Intel Compiler Engineer Shares Latest Project Gains For APX
Last week at the GNU Tools Cauldron 2026 conference in Prague there was an x86 BOF with presentations both by AMD and Intel compiler engineers. There are a few interesting nuggets out of that with both Advanced Performance Extensions (APX) and AI Compute Extensions (ACE) talked about as part of their ongoing enablement in the GCC compiler… ⌘ Read more
You have to try the new demo for Glory On Pluto, a chaotic rocket engine numbers-go-up space roguelite
I played the previous demo builds of Glory On Pluto far too much, and so you all have to join me in being hooked on this one.
Read the full article on [GamingOnLinux](https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2026/10/you-have-to-try-the-new-demo- … ⌘ Read more
My mate and I went on a hike on Saturday to Germany’s probably most famous tiniest hamlet. Well, not even hamlet, much smaller. It’s a farm (087) and a closed train station (088, 096-102). Okay, and four other houses. But that’s it. Durlesbach is known from the old folk song „Auf de schwäbsche Eisebahne“, literally “On the Swabian Railway”. According to the German Wikipedia article the German Folk Song Archive counts about 100 variants on the lyrics with up to 27 verses. The song enumerates a few stations and the most common version is about a farmer who ties his goat to the back of a train in order to save the freight costs. Alternatively, he’s used to that from previous ox cart trips where the goat just follows along. Of course, the goat doesn’t make it and the angry farmer throws the disembodied goat head at the conductor.
The weather was perfect. Sunny and clouds alternating, lower twenty-something degrees Celcius. Very beautiful. We took the train to Aulendorf and started our hike.
The level railway crossing in 051-054 is always closed and only opened on demand. I didn’t even know that this kind existed. But it’s really quiet there. We pressed the lever to call the train dispatcher who then opened the barriers for us. A few seconds later we told him that we successfully reached the other side and he closed them again. We were confused at first because the sign said only for authorized personnel and we were just two random hikers. But we gave it a shot and the dispatcher was super nice, no worries at all.
The river is always the Schussen. 092-094 is the creek Durlesbach, entering the Schussen, though. The Durlesbach station is now privately owned, unfortunately. However, it’s nicely kept in shape and there’s a cool monument with a historic steam engine, two wagons and four bronze figures reenacting the scene where the farmer is about to tie his goat, being observed by his wife and the conductor.
You can get all sorts of drinks in exchange for a donation at the display. These proceeds are used for the upkeep. I had an ACE juice which was absolutely delicious. A few hundred meters after we continued, I thought that I really should have bought a second one. It was just too good.
In Mochenwagen, we took the train back to Aulendorf. The Mochenwangen replacement service (we luckily didn’t have to take it, in fact, no idea when it is really in place) is 800 meters away from the train station. That fucking nuts.
We then changed trains to Ulm, just because that one arrived two minutes after we reached Aulendorf. But we spontaneously exited early in Biberach because we had some time to kill for the actual train to Stuttgart. The train station underpass there has some really beautiful graffiti. Shortly after, my second camera battery was flattened, too.
Going home worked out amazingly. When I switched again in Geislingen, my connecting train was already waiting on the other platform. 15 seconds before scheduled departure, the doors closed. One second to departure, we took off. That’s very rare nowadays and it was kind of magical to witness this first hand looking at the station clock.
Sorry for the many photos. I was busy sifting through them and only kept about 20%. Still too many, I know. Enjoy, nevertheless: https://lyse.isobeef.org/2026-10-03-wanderung-von-aulendorf-ueber-durlesbach-nach-mochenwangen/
Meta Rushed To Fix Muse ‘VM Escape’ Vulnerability Soon Before Launch
An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: In the immediate weeks before Muse’s launch, Meta engineers found several security vulnerabilities in the company’s viral AI agent product, at least one of which could have allowed malicious users to break outside of Muse’s intended environment and access Meta’s own sensitive databases and … ⌘ Read more
After Siemens Re-Licenses OpenRadioss, Rocky Linux Announces Open-Source Fork
- In 2022 Altair Engineering open sourced “OpenRadioss”, an industry-leading finite element solver under the GNU AGPL License, reports Phoronix.
- Siemens acquired Altair Engineering last year
- Siemens closes access to OpenRadioss.
