Intel Xe Driver For Linux 7.4 Adds vRAM Health Check, Degraded Memory Handling
Sent out this week were more Intel Xe kernel graphics driver changes targeting the upcoming Linux 7.4 kernel cycle. The theme this week was around dealing with video memory health and also being able to better deal with hardware degraded video RAM… ⌘ Read more

Google’s “Painful To Maintain” Binder C Linux Driver Being Removed In Favor Of Rust
Google’s Binder driver written in the C programming language has long been part of the mainline kernel as the inter-process communication (IPC) mechanism used on Android. The past few years the Binder driver was rewritten in Rust as one of the first “real” drivers in the Rust programming language. The Rust Binder driver was upstreamed in Linux 6.18 and now for the upcoming Linux 7.4 kernel cycle, the old Binder C-based driver is se … ⌘ Read more

Ubuntu 26.10 amd64v3 Can Provide A Nice Boost For Low-End/Budget Hardware
Canonical recently began producing Ubuntu 26.10 amd64v3 daily ISOs to complement their experimental amd64v3 package archive that they have been trialing the past few release cycles. While we still don’t know what any official plans are for amd64v3 with Ubuntu 26.10, the performance gains can be very worthwhile over the generic amd64 binaries even for low-end/budget hardware. ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.4 Slated To Land The AVX-512 Optimized xor_gen For A Big Performance Win
Over the past few months there have been patches floating around for an AVX-512 optimized xor_gen() for the Linux kernel for that functuon used by the Linux software RAID code. It’s been shhowing very nice performance gains with this function being used for generating and validating parity blocks such as for RAID5 and RAID6. The upcoming Linux 7.4 cycle is slated to merge this nice enhancement for benefiting AMD Zen 4 and new … ⌘ Read more

New Cache Aware Scheduling Fixes Out For Testing
Since being merged back during the Linux 7.2 cycle, the Cache Aware Scheduling code continues seeing more fixes as users test out this scheduling enhancement on different processors and system configurations… ⌘ Read more

Patches Ready For AMDGPU HDMI 2.1 Enabled By Default With Linux 7.4 With FreeSync, VRR & ALLM
Linux 7.4 is now set to reach the elusive milestone of HDMI 2.1 support for the AMDGPU kernel graphics driver. After the HDMI Forum previously rejected HDMI 2.1 for the AMDGPU open-source driver implementation going back years, earlier this year something changed – widely speculated to be with Valve’s involvement – that HDMI 2.1 patches began appearing for the AMDGPU driver. With the upcoming Linux 7.4 cycle, the b … ⌘ Read more

The Linux Kernel Planning To Remove Around ~55k Lines Of Old ARM Platform Code
For the current Linux 7.3 kernel many older 32-bit ARM platforms are deprecated and in turn orphaning hundreds of drivers only relevant to those out-of-date ARM platforms. The removal of that now deprecated code is planned for the next kernel cycle or two… ⌘ Read more

Nouveau Preparations For HDMI 2.1 DSC, AMD HDMI FreeSync Fixes For Linux 7.4
Last week’s set of DRM-Misc-Next changes submitted to DRM-Next with targeting the upcoming Linux 7.4 kernel cycle features HDMI 2.1 related work for both the AMDGPU kernel driver as well as the Nouveau open-source NVIDIA driver… ⌘ Read more

How US Campaigns Are Already Using AI to Try to Sway Voters
39 U.S. congressional candidates “reported paying for an OpenAI subscription this election cycle,” writes the Washington Post, citing campaign finance disclosures.

This means the campaigns “are using the technology to court voters — despite limits imposed by leading AI companies to protect elections from the technology’s risks.”

Two [candidates] sai … ⌘ Read more

Greg KH Forewarns Of “Rough” Linux 7.3 Kernel Cycle Due To Continued AI Churn
While Linux 7.3-rc1 only released this week and there are another roughly seven weeks to go until the official kernel release, Linux’s second-in-command Greg Kroah-Hartman is already warning that it’s likely to be another “rough” kernel cycle given the ongoing noise caused by AI/LLM with the increase in bug reports and kernel patches… ⌘ Read more

AI’s ‘Creepy’ Crawlers Criticized by Linux Foundation’s IT Infrastructure Director
The Linux Foundation’s director of IT infrastructure says they now spend more CPU cycles “rendering commits for scrapers than we spend on all other kinds of legitimate access.”

At any one time, across 5 geo-distributed nodes, there are 14 CPU cores doing nothing but rendering git commits as html….

