GNU/Linux Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jun 01, 2026

• Kernel Space

  • AMD Zen 6 Linux Update Points to a Much Larger CPU Lineup

    AMD’s next generation of processors is moving forward, with new signs about Zen 6 appearing in Linux.

    As usual in the tech industry, the first clues about future products often do not come from official announcements. Instead, they appear in open-source updates. Recent Linux kernel patches show that AMD is expanding support for its “Zen 6” design, which suggests a much larger product lineup than first expected.

    AMD engineers have been adding Zen 6 support across Linux. This includes CPU detection, better power management, compiler improvements, and support for new instruction sets, with several upgrades for AVX-512.

• Applications

  • OMG Ubuntu ☛ Linux App Release Roundup (May 2026)

    May 2026 delivered a sizeable set of GNU/Linux software updates, including the set I’ve rounded up for your reading pleasure in this post.  The month also saw a buffet of big browser updates, including Firefox 151 with new-look new tab page, Vivaldi 8.0 with a new-look generally and a new public beta of Kagi’s Orion. Elsewhere, Ubuntu 26.04 LTS support was added to VMware Workstation (and Fusion for macOS), while open-source system cleaner BleachBit debuted a TUI for interactive command-line based spring cleaning. Below, I run through a crop of other GNU/Linux app releases that landed in May and caught my eye.

• Distributions and Operating Systems

  • Distro Watch ☛ Put the fun back into computing. Use Linux, BSD.

    [...] Last week Canonical announced it will be retiring a service used by Ubuntu users to post information and troubleshoot problems and we provide details in the News section. [...]

  • BSD

    • DragonFly BSD Digest ☛ Lazy Reading for 2026/05/31

      No theme, just links. Let’s find out how to get predictable IPv6 addresses assigned to OpenBSD VMs.  Linked in part just for the IPv6 details. Fractions in HTML.  Linked to remember it for next time I need to write a fraction, though not here.  WordPress will eat the HTML entities when saving. DinoCon 2026 schedule.

  • Fedora Family / IBM

    • Red Hat ☛ Owning the system clock: Good enough?

      Across numerous industries, accurate timing is a common requirement. Applications will read the system clock and expect this to be the actual real-world time. But how accurate is it actually necessary? And is knowing the approximate time better than not having any idea what time it is?

      Looking at our PTP operator more specifically, its responsibilities are threefold: managing receiving and transmitting time, controlling the system clock, and keeping metrics and raising events based on the clocks.

      What is time?

      When we talk about time, we often just look at the time on a wristwatch, and want the time to be whatever that reads, but that can be misleading. In the context of computing, we want the system time to be a value that is continuously increasing according to the real-world time. Most importantly, we want the time to be the same everywhere. Unfortunately, having the exact same time anywhere is a very hard problem to solve, so we settle for approximately the same time anywhere.

      So where does the time on a computer's system clock come from? Most commonly, it's set through the network time protocol (NTP), using either chronyd or ntpd, which provide millisecond-level accuracy. This works by a client querying the time on a remote server, and then setting the system time to match. Obviously the speed of light is finite, so by the time the packets have travelled from the server to the client, the time has changed on the server, which can lead to differences in the level of milliseconds.

  • Canonical/Ubuntu Family

    • Ubuntu ☛ Ubuntu Pastebin Decommissioning - #4 by mbrouil3 - Community - Ubuntu Community Hub

      I don’t often complain, but holy moly it would be great to have a longer grace period between announcement and decommission.