“Siemens didn’t just end the project but they shutdown the GitHub repository that ho … ⌘ Read more
How Python Will Test Adding Rust Into CPython
Python’s security developer-in-residence Seth Larson reports from this year’s official core developer Python Language Summit:
“No one said ‘don’t do this’ last year”. After testing the waters at PyCon US 2025, [software engineer] David Hewitt returned to the Python Language Summit asking what Python core developers want from Rust, along with proposed timelines, phases, and s … ⌘ Read more
OpenCourant: Rocky Linux Developers Create Community Fork Of OpenRadioss
This week was the surprising and unfortunate decision of Siemens shutting down the OpenRadioss project as the four year old open-source project started by Altair Engineering with their prominent Radioss finite element solver. Siemens didn’t just end the project but they shutdown the GitHub repository that hosted the open-source code and removed other resources that had built around it. Fortunately, there’s a new community fork of OpenRadioss … ⌘ Read more
Long-Time Slashdot Reader Announces New Open Source Web Browser ‘Northstar’
Long-time Slashdot reader Andreas® announces Northstar, a “minimalist” web browser written entirely from scratch in C — now available in version 1.0.11:
One window, one page, one process — about 160,000 lines of original C, small enough for one person to read and audit end-to-end. It carries no upstream browser engine: no … ⌘ Read more
Linux Patches Show Promising Results For Lower Latency Of Short Slice Tasks
Linaro engineer Vincent Guittot sent out a set of patches on Friday working on scheduling latency improvements, especially when multiple short slice tasks are running concurrently on the same system… ⌘ Read more
Ubuntu’s Next Rust Effort May See OpenPGP Replaced By Sequoia PGP
Canonical engineer Richard Scott McNew published a status update surrounding the Rust programming language efforts in the upcoming Ubuntu 26.10 release. Sequoia PGP is being rolled out to Ubuntu Linux and in a future release may end up replacing OpenPGP… ⌘ Read more
Siemens Slams The Door Shut On Promising Open-Source Radioss Project
As a major disappointment to the open-source community, Siemens has decided to end – and close-up access – to the OpenRadioss project as the open-source version opened up by Altair Engineering under the GNU AGPL License back in 2022. This was an open-source version of the industry-leading finite element solver that Altair developed. Siemens acquired Altair Engineering last year and have now completely shut the door on OpenRadioss… ⌘ Read more
Qualcomm Continues Doing More For Their Open-Source Linux Graphics Drivers
Rob Clark, who originally started working on the reverse-engineering Freedreno and MSM DRM graphics driver projects prior to even being employed by Qualcomm, presented this week at XDC 2026 Toronto around all the recent efforts they have been pursuing at Qualcomm for this upstream open-source graphics driver stack… ⌘ Read more
Proposal To Set ARM64 Kernel Stack Size At Boot Time To Reduce Memory Consumption
A proposal was posted this week to the Linux kernel mailing list by a Google engineer to make it easier for ARM64 Linux to adjust the kernel stack size. The motivation for doing so to configure the kernel stack size during boot time is on reducing system memory consumption… ⌘ Read more
Meta Releases OpenZL 0.3 With Decompression Speed 144% Faster Than Zstd
Just shy of one year ago Meta announced OpenZL as a format-ware compression framework focused on delivering both high compression ratios and high speed compression/decompression. OpenZL has continued making more optimizations and out today is OpenZL v0.3 and advertising some huge gains over Zstandard (Zstd) that is also worked on by Meta engineers… ⌘ Read more
AMD Ryzen Zen 6 CPU Power Values Being Further Tuned For Linux
AMD engineers continue to prepare for upcoming Zen 6 powered Ryzen client processors on Linux… ⌘ Read more
SpaceX Launches Starship Into Orbit
SpaceX’s Starship reached orbit for the first time, successfully deploying 26 operational Starlink V3 satellites after overcoming an early Raptor 3 engine shutdown during ascent. “SpaceX plans to eventually deploy 100,000 upgraded Starlink V3s to expand the company’s wireless satellite internet services,” notes Space.com. Here’s the latest update from the report:
SpaceX has decided to return Starship … ⌘ Read more
New Tin-based Solar Cells Trap Heat 1,000 Times Longer, Could Beat 33% Limit
Could this push solar cell efficiency beyond the theoretical 33% limit? Interesting Engineering reports:
Researchers at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands found that tin-based perovskite solar cells can slow heat loss from high-energy “hot electrons…”
When sunlight strikes a panel, photons jump-start elect … ⌘ Read more
AI Finds So Many Linux Bugs, Canonical Changes to a Two-Week Stable Release Update Cycle
“Finding vulnerabilities faster also puts pressure on Linux distributions to fix and deliver patches faster,” writes Slashdot reader BrianFagioli
AI has transformed bug discovery from “a manual, time-intensive process into a highly automated engine,” notes Canonical’s blog, leading to a “recent expl … ⌘ Read more
AMD Posts GCC Compiler Patches For AVX10V1AUX ISA Support
Following their recent AVX10_V2_AUX support for GCC as part of the bring-up for the AI Compute Extensions “ACE” in GCC 17, AMD compiler engineers this week posted the initial patches for enabling the AVX10V1AUX ISA support… ⌘ Read more
KDE Plasma 6.8 Beta 2 Released With Union Theming Engine Maturing
Following the KDE Plasma 6.8 Beta from earlier this month, the second and last beta of the upcoming Plasma 6.8 desktop is now available for testing… ⌘ Read more
Intel Developing Their DXVK-IGDEXT For Improved Linux Gaming On Arc Graphics
Intel engineers have been quietly developing dxvk-igdext as their own component for DXVK Direct3D 8 / 9 / 10 / 11 atop the Vulkan API for leveraging Intel Direct3D 11 Graphics Extensions… ⌘ Read more
Qualcomm Posts Open-Source GPU Driver Patches For Adreno 850 One Day After Announcement
Yesterday Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 as quite an interesting mobile SoC. The Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 features Adreno 850 graphics and already one-day later their engineers are out with initial Linux kernel patches for bringing up the A850 with the MSM kernel driver… ⌘ Read more
Are Students Suddenly Losing Interest in Computer Science as AI Coding Takes Off?
On academic mentoring platform Nova Learning, Computer Science and AI, “once the dominant choice among students… is losing ground fast, while Engineering has nearly doubled its share.” It’s a small survey, but “The steepest proportional decline is in Software & Data Science, the most traditional ‘learn to code’ … ⌘ Read more
Gravity Linux Aims To Provide A Nice Experience For Apple M4 & Newer
There’s a new Linux distribution focused on supporting Linux on Apple Silicon Macs. Gravity Linux is this new distribution that is a spin of Fedora Remix and is catering to the still-experimentally-supported Apple M4 Macs and newer. In addition to leveraging Asahi Linux code and reverse engineering, Gravity Linux also leverages OpenAI Codex and Claude Code… ⌘ Read more
Orphaned VMs: Running VMs Uninterrupted While Host Kernel Is Offline For Reboots/Updates
Here’s some very intriguing work taking place by a Google engineer… With the hyperscalers and other cloud providers pushing for zero-downtime, a set of experimental patches for “Orphaned VMs” allow for the virtual machines to continue to run while the host kernel is offline for security updates or rebooting with the Live Update Orchestrator. The experimental patches and request for feedback from other Linux kernel stakeho … ⌘ Read more
AI Insiders Issue New Warnings - Including Former Anthropic Engineer Jacob Coxon
Neither OpenAI or Anthropic is acting responsibly, warned AI researcher Jacob Coxon when resigning last week from Anthropic. But just hours earlier, OpenAI VP of Research Aidan Clark had posted “For the first time, I am asking myself if things are moving too fast. I’m honestly not sure, but I am sure that it would be go … ⌘ Read more
Rust is Now a ‘Tier One’ Language at Microsoft
The Register reports:
When Microsoft’s developers and engineers sit down to code, they can now choose to work in Rust, which Redmond has added to its list of canonical languages. “Rust now is a Tier One language at Microsoft, and that just means that it sits among C++, C# and TypeScript as the best supported languages for internal development in the company,” explained Victor … ⌘ Read more
Mir/Wayland-Powered Miracle-WM 0.11 Released With New Overview Mode, Window Urgency
Canonical engineer Matthew Kosarek rolled out Miracle-WM 0.11 today as an end-of-summer update to this Wayland compositor built atop the Mir library… ⌘ Read more
Linux Randomly Picking Idle CPU Cores Shows Modest Win On High Core Count Systems
Arm engineer Christian Loehle sent out a patch series today proposing that the Linux scheduler code randomize its picking of equally shallow idle CPU cores. This randomization is showing to deliver a win at least for high CPU core counts for better distributing workloads… ⌘ Read more
