iPhone Video Shows ‘Earthset’ From Space
NASA astronaut Reid Wiseman posted an out-of-this-world iPhone video on Sunday, showing Earth disappear behind the Moon at 8x zoom. “I could barely see the Moon through the docking hatch window but the iPhone was the perfect size to catch the view,” said Wiseman, noting that this video is “uncropped, uncut with 8x zoom” and “quite comparable to the view of the human eye.” The New York Times s … ⌘ Read more

Voyager 1 is Running Out of Power. NASA Just Switched Part of It Off
After 49 years of space travel, Voyager 1 “is running out of power,” reports NPR:

The spacecraft runs on a radioisotope thermoelectric generator — a device that converts heat from decaying plutonium into electricity. It carries no solar panels, no rechargeable batteries. Just the slow, steady release of nuclear warmth, which diminishe … ⌘ Read more

NASA Restarts Work To Support Europe’s Uncrewed Trip To Mars After Years of Setbacks
NASA has revived support for the European Space Agency’s long-delayed Rosalind Franklin Mars rover mission. According to the space agency, the current plan is to launch via a SpaceX Falcon Heavy no earlier than 2028. Engadget reports: This is a partnership between NASA and the ESA, with the European agenc … ⌘ Read more

AlmaLinux OS Kitten 10 Adds i686 User-Space Packages
The community-based AlmaLinux OS alternative to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) continues exploring ways to better differentiate it from upstream RHEL and other derivatives. The latest difference is AlmaLinux OS Kitten 10 adding i686 user-space packages for those wanting to run on a RHEL 10 based platform but still needing x86 32-bit user-space software compatibility… ⌘ Read more

Intel LASS In Good Shape For Linux 7.1
In addition to Linux 7.1 supporting FRED by default for Flexible Return and Event Delivery, another Intel CPU feature now in good shape for this next kernel version is Linear Address Space Separation (LASS)… ⌘ Read more

Sched QoS For Linux Aims To Improve Scheduling & Inspired In Part By Apple’s QoS Classes
Linux developer Qais Yousef with Google has announced the alpha release of Sched QoS as a new initiative for user-space assisted scheduling. The scheduling model in turn is based in part on Apple’s quality of service classes used by iOS for classifying software as user interactive, user initiative, utility, or background tasks… ⌘ Read more

The Good & The Bad When Using LLMs To Write Spack Packages
The Spack package manager is quite popular in the HPC / supercomputer space for scientific software. Even with the more selective niche than a typical general purpose OS package manager, large language models (LLMs) have already proven capable of being useful in generating new Spack packages. But there have also been some headaches involved too for Spack developers… ⌘ Read more

Particles Seen Emerging From Empty Space For First Time
Longtime Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot shares a report from NewScientist: According to quantum chromodynamics (QCD) – widely considered to be our best theory for describing the strong force, which binds quarks inside protons and neutrons – even a perfect vacuum isn’t truly empty. Instead, it is filled with short-lived disturbances in the underlying energy of spa … ⌘ Read more

Planet Labs Tests AI-Powered Object Detection On Satellite
BrianFagioli writes: Artificial intelligence has now run directly on a satellite in orbit. A spacecraft about 500km above Earth captured an image of an airport and then immediately ran an onboard AI model to detect airplanes in the photo. Instead of acting like a simple camera in space that sends raw data back to Earth for later analysis, the satellite perfo … ⌘ Read more

Artemis II Astronauts Break Apollo Record For Farthest Distance Humans Have Traveled From Earth
Artemis II has broken the Apollo 13 record for the farthest distance humans have ever traveled from Earth. NASA reports: The Artemis II crew of NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch, along with CSA (Canadian Space Agency) astronaut Jeremy Hansen have set th … ⌘ Read more

Intel Linux NPU Driver 1.32 Adds Wildcat Lake Support
Intel today released their Linux NPU Driver 1.32 as the user-space driver components that interacts with the upstream IVPU kernel accelerator driver for supporting the NPU hardware with Core Ultra processors… ⌘ Read more

CachyOS Delivers More Performance Out Of Intel Panther Lake
Most of my Intel Panther Lake benchmarking over the past two months for the new Core Ultra Series 3 hardware has been done with Ubuntu Linux given the pervasiveness of it, especially in the corporate/enterprise space. But for those looking at achieving even greater out-of-the-box Linux performance on Intel Panther Lake, the Arch Linux based CachyOS does a pretty fine job at further advancing the performance. ⌘ Read more

SpaceX Files To Go Public
Reuters reports that SpaceX has confidentially filed for a U.S. IPO, reportedly targeting a valuation above $1.75 trillion. Reuters reports: SpaceX puts more rockets in space than any other company and promises a chance to invest in humanity’s return to the moon and attempt to colonize Mars. The company aspires to put artificial intelligence data centers in space, while running a lucrative satellite communications system that o … ⌘ Read more

