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Kernel Space / File Systems: ZFS, Linux Kernel 6.19, and Amiga's Filesystem
XDA ☛ ZFS is great for storage, but it can be a maintenance nightmare
ZFS has earned its reputation the hard way. It's one of the few filesystems that genuinely delivers on promises like end-to-end data integrity, self-healing, snapshots that don't feel like a hack, and storage management that actually scales as your system grows. Once you've lived with ZFS, it's hard to go back to traditional RAID and ext4 without feeling like you've lost safety nets you didn't realize you were relying on. ZFS can detect and correct errors that a simple RAID or ext4 setup would never catch, and features like instant snapshots and copy-on-write design make tasks like backups and rollbacks easy to make a habit.
But ZFS also comes with an uncomfortable truth that doesn't get talked about enough: the filesystem is only as good as the operating system wrapping it. And if you're running ZFS on a generic Linux distribution, you're often signing up for more risk, maintenance, and subtle breakage than you expect. ZFS works on Linux, and many use it daily, but it's not a seamless, built-in part of the kernel. Instead, it's an add-on with caveats, and setting it up can feel frustratingly difficult.
All of this is to say that ZFS itself is rock solid, but the wrong OS can make your experience far less so.
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Linux Kernel 6.19 Delivers Major Performance Boost for Old AMD GPUs
Linux users have long preferred AMD GPUs for their superior built-in support in the Linux kernel, and the latest Linux kernel update, version 6.19, appears to reinforce these notions, according to testing by Phoronix. For users of old GCN 1.0 and GCN 1.1 GPUs, like the AMD R9 390x, recent change to the Linux kernel now defaults to using the newer AMDGPU Linux kernel driver, where they would previously default to the Radeon driver. This change was facilitated by Valve, whose engineers have been working on bringing modern feature support to the GPUs and getting the AMDGPU kernel driver support into a state that allowed for it to become the default option. This change was expected to deliver a performance uplift, but in testing, it has been revealed that this performance uplift often exceeds 40%, depending on the game.
Phoronix tested the new configuration on an AMD Radeon HD 7900 3 GB from the Southern Island family, which is a 13-year-old graphics card, and in the publication's testing, the new driver outperformed the older version in every test, with the biggest performance increases coming from the GravityMark 1.87 OpenGL tests, although Unigine's benchmarks also saw a handsome improvement. Aside from performance improvements, access to features like the Mesa RADV Vulkan driver, among others, allows these older GPUs to play a number of games using Proton, which could improve performance or make previously unplayable games compatible.
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HowTo Geek ☛ The Amiga's filesystem is now on Linux and Mac, thanks to an emulated driver
Amiga computers may have been popular in the late 1980s and early 1990s, especially in media production, but their filesystems are not directly compatible with modern computers. The new 'amifuse' project aims to fix that with a new filesystem driver built around an invisible m68k CPU emulator.
Amifuse is a FUSE driver for macOS and Linux, allowing you to natively mount disk images using the Amiga's Professional File System 3 (PFS3). The project's documentation says other Amiga filesystems might work, "but have not been tested." Disks are read-only by default, but you can enable the experimental read-write support through a command-line argument.
If you have Amiga drives or disks, there aren't many options for accessing those files with modern computers. The Linux kernel has limited support for some of the old Amiga filesystems, but not PFS3, which was proprietary commercial software until it was open-sourced in 2011. The more common format was the Amiga Fast File System (FFS), which replaced the Amiga Old File System (OFS). There's also the Smart File System introduced in 1998, which had an experimental Linux driver at one point, but the project was abandoned.