[W]hen a s … ⌘ Read more

Old IBM Driver Joins Insecure SGI Drivers In Being Removed For Linux 7.3
The char/misc changes were merged this week for the Linux 7.3 cycle. While there is a lot of IIO driver churn as usual and updates to the likes of the Google Binder drivers, there continues to be the 2026 trend of removing old hardware drivers that are rarely updated these days and likely have no active users left on the mainline Linux kernel. This trend is further pushed along by the surplus of AI/LLM-generated bug reports and patches … ⌘ Read more

AppArmor In Linux 7.3 Adds Support For User-Space Compressed Policies
The AppArmor improvements have been merged for Linux 7.3 for this kernel security module providing per-program Linux application security controls around system resources. Most notable this cycle is being able to load user-space compressed policies… ⌘ Read more

The Modern NTFS Linux Driver Adds Read Support For Windows System Compression (WOF)
The pull requests for the existing Paragon NTFS3 kernel driver as well as the new modern “NTFS” drivers have been submitted for the ongoing Linux 7.3 kernel cycle. Besides bug fixes, most notable among these NTFS file-system drivers are Windows System Compression “WOF” read support for the modern NTFS driver… ⌘ Read more

New AF_ALG Restrictions With Linux 7.3 Due To The Security & Maintenance Nightmare
The past few Linux kernel cycles have chipped away at AF_ALG functionality for that interface for user-space programs to access the kernel’s internal cryptography API. Linux has been dropping AF_ALG features like zero-copy support and offloading. AF_ALG was quickly deprecated in Linux 7.2 while now for Linux 7.3 it’s being further restricted… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.3 Delivers Graphics Driver Improvements From Old GPUs To Next-Gen Hardware
The Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) subsystem updates have been merged for the ongoing Linux 7.3 merge window. There is a lot of exciting GPU kernel driver improvements this cycle ranging from some notable enhancements to old AMD Radeon graphics hardware up through enabling support for some next-generation AMD graphics IP blocks to over on the Intel side where Nova Lake S graphics are being enabled by default… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.3 Makes Preparations Toward Upstreaming FAMFS File-System
The NVDIMM and direct access (DAX) patches have been merged for the Linux 7.3 cycle. Most of the DAX/NVDIMM activity this cycle is on making preparations for the upcoming submission of Micron’s FAMFS file-system… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.3 Input Subsystem Updates Merged With Security Fixes, Other Improvements
The big set of input subsystem updates were merged earlier this week for the Linux 7.3 cycle. It’s a random assortment of different improvements as well as bug/security fixes driven in part by the flow of AI/LLM generated discoveries… ⌘ Read more

Sched_ext’s Sub-Scheduler Support Now “Feature Complete” With Linux 7.3
The extensible scheduler framework “sched_ext” that allows for custom schedulers as BPF programs has been working on sub-scheduler support in recent kernel cycles. With Linux 7.3, sub-scheduler support is now deemed feature complete… ⌘ Read more

Intel Computer Vision Sensing Driver Now Ready For Nova Lake
The main set of media subsystem updates have been merged for the ongoing Linux 7.3 merge window. Notable this round is the Intel Computer Vision Sensing “CVS” driver merged the previous cycle now supporting next-gen Nova Lake platforms… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.3 Network Changes Merged But Developers “Completely Overwhelmed” Due To AI/LLMs
All of the networking subsystem feature updates were merged today for the Linux 7.3 kernel’s merge window. There are a lot of wired and wireless networking improvements this cycle but also a ton of bug fixes – including many not so important fixes spun up by AI/LLM agents. The networking subsystem maintainers admit now they are “completely overwhelmed” due to this code churn from the output of AI large language models… ⌘ Read more

Two Very Exciting Memory Management Optimizations Going Into Linux 7.3
Andrew Morton on Tuesday sent out all of the memory management “MM” updates for the Linux 7.3 merge window. The MM pull was particularly heavy as he noted 1,250 “added-to-MM” emails were sent out this cycle compared to 920 the prior cycle. With a lot of patch churn, he also turned to Google’s Gemini AI for writing his patch summaries. In going through the very verbose AI-generated summary, there are two patch series that get me excited on the performance … ⌘ Read more

EFS & FreeVxFS File-Systems Get Booted While FailFS Merged For Linux 7.3
Among the early pull requests merged today by Linus Torvalds for the Linux 7.3 kernel cycle were removal of some ancient file-systems while adding in a new pseudo file-system… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.3 On PowerPC Now Supports In-Kernel Rust, Initial Power12 Enablement Begins
The PowerPC pull request has already been sent in for the now open Linux 7.3 merge window. The headline feature this cycle on the POWER side is Rust kernel support for PowerPC 32-bit PPC32BE big endian and PowerPC 64-bit PPC64LE little endian architectures… ⌘ Read more

