The Spectre class of hardware vulnerabilities truly is a gift that keeps on
giving. New variants are still being discovered in current CPUs nearly
eight years after the disclosure of this
problem, and developers are still working to minimize the performance costs
that come from defending against it. The masked user-space access
mechanism is a case in point: it reduces the cost of defending against some
speculative attacks, but it brought some challenges of its own that are
only now being addressed.

The past number of months has seen a lot of work by Intel Linux kernel engineers on cache-aware scheduling / load balancing for helping modern CPUs that have multiple caches. With cache aware scheduling, tasks that will likely share resources could be aggregated into the same cache domain to enjoy better cache locality. With the cache aware scheduling patches recently updated and now working past the “request for comments” stage, I was eager to try out these new patches. Especially with a 44% time reduction reported for one of the benchmarks, I was eager to run some tests and the first of those results are being shared today.

Canonical’s new push for their Snap app packaging/sandboxed format on Ubuntu Linux is for AI large language models (LLMs). Making it more interesting though is that they are working to deliver silicon-optimized AI LLMs for your hardware and to make it easily deployable for Ubuntu sers…

The AlmaLinux project has announced
that the upcoming 10.1 release will include support for
Btrfs:

Btrfs support encompasses both kernel and userspace enablement, and
it is now possible to install AlmaLinux OS with a Btrfs filesystem
from the very beginning. Initial enablement was scoped to the
installer and storage management stack, and broader support within the
AlmaLinux software collection for Btrfs features is forthcoming.

Btrfs support in AlmaLinux OS did not happen in isolation. This was
proposed and scoped in RFC 0005, and has been built upon prior efforts
by the Fedora
Btrfs SIG in Fedora Linux and the CentOS Hyperscale SIG
in CentOS Stream.

AlmaLinux OS is designed to be binary compatible with Red Hat
Enterprise Linux (RHEL); Btrfs, however, has never been supported in
RHEL. A technology preview of Btrfs in RHEL 6 and 7 ended with the
filesystem being dropped from RHEL 8 and
onward. AlmaLinux OS 10.1 is currently
in beta.

As of today, October 18th, 2025, Canonical has published the first daily build ISO images of the upcoming Ubuntu 26.04 LTS (codename Resolute Raccoon) for early adopters, application developers, and general public testing.

Discover the Radxa ROCK 4D single board computer running Linux. Explore its efficient power consumption and performance capabilities for your projects.

The post Radxa ROCK 4D Single Board Computer Running Linux: Power Consumption appeared first on Linux Today.

Not the default file system, but in the installer if you want itAlmaLinux is to support the Btrfs file system in version 10.1 of its eponymous RHELative operating system.…

The Fedora Council has finally come to a decision on allowing AI-assisted contributions to the project. The agreed upon guidelines are fairly straight-forward and will permit AI-assisted contributions if it’s properly disclosed and transparent…

Researchers say ‘Proto-X’ fine-tunes databases automatically, delivering multifold performance boostsAutomated database systems based on vector embedding algorithms could improve the performance of default settings on common PostgreSQL database services by a factor of two to ten, according to a database researcher.…

Oracle recently launched their E6 compute shape for Oracle Cloud and powered by AMD EPYC 9005 “Turin” processors. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure also launched their Compute Cloud@Customer X11 and Private Cloud Appliance X11 platforms that are all powered by the E6 compute shape with 5th Gen AMD EPYC. For those curious about the performance and value of the Oracle Cloud E6 shape compared to prior-gen E5 as well as alternatives from Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, these benchmarks are geared for you.

OpenZFS 2.4 stable should be out in the near future while out today is the third release candidate for this ZFS file-system implementation for Linux and FreeBSD operating systems…

The Fedora-based Ultramarine Linux 42 lands with WSL GPU support, while the Terra repo gets faster builds and improved performance.

Google engineer Rahman Lavaee today announced their work on a prototype software implementation to automatically insert optimal code prefetches into binaries for faster performance, especially for the latest Intel Granite Rapids and AMD Turin processors with new prefetching instructions…

Another phone Linux? The Reg attempts to disentangle the optionsThe latest version of Mobian, an edition of Debian aimed at mobile devices, is here, based on Debian 13 “Trixie”.…

While XP-PEN does provide out-of-tree drivers for their drawing tablets on Linux including the XP-PEN Artist 24 Pro, the Linux 6.19 kernel is set to provide upstream support for the XP-PEN Artist 24 Pro…

Synaptics has unveiled the Astra SL2600, a family of multimodal processors designed for edge computing across consumer, enterprise, and industrial IoT applications. The lineup debuts with the SL2610 product line, targeting low-power and high-performance designs used in smart home, automation, robotics, and retail systems. The Astra SL2600 family is built around the new Synaptics Torq […]

The Fedora Council has approved
an AI-assisted
contributions policy. This follows several
weeks of discussion, some of which were covered by LWN on
October 1. The final policy contains substantial differences from
the initial
proposal, and now requires disclosure of AI tools “when the
significant part of the contribution is taken from a tool without
changes“.

The EROFS read-only file-system continues enjoying nice uptick in use from embedded devices to containers. Merged today for Linux 6.18 is some new hardening to the EROFS driver where specially-crafted file-system images could lead to system crashes or infinite loops…

Germany’s Sovereign Tech Agency (nee Sovereign Tech Fund) is out with their latest newsletter where they outlined some new investments in various key open-source projects…

A new NTFSPlus driver has been proposed to replace NTFS3, aiming for faster, cleaner, and more stable NTFS support in Linux.