Category Archives: Linux

[$] Unpacking for Python comprehensions

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Unpacking Python iterables of various sorts, such as dictionaries or lists,
is useful in a number of contexts, including for function arguments, but
there has long been a call for extending that capability to comprehensions. PEP 798 (“Unpacking in
Comprehensions”) was first proposed in June 2025 to fill that gap. In early
November, the steering council accepted
the PEP, which means that the feature will be coming to Python 3.15 in
October 2026. It may be something of a niche feature, but it is an
inconsistency
that has been apparent for a while—to the point that some Python programmers
assume that it is already present in the language.

Clang 21 Delivering Nice Performance Gains On AMD EPYC Zen 4 With HBM3

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One of the areas I’ve been meaning to run more benchmarks on this season has been for the recently released Clang 21 compiler. Back in September when LLVM Clang 21 was debuting I ran some initial benchmarks and found it to deliver some nice performance gains on AMD EPYC Zen 5 but then have been busy with other benchmarks/articles for expanding that testing. Recently with having some spare cycles and gratis access still to the Microsoft Azure HBv5 instance for AMD EPYC Zen 4 with HBM3, I ran some Clang 20 vs. Clang 21 performance benchmarks there for those wondering about any performance benefits of this new compiler release on Zen 4.

PHP 8.5.0 released

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Version
8.5.0 of the PHP language has been released. Changes include a new
“|>” operator that, for some reason, makes these two lines
equivalent:

    $result = strlen("Hello world");
    $result = "Hello world" |> strlen(...);

Other changes include a new function attribute, “#[NoDiscard]” to
indicate that the return value should be used, attributes on constants, and
more; see the
migration guide for details.

Sovereign Tech Fund Hiring A New Leader For Driving Open-Source Funding

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Germany’s Sovereign Tech Fund / Sovereign Tech Agency has been a godsend the past few years for the open-source community. This funding from the German government has led to significant funding for dozens of prominent open-source infrastructure projects to provide more resources for enhancing security, enabling new features, and more. As the Sovereign Tech Fund prepares for the next phase of growth, they are hiring a new head to lead the efforts…

LILYGO Expands T-Beam Series With New 1W LoRa GPS Board

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LILYGO has introduced the T-Beam 1W, an ESP32-S3 development board that combines LoRa connectivity, GNSS positioning, an OLED display, and SD card storage. It follows the familiar T-Beam layout while adding a higher-power LoRa front end for long-range communication tasks. The system is built around the ESP32-S3FN8, a dual-core Tensilica LX7 processor with 16 MB […]

Intel Continues Working On Dynamic PAMT To Reduce Memory Overhead For TDX

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One of the improvements that Intel software engineers have been working on for the Linux kernel around their Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) functionality for confidential computing VMs is reducing the memory use. That work is under the Dynamic PAMT umbrella and this week brought the latest iteration of patches to help lower RAM use when engaging TDX for confidential VMs…