for some years. The 2025 Summit was no exception; Park led two
sessions on recent and future DAMON developme … ⌘ Read more

Security updates for Thursday
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (tomcat and webkit2gtk3), Debian (chromium), Fedora (ghostscript), Mageia (atop, docker-containerd, and xz), Red Hat (go-toolset:rhel8), SUSE (apache2-mod_auth_openidc, apparmor, etcd, expat, firefox, kernel, libmozjs-128-0, and libpoppler-cpp2), and Ubuntu (dino-im, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-hwe, linux-azure, linux-azure-4.15, linux-gcp,
linux-gcp-4.15, linux-hwe, linux-kvm, linux-oracle, linux, linux-aws, linux-kvm, linux-l … ⌘ Read more

[$] An update on torn-write protection
In a combined storage and filesystem track session at the
2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit, John
Garry continued the theme of “untorn” (or atomic) writes that started in the previous session. It was also
an update on where things have gone for untorn writes since his session at last year’s summit. Beyond that,
he looked at some of the plans and challenges for the feature in the future. ⌘ Read more

[$] A new type of spinlock for the BPF subsystem
The 6.15 merge window saw the inclusion of a new type of lock for BPF programs:
a resilient queued spinlock that Kumar Kartikeya Dwivedi has been working on
for some time. Eventually, he hopes to convert all of the spinlocks currently
used in the BPF subsystem to his new lock.
He gave a remote presentation about the design of the lock at the
2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem,
Memory-Management, and BPF summit. ⌘ Read more

[$] Improving hot-page detection and promotion
Tiered-memory systems feature multiple types of memory with varying
performance characteristics; on such systems, good performance depends on
keeping the most frequently used data in the fastest memory. Identifying
that data and placing it properly is a challenge that has kept developers
busy for years. Bharata Rao, presenting remotely during a
memory-management-track session at the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem,
Memory-Management, and BPF Summit, led a discussion on [a potential soluti … ⌘ Read more

[$] Two approaches to better kernel samepage merging
The kernel\
samepage merging (KSM) subsystem works by finding pages in memory with
the same contents, then replacing the duplicated copies with a single,
shared copy. KSM can improve memory utilization in a system, but has some
problems as well. In two memory-management-track sessions at the 2025
Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit, Mathieu
Desnoyers and Sourav Panda proposed improvements to KSM to
make it … ⌘ Read more

OH wait! 😳 Why am I storing the timestamp as created = 2025-04-07T19:59:51Z ?! 😱 @movq@www.uninformativ.de’s feed shows:

2025-04-07T19:59:51+00:00	I wonder if my current Linux installation will actually make it to 20 years:

    $ head -n 1 /var/log/pacman.log
    [2011-07-07 11:19] installed filesystem (2011.04-1)

It’s not toooo far into the future.

It would be crazy … 20 years without reinstalling once … phew. 🥴

Hmmmm

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Not according to the output of ./yarnc debug <your feed url>:

znf6csa 2025-04-07T19:59:51+00:00	I wonder if my current Linux installation will actually make it to 20 years:

    $ head -n 1 /var/log/pacman.log
    [2011-07-07 11:19] installed filesystem (2011.04-1)

It’s not toooo far into the future.

It would be crazy … 20 years without reinstalling once … phew. 🥴

Doesn’t look like it Hmmm

sqlite> select * from twts where content LIKE '%Linux installation%';
    hash = znf6csa
feed_url = https://www.uninformativ.de/twtxt.txt
 content = I wonder if my current Linux installation will actually make it to 20 years:

    $ head -n 1 /var/log/pacman.log
    [2011-07-07 11:19] installed filesystem (2011.04-1)

It’s not toooo far into the future.