NASA Launches Artemis II Astronauts Around the Moon
NASA’s Artemis II mission has launched four astronauts around the moon and back, marking humanity’s first crewed lunar voyage in 53 years and the first test flight of NASA’s Orion capsule and Space Launch System (SLS) with people on board. Five minutes into the flight, Commander Reid Wiseman saw the team’s target: “We have a beautiful moonrise, we’re headed right at it … ⌘ Read more

New Rust-Based BUS1 In-Kernel IPC In Development For The Linux Kernel
After KDBUS failed to make it into the mainline Linux kernel more than one decade ago as an in-kernel version of D-Bus, BUS1 was proposed as a clean sheet design for in-kernel, capability-based inter-process communication (IPC). BUS1 didn’t gain enough traction to make it to the mainline kernel and then many of the same developers devised Dbus-Broker as a more performant D-Bus user-space implementation. Well, as a big surprise now, a new version of BUS1 … ⌘ Read more

After 16 Years and $8 Billion, the Military’s New GPS Software Still Doesn’t Work
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Last year, just before the Fourth of July holiday, the US Space Force officially took ownership of a new operating system for the GPS navigation network, raising hopes that one of the military’s most troubled space programs might finally bear fruit. The GPS Next- … ⌘ Read more

‘Project Hail Mary’: Real Space Science, Real Astrophotography
Project Hail Mary has now grossed $300.8 million globally after earning another $54.1 million this weekend from 86 markets, reports Variety, noting that after just nine days it’s now Amazon MGM’s highest-grossing film ever. And last weekend it had the best opening for a “non-franchise” movie in three years, adds the Associated Press — the best … ⌘ Read more

NASA’s First Nuclear-Powered Interplanetary Spacecraft Will Send Helicopters to Mars in 2028
After decades of studying, this week NASA announced “a major step forward in bringing nuclear power and propulsion from the lab to space.”
NASA will launch the Space Reactor-1 Freedom, the first nuclear powered interplanetary spacecraft, to Mars before the end of 2028, demonstrating advanc … ⌘ Read more

KDE Plasma 6.7 Addresses 5 Year Old Request For Easier Microphone Testing
It’s been another busy week in the KDE space as Plasma developers continue working on new feature activity for the big Plasma 6.7 release… ⌘ Read more

UK Startup Ignites Plasma Inside Nuclear Fusion Rocket
UK startup Pulsar Fusion says it has achieved the first plasma ignition inside a nuclear fusion rocket engine prototype – a huge step for space travel that could cut missions to Mars “from months-long journeys to just a few weeks,” reports Euronews. From the report: Pulsar Fusion revealed the milestone during a live stream at Amazon’s MARS Conference, hosted by … ⌘ Read more

Intel Xe Driver Improves Memory Pressure / Out-Of-Memory Behavior For vRAM With Linux 7.1
Following the Intel Xe kernel graphics driver pull request landing transparent hugepages for device pages as an SVM win, another round of Intel Xe driver updates were sent out this week ahead of next month’s Linux 7.1 merge window. This latest pull request lands a new user-space API for helping the Intel Xe driver better cope with situations of video memory pressure / out-of-memory behavior for vRAM… ⌘ Read more

Mozilla and Mila Team Up On Open Source AI Push
BrianFagioli writes: Mozilla just teamed up with Mila, the Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute, to push open source AI – and it feels like a direct response to Big Tech tightening its grip on the space. Instead of relying on closed models, the goal here is to build “sovereign AI” that’s more transparent, privacy-focused, and actually under the control of developers and even … ⌘ Read more

NXP Neutron NPU Kernel Driver Blocked For Now By A Closed-Source User-Space Blob
Last month NXP posted open-source Linux kernel driver patches for their Neutron NPU accelerator. The NXP Neutron NPU aims to help with edge AI applications and this neural processing unit is found in their different SoCs. Unfortunately, their GitHub repository for the user-space software ends up containing a binary-only blob that will end up delaying plans on getting this driver into the mainline Linux kernel… ⌘ Read more

NASA Halts Work On Gateway To Develop a Lunar Base
NASA is reportedly halting work on the lunar Gateway in favor of a more direct push to build a lunar base. The new plan would cost tens of billions over the next decade, though the change could face hurdles because Congress previously funded Gateway specifically. SpaceNews reports: “Starting today, we’re building humanity’s first deep space outpost,” said Carlos Garcia-G … ⌘ Read more

Can Private Space Companies Replace the ISS Before 2030?
China’s orbital outpost Tiangong was completed in 2022 and is hosting up to three astronauts at a time, reports CNN.

