Category Archives: Linux

[$] A FUSE implementation for famfs

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The famfs
filesystem is meant to provide a shared-memory filesystem for large data
sets that are accessed for computations by multiple systems. It was
developed by John Groves, who led a combined filesystem and
memory-management session at
the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory
Management, and BPF Summit (LSFMM+BPF) to discuss it. The session was a
follow-up to the famfs session at last year’s
summit, but it was also meant to discuss whether the kernel’s direct-access (DAX)
mechanism, which is used by famfs, could be replaced in the filesystem
by using other kernel features.

Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite Benchmarks On Ubuntu Linux vs. AMD vs. Intel

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June 2024 marked the launch of the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite to much initial fanfare for finally some compelling ARM laptop designs. While initially — and still to this day with the likes of the TUXEDO X Elite laptop not materializing yet — being focused on Windows 11 on ARM, there was hope among Linux users this would lead to a nice ARM Linux laptop experience, since after all Qualcomm and Linaro were working on enhancing the support for Linux. Now approaching the one year point, the overall state of the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite support and performance is rather disappointing. Here’s a look at where things currently are and performance relative to AMD Ryzen and Intel Core Ultra when making use of the latest Ubuntu Linux support.

OpenSUSE removes the Deepin desktop

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The openSUSE project has posted a
detailed explanation on why the Deepin Desktop has been removed
from the distribution; it comes down to a history of security problems and
a deliberate bypass (by the packager) of openSUSE’s security review.

Perhaps tired of waiting, the packager decided to try a different
avenue to get the remaining Deepin components into openSUSE
skirting the review requirements. In January 2025, during routine
reviews, we stumbled upon the deepin-feature-enable
package, which was introduced on 2021-04-27 without consulting us
or even informing us. This innocently named package implements a
“license agreement dialog” which basically explains that the SUSE
security team has doubts about the security of Deepin, but to
properly use Deepin, certain components need to be installed
anyway. Thus, if the user does not care about security then “the
license” should be accepted.

Fitti: Waiting for Postgres 18: Accelerating Disk Reads with Asynchronous I/O

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Lukas Fitti writes in detail
on the pganalyze blog about the asynchronous I/O capability coming with the
PostgreSQL 18 release.

Asynchronous I/O delivers the most noticeable gains in cloud
environments where storage is network-attached, such as Amazon EBS
volumes. In these setups, individual disk reads often take multiple
milliseconds, introducing substantial latency compared to local
SSDs.

With traditional synchronous I/O, each of these reads blocks query
execution until the data arrives, leading to idle CPU time and
degraded throughput. By contrast, asynchronous I/O allows Postgres
to issue multiple read requests in parallel and continue processing
while waiting for results. This reduces query latency and enables
much more efficient use of available I/O bandwidth and CPU cycles.