Cops Searched Thousands of Flock Cameras for Reasons of ‘LMAO,’ ‘IDK,’ ‘Hehe,’ And ‘Asdfg’
404 Media reports:
Last summer, a cop with the Lake County, Indiana Sheriff’s Department used Flock’s surveillance search engine to look for a license plate across more than 19,000 cameras in 1,558 cities and towns. The cop’s stated reason for the search, according to a record of Flock’s system, was “LMAO. … ⌘ Read more
AMD Preparing Linux For Enhanced SMT Protection “ESMTP” For EPYC VMs
AMD engineers today sent out patches on the Linux kernel mailing list for beginning to enable Enhanced SMT Protection “ESMTP” for better security with virtual machines running atop EPYC server processors with SEV-SNP… ⌘ Read more
Male Fruit Fly Brain Trained to Play Doom
Last week, Google announced that it managed to produce a detailed 3D reconstruction of an adult male fruit fly’s brain and central nervous system. A few days later a software engineer at Coinbase said the fly brain was being trained to play the original Doom. “Each Doom frame stimulates sensory neurons,” says Alex Wormuth. “Neural activity is mapped to game controls. Damage triggers a stimu … ⌘ Read more
AI Made A Lot Of “Hideous” Code But Found Major Bottlenecks For Faster Linux Compilation
An ARM Linux engineer leveraged AI/LLMs to help uncover some improvements to “significant speed up” the Linux kernel build times. In the process the LLM used generated “a lot of code, much of it hideous” but in the end was used to find some very significant time savings for faster kernel builds via more task parallelization in different areas of the kernel build process… ⌘ Read more
Google Engineer Accused of Polymarket Insider Trading Says He Was Just Gambling
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Michele Spagnuolo, the Google engineer arrested in May by U.S. authorities for alleged insider trading on Polymarket, is making a new bold bet. On Wednesday, his legal team filed a motion to dismiss the charges against him. Spagnuolo isn’t outright denying that he made mo … ⌘ Read more
Perplexity Will Open Source Its Faster Lily AI Engine For Apple Silicon
BrianFagioli writes: Perplexity has built a local artificial intelligence engine designed specifically for Apple silicon and the Qwen3.6-35B-A3B model. Called Lily, the engine uses a Rust runtime and custom Metal kernels, with neither PyTorch nor MLX in its execution path. Perplexity says Lily averaged 23 percent faster pro … ⌘ Read more
Wadjet Eye Games reveal vampire RPG ‘Nighthawks’ to release September 22
Nighthawks from developer The Curiosity Engine and publisher Wadjet Eye Games looks really interesting and it’s now set for release on September 22nd.
Read the full article on [GamingOnLinux](https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2026/09/wadjet-eye-games-reveal-vampire-rpg-nighthawks-to-release-septemb … ⌘ Read more
Who Is John Ternus, the New Apple CEO?
John Ternus has officially taken over as Apple CEO after 15 years under Tim Cook, stepping up from his role as senior vice president of hardware engineering. A 25-year Apple veteran who helped oversee products including AirPods, Apple Watch, Vision Pro, Apple silicon, and the new MacBook Neo, Ternus now inherits the challenge of pushing Apple forward in AI while Cook stays on as executive chairm … ⌘ Read more
Linux Gets A Reverse-Engineered Driver For ASUS ROG NVMe Enclosure RGB Lighting
If you are into RGB lighting, you can even find NVMe external enclosures these days with RGB LEDs like the ASUS ROG Strix Arion. Now thanks to reverse engineering there is a Linux driver for allowing the RGB lighting controls for the ASUS ROG Strix Arion NVMe enclosure… ⌘ Read more
Literally just a day after Elon came out with his legal threats towards all of Nitter and people like me complained about it, Open AI decides to no longer work with Cursor (acquired by Space X), explicitly saying it’s because Elon wouldn’t stop breaking their signed contracts and scraping (distilling) their models, behind their back.
https://openai.com/index/our-decision-on-cursor-following-its-acquisition-by-spacex/
This is not even the only instance of this happening, many mentioned having similar problems with Elon in the past. Not too long ago Kylie Robison shared a rumor xAI engineers were banned from using Anthropic models through Cursor, because of their scraping, though they seem to have later patched things over with Elon, when they had to start renting his data centers.