But meanwhile U.S. lawmakers are now signaling there’s not time to develop and launch a replacement for the International Space Station — considered the signal most expensive object ever built — before its deorbiting in 2030. A recent Senate bi … ⌘ Read more

NASA’s Hubble Unexpectedly Catches Comet Breaking Up
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope unexpectedly captured a rare, early-stage breakup of comet C/2025 K1 (ATLAS) just days after it first began disintegrating. Phys.org reports: “Sometimes the best science happens by accident,” said co-investigator John Noonan, a research professor in the Department of Physics at Auburn University in Alabama. “This comet got observed becaus … ⌘ Read more

Virtual Swap Space Patches Updated For Improving Linux’s Swap Design
The fourth iteration of patches implementing Virtual Swap Space for Linux were sent out on Wednesday. This stems from ideas going back years for an abstraction to better separate a swap entry from its physical backing storage… ⌘ Read more

Virtual Swap Space Patches Updated For Improving Linux’s Swap Design
The fourth iteration of patches implementing Virtual Swap Space for Linux were sent out on Wednesday. This stems from ideas going back years for an abstraction to better separate a swap entry from its physical backing storage… ⌘ Read more

Nvidia Announces Vera Rubin Space-1 Chip System For Orbital AI Data Centers
Nvidia unveiled its Vera Rubin Space-1 system for powering AI workloads in orbital data centers. “Space computing, the final frontier, has arrived,” said CEO Jensen Huang. “As we deploy satellite constellations and explore deeper into space, intelligence must live wherever data is generated.” CNBC reports: In a press rel … ⌘ Read more

Space Solar Farms, Blue Straggler Stars, & Earth’s Escape Plan ⌘ Read more

Bcachefs 1.37 Released With Linux 7.0 Support, Erasure Coding Stable & New Sub-Commands
Kent Overstreet today released Bcachefs 1.37 as the newest feature release to this out-of-tree file-system driver and user-space tooling for this next-gen, copy-on-write file-system… ⌘ Read more

I’m supporting incremental SQLite schema changes to just upgrade from an older database version to whatever the current software version supports. In the past, I already noticed that this is quite expensive in unit tests when each test case runs through the entire schema patches and applies them one by one.

To speed up test execution I now decided that I finally go through the troubles of maintaining both a set of incremental patches and a full schema setup in one go. A unit test verifies that both ways end up with the same structure. This gives me a set of SQLs to check the structures:

SELECT type, name, tbl_name, sql
FROM sqlite_schema
ORDER BY type, name, tbl_name

Unfortunately, the resulting CREATE TABLE SQL queries are formatted differently, depending on whether the full schema was set up in one big step or the structure had been modified with ALTER TABLE. Mainly, added columns are not on their own lines but appended in one physical line. That’s why I wanted an SQL formatting tool. Since I didn’t find one that works decently, I’m now doing some simple string manipulation. Joining consecutive whitespace into a single space character, removing spaces before commas and closing parentheses and spaces after opening parentheses. This works surpringly good enough. Of course, if it fails, the “diff” is absolutely horrendous.

Now for the cool part, my test execution dropped from around 5:05 minutes to just 1:32 minutes! I call that a win.

I just stumbled across PRAGMA table_info('tablename') https://sqlite.org/pragma.html#pragma_table_info, PRAGMA foreign_key_list('tablename') and friends. I guess, I have to play with that, now. It’s probably much better to use than the SQL text approach.

Data centres in space? That’s less crazy than you think
Elon Musk and other tech leaders explore building data centres in space to overcome terrestrial constraints, with launch costs and satellite efficiency key factors. ⌘ Read more

AMD Ryzen AI NPUs Are Finally Useful Under Linux For Running LLMs
Over the past two years AMD has developed the AMDXDNA accelerator driver in the mainline Linux kernel for supporting the AMD Ryzen AI NPUs. But when it comes to user-space software on Linux actually able to leave the Ryzen AI NPUs it’s been… extremely limited with nothing really useful besides some niche bits of code. Even AMD’s own software like their GAIA on Linux has used Vulkan with their iGPUs rather than any NPU support. But finally tod … ⌘ Read more

A 1,300-Pound NASA Spacecraft To Re-Enter Earth’s Atmosphere
Van Allen Probe A, a 1,300-pound (600 kg) NASA satellite launched in 2012 to study Earth’s radiation belts, is expected to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere this week. While most of it is expected to burn up during descent, “some components may survive,” reports the BBC. “The space agency said there is a one in 4,200 chance of being harmed by a piece of the p … ⌘ Read more

exfatprogs 1.3.2 Brings Improvements To mkfs.exfat, fsck.exfat
For those making use of Microsoft’s exFAT file-system under Linux, tagged today was exfatprogs 1.3.2 as the newest update to these open-source user-space programs for going along with the Linux kernel’s exFAT file-system driver… ⌘ Read more

