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

M-Audio M Track Duo HD Producer Pack Review: Hot Takes, Cold Opens
The M-Track Duo HD Producer Pack removes the last remaining excuse for terrible audio and potentially terrible opinions. ⌘ 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

Startups win, science funding static in Budget 2026
Startup entrepreneurs had some good news in Budget 2026, while scientists were largely treading water amid major sector reforms.

According to the NZ Association of Scientists (NZAS), funding for NZ’s science and innovation system was about $30 million higher in 2026 than last year and was tracking slightly below inflation. ⌘ Read more

The Pentagon Knew Enemies Could Track Troops’ Phones for Years. Now They Are
The US military has long known that cheap fixes could stop location data from exposing its troops. It adopted almost none—and now says adversaries are using the data to target soldiers during a war. ⌘ 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

Last.fm Goes Independent After Breaking Up With Paramount Skydance
Last.fm announced that it is independent again after separating from Paramount Skydance, nearly two decades after CBS acquired the music-tracking service in 2007. The company says accounts, scrobbles, privacy settings, Pro subscriptions, and billing information will remain intact. Additional details are forthcoming. Engadget reports: … ⌘ Read more

[$] Further progress toward removing the page map count
The mapcount field was created to track the number of mappings
(page-table entries) that refer to the given page. Among other things, a
mapcount of zero means that the page has no references and can be
reclaimed. Maintaining mapcount has become increasingly
challenging and expensive as the memory-management system has grown in
complexity, so Hildenbrand has been looking for ways to get rid of it.
This session was, he said, maybe one of the last times he will have to
bring … ⌘ 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

[$] 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

It’s Like the Olympics - But Steroids Are Allowed
“Think Olympics on steroids. Literally,” quips the BBC, describing Sunday’s controversial Enhanced Games event in Las Vegas featuring dozens of athletes “using performance-enhancing drugs to try and break world records in track, weightlifting and swimming.

Some $25m (£18.6m) in prize money is up for grabs — with cash prizes for winners… The drugs they use must be legal, … ⌘ Read more

Venmo Redesign Makes New Users’ Posts Friends-Only by Default
Venmo is testing a major redesign that will make new users’ payment posts viewable by their friends by default instead of being public. The Verge reports: It’s a notable update for a platform that has struggled with privacy in the past. In 2021, BuzzFeed News tracked down President Joe Biden’s Venmo account and the accounts of people in his inner circle … ⌘ Read more

A Bipartisan Amendment Would End Police License Plate Tracking Nationwide
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: US lawmakers plan to introduce an amendment Thursday at a House committee markup hearing that would prohibit any recipient of federal highway funding from using automated license plate readers for any purpose other than tolling – a sweeping restriction that, if adopted, would bring … ⌘ 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

Microsoft Hires Analyst With Influential Video Game Blog To Fix Xbox
Microsoft has hired games analyst and investor Matthew Ball as Xbox’s new chief strategy officer. With a long track record of analyzing the video game market and industry’s biggest shifts, Ball’s background could help Xbox rethink its hardware and console strategy at a moment when competition is tougher than ever. Engadget reports: Ball i … ⌘ Read more

[$] BPF support in GCC 16 and beyond
José Marchesi and the GCC-BPF developers opened the BPF track at the 2026
Linux Storage,\
Filesystem, Memory-management, and BPF Summit
with a 90-minute summary of what has changed for GCC’s BPF support in the past year.
This kind of session has become something of a tradition. There were similar
updates in
2025 and
2024. This time around, GCC seems to be closing in on
feature p … ⌘ Read more

[$] Support for private memory nodes
Gregory Price started his session in the memory-management track of the
2026 Linux Storage,\
Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit by saying that, in
current kernels, if a NUMA node has memory, the assumption is that anybody can
make use of it. He is trying to implement the opposite policy — to make
some memory off-limits for all processes except those designed specifically
to use it. The session was used to present his goals and to discuss h … ⌘ Read more

3 Best Smart Ring Brands: Oura, RingConn, and Samsung (2026)
A svelte smart ring can track important activity, sleep, and health metrics. Plus—unlike most smartwatches—it doesn’t need to be charged every day. ⌘ Read more

Intuit To Lay Off Over 3,000 Employees To Refocus On AI
Intuit is reportedly cutting about 3,000 jobs, or 17% of its workforce, as it restructures around AI and simplifies its corporate organization. TechCrunch reports: The layoffs come during a bad year for the tech workforce. The tech industry has already cut more than 100,000 jobs this year, per Statista, and is on track to outpace both 2024 and 2025 if the layoff trend c … ⌘ Read more

A Bipartisan Amendment Would End Police License Plate Tracking Nationwide
One line tucked into a federal highway bill would strip funds from cities and states unless they kill their automated plate tracking programs—effectively banning the tech for all but toll collection. ⌘ Read more

