today's leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Apr 15, 2025

• BSD/Linux

  • Audiocasts/Shows

    • Late Night Linux – Episode 329

      Two very different approaches to setting up security cameras, an IDE-like experience for text adventure games, a glimpse of convergence on Pixel phones, a new LTS of the flight sim FlightGear, and more.

  • Kernel Space

    • University of Toronto ☛ ZFS's delayed compression of written data (when compression is enabled)

      Like basically all filesystems, ZFS doesn't immediately start writing data to disk when you do a write() system call. Instead it buffers this data in memory for a while and only writes it later. As part of this, ZFS doesn't immediately decide where on disk the data will be written (this is often called 'delayed allocation' and is common in many filesystems) and otherwise prepare it to be written out. As part of this delayed allocation and preparation, ZFS doesn't immediately compress your written data, and as a result ZFS doesn't know how many disk blocks your data will take up. Instead your data is only compressed and has disk blocks allocated for it as part of ZFS's pipeline of actually performing IO, when the data is flushed to disk, and only then is its physical block size known.

    • Loganius ☛ I bought a Mac. – Loganius' Site

      For a while now, I have been working intermittently on the Wii U Linux kernel. In December, for reasons that aren’t important right now, I turned my attention towards fixing KVM on the Wii U, but in order to fix it, I needed to figure when and why it broke, and the easiest way I could think to do that was with a PowerMac.4 Fortunately, my roommate already had a 233 MHz Bondi Blue iMac G3, which he very kindly agreed to lend me. However, when I tried to use it, it was so slow that I couldn’t even get Linux installed. After that, I decided I’d rather get crushed by a crane then do kernel debugging on a 233 MHz G3. I realized, somewhere, something needed a change.5

• Distributions and Operating Systems

  • Canonical/Ubuntu Family

    • Ubuntu ☛ How we ran an effective sprint to refresh our website, Part 1

      We want to share our journey of designing innovative and user-centric solutions for complex technical systems. This way, we hope to set high standards for excellence in design and engineering, as well as champion collaboration, curiosity, and resourcefulness.”

    • Ubuntu News ☛ Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 887

      Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 887 for the week of April 6 – 12, 2025. The full version of this issue is available here.

• Other

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • Open Access/Content

      • Ismael Olea: A Wikibase call for action at the Wikimedia Hackathon 2025

        This year I have again received a grant from the WMF to attend to the annual Wikimedia Hackathon, this year is in Istanbul. I’m very grateful to them.

        Since 2024 I’m very interested in the Wikibase platform since we are using it at LaOficina and is a main topic for the DHwiki WG. I’m not going into details but, from the very beginning, my first thoughs of involvement in the hackathon are related with Wikibase. Specially the need of «productization» and reduce entry barriers for Wikibase adoption, at least