GNU/Linux and BSD Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on May 29, 2025

• Kernel Space

  • Klara ☛ The Maintainer's Dilemma: Strategies for Supporting Legacy Drivers Across Decades of Hardware Evolution

    The fundamental paradox of driver maintenance presents itself: as hardware architectures evolve at an accelerating pace, the software layer interfacing with them must simultaneously maintain backward compatibility while embracing technological advancement. This technical exploration examines the multifaceted challenges of supporting legacy drivers across hardware evolution timescales measured in decades rather than years and presents architectural strategies that have proven effective in real-world implementations.

    Drivers represent a unique class of software that straddles the boundary between hardware abstraction and operating system integration. Unlike application software, drivers must contend with both API/ABI compatibility requirements from the operating system above and hardware interface changes from below. This dual constraint creates what we term the "maintainer's dilemma" – the increasingly complex challenge of supporting legacy hardware without inhibiting innovation or compromising system stability.

• Graphics Stack

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Arc B770 spotted? Four new defective chip maker Intel Battlemage GPU IDs appear in GNU/Linux Mesa graphics driver

    Intel has added four new PCI IDs to the GNU/Linux Mesa graphics library, potentially signaling the upcoming release of a B770 graphics card.

• Applications

  • It's FOSS ☛ Looking for Some Good Note Taking Apps on Linux? Here are the Best Notes Apps we Found for You

    No matter what I’m working on, taking notes has always been a helpful habit. Over the years, I’ve tried scribbling on sticky notes, typing into text files, and even emailing myself reminders.

    Eventually, I realised that a good note-taking app makes all the difference, especially on Linux, where we have versatile options. So, after a fair bit of trial and error, I’ve rounded up some of the best note-taking apps that actually work well on a Linux system.

• Distributions and Operating Systems

  • PCLinuxOS

    • PCLOS Official ☛ PCLinuxOS Recent Updates

  • SUSE/OpenSUSE

    • OpenSUSE ☛ Lend a Hand at the openSUSE Conference

      Whether you’re a longtime contributor or a new face looking to get more involved, there are several ways you can support the conference and ensure everyone has a good time.

  • Fedora Family / IBM

    • Copr: Log Detective Model Analysis

      Before we start with the comparison, let’s acknowledge a big milestone in the Log Detective project. Our tool now comments on Gitlab merge requests for failed CentOS Stream builds [1]. Here is an example of such a comment. I picked the first one from the list and in this case, the explanation is just wrong. However, upon examining the “Details”, which displays log lines annotated by the drain3 library, you can identify the root cause - files are not present on the expected paths.

      Back to the comparison. We have been using the Mistral 0.2 7B model in Log Detective for quite some time. It was updated last time in December 2023. 1.5 years is a long time in the development of LLMs. Therefore we decided to compare how Mistral is doing against: [...]

  • Debian Family

    • Debian ☛ Bits from Debian: Debian welcomes the 2025 GSOC contributors/students

      We are very excited to announce that Debian has selected nine contributors to work under mentorship on a variety of projects with us during the Google Summer of Code.

      Here is a list of the projects and students, along with details of the tasks to be performed.

    • Medium ☛ Simon Quigley: Touch Grass Sustainably

      If you’ve been in a debate online long enough, you’ll eventually get to the point where someone will tell you to “go touch grass.” What does that mean, and does it actually help?

      Touching grass really just means spending time outside of your normal zone. This could mean going to a park and bringing a book, going fishing, or even some activities like bowling.

      There are some who argue, “well, my job requires me to work 80+ hours a week. I’m constantly stressed out, and I really don’t feel like I have the time to work out.” There are also some who argue, “due to a physical limitation, I’m unable to enjoy exercise.” Even more so, there are those that argue, “physical health shouldn’t be your only goal in life, you should really dig deep into yourself as a person on an emotional level, or even better, spiritually.”

      I have answers for all three of you. I’ll start by sharing a quick story.

      I don’t recall exactly what year it was, but I was still in elementary school. As part of the Running Club I participated in, our end goal was to run the Bellin Run.

  • Canonical/Ubuntu Family

    • Ubuntu ☛ The 2025 Frankfurt Engineering Sprint: What did you miss?

      My name is Nkeiruka, and I work as a Software Engineer for Canonical on the LXD-UI team. From the 11th to the 18th of May 2025, you would have found myself, my team, and about 90% of the Canonical engineers, in Frankfurt, Germany as we prepared a roadmap for the next 6 months of releases and features across our products.