GNU/Linux and Free Software Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jul 11, 2026

• Kernel Space / File Systems / Virtualization

  • University of Toronto ☛ Using Linux tc to limit the outgoing bandwidth of a web server

    Suppose, not hypothetically, that you have a web server that's using as much of your server's bandwidth as it can get and you would like it to use less bandwidth than that, so that you can get a word in edgewise (for backups, for example) or just because you don't feel like donating 1/10th of your outgoing bandwidth in apparent perpetuity to people who should be building local caches. There are various ways you might do this, for example using FreeBSD pf on your perimeter firewall, but the lowest impact and risk option is to do it on the (Linux) web server itself with tc(8), the Linux traffic control system. Conveniently I've already done a tiny bit with tc to fight bufferbloat latency.

  • Security Week ☛ Linux Kernel Vulnerability Allows VM Escape on Intel and AMD Systems

    The guest-to-host vulnerability poses a major threat to multi-tenant x86 public clouds running untrusted guests and exposing nested virtualization. It is known to be the first KVM exploit that can be triggered on both Intel and AMD architectures.

• Graphics Stack

  • David Rosenthal ☛ My Introduction To Computer Graphics

    Most of my career has been involved in various ways with computer graphics. Below the fold I recount the story of how I got started in the field just as it was getting started. To give you some idea of just how early my introduction was the Mother of all Demos had been the year before. The displays I got to work with drew lines in monochrome, not rasters in color. You created the image by writing a loop of instructions in the "display processor" instruction set. These told it the lines to draw at each refresh cycle. There was no mouse.

• Distributions and Operating Systems

  • SUSE/OpenSUSE

    • OpenSUSE ☛ Support of XBOOTLDR in openSUSE

      This decision also required more space in the ESP partition, as now the kernel and initrds of all snapshots are stored in /boot/efi/$TOKEN, where $TOKEN can be the machine-id, opensuse-tumbleweed or opensuse-microos, depending on the installation. For new installations, this is not a problem since the installer (YaST or Agama) will recommend a large (1 GB) partition; for older installations, the migration can be problematic, to the extreme that if the partition cannot be resized. It is advisable to keep the old GRUB2-EFI bootloader.

  • Debian Family

    • Thorsten Alteholz ☛ My Debian Activities in June 2026

      This was my hundred-forty-fourth month that I did some work for the Debian LTS initiative, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian.

      During my allocated time I uploaded or worked on: [...]

  • Canonical/Ubuntu Family

    • Ubuntu ☛ Ubuntu Server: a platform made for enterprise scale

      Ubuntu 26.04 LTS represents over 12 years of that work coming together. In this blog, we’ll highlight the features that show just how far it’s come, and how you can use Ubuntu Server in combination with other Canonical products to deliver solutions for enterprise scale.

• Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

  • Watts Martin ☛ Bring back the Insert key on Emacs

    Back in the olden days, there was an Insert key on Mac keyboards. (There still is on PC keyboards, although in many programs it doesn’t actually do anything anymore.) If you were editing text, you had two different modes, overwrite and insert. If you were in insert mode, then when text was in front of the cursor, typing would insert text. If the | character represents the cursor: [...]

  • Web Browsers/Web Servers/Feed Readers

    • Andrew Shell ☛ rssCloud Server 4.0 Now Supports WebSub Notifications

      So if you have an app that publishes an RSS feed, you can notify my server when it changes, using either protocol. Subscribers can subscribe to your feed using either protocol and will be notified regardless of which notification protocol your CMS supports. Here is a quick start guide showing how simple it can be.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • Dan Q ☛ British Columbia, Time Zones, and Postgres

      This is the kind of thing that keeps me up at night every time I expand on Three Rings‘ timezone support. Right now, Three Rings stores the times of “shifts” (when volunteers do things) as UTC timestamps but treats them as “local time” to the voluntary organisation using them. If they say a shift starts at 8pm, that’s probably what they mean: they mean 8pm local time, no matter where they happen to be in the world and whether or not their region uses daylight saving time.

      But this approach, while simple, has limitations: [...]