news
Linux Associated With Ads, Fake Currencies, Some Graphics News
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Modernizing the Meta Ads Service With an Open-Source Kernel Scheduler [Ed: Tarnishing the name of Linux with brainwash and spam]
sched_ext is an open-source, BPF-based scheduler framework that officially entered kernel v6.12. We developed it by partnering with the authors of Google’s ghOSt to design a scheduler suitable for upstream Linux integration. It has already been deployed in several services at Meta, delivering meaningful reductions in scheduling latency.
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LWN ☛ Progress in modernizing kernel cryptography [LWN.net]
At the 2026 Linux Security Summit North America, Eric Biggers spoke about some of the problems with the kernel's cryptography framework, as well as the recent progress in adding library APIs to allow developers to use cryptographic functions without using the traditional crypto API. He walked through a couple of examples to demonstrate the frailty of the original API and showed how the new library API made life easier for developers and kernel maintainers.
Biggers began by introducing himself. He is a maintainer of the crypto and cyclic redundancy check (CRC) library code in the Linux kernel, as well as of the fscrypt library and fs-verity support layer. He said that he was grouping CRCs in with crypto because ""they are very similar from an implementation perspective"" and the code was for the kernel itself to use—user space has its own code. ""It's for all the kernel features that use these algorithms and need to execute them in kernel mode."" The use cases, he said, range from storage or network encryption to generating random numbers, checking firmware integrity, protecting against denial-of-service attacks, and more.
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LWN ☛ The kernel's iomap layer [LWN.net]
Conversations about the kernel's filesystem implementations often involve a layer called "iomap", but relatively few people can reliably say what iomap actually is. That is just the kind of gap that LWN exists to fill. In short, iomap handles the mapping between data in the filesystem space (identified by a file of interest, and an offset within that file) and in the storage space (which may be a memory location, or a set of blocks on a storage device). Using that mapping, iomap handles a long list of common, filesystem-related tasks, allowing a lot of boilerplate code to be removed from individual filesystem implementations.
The iomap code was first introduced as such by Christoph Hellwig for the 4.8 kernel release in late 2016, but much of that functionality was based on an earlier implementation by Dave Chinner in the XFS filesystem. It has grown over the years as filesystems have been converted over and new functionality has been added. The current implementation consists of a dozen files in the fs/iomap directory. It is implemented as two broad layers, a low-level mapping between files and their backing store, which is used by higher-level code to implement much of the functionality that a filesystem needs.
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LWN ☛ Limiting negative dentries [LWN.net]
A number of problems related to negative directory entries (dentries) were the topic of a filesystem-track session at the 2026 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit. Negative dentries are used to indicate that a file of a given name does not exist in a directory; it is an optimization that short-circuits the lookup of the file name when the answer is already known. Miklos Szeredi led a session that discussed some problems that come from having too many negative dentries for a directory.
He began by noting that Ian Kent had reported a problem with hundreds of millions of negative dentries for a directory; in that case, the fsnotify_set_children_dentry_flags() call was made, which will iterate over all of the dentries in the directory and cause a soft lockup. A related issue is that the reference count field of the d_lockref lock in struct dentry can overflow if enough dentries are created, Szeredi said. It is not negative-dentry-specific, but it would be hard to create two-billion positive dentries for a directory. Kent had also mentioned that the hash chains may grow too long when there are so many negative dentries, but Szeredi is not sure that is a real problem.
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LWN ☛ Faster RCUs and lockless memory allocation [LWN.net]
Puranjay Mohan shared some of the work he's been doing recently on improving the performance of read-copy-update (RCU) at the 2026 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit; his talk would have been nice context to have earlier in the day when Harry Yoo and Alexei Starovoitov led a session about the new kmalloc_nolock() function that allows for lockless allocation from any kernel context, and which interacts with the RCU subsystem to allow that. This article therefore covers the two sessions together and in the reverse order, to provide that missing context.
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Graphics Stack
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The Register UK ☛ Frame: A new X11 server – implemented directly in assembly
Wayland is dominating the recent news about FOSS GUIs – even dignified elder Xfce’s official support is getting close. However, X11 is very much not dead yet, and new developments keep appearing.
Last week, Norwegian FOSS developer Geir Isene announced his all-new server for the venerable X11 display protocol. Its description is in the title of the announcement post: Frame - the first Linux Assembly X server. Isene explains his motivation thus:
“On my quest to own my software, one foundational piece kept itching… the X server. The underlying graphics engine, the thing that puts pixels on the screen. X11 is 4 million lines of code, a beast very few can claim they understand. So I did the reasonable thing. I wrote my own, in Assembly.”
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Lossless Scaling benchmarked in Linux on a GeForce RTX 5070 Ti and Radeon RX 6600 in 4K
An enthusiast tested the Lossless Scaling frame generation technology on a hybrid setup of two graphics cards from different manufacturers running the Linux CachyOS operating system with the KDE Plasma desktop environment over the Wayland protocol. A twelve-core AMD Ryzen 9 9900X served as the CPU. The primary graphics card for rendering the game was Cyberpunk 2077 The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 Ti model served as the graphics card, and an AMD card was used as a secondary graphics accelerator for image output and running the Lossless Scaling utility. Radeon RX 6600.
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Linux Foundation
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Linux Foundation's Site/Blog ☛ Linux Foundation Announces Operational Launch of x402 Foundation to Standardize Internet-Native Payments for AI Agents and Applications [Ed: Shilling slop]
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PR Newswire ☛ Linux Foundation Announces Operational Launch of x402 Foundation to Standardize Internet-Native Payments for AI Agents and Applications
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Ripple, Coinbase, Circle Join Linux x402 Foundation to Help Shape AI Payments [Ed: The brand "Linux" getting associated with dodgy pyramid schemes]
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Ripple, Coinbase, Circle Join Linux x402 Foundation to Help Shape AI Payments [Ed: Scammy companies misusing the brand "Linux" to legitimise themselves]
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Diginomica ☛ Agent identity gets a DNS anchor – how GoDaddy built the Agent Name Service, then gave it to the Linux Foundation [Ed: Openwashing it or "gave it"?]
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