GNU/Linux and BSD Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Mar 14, 2026

• Server

  • Techstrong Group Inc ☛ What to Expect From Kubernetes 1.36

    Kubernetes 1.36 launches April 22, 2026, marking a major shift in networking as Ingress-Nginx retires in favor of the more scalable Gateway Hey Hi (AI) Key updates include bolstered GNU/Linux User Namespaces for better isolation and Dynamic Resource Allocation (DRA) enhancements for hardware maintenance. Additionally, manifest-based admission control and OCI artifact mounting aim to boost cluster security.

• Kernel Space / File Systems / Virtualization

  • Christian Hofstede-Kuhn ☛ FreeBSD Foundationals: ZFS - The Last Filesystem You’ll Ever Need

    ZFS was born at Sun Microsystems in 2004, open-sourced in 2005 as part of OpenSolaris, and has since become the default filesystem on FreeBSD. Not just the default in the installer - the default in production, the default in the Handbook, the default in the minds of people who have lost data exactly once and decided never again. (It’s also available on Linux, where it works beautifully - just don’t ask me how I know you can run RHEL on a ZFS root pool. That was a crime, not a tutorial.)

    This is the second article in the FreeBSD Foundationals series. The first one covered Jails. We’re covering ZFS now because it’s the foundation everything else sits on: your jails, your databases, your mail spools, your backups. Understanding ZFS isn’t optional if you’re running FreeBSD seriously.

  • The Register UK ☛ RAM is getting expensive, so squeeze the most from it

    inux has two ways to do memory compression – zram and zswap – but you rarely hear about the second. The Register compares and contrasts them.

    The Linux kernel's zram tool has been in the news this week. Phoronix reports that the new patch could make some zram operations 50 percent faster.

    Thanks to the increasingly desperate flailing by the hucksters selling automatic plagiarism machines, RAM has got much more expensive and the price rises are expected to continue. Apple has even quietly dropped the 512 GB RAM model of its Mac Studio. This is not a good time to buy computers with lots of RAM, or to add more RAM to existing machines.

    Better to try to make the most of what you've already got. So we thought this might be a good time to look at what zram is and does, and explore its less well-known companion zswap.

• Distributions and Operating Systems

  • Andrew Nesbitt ☛ Reviewing ENISA’s Package Manager Advisory

    Their risk taxonomy splits threats into packages with inherent vulnerabilities (bugs, abandonware) and supply chain attacks (malicious packages, account takeover, typosquatting, dependency confusion), which is the right framing. The section on compromised legitimate packages walks through event-stream, ua-parser-js, and colors/faker with enough detail that a developer unfamiliar with these incidents would understand the attack patterns.

  • Dedoimedo ☛ DOSBox and additional sound tweaks

    Recently, I've done quite a lot of DOS-related stuff. It all started because of one awesome game, the lovely WW2 simulator called 1942: Pacific Air War. As it happens, this humble old title introduced all manner of challenges into my modern gaming world, including both performance and sound issues, which you sort of wouldn't expect. Namely, the simulator wouldn't run as fast as you'd expect some thirty plus years after its inception, and the sound wouldn't work correctly, either.

  • BSD

    • Dan Langille ☛ Using variable names in nginx declarations has a price: e.g. ssl_certificate /usr/local/etc/ssl/${server_name}.fullchain.cer;

      I recently implemented a fun (to me) and easy solution for taking my web proxy websites offline, either one-by-one, or all-at-once. Today’s post talks about some of the repercussions which followed one-new-thing I tried. In this post: FreeBSD 15.0 nginx 1.28.2 I jump between testing the test host and stage host; both had similar issues. The relevant changes This is the type of change I started to do.