Category Archives: Linux

Linus Torvalds Rejects MMC Changes For Linux 7.0 Cycle: “Complete Garbage”

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The Linux MultiMediaCard “MMC” subsystem was set to see some new hardware support, optimized support for secure erase/trim on some eMMCs, and a variety of other improvements. But all of the MMC changes are rejected and will be for the duration of the Linux 7.0 cycle due to an apparent lack of testing and vetting via linux-next that led Linus Torvalds to calling it “complete garbage” and “untested crap”…

Intel Arc B390 Panther Lake Generational Performance Since The Gen9 Graphics Era

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Last week on Phoronix we provided initial Linux graphics benchmarks for the new Xe3-based Arc B390 graphics found with the higher-end Panther Lake SoCs with 12 Xe cores. Those benchmarks showed great gains over recent generations of Intel graphics like with Lunar Lake, Meteor Lake, and even Alder/Raptor Lake… But what if you hold onto your laptop for even longer? In this article is an Intel integrated graphics comparison looking at the general performance and power efficiency going all the way back to the Gen9 graphics era for what seemed like an eternity of Gen9-derived graphics during the Skylake era.

[$] Evolving Git for the next decade

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Git is ubiquitous; in the last two decades, the version-control
system has truly achieved world domination. Almost every developer
uses it and the vast majority of open-source projects are hosted in
Git repositories. That does not mean, however, that it is
perfect. Patrick Steinhardt used his main-track session at FOSDEM 2026
to discuss some of its shortcomings and how they are being
addressed to prepare Git for the next decade.

postmarketOS FOSDEM 2026 and hackathon recap

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The postmarketOS project
has published
a recap from FOSDEM 2026, including the FOSS on
Mobile devroom, and a summary of its post-FOSDEM
hackathon. This includes decisions on governance and the project’s
AI policy:

AI policy: our current AI
policy does not state that we forbid the use of generative AI in
postmarketOS, so far this document just lists why we think it is a bad
idea and misaligned with the project values. We discussed this and
will soon change it (via merge request) to clearly state that we don’t
want generative AI to be used in the project. It was also noted that
currently the policy is too long, it would make sense to split it into
the actual policy and still keep, but separate the reasoning from
it.

[…] Power delegation and teams: in over two
hours we discussed how to move forward with [postmarketOS change
request] PMCR 0008 to organize
ourselves better, and how it fits with soon having a legal entity. We
figured that we need to rename “The Board” (which is currently for
financial oversight) to “Financial Team”, as we will soon have a new
board for the legal entity. In the end our idea was to have the new
board refer to an “assembly” for all important decisions, and this
“assembly” would just be all Trusted Contributors in postmarketOS. The
Core Contributors team would be dissolved in favor of having several
topic-specific teams (a lot of which we already have, such as the
infra team). This way we would have a very flat decision
structure. The PMCR will be updated soon and discussed further
there. Casey
also asked on fedi for further feedback and got a lot of input.

Other topics include reaching out to resellers to sell phones with
postmarketOS preinstalled, security, and more.