BSD and Linux Kernel Space

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Feb 23, 2026

• The Register UK ☛ Linus Torvalds jokingly ponders his successor as Linux boss

  “We haven't done releases based on features (or on "stable vs unstable") for a long, long time now. So that new major number does *not* mean that we have some big new exciting feature, or that we're somehow leaving old interfaces behind. It's the usual "solid progress" marker, nothing more.”

  He then reiterated his plan to end each series of kernels to end at x.19, before the next release becomes y.0 – a process that takes about 3.5 years – and then pondered what happens when the next version of Linux reaches a number he finds uncomfortable.

• Shayon Mukherjee ☛ Let's discuss sandbox isolation

  The word “isolation” gets used loosely. A Docker container is “isolated.” A microVM is “isolated.” A WebAssembly module is “isolated.” But these are fundamentally different things, with different boundaries, different attack surfaces, and different failure modes. I wanted to write down my learnings on what each layer actually provides, because I think the distinctions matter and allow you to make informed decisions for the problems you are looking to solve.

• Video Cardz ☛ Linux 7.0 merges AMDGPU update for decade old Radeon GPUs

  Linux 7.0 is getting its first round of post feature fixes for graphics drivers, and a large share of them are for AMDGPU. The patch set was reported yesterday, as part of the normal DRM fix process that follows the bigger feature merges earlier in the release cycle.

• BSD

  • Dan Langille ☛ nagios03: drive recovery

    After zpool upgrade blocked by gpart: /dev/da0p1: not enough space, I’ve decided to create a new Azure VM, snapshot the now-faulty-drive, attach it to the host, and start zfs replication to copy the data to new drive. Or something like that. The existing drive needs to be imported with a checkpoint rollback, then copied to a drive with different partition sizes.

    Here’s the new host: [...]

  • Hypha ☛ Back to FreeBSD: Part 1

    The quiet revolution happened in 2000. Not on Windows Server, and not yet on Linux — but on FreeBSD, a UNIX-based operating system that was the default choice for IT professionals long before Linux dominated the space.

    FreeBSD is worth a brief aside here, because it differs from Linux in a fundamental way. Linux is a kernel. What most people call "Linux" is actually that kernel combined with a GNU userland, a package ecosystem, and a set of choices that vary from distro to distro — Ubuntu, Fedora, and Arch are all running the same kernel but are meaningfully different systems underneath.