It would be crazy … 20 years without reinstalling once … phew. 🥴
 created = 2025-04-07T19:59:51Z
 subject = (#znf6csa)
mentions = []
    tags = []
   links = []

[$] Using large folios for text areas
Quite a bit of work has been done in recent years to allow the kernel to
make more use of large folios. That progress has not yet reached the
handling of text (executable code) areas, though. During the
memory-management track of the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem,
Memory-Management, and BPF Summit, Ryan Roberts ran a session on how that
situation might be improved. It would be a relatively small and contained
operation, but can give a measurable performance improvement. ⌘ Read more

[$] Per-CPU memory for user space
The kernel makes extensive use of per-CPU data as a way to avoid contention
between processors and improve scalability. Using the same technique in
user space is harder, though, since there is little control over which CPU
a process may be running on at any given time. That hasn’t stopped Mathieu
Desnoyers from trying, though; in the memory-management track of the 2025
Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit, he presented
a proposal for how user-space per-CPU memory could work. ⌘ Read more

Security updates for Tuesday
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (gimp, libxslt, python3.11, python3.12, and tomcat), Debian (ghostscript and libnet-easytcp-perl), Fedora (openvpn, perl-Data-Entropy, and webkitgtk), Red Hat (python-jinja2), SUSE (giflib, pam, and xen), and Ubuntu (apache2, binutils, expat, fis-gtm, linux-azure, linux-azure-6.8, linux-nvidia-lowlatency, linux-azure, linux-azure-fde, linux-azure-5.15, linux-azure-fde-5.15, linux-azure-fips, linux-gcp-fips, linux-hwe-5.4, linux-nvidia, … ⌘ Read more

Git turns 20: A Q&A with Linus Torvalds
To celebrate two decades of Git, we sat down with Linus Torvalds—the creator of Git and Linux—to discuss how it forever changed software development.

The post Git turns 20: A Q&A with Linus Torvalds appeared first on The GitHub Blog. ⌘ Read more

[$] An update on pahole
Pahole (originally “Poke-a-hole”) is a Swiss Army knife for exploring and
editing debug information. Pahole is also currently involved
in the kernel’s build process to rearrange the information
produced by various compilers into a form useful to the BPF verifier, although
there are plans to render it unnecessary.
Pahole maintainer Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo shared some status
updates about the project at the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem,
Memory-Management, and BPF summit. Interested readers can find his slides … ⌘ Read more

I wonder if my current Linux installation will actually make it to 20 years:

$ head -n 1 /var/log/pacman.log
[2011-07-07 11:19] installed filesystem (2011.04-1)

It’s not toooo far into the future.

It would be crazy … 20 years without reinstalling once … phew. 🥴

[$] Three ways to rework the swap subsystem
The kernel’s swap subsystem is complex and highly optimized — though not
always optimized for today’s workloads. In three adjacent sessions during
the memory-management track of the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem,
Memory-Management, and BPF Summit, Kairui Song, Nhat Pham, and Usama Arif
all talked about some of the problems that they are trying to solve in the
Linux swap subsystem. In the first two cases, the solutions take the form of
an additional layer of indirection in the kernel’s swap … ⌘ Read more

Security updates for Monday
Security updates have been issued by Debian (abseil, atop, jetty9, ruby-saml, tomcat10, trafficserver, xz-utils, and zfs-linux), Fedora (chromium, condor, containernetworking-plugins, cri-tools1.29, crosswords-puzzle-sets-xword-dl, exim, ghostscript, matrix-synapse, upx, varnish, and yarnpkg), Gentoo (XZ Utils), Mageia (augeas, corosync, nss & firefox, and thunderbird), Oracle (container-tools:ol8, firefox, freetype, and kernel), Red Hat (firefox), SUSE (chromium, gn, firefox-es … ⌘ Read more

[$] The state of guest_memfd
A typical cloud-computing host will share some of its memory with each
guest that it runs. The host retains its access to that memory, though,
meaning that it can readily dig through that memory in search of data that
the guest would prefer to keep private. The guest_memfd subsystem removes (most of) the
host’s access to guest memory, making the guest’s data more secure. In the
memory-management track of the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem,
Memory-Management, and BPF Su … ⌘ Read more

[$] The future of ZONE_DEVICE
Alistair Popple started his session at the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem,
Memory-Management, and BPF Summit by proclaiming that ZONE_DEVICE
is “the ugly stepchild” of the kernel’s memory-management subsystem.
Ugly or not, the ability to manage memory that is attached to a peripheral
device rather than a CPU is increasingly important on current hardware.
Popple hoped to cover some of the challenges with ZONE_DEVICE and
find ways to make the stepchild a bit more attractive, if not bring it into
the fa … ⌘ Read more

