Patches Posted With Aim To Mainline Linux Kernel Support For The Amazon Kindle 4
Amazon released the Kindle 4 back in 2011 with a 6-inch E-ink display, 2GB internal storage, and running a modified version of Linux. In the years since the Amazon Kindle 4 has been jail-broken and there are some customized Linux distributions with a patched kernel to run on the Kindle 4. Now in 2026 there are patches on the Linux kernel mailing list looking to mainline support for that fifteen year old e-reader device… ⌘ Read more

No Rolling Power Outages for California Since 2020 - Thanks to 17,000 MW of New Battery Storage
“Californians just made it through the hottest August on record without having to endure any rolling power outages,” reports the Los Angeles Times. In fact, the state hasn’t implemented rotating power outages since 2020.

Because “Over the last few years, California has quietly but drama … ⌘ Read more

Amazon to Acquire DuckLabs, Adding the Team Behind DuckDB
Amazon has agreed to acquire DuckLabs, bringing the team behind the popular open-source DuckDB database into AWS. “The deal fits Amazon’s broader push to turn S3, its flagship cloud storage service, into a place where customers analyze data rather than just store it,” reports GeekWire. “It gives Amazon a team experienced in building fast, lightweight anal … ⌘ Read more

Apple Announces New Mac Mini With M6 and M5 Pro Chips
Apple has unveiled a new Mac mini with either its new M6 chip or the M5 Pro chip released earlier this year. It adds faster CPU, GPU, storage, and AI performance along with Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6, and 2.5Gb Ethernet as standard. There’s also a new higher starting price of $899, which is up from the previous $799 base price and far above the $599 starting price of th … ⌘ Read more

Amazon Hikes Hardware Prices By 60%, Blaming Memory Shortage
Amazon has raised the prices of its hardware devices by as much as 60%, blaming “significant increases in memory and storage component costs.” TechCrunch reports: The price explosion impacted Fire TVs, Echos, Kindles, and Eeros. One egregious example that’s been cited is that of the Echo Dot, one of Amazon’s cheapest smart speakers, the price of which jumpe … ⌘ Read more

Supply Chain Issues Delaying US Grid Batteries’ Installation
Falling prices have made grid-scale storage batteries more attractive, reports Bloomberg. But after decades of stagnant investment, America’s grids “are racing to make the upgrades needed to plug them in,” with supplies straining for the necessary equipment.

Demand for batteries has skyrocketed as electricity use across the U.S. swells, driven by dat … ⌘ Read more

IOmap Improvement For Linux 7.3 Takes EXT4 & XFS Performance Further
As part of the VFS pull requests now merged to the Linux 7.3 development kernel was an improvement to the IOmap framework used by various file-systems for mapping logical file byte offsets in memory to their physical locations on storage. With the now-merged code, this modern block mapping framework is allowing better performance at least for the EXT4 file-system… ⌘ Read more

Judge Sets Framework For Nine PBS to Retrieve 70 Years of Archival TV Data
District Court Judge Eric Elliff has ordered Iron Mountain to cooperate with Nine PBS in recovering roughly 50TB of archival material stored through now-defunct vendor OSS. “He found that the station is the rightful owner of the materials and entitled to recover them from OSS’ storage systems,” reports Current.org. Nine PB … ⌘ Read more

PBS Station Fears Losing 50TB of Data After Being Ghosted By Cloud Provider
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: After its cloud storage provider went defunct, a PBS affiliate decided to sue a data center provider to regain access to 50TB of TV shows, videos, and other data dating back 70 years. As reported this week by Current, a trade newspaper covering public broadcasting, S … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Responds to Outcry After Quietly Installing Beta ‘Photos’ App on Enterprise Machines
Microsoft’s cloud storage app OneDrive got a new Photos app in the worst possible way, reports the blog Neowin . “The app is reportedly showing up even on Windows 11 Enterprise machines, despite apparently being a beta application aimed at consumer functionality.”

One admin questioned why … ⌘ Read more

America’s First Grid-Scale Sodium-Ion Battery Plant Gets Its First Big Test
“In a milestone for energy storage technology, Peak Energy has selected Sacramento, California, as the home of America’s first manufacturing facility dedicated to grid-scale sodium-ion battery systems,” according to the sustainability news site Intelligent Living.

