news
Kernel: Reconsidering x32, Buildroot, FreeBSD
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LWN ☛ Reconsidering x32 — again [LWN.net]
The x32 ABI was meant to be the best of both worlds, providing the expanded registers and instruction set of the x86-64 architecture while preserving the lower memory use of 32-bit systems. The Linux kernel has supported x32 since the 3.4 release in 2012. The initial excitement around x32 did not last, though, and kernel developers are considering removing that support — and not for the first time. Even the most unloved features tend to have a few users, though, making removal hard.
The 64-bit x86 CPU architecture brought a number of long-desired features, including more registers, better system-call support and, of course, the ability to support larger virtual address spaces. There is a cost to that last feature, though; the size of addresses (and, thus, pointers) doubled from four to eight bytes. That change inevitably increases the amount of memory used by a program and, importantly, the amount of cache required to hold the pointed-to values. Since cache utilization has a huge effect on the performance of many programs, that extra cache footprint hurts.
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Bootlin ☛ Updated Buildroot support for STM32MPU platforms, ST BSP v6.2
The buildroot-external-st project is an extension of the Buildroot build system with ready-to-use configurations for the STMicroelectronics STM32MP1 and STM32MP2 platforms. More specifically, this project is a BR2_EXTERNAL repository for Buildroot, with a number of defconfigs that allow to quickly build embedded GNU/Linux systems for the STM32MPU Discovery Kit platforms and Evaluation board.
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LWN ☛ Buildroot 2026.05 released
Version 2026.05 of the Buildroot tool has been released. Buildroot simplifies and automates the process of building embedded GNU/Linux systems using cross-compilation. Notable changes in this release include support for Arm Neoverse cores, addition of XFS rootfs generation, as well as many package updates and bug fixes. See the CHANGES file for the full list.
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BSD
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NYC BUG ☛ Wed June 10: FreeBSD talk at St Louis Unix Users Group
"In this talk, Deb shares what happened when she decided to run FreeBSD on a modern laptop. Learn more about her journey to getting this rock-solid operating system on her laptop, and how it is far more accessible than its reputation suggests."
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DragonFly BSD Digest ☛ FreeBSD talk at St Louis Unix Users Group, tonight
I’m posting this now cause it’s timely: there’s a remote-only FreeBSD presentation at SLUUG so everyone can watch.
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Klara ☛ Native inotify in FreeBSD
A seemingly simple file monitoring problem exposed deep limitations in FreeBSD’s traditional EVFILT_VNODE approach. This article explores how race conditions, scalability issues, and Linux compatibility challenges ultimately led to the development of a native inotify implementation for FreeBSD 15.
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