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

RISC-V In Linux 7.0 Brings User-Space CFI & Optimized strlen Assembly
The RISC-V architecture updates have been merged for Linux 7.0 with a few items to note… ⌘ Read more

Analysis of JWST Data Finds - Old Galaxies in a Young Universe?
Two astrophysicists at Spain’s Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias analyzed data from the James Webb Space Telescope — the most powerful telescope available — on 31 galaxies with an average redshift of 7.3 (when the universe was 700 million years old, according to the standard model). “We found that they are on average ~600 million years old old … ⌘ Read more

Autonomous AI Agent Apparently Tries to Blackmail Maintainer Who Rejected Its Code
“I’ve had an extremely weird few days…” writes commercial space entrepreneur/engineer Scott Shambaugh on LinkedIn. (He’s the volunteer maintainer for the Python visualization library Matplotlib, which he describes as “some of the most widely used software in the world” with 130 million downloads each month.) … ⌘ Read more

Haiku OS Lands Improved Touchpad Support, Still Working Toward Beta 6
The Haiku open-source operating system project inspired by BeOS kicked off 2026 by making many improvements to its kernel, device drivers, and user-space software… ⌘ Read more

Intel Releases QATlib 26.02 With New APIs For Zero-Copy DMA
Of Intel’s different CPU accelerator IPs, the arguably most useful and with the greatest customer interest remains around QuickAssist Technology (QAT). Intel QAT allows offloading various compression and encryption tasks for better performance. Intel this week released QATlib 26.02 as the newest version of their user-space library for leveraging QuickAssist Technology on capable hardware… ⌘ Read more

Musk Predicts SpaceX Will Launch More AI Compute Per Year Than the Cumulative Total on Earth
Elon Musk told podcast host Dwarkesh Patel and Stripe co-founder John Collison that space will become the most economically compelling location for AI data centers in less than 36 months, a prediction rooted not in some exotic technical breakthrough but in the basic math of electricity su … ⌘ Read more

Russian Spy Satellites Have Intercepted EU Communications Satellites
European security officials believe two Russian space vehicles have intercepted the communications of at least a dozen key satellites over the continent. From a report: Officials believe that the likely interceptions, which have not previously been reported, risk not only compromising sensitive information transmitted by the satellites … ⌘ Read more

Anthropic Pledges To Keep Claude Ad-free, Calls AI Conversations a ‘Space To Think’
Anthropic said today that its AI assistant Claude will not carry advertising of any kind – no sponsored links next to conversations, no advertiser influence on the model’s responses, and no unsolicited third-party product placements – calling Claude a “space to think” that should remain free of commercial interrupt … ⌘ Read more

Why Elon Musk just created a $1.8 trillion space monster
Elon Musk has always had a remarkable capacity to convince investors to help pay for his fantastical dreams. ⌘ Read more

Google Plots Big Expansion in India as US Restricts Visas
Alphabet is plotting to dramatically expand its presence in India [non-paywalled source], with the possibility of taking millions of square feet in new office space in Bangalore, India’s tech hub. From a report: Google’s parent company has leased one office tower and purchased options on two others in Alembic City, a development in the Whitefield tech corrido … ⌘ Read more

Reworked NTFS Linux Driver Posted With More Improvements & Fixes
Announced back in October was NTFS Plus as a new Linux driver for NTFS based on the former NTFS kernel driver prior to Paragon Software contributing the NTFS3 driver code. The intent with this new driver is for better performance. more features, public user-space utilities around it, and all-around a nice step forward for those reliant on this Microsoft file-system. Out this week is the sixth iteration of this remade NTFS driver… ⌘ Read more

Walmart Begins Building Out Nationwide EV Charging Network Across America
Walmart, the world’s largest retailer, will be adding spaces for electric vehicle charging to parking lots in 19 different states, reports MLive:

The move follows up on a plan announced in 2023 to build a network of charging stations at Walmart and Sam’s Club stores throughout the U.S… “With a store or club located within 10 … ⌘ Read more

Microbes In Space Mutated and Developed a Remarkable Ability
“A box full of viruses and bacteria has completed its return trip to the International Space Station,” reports ScienceAlert, “and the changes these ‘bugs’ experienced in their travels could help us Earthlings tackle drug-resistant infections…”

Scientists aboard the space station incubated different combinations of bacteria and phages for 25 days, w … ⌘ Read more

Blue Origin Announces Two-Year Pause in Space Tourism - to Focus on the Moon
TechCrunch reports:

Jeff Bezos’ space company Blue Origin is pausing its space tourism flights for “no less than two years” in order to focus all of its resources on upcoming missions to the moon, the company announced Friday. The decision puts a temporary halt on a program that Blue Origin has been using to fly humans … ⌘ Read more

RISC-V User-Space Control Flow Integrity / Shadow Stack Appears Finally Ready
Similar to what has been available on Intel and AMD processors for users with the shadow stack for control-flow integrity, Linux on RISC-V is finally ready to roll-out its user-space control-flow integrity support… ⌘ Read more

Linux’s ublk Adding Batch I/O Dispatch Capability For Greater Performance
Linux’s user-space block device driver framework “ublk” for implementing virtual block device drivers in user-space relayed by IO_uring is introducing batch I/O dispatch infrastructure… ⌘ Read more

NVIDIA VA-API Driver 0.0.15 Released With A Few Fixes
The NVIDIA-VAAPI-Driver 0.0.15 was released overnight as this VA-API driver implementation built atop NVIDIA’s NVDEC interface used by their proprietary user-space driver stack. The purpose of NVIDIA-VAAPI-Driver as this community open-source project continues to be around enabling video acceleration for NVIDIA GPUs with the Firefox web browser on Linux that supports the VA-API interface but not NVIDIA’s NVDEC… ⌘ Read more

Pinterest Cuts Up To 15% Jobs To Redirect Resources To AI
Pinterest said on Tuesday it would trim its workforce by less than 15% and reduce office space, as the social media company looks to reallocate resources to AI-focused roles and initiatives. From a report: The announcement comes as the company competes with TikTok and Meta-owned Facebook and Instagram for digital advertising budgets, as these platforms continue to d … ⌘ Read more

Startup Uses SpaceX Tech to Cool Data Centers With Less Power and No Water
California-based Karman Industries “says it has developed a cooling system that uses SpaceX rocket engine technology to rein in the environmental impact of data centers,” reports the Los Angeles Times, “chilling them with less space, less power and no water.”

Karman has developed a cooling system similar to the heat pumps … ⌘ Read more

A Decade In The Making, Time Slice Extension Could Be Merged For Linux 7.0
With the upcoming Linux 6.20~7.0 kernel cycle it looks like the time slice extension work could finally been merged, which has seen various attempts over the past decade. Time slice extension for the Linux kernel implemented using Restartable Sequences “RSEQ” allows user-space processes to request a temporary, opportunistic extension of their CPU time slice without being preempted… ⌘ Read more