The move “represents the first large-scale test of whethe … ⌘ Read more

NVMe Polishes Its Specs, Brings Virtualization to Locally Attached SSDs
The latest NVMe specifications add SSD-level virtualization that can simplify live VM migration by preserving storage identities across servers. The updates also introduce support for post-quantum cryptography, controller-based rate limiting, voltage monitoring, and factory-reset capabilities. The Register reports: Announced by t … ⌘ Read more

Sandisk and SK Hynix Publish First Open High Bandwidth Flash Standard
BrianFagioli writes: Sandisk and SK hynix have published the first open technical specification for High Bandwidth Flash (HBF) through the Open Compute Project. HBF is designed to create a new memory tier between High Bandwidth Memory and traditional SSD storage, giving AI inference systems more near compute capacity without relying … ⌘ Read more

AMD EPYC Turin With PCIe 5.0 Storage Shows Off Nice Gains On Linux 7.2
Earlier this week was an exciting look at Intel Xe3 graphics performance gains on Linux 7.2 with Intel Core Ultra Series 3 “Panther Lake” hardware. On the other side of the table, with AMD hardware on this forthcoming kernel an area to be excited about are some I/O improvements at least for 5th Gen EPYC with speedy PCIe Gen5 NVMe SSD storage. ⌘ Read more

Cryptsetup 2.8.7 Released To Deal With Fallout Of Linux’s Rushed AF_ALG Deprecation
Linux’s cryptsetup for configuring and managing encrypted storage devices is ready with a new version as the developers work to deal with the recent deprecation of the Linux AF_ALG interface… ⌘ Read more

Stratis Storage Anaconda Integration Approved For Fedora 45
The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has approved the latest batch of features for the upcoming Fedora 45 release… ⌘ Read more

Fedora 45 Looks To Finally Offer Install Support For Stratis Storage
Ever since RHEL deprecated their short-lived Btrfs plans, Red Hat engineers over the past decade have been developing Stratis Storage as their storage management solution leveraging XFS, LUKS, DM, and their Rust-based daemon. While Stratis Storage has been available in Fedora Linux going all the way back to Fedora 28, until now there hasn’t been the option of using it for the root file-system on new Fedora installations. Finally with Fedora 45 … ⌘ Read more

Apple Raises Prices On Macs, iPads, and More By Hundreds of Dollars
Apple has sharply raised prices across its Mac, iPad, HomePod, and Apple TV lineups as surging AI-driven demand creates a global memory and storage shortage. Increases range from $30 for the HomePod mini to $1,300 for the M3 Ultra Mac Studio, with Apple CEO Tim Cook saying efforts to shield customers from higher costs had become “unsustainabl … ⌘ Read more

Steam Machine Launches, Priced $1049 To $1428 USD
Valve today finally revealed pricing on their SteamOS Linux-powered Steam Machine living room PC. Given the ongoing RAM and storage pricing pressure, the Steam Machine pricing comes in at the high-end… ⌘ Read more

The Secret Revolution in Battery Technology: 3-D Printing
“There’s a revolution in battery technology hiding in plain sight,” reports The Wall Street Journal. “The 3-D printing of batteries has the potential to put energy storage inside any device.

“This will enable lightweight and long-lasting consumer gadgets, long-range military drones and even nanoscale robots.”
Almost all the innovations we regularly hear ab … ⌘ Read more

Linux’s ARM64 NEON Intrinsics CRC64 Code Adapted To Work On 32-bit ARM
Merged for Linux 7.1 was ARMM64 NEON-accelerated CRC64-NVMe support for around 6x the performance out of that checksumming algorithm. The generic code had been a bottleneck in NVMe and other storage subsystem code of the Linux kernel with CRC64-NVMe being used to help verify against data corruption. Now for Linux 7.2, the NEON-accelerated code will also work for those still relying on 32-bit ARM… ⌘ Read more

Tim Cook Says Apple Price Increases Are ‘Unavoidable’ Due To Memory Costs
An anonymous reader quotes a report from MacRumors: Apple is raising its prices to offset the high cost of memory and storage, CEO Tim Cook told The Wall Street Journal. Apple is no longer able to absorb the increased prices and will need to pass some of the cost on to consumers. “Unfortunately, price increases are unavoidable,” s … ⌘ Read more

Epic Games Announces Lore Open-Source Version Control System
Epic Games has released Lore, an MIT-licensed version control system written in Rust and designed specifically for “games and entertainment purposes with large file sizes,” reports Phoronix. From the report: While there is Git LFS for large file storage with Git, Epic Games has crated Lore as a version control system designed entirely around the large fi … ⌘ Read more

IO_uring, NVMe & Other Block + Device Mapper Changes Merged For Linux 7.2
Linux 7.2 continues seeing a fair amount of storage-related changes from file-systems to the block device code itself, software RAID, the wonderful IO_uring interface, and more. Here is some of the latest feature work that has been merged for Linux 7.2… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.2 Optimization Shows +5% IOPS For EXT4 & XFS After Moving Around Two Lines Of Code
In addition to the surprising impact of /proc/filesystems read optimizations for Linux 7.2, another one of the VFS pull requests for this next kernel version is delivering some nice improvements for EXT4 and XFS around IOmap, the framework that maps file data offsets in memory to their physical locations on storage… ⌘ Read more