ARM64 BBML3 Feature Ready With Linux 7.3, NVIDIA Olympus Workarounds
AI/LLM patch craziness hurt ARM64 development for the Linux 7.2 cycle that no real features landed for that kernel version on AArch64. Fortunately, the ARM Linux developers are more prepared now and for Linux 7.3 are introducing some new ARM64 features… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.2 Released With Faster I/O, New AMD & Intel Driver Improvements
Linus Torvalds just released Linux 7.2 as stable! After a very busy kernel cycle due to the increased patch and reporting churn due to AI/LLM ages, Linux 7.2 managed to make it out today on-schedule for this feature-packed kernel. Linux 7.2 is going on to power Ubuntu 26.10 and other upcoming Linux distribution releases… ⌘ Read more

GNOME 51 Beta Released With Many Minor Improvements
The beta release of GNOME 51 is now available for testing. This cycle for the beta milestone is mostly a wide collection of minor improvements throughout the vast package set… ⌘ Read more

USB4STREAM Adding Busy Poll Option For Lower Latency At The Cost Of Increased CPU Cycles
One of the nifty new features of Linux 7.2 is USB4STREAM as an Intel-developed solution for quickly sending data between USB4 connected systems. Now for the upcoming Linux 7.3 cycle, a busy poll mode is being added to provide lower-latency data transfers at the expense of increased CPU activity… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.3 Will Treat Intel Nova Lake S Graphics As Stable
Ahead of the next-generation Intel Nova Lake processors expected to begin rolling out around the start of 2027, the upcoming Linux 7.3 kernel cycle is going to begin treating Nova Lake S processors with their integrated graphics as stable… ⌘ Read more

Earth’s Biggest Disasters Strike In a Hidden Pattern Every 27 Million Years
A new analysis of 89 major geological events over the past 260 million years found evidence that mass extinctions, volcanic eruptions, ocean crises, and other upheavals may cluster around a roughly 27.5-million-year cycle. The cause remains unknown, with possibilities ranging from mantle activity and orbital changes to spe … ⌘ Read more

AMD PMF Testing Tool Slated For Linux 7.3
Looking to be added to the Linux kernel source tree for the upcoming Linux 7.3 cycle is test_amd_pmf, a small testing application for exercising the AMD Platform Management Framework (PMF) interfaces and dumping various system data points… ⌘ Read more

AMD ROCm Committed To Six Week Release Cycle Moving Forward
One of many interesting takeaways from this week’s AMD Advancing AI event in San Francisco was word that ROCm will be on a rigid six week release cycle moving forward… ⌘ Read more

Intel Directed Package-Level Thermal Interrupts Slated For Linux 7.3
Back in March Intel software engineers began sending out Linux patches for Directed Package-Level Thermal Interrupts as a new capability with recent Intel processors. This notable efficiency improvement is now queued for introduction in the Linux 7.3 cycle once its merge window opens in a month… ⌘ Read more

🥳 Finally! After nearly 4 years, yarnd v0.16.0 “Silver Sojourner” is out! 🚀 Twt Hash v2, SQLite FTS5 search, HTMX-powered UI, first-time setup wizard and literally hundreds of bug fixes 🐛

Release notes: https://git.mills.io/yarnsocial/yarn/releases/tag/0.16.0

Upgrading is fully automatic — the Twt Hash v2 migration re-fetches all feeds on first start, so expect the first cycle to be a bit heavier. Images on Docker Hub as prologic/yarnd:0.16.0 👌

cc @kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz @abucci@anthony.buc.ci @shinyoukai@yume.laidback.moe @eldersnake@we.loveprivacy.club 🙏

AMD Begins Staging Graphics Driver Changes For Linux 7.3
In addition to Intel beginning to volley graphics driver patches for Linux 7.3, this week AMD also began sending out their pull requests of “new stuff” to DRM-Next for the Linux 7.3 kernel cycle… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.3 To Introduce DRM “Color Format” Property With AMD GPU Driver Support
While the Linux 7.2 kernel merge window is only ending later today to cap off the feature work on this next version of the Linux kernel, already for the Linux 7.3 kernel cycle later in the year there is one notable feature on the way: the DRM color format property is being introduced and being first supported by the AMDGPU kernel graphics driver… ⌘ Read more

Micron Locks In Historically High Memory Prices For Five Years
Micron has signed 16 “strategic customer agreements” (SCAs) that include a floor price the company says comes with “a very robust gross margin for Micron, well above our peak quarterly margins in any past cycle.” Most of the deals run through 2030 and cover about 40% of Micron’s revenue. The Register reports: Micron CEO, president and chairman Sa … ⌘ Read more

