UALink as the open standard alternative to NVIDIA NVLink that is backed by Intel, AMD, and other vendors has published the UALink 200G 1.0 specification…

Version
1.4 of FreeDOS has been
released. This is the first stable release since 2022, and
includes improvements to the Fdisk hard-disk-management program, and
reliability updates for the mTCP set of TCP/IP applications for
DOS.

This version was much smoother because Jerome Shidel, our
distribution manager, had an idea after FreeDOS 1.3 that we could have
a rolling test release that collected all of the changes that people
make over time. Previous to this, each new FreeDOS distribution (like
1.0, 1.1, 1.2, and 1.3) required bundling up packages into a “release
candidate,” and we would go through several iterations of updating the
release candidates.

Jerome’s method of building the FreeDOS distribution made it easier
to automate a test release, which we decided to update every month. As
the test releases accumulated enough changes to warrant a release, we
could then make the next test release a “release candidate” which
would iterate to the next version of the FreeDOS distribution. Since
2022, we’ve released monthly test releases. Thanks Jerome!

LWN covered FreeDOS
last year for its 30th anniversary.

The Rust-written Redox OS open-source operating system project has published its March 2025 status report that outlines exciting progress made over the past month…

Learn how to install Docker on Void Linux and get this containerization platform up and running smoothly on your Void system in minutes.

Joplin is an open-source
note-taking application designed to handle taking many kinds of notes,
whether it is managing code snippets, writing documentation, jotting
down lecture notes, or drafting a novel. Joplin has Markdown support,
a plugin system for extensibility, and accepts multimedia content,
allowing users to attach images, videos, and audio files to their
notes. It can provide synchronization of content across devices using
end-to-end encryption, or users can opt to stick to local storage
only. Joplin even offers a command-line
version for terminal-based usage. Joplin
3.2, the most recent feature release, brought long-awaited
multi-window support, multi-column layouts, enhanced accessibility,
and theme detection.

The Linux 6.15 merge window ended on Sunday with the release of Linux 6.15-rc1. There is a lot of exciting features and updates that were merged during the two-week merge window. Here is a look at all of the most prominent changes to be found with Linux 6.15.

Quite a bit of work has been done in recent years to allow the kernel to
make more use of large folios. That progress has not yet reached the
handling of text (executable code) areas, though. During the
memory-management track of the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem,
Memory-Management, and BPF Summit, Ryan Roberts ran a session on how that
situation might be improved. It would be a relatively small and contained
operation, but can give a measurable performance improvement.

The kernel makes extensive use of per-CPU data as a way to avoid contention
between processors and improve scalability. Using the same technique in
user space is harder, though, since there is little control over which CPU
a process may be running on at any given time. That hasn’t stopped Mathieu
Desnoyers from trying, though; in the memory-management track of the 2025
Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit, he presented
a proposal for how user-space per-CPU memory could work.

Canonical announced today they have released Ubuntu developer images for the Orange Pi RV2, a new RISC-V single board computer that is low-cost with the SBC featuring 8GB of RAM costing just $64 USD…

It turns out the Hierarchical Z “HiZ” implementation with AMD RDNA4 GPUs with the GFX12 graphics engine for early rejection of fragments before hitting the rendering pipeline is slightly buggy. Driver workarounds are needed for the HiZ/HiS support with RDNA4 GPUs to avoid potential hangs…

DXVK 2.6.1, an open-source translation layer that converts Direct3D 8/9/10/11 calls to Vulkan, brings bug fixes and performance tweaks, improving stability for AMD, Nvidia, and Intel GPUs across various games and setups.

DXVK 2.6.1 Vulkan-based implementation of D3D9, D3D10, and D3D11 for Linux / Wine is now available for download with improvements for several games and various bug fixes.

In hoping to ease the experience for Linux enthusiasts and desktop users work through various potential hardware issues when running with AMD Zen (Ryzen) systems on Linux, a new documentation proposal adds a lot of helpers to the Linux kernel documentation area for dealing with different hardware woes…

fum is a TUI-based MPRIS music client designed to provide a simple and efficient way to display and control your music.

Tails will take you through a den of identity thieves, who will never learn your name. It’s sorta the opposite of Cheers.

Pahole (originally “Poke-a-hole”) is a Swiss Army knife for exploring and
editing debug information. Pahole is also currently involved
in the kernel’s build process to rearrange the information
produced by various compilers into a form useful to the BPF verifier, although
there are plans to render it unnecessary.
Pahole maintainer Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo shared some status
updates about the project at the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem,
Memory-Management, and BPF summit. Interested readers can find his slides
here.

At the end of March with the Ubuntu 25.04 beta release I began running Ubuntu 25.04 benchmarks on desktop hardware and finding some nice performance improvements thanks to the fresh Linux 6.14 kernel and other new software updates found in this next Ubuntu release. While those numbers were positive, the Ubuntu 25.04 beta performance I am seeing on AMD EPYC 5th Gen “Turin” servers is even more exhilarating. As the first of a lot more Ubuntu 25.04 server benchmarks to come, today is a first look at the Ubuntu 25.04 beta performance on AMD EPYC 9005 compared to Ubuntu 24.10 and the Ubuntu 24.04 LTS releases.

The kernel’s swap subsystem is complex and highly optimized — though not
always optimized for today’s workloads. In three adjacent sessions during
the memory-management track of the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem,
Memory-Management, and BPF Summit, Kairui Song, Nhat Pham, and Usama Arif
all talked about some of the problems that they are trying to solve in the
Linux swap subsystem. In the first two cases, the solutions take the form of
an additional layer of indirection in the kernel’s swap map; the third,
which enables swap-in of large folios, may or may not be worthwhile in the
end.

Flashcards are one of the best tools for memorizing information. This is partly because of their versatility. They can help teach multiplication skills, learn a foreign language, recall facts, historical dates, in fact anything that can be learned in an intuitive way.

Linus Torvalds released 6.15-rc1 and
closed the 6.15 merge window on April 6. By that time, 12,633
non-merge changesets had found their way into his repository; that is
substantially more than were merged during the entire 6.14
development cycle. Just under 6,000 of those changesets were merged after
the first-half merge-window summary was
written.