Startup Wants To Launch a Space Mirror
A startup called Reflect Orbital wants to launch thousands of mirror-bearing satellites to reflect sunlight onto Earth at night and “power solar farms after sunset, provide lighting for rescue workers and illuminate city streets, among other things,” reports the New York Times. From the report: It is an idea seemingly out of a sci-fi movie, but the company, Reflect Orbital of Hawthorne, Calif., … ⌘ Read more

New SETI Study: Why We Might Have Been Missing Alien Signals
After decades of searching for extraterrestrial intelligence, the nonprofit SETI Foundation has an announcement. “A new study by researchers at the SETI Institute suggests stellar ‘space weather’ could make radio signals from extraterrestrial intelligence harder to detect.”
Stellar activity and plasma turbulence near a transmitting planet can broaden a … ⌘ Read more

Scientists Just Doubled Our Catalog of Black Hole and Neutron Star Collisions
Colliding black holes were detected through spacetime ripples for the first time in 2015 by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), notes Space.com:

Since then, LIGO and its partner gravitational wave detectors Virgo in Italy and KAGRA (Kamioka Gravitational Wave Detector) in Japan have detect … ⌘ Read more

Asteroid 2024 YR4 Will Not Impact the Moon
Ancient Slashdot reader alanw shares a report from the European Space Agency (ESA): Last year, an approximately 60 meter near-Earth object captured global attention. For a brief period, asteroid 2024 YR4 became the most dangerous asteroid discovered in the last 20 years. While an Earth impact was soon ruled out, the asteroid faded from view with a lingering 4% chance of striking the Moo … ⌘ Read more

Intel Xeon Features To Be Supported By Ubuntu 26.04 LTS - Some Lacking User-Space Packages
Canonical engineer Serkan Uygungelen published a post outlining some of the Intel Xeon CPU features to be supported by the upcoming Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release, some Xeon features already supported by the existing Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, and some features only partially supported for still not having packaged user-space libraries/support within the Ubuntu archive… ⌘ Read more

Congress Extends ISS, Tells NASA To Get Moving On Private Space Stations
A recently-revised Senate authorization bill (PDF), co-sponsored by Senate Commerce Committee Chair Ted Cruz, would extend the International Space Station’s lifespan from 2030 to 2032 while pushing NASA to accelerate plans for commercial space stations to replace it. Ars Technica’s Eric Berger reports: Regarding NASA’s support f … ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.1 To Prevent Intel NPUs From Being Exhausted By Single Programs
The Intel IVPU accelerator driver will be introducing limits on Intel NPU resource usage by non-root user-space programs beginning with the Linux 7.1 kernel… ⌘ Read more

AMD Engineer Leverages AI To Help Make A Pure-Python AMD GPU User-Space Driver
AMD’s VP of AI Software, Anush Elangovan, has used Claude Code to help craft a pure-Python AMD GPU user-space driver. This Python user-space driver is currently being created to help exercise other ROCm code and for debugging in passing through the ROCm/HIP user-space stack… ⌘ Read more

NASA Repairs Artemis 2 Rocket, Continues Eyeing April Moon Launch
NASA is eyeing an April launch window for the upcoming Artemis II mission after it repaired a helium-flow issue on the Space Launch System upper stage rocket. “Work on the rocket and spacecraft will continue in the coming weeks as NASA prepares for rolling the rocket out to the launch pad again later this month ahead of a potential launch in … ⌘ Read more

Using KMSCON As The Default VT Console Delayed To Fedora 45
For the past few months have been an ambitious proposal to replace FBCON with the user-space KMSCON as the default VT console starting on Fedora 44. Unfortunately, this and a few other features have now been delayed to the Fedora 45 release six months later… ⌘ Read more

Nasa Announces Artemis III Mission No Longer Aims To Send Humans To Moon
Nasa announced on Friday radical changes to its delayed Artemis III mission to land humans back on the moon, as the US space agency grapples with technical glitches and criticism that it is trying to do too much too soon. From a report: The abrupt shift in strategy was laid out by the space agency’s recently confirmed administr … ⌘ Read more

NASA Reveals Identity of Astronaut Who Suffered Medical Incident Aboard ISS
Longtime Slashdot reader ArchieBunker shares a report from NBC News: NASA revealed that astronaut Mike Fincke was the crew member who suffered a medical incident at the International Space Station in January, which prompted the agency to carry out the first evacuation due to a medical issue in the space station’s 25-year h … ⌘ Read more

NASA Eyes March 6 To Launch 4 Astronauts To the Moon On Artemis II Mission
An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: NASA could launch four astronauts on a mission to fly around the moon as soon as March 6th. That’s the launch date (PDF) that the space agency is now working towards following a successful test fueling of its big, 322-foot-tall moon rocket, which is standing on a launch pad at th … ⌘ Read more

Places in Space Where All Forces Equal ⌘ Read more