Category Archives: Linux

The Sashiko patch-review system

Posted on by

Roman Gushchin has announced the
existence of an LLM-driven patch-review system named Sashiko. It automatically creates reviews
for all patches sent to the linux-kernel mailing list (and some others).

In my measurement, Sashiko was able to find 53% of bugs based on a
completely unfiltered set of 1,000 recent upstream issues using
“Fixes:” tags (using Gemini 3.1 Pro). Some might say that 53% is
not that impressive, but 100% of these issues were missed by human
reviewers.

Sashiko is built on Chris Mason’s review prompts (covered here in October 2025), but the
implementation has evolved considerably.

Age verification isn’t sage verification when it’s inside operating systems

Posted on by

Toothbrushes, Turing and the truth give the lie to California’s legal lunacyOpinion There are two ways to look at the California Assembly Bill 1043, known as The Digital Age Assurance Act or DAAA. One is to say it is a 2025 law requiring operating systems and app stores to implement age verification during account setup to protect minors online. The other is to note that the law is all the worst things a law can be.…

FSFE reports trouble with payment provider

Posted on by

The Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) is reporting
that payment provider Nexi has terminated its contract without prior
notice, which means that a number of FSFE supporters’ recurring
payments have been halted:

Over the past few months, our former payment provider Nexi
S.p.A. (“Nexi”) requested access to private data, which we understood
to be specifically the usernames and passwords of our supporters. We
have refused this request. All our attempts to clarify Nexi’s request,
or to understand how their need for such information was necessary and
legal, were met with what we consider to be vague and unsatisfactory
explanations relating to a general need for risk analysis.

[…] The decisions that Nexi has made are incomprehensible to
us. Over the last months, as part of a security audit that Nexi
claimed to be conducting, we have provided them with large amounts of
the FSFE’s financial documentation, which even included private
information of our executive staff. We have answered all of their
questions. But we have to draw a line when private companies like Nexi
demand access to the sensitive and private data of our supporters.

According to the blog post, more than 450 supporters have been
affected by this. The FSFE’s donation pages have been updated with its
new payment provider.

System76 Makes The Best Open-Source Keyboard Even Better

Posted on by

If System76 engineers didn’t already have enough going on with recently shipping the COSMIC Rust-based desktop environment and also shipping Pop!_OS 24.04 as their in-house Linux distribution plus completely redesigning the Thelio Desktop, they also recently revised their Launch Keyboard. They have made this leading open-source keyboard design even better with the latest iteration of the System76 Launch Keyboard.

[$] Fedora ponders a “sandbox” technology lifecycle

Posted on by

Fedora Project Leader (FPL) Jef Spaleta has issued
a “modest proposal” for a technology-innovation-lifecycle process
that would provide more formal structure for adopting technologies in
Fedora. The idea is to spur innovation in the project without having an adverse
impact on stability or the release process. Spaleta’s proposal is
somewhat light on details, particularly as far as specific examples of
which projects would benefit; however, the reception so far is mostly
positive and some think that it could make Fedora more “competitive” by being the
place where open-source projects come to grow.

Meta Renewing Investment Into The jemalloc Memory Allocator

Posted on by

The jemalloc memory allocator “malloc” implementation has been popular for HPC and server use down to desktop use in apps like Firefox. Jemalloc has proven over the years to be effective on delivering better performance and scalability while enjoying lower memory usage and less fragmentation than alternative malloc implementations. Meta recently announced that they are renewing their investment into jemalloc…