[$] Supporting untorn buffered writes
At last year’s
Linux Storage, Filesystem,
Memory-Management, and BPF Summit (LSFMM+BPF), there was a discussion about atomic writes that was
accompanied by patches to support the feature in the block layer, and for
direct I/O on XFS. That
work was merged, but another piece of that discussion concerned adding the
feature for buffered I/O, in part because the PostgreSQL database currently
has to jump through hoops to ensure that its writes are not “torn”
(partial … ⌘ Read more

[$] A strange BPF error message
Yonghong Song brought a story about tracking down the cause of a strange verifier error
message to the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF
Summit. He then presented some possible ways to improve Clang’s user experience for
anyone running into the same class of error in the future. Toward the end of his
allotted time, he also discussed the problems with optimizations that change the
signature of functions — a problem that José Marchesi had also brought up in
[the previous session] … ⌘ Read more

Security updates for Friday
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (firefox), Debian (atop and thunderbird), Fedora (webkitgtk), Mageia (microcode), Oracle (expat), SUSE (apparmor, assimp-devel, aws-efs-utils, expat, firefox, ghostscript, go1.23, gotosocial, govulncheck-vulndb, GraphicsMagick, headscale, libmozjs-128-0, libsaml-devel, openvpn, perl-Data-Entropy, and xz), and Ubuntu (gnupg2, kernel, linux-azure-fips, linux-iot, openvpn, ruby-saml, and xz-utils). ⌘ Read more

Luckfox Nova Features Cortex-A35 and Onboard Audio Peripherals
LuckFox has introduced a compact Linux development board named Luckfox Nova, built around the Rockchip RK3308B. This quad-core 64-bit Arm Cortex-A35 processor runs at 1.3GHz and is designed for audio processing and smart voice applications. This device shares the same form factor as other LuckFox boards, such as the Pico Ultra RV1106 (ARM Cortex-A7) and […] ⌘ Read more

[$] Page allocation for address-space isolation
Address-space isolation may well be, as Brendan Jackman said at the
beginning of his memory-management-track session at the 2025 Linux Storage,
Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit, “some security
bullshit”. But it also holds the potential to protect the kernel from
a wide range of vulnerabilities, both known and unknown, while reducing the
impact of existing mitigations. Implementing address-space isolation with
reasonable performance, though, is going to require some signific … ⌘ Read more

[$] Better hugetlb page-table walking
The kernel must often step through the page tables of one or more processes
to carry out various operations. This “page-table walking” tends to be
performed by ad-hoc (duplicated) code all over the kernel. Oscar Salvador
used a memory-management-track session at the 2025 Linux Storage,
Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit to talk about strategies to
unify the kernel’s page-table walking code just a little bit by making
hugetlb pages look more like ordinary pages. ⌘ Read more

[$] An update on GCC BPF support
José Marchesi and David Faust kicked off the BPF track at the 2025 Linux Storage,
Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit with an extra-long session on what
they have been doing to support compiling to BPF in GCC. Overall, the project is slowly working
toward full support for BPF, with most of the self-tests now passing using
Faust’s in-progress patches. However, the progress toward that goal has turned up
a number of problems with how Clang supports BPF that needed to be discussed at
length to … ⌘ Read more

PorteuX 2.0 released
Version\
2.0 of PorteuX, a distribution based on Slackware Linux, has been
released. This release adds the ability to test experimental Wayland
sessions for the Cinnamon, LXQt, and Xfce desktops. PorteuX 2.0
updates the Linux kernel to 6.14 and includes many package updates and
bug fixes. Users have the choice of PorteuX stable or its rolling release
called current. See the [install.txt](https://github. … ⌘ Read more

[$] Approaches to reducing TLB pressure
The CPU’s translation lookaside buffer (TLB) caches the results of
virtual-address translations, significantly speeding memory accesses. TLB
misses are expensive, so a lot of thought goes into using the TLB as
efficiently as possible. Reducing pressure on the TLB was the topic of Rik
van Riel’s memory-management-track session at the 2025 Linux Storage,
Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit. Some approaches were
considered, but the session was short on firm conclusions. ⌘ Read more

Security updates for Wednesday
Security updates have been issued by Debian (firefox-esr, jetty9, openjpeg2, and tomcat9), Fedora (dokuwiki, firefox, php-kissifrot-php-ixr, php-phpseclib3, and rust-zincati), Red Hat (kernel and pki-core), Slackware (mozilla), SUSE (apparmor, atop, docker, docker-stable, firefox, govulncheck-vulndb, libmodsecurity3, openvpn, upx, and warewulf4), and Ubuntu (inspircd, linux, linux-aws, linux-gcp, linux-gke, linux-gkeop, linux-ibm,
linux-lowlatency, linux-lowlatency-hwe-6.8, linu … ⌘ Read more

I’m playing with ratterplatter again: It’s a toy that watches disk I/O and emulates the noise of a real hard disk. (Linux only.) It uses sound samples from one of my older disks.

