GNU/Linux and BSD Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Sep 17, 2025

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • Linux Matters: Ethical Retro Gaming

    Mark’s been retro gaming, Martin’s been syncing, and Alan’s been Gryping.

  • Kodsnack ☛ Kodsnack 662 - A super-super-app, with Teresa Wu

    Why does frontend feel so complex? Does it have to be?

• Kernel Space

  • Dan Langille ☛ Mounting and unmounting zfs filesystems within a #FreeBSD jail

    This situation, where a mounted filesytem prevents me from doing what I want to do, occurs infrequently yet is annoying enough for me to automate it. These are the entries I add to the jail configuration file for this particular jail: [...]

• Graphics Stack

  • Mike Blumenkrantz: Now We CAD

    Perf Must Increase.

    After my last post, I’m sure everyone was speculating about the forthcoming zink takeover of the CAD industry. Or maybe just wondering why I’m bothering with this at all. Well, the answer is simple: CAD performance is all performance. If I can improve FPS in viewperf, I’m decreasing CPU utilization in all apps, which is generally useful.

    As in the previous post, the catia section of viewperf was improved to a whopping 34fps against the reference driver (radeonsi) by eliminating a few hundred thousand atomic operations per frame. An interesting observation here is that while eliminating atomic operations in radeonsi does improve FPS there by ~5% (105fps), there is no bottlenecking, so this does not “unlock” further optimizations in the same way that it does for zink. I speculate this is because zink has radv underneath, which affects memory access across ccx in ways that do not affect radeonsi.

• Distributions and Operating Systems

  • Barry Kauler ☛ How and why EasyOS is different page updated

    This page needed to be updated:

    https://easyos.org/about/how-and-why-easyos-is-different.html

    There are lots of other documentation pages that need to be updated; hope to get around to doing it soon.  
    

  • BSD

    • Roman Bogorodskiy ☛ Roma's Blog: CI for libvirt/bhyve on FreeBSD

      This year, I was lucky to be sponsored by the FreeBSD Foundation to improve libvirt's FreeBSD integration. One of the areas of focus was enabling CI. Actually, I had wanted to have some form of CI for a while, as manually testing things is quite time-consuming. Quite often, I don’t have enough time to test RC releases, so sometimes the releases ship with issues on FreeBSD. I knew about the libvirt TCK project (TCK stands for "Technology Compatibility Kit"), but I wasn’t sure whether it would be easier to implement my own testing routine or port the existing one to run on FreeBSD.

      When I started this project, I decided to re-evaluate libvirt-tck, because it makes much more sense to re-use the existing tests—even if the initial porting requires more effort—than to implement everything from scratch.

  • SUSE/OpenSUSE

    • The New Request Workflow in Detail

      After a couple of months of beta testing, the new request workflow user interface is enabled for everyone now. Let’s take a closer look at the key improvements and the reasons we have introduced them. Working together on software in an OBS request involves a lot of information.

  • Canonical/Ubuntu Family

    • The Register UK ☛ Linux Mint's ambitious Q4: Two releases, better Wayland

      The latest Linux Mint Monthly News blog drafts the project's plans for the final quarter of 2025. At least in terms of timing, the timeline is somewhat bold – especially considering that the blog is titled "August 2025" and it was published on September 12.

  • Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

    • Manuel Moreale ☛ RIP my minimal phone setup

      This empty screen was achieved with a workaround, using a combination of a purposely designed wallpaper and a few accessibility settings. And I loved it. The fact that my home screen was empty was making me so happy. The only way I was interacting with my phone was by swiping down and using Spotlight.