news
Linux Kernel: Asahi, Some BSD, and Value of GPL
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Asahi Linux ☛ Progress Report: Linux 6.19 - Asahi Linux
Asahi Linux turns 5 this year. In those five years, we’ve gone from Hello World over a serial port to being one of the best supported desktop-grade AArch64 platform in the Linux ecosystem. The sustained interest in Asahi was the push many developers needed to start taking AArch64 seriously, with a whole slew of platform-specific bugs in popular software being fixed specifically to enable their use on Apple Silicon devices running Linux. We are immensely proud of what we have achieved and consider the project a resounding and continued success.
And yet, there has remained one question seemingly on everyone’s lips. Every announcement, every upstreaming victory, every blog post has drawn this question out in one way or another. It is asked at least once a week on IRC and Matrix, and we even occasionally receive emails asking it.
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LWN ☛ An Asahi Linux progress report
The Asahi Linux project, which is working to implement support for Linux on
Apple CPUs, has published a detailed 6.19
progress report.
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Klara ☛ ARC and L2ARC Sizing on Proxmox
ARC and L2ARC sizing in Proxmox is a capacity-planning problem, not a tuning exercise. This article explains how to budget RAM for guests and ZFS, set deterministic ARC limits, and decide when L2ARC improves performance—and when it adds unnecessary complexity.
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Mark-James McDougall ☛ 6502 Emulation - The Jump Indirect Bug
After some investigation, I discovered that there’s a bug in the original 6502 hardware that occurs when a page boundary is crossed during the jump indirect instruction. According to 6502.org, there’s no carry associated with jump indirect, and so they caution that it must never use a vector beginning on the last byte of a page.
To better understand what’s happening here, consider the above test case: [...]
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The Register UK ☛ Linus Torvalds and friends tell The Reg how Linux solo act became a global jam session
If you know anything about Linux's history, you'll remember it all started with Linus Torvalds posting to the Minix Usenet group on August 25, 1991, that he was working on "a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones." We know that the "hobby" operating system today is Linux, and except for PCs and Macs, it pretty much runs the world.
Did you ever wonder, though, how it went from being one person's project to being a group effort? I knew most of the story because I'd been using Linux since 1993. But I thought I'd ask Linus, and some of the early Linux developers.
It all began when Torvalds and his friend Lars Wirzenius met at the University of Helsinki. They began tinkering with PCs; computer games (Prince of Persia); social networking, which in those days was Usenet; and Unix.
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Another crucial structural shift came in 1992, when Torvalds moved the kernel under the GNU General Public License (GPL). This clarified that anyone could study, modify, and redistribute the code as long as improvements remained free. That made it possible for developers to build distributions that combined the Linux kernel with GNU tools and other free software, and early distros in 1992-1993 transformed Linux from a kernel hackers compiled themselves into complete systems ordinary users could install, widening the contributor base.