I tried a different approach at estimating the disk activity and I think I finally got it right (after almost 10 years … 🤦).

Demo, booting a Windows 2000 VM: https://movq.de/v/1400544cc6/2kboot-ratterplatter-2.mp4

(For this purpose alone, I put a couple of mini speakers into my PC case, so that the noise comes from the right place: https://movq.de/v/a3b2dc0932/speakers.jpg)

The results aren’t too bad, but this thing can’t be super accurate due to the huge I/O caches that we have these days. For the video, I dropped the caches before booting Windows, otherwise you would have heard almost nothing.

FWIW, if you don’t know it yet, this is the equivalent for proper keyboard sound: https://github.com/zevv/bucklespring

[$] Slab allocator: sheaves and any-context allocations
The kernel’s slab allocator is charged with providing small objects on
demand; its performance and reliability are crucial for the functioning of
the system as a whole. At the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem,
Memory-Management, and BPF Summit, two adjacent sessions in the
memory-management track dug into current work on the slab allocator. The
first focused on the new sheaves feature, while the second discussed a set
of allocation functions that are safe to call in any context. ⌘ Read more

[$] Updates on storage standards
As he has in some previous editions of the Linux Storage, Filesystem,
Memory-Management, and BPF Summit (LSFMM+BPF), Fred Knight gave an update
on the status of various storage standards this year. In it, he looked at
changes to the NVM Express (NVMe)
standards in some detail. He also updated attendees on the fairly small
changes that have come to the SCSI ( T10)
and ATA ( T13) standards over the last few
years. ⌘ Read more

[$] Memory persistence over kexec
The kernel’s kexec\
mechanism allows one kernel to directly boot a new one; it can be
thought of as a sort of kernel equivalent to the execve()
system call. Kexec has a number of uses, including booting a special kernel
to perform dumps after a crash. Normally, one does not expect user-space
processes to survive booting into a new kernel, but that has not stopped
developers from trying to im … ⌘ Read more

Security updates for Tuesday
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (freetype, grub2, kernel, kernel-rt, and python-jinja2), Debian (freetype, linux-6.1, suricata, tzdata, and varnish), Fedora (mingw-libxslt and qgis), Mageia (elfutils, mercurial, and zvbi), Oracle (grafana, kernel, libxslt, nginx:1.22, and postgresql:12), Red Hat (opentelemetry-collector), SUSE (corosync, opera, and restic), and Ubuntu (aom, libtar, mariadb, ovn, php7.4, php8.1, php8.3, rabbitmq-server, and webkit2gtk). ⌘ Read more

[$] Improving the merging of anonymous VMAs
The virtual memory area (VMA), represented by struct\
vm_area_struct, is one of the core abstractions of the kernel’s
memory-management subsystem; a VMA represents a portion of a process’s
address space with the same characteristics. A memory-mapped file will be
represented by (at least) one VMA, as will the process’s stack or a region
of anonymous memory. Efficiently managing VMAs and the logic around them
i … ⌘ Read more

[$] Fedora change aims for 99% package reproducibility
The effort to ensure that open-source software is reproducible has been
gathering steam over the years, and gaining traction with major Linux
distributions. Debian, for example, has been working toward reproducible\
builds for more than a decade; it can now
produce [official\
live CDs](https://wiki.debian.org/ReproducibleInst … ⌘ Read more