MGLRU Improvement Yielding Nice Gains On Linux 7.2: MongoDB 30~100% Higher Throughput
The many memory management “MM” related improvements were recently merged to Git for the Linux 7.2 kernel. As typical most kernel cycles, some of the low-level improvements can yield nice efficiency wins and better performance in different areas… ⌘ Read more

“So Many AI-Fueled Fixes” Means No New ARM64 KVM Features For Linux 7.2
The KVM virtualization-related changes were merged a few days ago for the ongoing Linux 7.2 kernel merge window. While there are a number of features/improvements for AMD and Intel virtualization as well as the likes of s390 and RISC-V, there aren’t any new features on ARM64. The lack of ARM64 feature work this cycle is being attributed to “so many AI-fueled fixes” swamping the ARM Linux developers… ⌘ Read more

On CPU Physics and CPU Cycles
Article URL: https://6it.dev/blog/on-cpu-physics-and-cpu-cycles-80730

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48513222

Points: 3

# Comments: 0 ⌘ Read more

[$] Automatic mTHP creation in 7.2
The Linux kernel has long tried to use huge pages as a way to improve
performance, sometimes with more success than others. The size of huge
pages has traditionally been imposed by the hardware, which typically only
offers a couple of relatively large options. In more recent times, though,
the use of multi-size transparent huge pages (mTHPs), with more flexible
sizing implemented in software, has been growing. If all goes well, the
7.2 development cycle will include the addition of [a new feature](h … ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.1-rc7 Released: Stable Hopefully Next Sunday
Last week Linux 7.1-rc6 was larger than Linus Torvalds wished for and for Linux 7.1-rc7 it has come in still heavier than typically seen this late in the cycle, but is shrinking and making Linus comfortable in hopefully releasing Linux 7.1 stable next Sunday… ⌘ Read more

Do Women’s Mate Preferences Change Across the Ovulatory Cycle? A Meta-Analysis [pdf]
Article URL: https://www.martiehaselton.com/_files/ugd/3ae410_aeb76edab75f457aae0c14c4c68d93c0.pdf

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48423541

Points: 8

# Comments: 3 ⌘ Read more

Linux DRM Ioctl Developed By AMD Being Disabled Following Ongoing Security Issue
It’s unfortunately another busy week in the Linux 7.1 kernel space with not everything slowing down so well, late in the cycle and leading to the upcoming 7.1 stable release. This week’s DRM pull request of kernel graphics/accelerator drivers is again heavy on fixes and also ends up disabling an ioctl interface given ongoing security concerns from that code merged last year… ⌘ Read more

Ubuntu 26.10 To Begin Laying Foundation For Context-Aware Desktop, Other New Features
Jean Baptiste Lallement of the Canonical Desktop Team today posted a roadmap of many development items they are hoping to tackle for Ubuntu 26.10 due out in October. Some of these desktop plans are more ambitious and will take multiple release cycles to fully realize, but it goes to show their continued investment into the Ubuntu desktop… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.2 Proceeding To Deprecate AF_ALG Due To “Massive Attack Surface”, Drops Offloading
The Linux kernel’s AF_ALG interface for user-space applications to directly access the Linux kernel’s built-in cryptographic engine is proceeding with a quick deprecation cycle due to a “massive attack surface” with increased vulnerabilities coming to light due to AI/LLM-based tooling… ⌘ Read more

Kernel prepatch 7.1-rc6
The 7.1-rc6 kernel prepatch is out for
testing. Linus said: “Well, I wouldn’t call this ‘small’, but it is
certainly smaller than rc5 was. And I don’t think there’s anything
particularly scary here, so maybe we’re still on track for a normal release
cycle. Let’s see.” ⌘ Read more

Linux Networking Still Seeing “Significantly Bigger” Pull Requests Due To AI
Last week’s collection of networking subsystem fixes for Linux 7.1 noted craziness continuing with no end in sight with a large pull request of fixes with many of them spurred on by AI/LLM coding agents. This week it’s “significantly bigger” than prior kernel cycles for this late stage of kernel development due to this assistance of large language models… ⌘ Read more

Btrfs Change Coming For Linux 7.2 Yields Very Healthy Performance Gain
A change coming on the way for the upcoming Linux 7.2 kernel cycle is yielding a significant improvement to the direct I/O write performance. While a big gain, technically it’s a regression fix after a change mistakenly dropped the behavior several years ago… ⌘ Read more

Intel To Support DRM Background Color Property With Linux 7.2
Introduced in Linux 7.1 is a dedicated CRTC background color property for DRM graphics/display drivers. The “BACKGROUND_COLOR” property can be used with capable drivers and display controllers as the default background color when not covered by any plane or from transparent regions of higher planes. With the upcoming Linux 7.2 kernel cycle, the Intel DRM driver will begin supporting this background color property… ⌘ Read more