Yearslong Fight Over Users’ Right To Tweak Smart TV Software Heads To Trial
A long-running lawsuit over Vizio’s Linux-based smart TV software is headed to trial in August, with the Software Freedom Conservancy arguing that GPL rules require Vizio to release complete source code owners could use to modify, maintain, or strip ads and tracking from their TVs. Ars Technica reports: The outcome could rever … ⌘ Read more

[$] What is to be done about MGLRU?
“Reclaim” is the task of finding memory that can be taken away from its
current user and put to better uses within the system; it is a core part of
the memory-management picture. The addition of the multi-generational LRU (MGLRU) was meant to
provide a better reclaim implementation than the “traditional LRU” that
preceded it, but MGLRU has complicated the situation instead. No fewer than
three memory-management-track sessions at the 2026 [Linux Storage,\
Filesyst … ⌘ Read more

Siren Gold’s Golden Bay mining application is declined
Siren Gold’s application to mine for gold in Golden Bay has been rejected, it announced on May 20.

The application was not on the fast-track approvals process and was declined by New Zealand Petroleum and Minerals (NZPaM), a division of the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) ⌘ Read more

[$] In search of faster this_cpu operations
The kernel’s this_cpu\
operations are meant to speed access to per-CPU variables. They are
more optimal on some CPUs than others, though. During a
memory-management-track session at the 2026 Linux Storage,\
Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit, Yang Shi proposed a
fundamental, and somewhat controversial, change to how these operations
work in order to provide better performance on … ⌘ Read more

[$] What’s brewing in CXL
Compute\
Express Link (CXL) is a technology intended to enable the provision of
“memory nodes” in data centers that provide (possibly shared) memory to
nearby CPUs. It has, Dan Williams said at the beginning of his
memory-management-track session on the topic at the 2026 Linux Storage,\
Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit, “been making
memory-management problems worse since 2021”. He used the sessi … ⌘ Read more

[$] Improving the per-CPU memory allocator
There are many places in the kernel where performance can be improved by
using per-CPU data. But, as it turns out, the kernel’s allocator for
per-CPU data has some performance problems of its own. Harry Yoo led a
session in the memory-management track of the 2026 Linux Storage,\
Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit to explore ways to
address those problems and accelerate the allocation and initialization of
per-CPU data. ⌘ Read more

[$] Swap tables, flash-friendly swap, swap_ops, and more
The kernel’s swap subsystem is charged with managing anonymous pages in
secondary storage when those pages are (hopefully) not being used and the
memory they occupy is needed elsewhere. This long-unloved subsystem has
seen a resurgence of developer interest in recent times, so it is not
surprising that it was the topic of three separate sessions in the
memory-management track at the
2026 [Linux Storage,\
Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit](https://events.linuxfoundat … ⌘ Read more

I’m a Normie. Can Normies Really Vibe Code?
Apparently anyone can vibe code anything these days. So Claude and I tried to make a database for tracking the petty grievances of the masses. ⌘ Read more

America’s Library of Congress Officially Inducts… the Soundtrack for the Videogame ‘Doom’
America’s Library of Congress “is preserving a little piece of Hell,” jokes Engadget, “by inducting the soundtrack to the original Doom into the National Recording Registry.”

The album of demon-slaying tracks is joined by several other notable 2026 additions to the registry, like Weezer’s self-ti … ⌘ Read more

The running boom brings business for brands, retailers
Four days a week, the Zone Blue run club gathers for runs of varying length on Wellington’s waterfront, on the track at Newtown Park, and at Freyberg Beach.

There’s a “take it easy” Tuesday evening run, a speed session on the track on Wednesday, and a 30-minute effort followed by a coffee on Saturday mornings. ⌘ Read more

GNOME 51 Could End Up Replacing System Tools With “Resources” App
The current GNOME System Monitor is on track to be replaced by the GNOME Resources app for as soon as the GNOME 51 desktop release… ⌘ Read more

[$] Controlling memory-management with BPF
Roman Gushchin began his session in the memory-management track of the
2026 Linux Storage,\
Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit by saying that the
community has seen a lot of proposals adding BPF-based interfaces for
memory management. None of them have made their way into the mainline,
though. He wanted to explore the ways in which BPF might be helpful and
the obstacles that have kept BPF-based solutions out so far. This session
was … ⌘ Read more

[$] HugeTLB preservation over live update
Recent times have seen a lot of effort put into the implementation of the kexec handover and live update orchestrator
features in the Linux kernel. But that work is not yet complete. At the
2026 Linux Storage,\
Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit, Pratyush Yadav led a
memory-management-track session on adding the ability to preserve [hugetlbfs](https://docs.kernel.org/admin-guide/mm/hugetlbpage.html … ⌘ Read more

An Engineer’s Post Protesting Laptop Surveillance Is Going Viral Inside Meta
Meta employees in the US and UK are organizing against corporate software that tracks workers’ keystrokes and mouse activity. ⌘ Read more

[$] Policy groups for memory management
The kernel’s control-group\
subsystem works well for resource management, Chris Li said at the
beginning of his memory-management-track session at the 2026 Linux Storage,\
Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit. Control groups work
less well for other use cases, though. He was there to present his
proposed enhancement, called “policy groups”, that would address some of
the shortcomings t … ⌘ Read more