Security updates for Monday
Security updates have been issued by Debian (amd64-microcode, flatpak, intel-microcode, libdata-entropy-perl, librabbitmq, and vim), Fedora (augeas, containerd, crosswords-puzzle-sets-xword-dl, libssh2, libxml2, nodejs-nodemon, and webkitgtk), Red Hat (libreoffice and python-jinja2), SUSE (389-ds, apparmor, corosync, docker, docker-stable, erlang26, exim, ffmpeg-4, govulncheck-vulndb, istioctl, matrix-synapse, mercurial, openvpn, python3, rke2, and skopeo), and Ubuntu (ansible, linux, l … ⌘ Read more

%%title%% Low-Cost Luckfox Pico Pi Boards Offer Linux Development with Ubuntu Support
The Luckfox Pico Pi series consists of four models with a Raspberry Pi SBC form factor, designed for embedded applications. Offering various processing capabilities, connectivity options, and memory configurations, these boards include PoE support and optional 4G connectivity. This SBC accommodates the LuckFox Core1106 module seen earlier this year. The series features the Rock … ⌘ Read more

Security updates for Friday
Security updates have been issued by Debian (mercurial and opensaml), Fedora (augeas, mingw-libxslt, and nodejs-nodemon), Mageia (chromium-browser-stable), Red Hat (grafana, kernel, kernel-rt, opentelemetry-collector, and podman), SUSE (apache-commons-vfs2, python3, and python36), and Ubuntu (ghostscript, linux, linux-aws, linux-azure, linux-gcp, linux-gke, linux-gkeop,
linux-ibm, linux-intel-iotg, linux-lowlatency, linux-lowlatency-hwe-5.15,
linux-nvidia, linux-oracle, linux-orac … ⌘ Read more

[$] A process for handling Rust code in the core kernel
The 2024 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit
included a tense session on the use of Rust
code in the kernel’s filesystem layer. The Rust topic returned in 2025 in
a session run by Andreas Hindborg, with a scope that also covered the
storage and memory-management layers. A lot of progress has been made, and
the discussion was less adversarial this year, but there are still process
issues that need to be worked out. ⌘ Read more

Security updates for Thursday
Security updates have been issued by Arch Linux (exim), Debian (exim4, ghostscript, and libcap2), Red Hat (container-tools:rhel8), SUSE (apache-commons-vfs2, argocd-cli, azure-cli-core, buildah, chromedriver, docker-stable, ed25519-java, kernel, kubernetes1.29-apiserver, kubernetes1.30-apiserver, kubernetes1.32-apiserver, libmbedcrypto7, microcode_ctl, php7, podman, proftpd, tomcat10, and webkit2gtk3), and Ubuntu (containerd, exim4, mariadb, opensaml, and org-mode). ⌘ Read more

A new home for kernel.org
Akamai has sent out a\
press release saying that it is now hosting the kernel.org
repositories.

The Linux kernel is massive — approximately 28 million lines of
code. Since 2005, more than 13,500 developers from more than 1,300
different companies have contributed to the Linux
kernel. Additionally, there are many kernel versions, and
developers updat … ⌘ Read more

Easily Create MacOS Virtual Machines with VirtualBuddy
VirtualBuddy offers a simple way to quickly virtualize MacOS (and Linux) on any Apple Silicon Mac, offering an easy method for developers, enthusiasts, and the curious to run multiple instances of MacOS on their Mac. And VirtualBuddy is speedy with great performance, plus it’s free and open source, so you can easily explore the world … [Read More](https://osxdaily.com/2025/03/26/easily-create-macos-virtual-machines-with-virt … ⌘ Read more

[$] LWN.net Weekly Edition for March 27, 2025
Inside this week’s LWN.net Weekly Edition:

• Front: Open source in government; OSI election; Memory-management medley; Address-space isolation; CMA; 6.14 Development stats; State of the page.

• Briefs: Asahi Linux progress; Reproducible Debian; rpi-image-gen; Neovim 0.11; OpenH264; Quotes; …

• Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more. ⌘ Read more

Easily Create MacOS Virtual Machines with VirtualBuddy
VirtualBuddy offers a simple way to quickly virtualize MacOS (and Linux) on any Apple Silicon Mac, offering an easy method for developers, enthusiasts, and the curious to run multiple instances of MacOS on their Mac. And VirtualBuddy is speedy with great performance, plus it’s free and open source, so you can easily explore the world … [Read More](https://osxdaily.com/2025/03/26/easily-create-macos-virtual-machines-with-virt … ⌘ Read more