[$] An overlayfs update
In a shortened session in the filesystem track at the 2026 Linux Storage,\
Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit, Amir Goldstein gave an
update on the overlayfs\
union filesystem. There are some new features over the last few years
that he wanted to mention, along with looking at the status of nesting
overlayfs layers. The composefs use case
that was [discussed at th … ⌘ Read more

Genesis takes Unit 5 offline as hydro storage lifts
Genesis Energy is shutting down its 400-megawatt Huntly Unit 5 from July 1 to Dec 31 to make gas available to commercial and industrial users.

It is another sign the sector believes it will get through winter without an energy shortfall, given high hydro storage levels and the exist … ⌘ Read more

AMD Support Being Added To UFS Host Controller PCI Driver In Linux 7.2
Linux’s ufshcd-pci as the Universal Flash Storage host controller PCI driver has supported a variety of Intel devices to this point while for Linux 7.2 the first AMD device is set to be added… ⌘ Read more

[$] An update on fanotify
In a filesystem-track session at the 2026 Linux Storage,\
Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit, Amir Goldstein updated
attendees on the fanotify
filesystem-event monitoring
subsystem. He wanted to describe changes that had come in the last year or
so, as well as upcoming features and some remaining challenges in his
efforts [to use fanotify for hierarchical\
storage management](https://lwn.net/Ar … ⌘ Read more

‘Extremely vile’: Russia strikes Chernobyl nuclear plant as Zelensky meets European leaders
A drone blasted a fuel storage facility at the decommissioned nuclear power plant in Ukraine on the eve of talks in London about the need for stronger air defence. ⌘ Read more

Used Waymo Robotaxi Batteries Become Backup Storage For Power Grids
Waymo and B2U Storage Solutions have struck a “strategic supply agreement” to repurpose used batteries from Waymo’s electric robotaxi fleet into stationary storage for California and Texas power grids. The arrangement could give robotaxi batteries a second life storing renewable energy after they’re no longer suitable for vehicle use. I … ⌘ Read more

Meridian rejects Energy Minister’s concerns in late-stage fast-track submission
As Meridian Energy welcomes the fast-track panel’s draft decision to ease access restrictions on Lake Pūkaki hydro storage for a three-year period, new documents show it rejected concerns raised by the Energy Minister over electricity security of sup … ⌘ Read more

Castor: CERN Advanced STORage Manager
Article URL: https://castor.web.cern.ch/content/home.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48403753

Points: 11

# Comments: 1 ⌘ Read more

From Uber to Exaba: AJ Tills takes on Big Tech storage
When it comes to scaling high‑growth tech companies, AJ Tills has been in the engine room. ⌘ Read more

Liam Neeson & Joe Keery’s New Sci-Fi Horror Sets Streaming Release Date
Joe Keery and Liam Neeson‘s 2026 sci-fi horror movie Cold Storage has set its streaming release date. The movie originally debuted in US theaters on February 13, 2026. The film received mostly positive reviews on release, though it made little impact at the box office. Cold Storage gets streaming release date on MGM+ Cold Storage […]

The post [Liam Neeson & Joe Keery’s New Sci-Fi Horror Sets Stre … ⌘ Read more

[$] BPF in the agentic era
Alexei Starovoitov gave “less of a presentation, more of a scream of
realization” at the BPF track of the 2026
Linux Storage, Filesystem,\
Memory-Management, and BPF Summit. He shared a set of ideas for how BPF could
change to avoid being swept away by the sea-change in programming represented by modern
large language models (LLMs) and the coding agents based on them.
In a follow-up session, the discussion covered
more problems with how coding agents use tools … ⌘ Read more

[$] Caching for extended attributes
Extended\
attributes (xattrs) provide a way to attach key/value metadata to
inodes—files, directories, and the like—in a filesystem. As with many
Linux filesystems, the FUSE filesystem
supports xattrs. In a filesystem-track session at the 2026 Linux Storage,\
Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit, FUSE maintainer Miklos
Szeredi led a discussion a … ⌘ Read more

[$] Representing the true signatures of kernel functions
Optimizing compilers can, under some circumstances, infer when a parameter to a
function is not needed, and remove it. This is all well and good until the
kernel’s tracing or BPF subsystems need information on how to call the function
or where its arguments are stored.
Alan Maguire and Yonghong Song spoke at the 2026
Linux\
Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit about their work on
recording information regarding c … ⌘ Read more

