Latest From LWN (Outside Paywall) and Latest GAFAM Layoffs

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Sep 10, 2026

• GNU/Linux

  • Kernel Space / File Systems / Virtualization

    • LWN ☛ Using steal time to moderate CPU demands [LWN.net]

      Virtualization can increase CPU utilization by allowing a large number of virtual CPUs to share a smaller number of physical CPUs. The amount of CPU time that is actually available does not change, though, so heavy activity on too many virtual CPUs can lead to contention and significant performance loss. The steal governor patch series from Shrikanth Hegde is an attempt to address that problem with a mechanism that allows virtual machines to voluntarily reduce the number of virtual CPUs they use when contention is high.

      From a virtual machine's point of view, contention for a physical CPU is clearly an undesirable thing. When contention occurs, the physical CPU will be unavailable at times when the virtual machine is trying to make use of it; that slows the execution of the workload. The situation can be worse than that, though, if a virtual CPU is preempted while holding locks needed elsewhere in the same virtual machine. At that point, threads that do still have access to a physical CPU may waste their execution time spinning on locks that the preempted CPU is no longer able to free, with possibly severe effects on performance. That is the sort of situation that causes customers to reconsider shared hosting.

    • LWN ☛ The rest of the 7.3 merge window [LWN.net]

      By the time Linus Torvalds released 7.3-rc1 and closed the merge window for this release, 15,267 non-merge changesets had been pulled into the mainline repository. That is the second-highest commit count for an -rc1 release in the kernel's history; only the 6.7-rc1 release, which included nearly 3,000 commits of bcachefs history, had more. About 13,000 of those commits entered the mainline after the first 7.3 merge-window summary was written so, needless to say, there are a lot of changes to cover.

    • LWN ☛ Securely suspending LUKS-encrypted disks [LWN.net]

      When a laptop is asleep, its memory is not unreadable. The right tooling can attach to the computer's memory bus and read out its contents, and cold-boot attacks can theoretically read values from memory for a short time after the computer loses power. That is really an unavoidable fact about the hardware, but some users would still like to ensure that, even if this happens, their long-term encryption keys, such as the key for full-disk encryption, remain unreadable. In June 2026, Ingo Blechschmidt discovered that Linux kernel versions after 6.9 (released in May 2024) were not erasing disk-encryption keys when a laptop was put to sleep, even when configured to do so. He quickly identified a potential fix, which has been merged, but it was not a comprehensive solution.

    • LWN ☛ A note on subscription prices from LWN [LWN.net]

      The online publication industry, as a whole, is struggling, with challenges coming from multiple directions. Thanks to the support of all of you, our readers, LWN would appear to be doing better than most. But the world has changed around us and, in particular, prices have changed considerably. By now, you probably know where this is going: subscription prices at LWN will be increasing as of September 15.

      We adopted the subscription model in late 2002; it was one of the best decisions we have ever made. This model makes us independent of the volatile (and surveillance-driven) advertising market and aligns our interests with those of our readers. But it does depend on support from those readers; if you have not yet subscribed to LWN, please consider doing so now — our subscribers are the only reason we continue to exist.

  • Desktop Environments

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • LWN ☛ Governing GNOMEs: how the project's technical decision-making is evolving [LWN.net]

        Emmanuele Bassi kicked off a project to improve GNOME's technical governance with a presentation about his ideas (video) at GUADEC 2025. His nudging has led the project to, slowly, work on creating more formal structures for technical governance. It is adopting a teams structure and looking toward creating a steering committee, as well as bootstrapping a Request for Comments (RFC) process. If adopted, GNOME would require RFCs for design, user experience, architectural, and other changes that carry a major impact on the project.

• Development

  • Programming

    • Python

      • LWN ☛ A pause for the Python JIT [LWN.net]

        In 2024 the Python 3.13 release added an experimental just-in-time (JIT) compiler to optimize the way that CPython executes Python code. Since then, work has proceeded on the JIT, albeit perhaps less formally than some might like. In June, Python's steering council (SC) put out an announcement that no new development on the JIT land (with the exception of bug and security fixes) in Python's main branch, until it accepts a Python Enhancement Proposal (PEP) that would make the case for the JIT as a supported part of CPython. That has led to the creation of PEP 836 ("JIT Go Brrr: The Path to a Supported JIT Compiler for CPython"), which is currently under discussion. As it stands, it seems likely that work on JIT will continue, but when that will happen is less certain.

    • Rust

      • LWN ☛ The "rnull" Rust block driver [LWN.net]

        The null block driver (null_blk) is a small driver that is mostly useful for benchmarking block-layer implementations. It accepts all requests and marks them complete as quickly as possible, doing as little work as possible. In June 2026, Andreas Hindborg shared a patch set implementing the same functionality in Rust, in order to show that a simple block driver is now possible to write using the kernel's Rust APIs and to enable comparisons between the C and Rust implementations. A minimal version of the "rnull" driver is already present in the mainline kernel, but Hindborg's patch set brings it up to feature parity with the C version.

• GAFAM

  • Proprietary / Vendor Lock-in

    • Bizzard Workers Secure One of Gaming's Biggest Union Wins [Ed: Uniting against Microsoft management]

      In spite of the major releases and announcements that have punctuated 2026 so far, the overall attitude in the gaming sector, business-wise, is a bit more mixed. Costs are rising on both the production and consumer ends of the equation, and as the gains from the COVID-era gaming booms slide back to pre-2020 levels, layoffs have been mounting at an alarming rate in studios and publishers both large and small. It’s in this tumultuous period that unions have become very important for those working in the industry, and why the latest victory by Blizzard Workers Union is so heartening.

    • Bizzard Workers Secure One of Gaming's Biggest Union Wins

      In spite of the major releases and announcements that have punctuated 2026 so far, the overall attitude in the gaming sector, business-wise, is a bit more mixed. Costs are rising on both the production and consumer ends of the equation, and as the gains from the COVID-era gaming booms slide back to pre-2020 levels, layoffs have been mounting at an alarming rate in studios and publishers both large and small. It’s in this tumultuous period that unions have become very important for those working in the industry, and why the latest victory by Blizzard Workers Union is so heartening.

    • The Business Journals ☛ Meta offices in Seattle, Redmond up for sublease following mass layoffs