news
BSD/Linux Kernel Space: Linux 7.0, 6.6, 6.12, and 6.18; ZFS and More
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PC Gamer ☛ 'We have a new major number purely because I'm easily confused and not good with big numbers' says Linus Torvalds about Linux 7.0
I've never been particularly number-inclined, and apparently I'm in good company, as Linux kernel creator Linus Torvalds has a similar issue. In a post announcing Linux 7.0 rc1, Torvalds is quick to point out that the major number release version doesn't necessarily mean it's the most exciting version of the Linux kernel yet.
"We have a new major number purely because I'm easily confused and not good with big numbers", says Torvalds (via The Register).
"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."
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LWN ☛ Support period lengthened for the 6.6, 6.12, and 6.18 kernels
The stated support periods for the 6.6, 6.12, and 6.18 kernels has been extended.
The 6.6 kernel will be supported with stable updates through the end of
2027 (for four years of support total), while 6.12 and 6.18 will get
updates through the end of 2028, for four and three years of support.
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Collabora ☛ RK3588 and RK3576 video decoders support merged in the upstream Linux Kernel
Support for Rockchip’s VDPU381 and VDPU383 decoders is now upstream in Linux, bringing mainline H.264/HEVC decode support, robust IOMMU-reset recovery, and new HEVC V4L2 UAPI controls aligned with Vulkan Video.
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Klara ☛ ZFS Fast Dedup for Proxmox VE 9.x
ZFS Fast Dedup in Proxmox VE 9.x, powered by OpenZFS 2.3, introduces a bounded and predictable deduplication model using DDT quotas, prefetch, and prune operations. This guide explains architecture, enabling steps, sizing methodology, and workload selection for production deployments.
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Trail of Bits ☛ mquire: Linux memory forensics without external dependencies
Today, we’re open-sourcing mquire, a tool that eliminates this dependency entirely. mquire analyzes Linux memory dumps without requiring any external debug information. It works by extracting everything it needs directly from the memory dump itself. This means you can analyze unknown kernels, custom builds, or any Linux distribution, without preparation and without hunting for symbol files.
For forensic analysts and incident responders, this is a significant shift: mquire delivers reliable memory analysis even when traditional tools can’t.
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University of Toronto ☛ With disk caches, you want to be able to attribute hits and misses
Suppose that you have a disk or filesystem cache in memory (which you do, since pretty much everything has one these days). Most disk caches will give you simple hit and miss information as part of their basic information, but if you're interested in the performance of your disk cache (or in improving it), you want more information. The problem with disk caches is that there are a lot of different sources and types of disk IO, and you can have hit rates that are drastically different between them. Your hit rate for reading data from files may be modest, while your hit rate on certain sorts of metadata may be extremely high. Knowing this is important because it means that your current good performance on things involving that metadata is critically dependent on that hit rate.
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The New Stack ☛ WebAssembly is everywhere. Here's how it works
Wasm is a binary instruction format that works alongside JavaScript. It speeds up web applications that process a high amount of data (i.e. image processing, heavy math computations, etc.). Think of it this way, if the purpose of the site is something that would be better performing if it were written in a language built to perform those tasks (Rust, C, C++, and the like), then it probably would be better written in one of those languages. And by using Wasm, it can be. This is no criticism of JavaScript. JavaScript wasn’t created to perform heavy computations. JavaScript was built to give the browser interactive functionality. And it’s still the leader at that.
Wasm became a W3C standard in December 2019, and industry adoption followed quickly. It’s currently present on approximately 43,000 sites, including major products like Figma, Unity, and Fastly.
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Making Linux fly: Siebel School researchers work on aviation certification for the Linux kernel
In work awarded a best paper at the 2025 Digital Avionics Systems Conference, Siebel School of Computing and Data Science graduate student Wentao Zhang and his collaborators at Boeing developed safety-testing infrastructure for the Linux kernel, advancing the goal of certification for commercial aviation.
More on LTS kernels:
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Longterm supported Linux kernels get a longer life | GamingOnLinux
Linux developer Greg Kroah-Hartman announced that the Longterm supported Linux kernels are going to be supported for longer than previously announced.