[$] Keeping COWs in context (a.k.a. anonymous reverse mapping)
The kernel’s reverse-mapping machinery is charged with locating the
page-table entries that refer to a given page in memory. The reverse
mapping of anonymous pages is handled differently than for file-backed
pages. The kernel’s implementation of reverse mapping for anonymous pages
is, according to Lorenzo Stoakes in his proposal
for a memory-management-track session at the 2026 [Linux Storage,\
 … ⌘ Read more

Meta Employees Launch Protest Against Mouse-Tracking Tech At US Offices
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Meta employees distributed flyers at multiple U.S. offices on Tuesday to protest the company’s recent installation of mouse-tracking software on their computers, according to photos of the pamphlets seen by Reuters. The flyers, which appeared in meeting rooms, on vending machines and … ⌘ Read more

[$] Managing pages outside of the direct map
When Brendan Jackman proposed
a session for the 2026 Linux Storage,\
Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit, his topic was “a
pagetable library for the kernel”. During the actual
memory-management-track session, though, he stated that the idea had
“fizzled” and he was going to cover related topics instead. What
resulted was a session on ways to efficiently mana … ⌘ Read more

[$] Using dma-bufs for read and write operations
The kernel’s dma-buf\
subsystem provides a way for drivers to share memory buffers, usually
in order to support efficient device-to-device I/O. At the 2026 Linux Storage,\
Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit, Pavel Begunkov, assisted
by Kanchan Joshi, led a joint session of the storage and memory-management
tracks to explore ways to make the use of dma-bufs more efficient yet, a … ⌘ Read more

[$] Providing 64KB base pages with 4KB kernels, two different ways
Some CPU architectures are able to run with a number of different base-page
sizes; using a larger size can often result in better performance at the
cost of increased memory use. Other architectures are more limited. At
the 2026 Linux\
Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit, two sessions in
the memory-management track explored options for letting processes run with
64KB page sizes when the underlying kern … ⌘ Read more

NYT: ‘Meta’s Embrace of AI Is Making Its Employees Miserable’
“Meta’s embrace of AI is making its employees miserable,” reports the New York Times.

And “After Meta said late last month that it would start tracking employees’ computer use, hundreds of workers spoke up.” (One employee even told Meta’s CTO in an internal post, “Your callousness to the concerns of your own employees is concerning.”
In an internal post … ⌘ Read more

NASA Keeps Track As Mexico City Sinks Into the Ground
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: Walking into Mexico City’s sprawling central Zocalo is a dizzying experience. At one end of the plaza, the capital’s cathedral, with its soaring spires, slumps in one direction. An attached church, known as the Metropolitan Sanctuary, tilts in the other. The nearby National Palace also seems off-kilter. The tee … ⌘ Read more

[$] A new era for memory-management maintainership
On April 21, Andrew Morton let\
it be known that he intends to begin stepping away from the
maintainership of kernel’s memory-management subsystem — a responsibility
he has carried since before memory management was even seen as its own
subsystem. At the 2026 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and
BPF Summit, one of the first sessions in the memory-management track was
devoted to how the … ⌘ Read more

Linux Drivers For The AMD Elan SoCs From The 1990s On Track For Retirement
Merged for the current Linux 7.1 cycle was beginning to phase out the Intel 486 processor support from the mainline kernel moving forward. That initial step with Linux 7.1 was dropping the various Kconfig options to allow compiling Linux kernel builds for targeting various i486 platforms. As part of that, the AMD Elan SoC configuration patches were dropped. The next step is proceeding on the AMD Elan side with beginning to remove the … ⌘ Read more

Zest Maps Is the AI-Powered ‘Spiritual Successor to Foursquare’
This new app tracks every time you swipe your card at a cool restaurant—and tells all your friends. ⌘ Read more

Flatpak 1.17.7 To Track The Age Of Configurations For Providing Much Better Performance
Flatpak 1.17.7 is now available for continuing to advance open-source app sandboxing and distribution on the Linux desktop. Some interesting new features are in tow with this Flatpak update plus there is also an updated XDG-Desktop-Portal release too… ⌘ Read more

How to Track Your Luggage (2026): AirTag, Pebblebee, CaseSafe
A Bluetooth tracker can prevent vacation hell, aka arriving at the beach sans bathing suit. Here are our travel tips for using one. ⌘ Read more

OpenAI Enables Marketing Cookies by Default for Free ChatGPT Users
ChatGPT’s new privacy policy states how the company uses cookies for tracking, to turn free users into paying subscribers. ⌘ Read more

Hackers Are Actively Exploiting a Bug In cPanel, Used By Millions of Websites
Hackers are actively exploiting a critical cPanel and WHM vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-41940, that allows remote attackers to bypass the login screen and gain full administrative access to affected web servers. Major hosts including Namecheap, HostGator, and KnownHost have taken mitigation steps or patched systems, bu … ⌘ Read more