Dell Rivals Apple’s MacBook Neo With $699 Touchscreen XPS 13 Laptop
Dell has introduced a redesigned $699 XPS 13 aimed squarely at Apple’s budget MacBook Neo, offering a premium aluminum design, touch display, backlit keyboard, Wi-Fi 7, 512GB of base storage, and various other configuration options. Dell’s machine costs more than Apple’s entry model but tries to justify the difference with lighter weight, … ⌘ Read more

Renewable Energy is Surging in Africa
Almost a fifth of the earth’s population lives in Africa. And Africa’s next generation of power projects “is increasingly being built around solar and wind power and battery storage,” reports the Associated Press, “as governments and investors shift away from coal and large hydropower dams in search of cheaper, faster and more reliable electricity.”

The shift is visible in a $1.5 billion energy … ⌘ Read more

Energy Minister Simeon Brown opposes Meridian’s Pūkaki storage bid
Energy Minister Simeon Brown has made a late intervention opposing Meridian Energy’s fast-track application to use more water from Lake Pūkaki, warning the proposal in its current form could weaken the electricity system’s dry-year security while gas supply declines and wider market reforms remain unresolved.

The intervention puts the Government directly at odds with Meridian over one of the co … ⌘ Read more

[$] Policies for merging new filesystems
In a filesystem-track session at the 2026 Linux Storage,\
Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit, Amir Goldstein wanted to
discuss his proposed\
documentation on adding new filesystems to the kernel. There are a
number of unmaintained and untestable filesystems already in the kernel,
which are a burden to VFS-layer developers who are trying to make sweeping
changes, suc … ⌘ Read more

[$] Separating memory descriptors from struct page
The kernel’s memory-management subsystem is currently partway through a
multi-year project to replace the page structure (which represents
a page of physical memory) with memory\
descriptors. At the 2026 Linux Storage,\
Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit, Vishal Moola ran a
fast-paced session in the memory-management track to describe the current
state of that work and wha … ⌘ Read more

Andrew Morton’s 2004 OLS keynote
I recently presented a brief tribute to Andrew Morton at the 2026 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory\
Management, and BPF Summit; it included a suggestion that reading (or
re-reading) his 2004 Ottawa Linux Symposium keynote would be instructive.
This talk, given immediately after the Kernel\
Summit session that decided to fundamentally change the kernel’s
development model, tells a lot about how the kernel project got to where … ⌘ Read more

15 Best Travel Toiletry Bags, Tested Over Many Miles (2026)
Our team evaluated a ton of toiletry bags to find the best storage, organization, and design options for all your essentials. ⌘ Read more

[$] Better automatic management of transparent huge pages
Huge pages can improve performance by increasing translation lookaside
buffer (TLB) utilization and reducing memory-management overhead.
Transparent huge pages (THPs) are supposed to make huge-page usage,
well, transparent, Nico Pache said at the beginning of his session in the
memory-management track of the 2026 Linux Storage,\
Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit. That transparency has
never worked as well as many wo … ⌘ Read more

[$] Reviewing kernel patches with LLMs
In a plenary session at
the
2026 Linux Storage,\
Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit, the state of patch
review using large language models (LLMs) was discussed. It is a topic that has been swirling around in the
kernel community for much of the year. The plenary, which was led by Roman
Gushchin, Chris Mason, Josef Bacik, and Sasha Levin, resulted in a quite bit
of discussion, so much that a second fil … ⌘ Read more

[$] Tier-aware memory-controller limits
Joshua Hahn began his session in the memory-management track of the 2026 Linux Storage,\
Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit by saying that the memory
controller for control groups is intended to provide resource allocation,
accounting, and protection from interference by other tasks. But
it was not really designed for tiered-memory systems; he is looking for a
way to improve that situation. ⌘ Read more

[$] Custom page-cache policies with BPF
The kernel’s page cache is charged with maintaining pages (or, more
correctly, folios) containing copies of
data from files in the filesystem; its performance has a big effect on the
performance of the system as a whole. One of the key decisions the kernel
must make is when to evict folios from the page cache. At the 2026 Linux Storage,\
Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit, Tal Zussman ran a
memory-ma … ⌘ Read more

[$] Toward better handling of major page faults
A major page fault occurs when a process attempts to access a page that is
not currently present in RAM; satisfying such faults usually involves I/O, and can thus take some time. When many threads
sharing an address space are generating page faults, the result can be
significant lock contention while that I/O
takes place. During the memory-management track at the 2026 Linux Storage,\
Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit, Barry Son … ⌘ Read more