news
GNU/Linux and NetBSD Leftovers
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Kernel Space
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Brendan Gregg ☛ Brendan Gregg: When to Hire a Computer Performance Engineering Team (2025) part 1 of 2
As a leader in computer performance I've been asked by companies about how (and why) to form a performance engineering team, and as this is broadly useful I'll share my advice here.
Large tech companies in the US hire performance engineers (under that or other titles) to ensure that infrastructure costs and service latency don't grow too high, and that their service is reliable under peak load. A new performance team can likely find enough optimizations to halve infrastructure spend in their first couple of years, even for companies that have been using commercial performance or observability tools. Performance engineers do much more than those tools, working with development teams and vendors to build, test, debug, tune, and adopt new performance solutions, and to find deep optimizations that those tools can miss.
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Desktop Environments (DE)/Window Managers (WM)
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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GNOME ☛ Christian Hergert: Week 31 Status
Foundry
Added a new gutter renderer for diagnostics using the
FoundryOnTypeDiagnosticsdescribed last week.Write another new gutter renderer for “line changes”.
I’m really happy with how I can use fibers w/
GWeakRefto do worker loops but not keep the “owner object” alive. As long as you have a nice way to break out of the fiber loop when the object disposes (e.g. trigger aDexCancellable/DexPromise/etc) then writing this sort of widget is cleaner/simpler than before w/GAsyncReadyCallback.
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Distributions and Operating Systems
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BSD
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NetBSD ☛ NetBSD 11.0 release process underway
No promises, but we will try to make this one of the shortest release cycles ever...
Ideally we will be in release candidate state at EuroBSDCon late in September, and cut the final release early in October.
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Debian Family
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Aigars Mahinovs ☛ Snapshot mirroring in Debian (and Ubuntu)
The use of snapshots has been routine in both Debian and Ubuntu for several years now—or more than 15 years for Debian, to be precise. Snapshots have become not only very reliable, but also an increasingly important part of the Debian package archive.
This week, I encountered a problem at work that could be perfectly solved by correctly using the Snapshot service. However, while trying to figure it out, I ran into some shortcomings in the documentation. Until the docs are updated, I am publishing this blog post to make this information easier to find.
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Freexian Collaborators: Secure boot signing with Debusine (by Colin Watson)
Debusine aims to be an integrated solution to build, distribute and maintain a Debian-based distribution. At Debconf 25, we talked about using it to pre-test uploads to Debian unstable, and also touched on how Freexian is using it to help maintain the Debian LTS and ELTS projects.
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Canonical/Ubuntu Family
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Ubuntu News ☛ Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 903
Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 903 for the week of July 27 – August 2, 2025. The full version of this issue is available here.
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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Zimbabwe ☛ Why Android 15 Makes Some Phones 30% Faster, And Why You Might Miss Out
We don’t change phones every year in Zimbabwe. For many of us, a phone has to last four, maybe even six or seven years.
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Scoop News Group ☛ Google addresses six vulnerabilities in August’s Android security update
Android partners and customers have experienced a temporary respite from double-digit vulnerabilities this summer. Surveillance Giant Google issued no security patches in its update last month.
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