Former Intel Engineer Who Was One Of The Clear Linux Architects Is Starting A New Distro
One of the former Intel engineers who was a Linux OS architect on their legendary Clear Linux distribution and before that also driving their Moblin and MeeGo Linux efforts is starting a new distribution project. This new initiative, named The Ur Project, is highly leveraging Rust and will rely on AI/LLMs in part and aims to incorporate some deisng improvements Clear Linux… ⌘ Read more
Servo 0.5 Released: DuckDuckGo Properly Rendering, Up To 10x Faster Text Rendering
Servo 0.5 is out today as the newest monthly update to this open-source, Rust-based browser engine. Servo 0.5 ships many notable enhancements for benefiting those running the Servoshell example browser or looking at Servo as an opportunity for embedded use… ⌘ Read more
Scientists Turn Plastic Waste Into Edible Cookies
A team of researchers at Southern Illinois University Carbondale engineered yeast to create cookies that were 3D printed out of plastic waste, reports Futurism:
The yeast breaks down the components of plastic compounds and agricultural byproducts like discarded plant stalks into proteins, fats, acids, and flavorings that we can eat. When these are combined together, the m … ⌘ Read more
Trump Creates a Space Academy and Honors the Artemis Astronauts
President Trump awarded the four-member Artemis II crew the Congressional Space Medal of Honor and signed an executive order directing the creation of a new U.S. Space Academy. The proposed academy would train engineers, scientists, technicians, operators, and astronauts for NASA, the Space Force, and the commercial space industry. Houston Public … ⌘ Read more
Union QtWidgets Sees Initial Release For Advancing KDE Plasma’s Union
Premiering in KDE Plasma 6.7 was Union as the new CSS-based style/theming engine for Plasma. Union ultimately aims to address KDE’s fragmented ways of styling apps. As a step closer to that goal, there is now the initial release of Union for QtWidgets support… ⌘ Read more
Fedora + Tuned-PPD Performance Regression Should Be Fixed With New Linux Kernel
Earlier this month when benchmarking six Linux distributions on the new Framework Laptop 13 Pro powered by Intel Core Ultra Series 3 “Panther Lake”, the performance was strangely slow on Fedora Workstation 44. When digging further into it, the performance loss was with Fedora 44 using Tuned-PPD by default where as other Linux distributions default to Power Profiles Daemon. Ultimately, after Red Hat engineers got involved, was found t … ⌘ Read more
GCC Patches Added -mcpu=native -mtune=native Support For RISC-V
A SiFive engineer posted patches today for the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) for adding -mtune=native -mcpu=native support for the compiler on RISC-V… ⌘ Read more
Chrome/Chromium Experimenting With Flatpak Packaging
Google engineers responsible for the Chrome/Chromium web browser are experimenting with Flatpak packaging on Linux. They aren’t yet committed to officially supporting Flatpak packages but for now are at least exploring the option… ⌘ Read more
W4 Games, the company formed by Godot Engine veterans, gets help and funding from Tencent
With an extra $18 million raised, W4 Games plan to continue to expand their enterprise technology and support for the open-source Godot Engine.
Read the full article on [GamingOnLinux](https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2026/08/w4-games-the-company-formed-by-godot-engine-veterans-gets-help … ⌘ Read more
Intel Engineers Propose DRM Fabric For Linux
Coincidentally just days after AMD posted their big UALink patch series for Linux, Intel engineers today announced a proposal called DRM Fabric… ⌘ Read more
GCC Patch Adjusting AMD Zen 5 Misprediction Cost Nets 12% Win In Benchmark
An AMD compiler engineer posted a patch on Saturday for the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC). The two-line patch adjusts the misprediction cost for Zen 4 and Zen 5 processors, which ends up yielding a 12% improvement in one SPEC CPU benchmark on Zen 5 and a 9% improvement on Zen 4… ⌘ Read more