GNU/Linux and FOSS Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Sep 14, 2025

• GNU/Linux

  • Benchmarks

    • Cybertec PostgreSQL International GmbH ☛ Christoph Berg: The Cost of TDE and Checksums in PGEE

      It's been a while since the last performance check of Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) in Cybertec's PGEE distribution - that was in 2016. Of course, the question is still interesting, so I did some benchmarks.

      Since the difference is really small between running without any extras, with data checksums turned on, and with both encryption and checksums turned on, we need to pick a configuration that will stress-test these features the most. So in the spirit of making PostgreSQL deliberately run slow, I went with only 1MB of shared_buffers with a pgbench workload of scale factor 50. The 770MB of database size will easily fit into RAM. However, having such a small buffer cache setting will cause a lot of cache misses with pages re-read from the OS disk cache, checksums checked, and the page decrypted again.

  • Desktop Environments (DE)/Window Managers (WM)

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • Alley Chaggar: Final Report

        Intro:

        Hi everyone, it’s the end of GSoc! I had a great experience throughout this whole process. I’ve learned so much. This is essentially the ‘final report’ for GSoC, but not my final report for this project in general by a long shot. I still have so much more I want to do, but here is what I’ve done so far.

        [...]

        The main objective of this project is to integrate direct syntax support for parsing and emitting JSON, XML, and/or YAML formats in Vala. This will cut back the boilerplate code, making it more user-friendly and efficient for developers working with these formatting languages.

• Distributions and Operating Systems

  • Fedora Family / IBM

    • Federal News Network ☛ Building Hey Hi (AI) that works: Red Bait shares how ecosystem approach can be ‘the glue’ in federal innovation

      Red Hat Solution Architect Kush Gupta suggests seven ways agencies can scale artificial intelligence capabilities in complex federal landscape.

  • Debian Family

    • Michael Ablassmeier: qmpbackup and proxmox 9

      The latest Proxmox release introduces a new Qemu machine version that seems to behave differently for how it addresses the virtual disk configuration.

      Also, the regular “query-block” qmp command doesn’t list the created bitmaps as usual.

      If the virtual machine version is set to “9.2+pve”, everything seems to work out of the box.

      I’ve released Version 0.50 with some small changes so its compatible with the newer machine versions.

• Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

  • Programming/Development

    • Rust

      • Rust Blog ☛ The Rust Programming Language Blog: crates.io phishing campaign

        We received multiple reports of a phishing campaign targeting crates.io users (from the rustfoundation.dev domain name), mentioning a compromise of our infrastructure and asking users to authenticate to limit damage to their crates.