Coding
Linux 7.4 removes BFS, the UnixWare boot file system
A patch deleting 1,275 lines of BFS support is queued for Linux 7.4, one kernel cycle after EFS and FreeVxFS were dropped for the same reason.
Tagged: Linux - Page 3
The latest Linux coverage on Tech AI Wire.
Dev Stack
Intel's Linux NPU driver 1.38 adds Ubuntu 26.04 support
Intel's NPU driver 1.38 officially supports Ubuntu 26.04 LTS about five months late, with 322 tests passing across five processor generations.
Dev Stack
GTK 4.24 sharpens fractional scaling and frame timing
GTK 4.24 snaps content to whole screen pixels for sharper fractional scaling, reworks the frame clock, and pushes session restore back to 4.26.
Dev Stack
Mold's Rust rewrite aims to be Linux's default linker
Mold links 4.9x faster than LLVM lld. Its author is rewriting it in Rust and wants distributions to install it as the default linker, /usr/bin/ld.
Dev Stack
KDE Plasma 6.8 beta brings Kup backups and Wayland fixes
KDE shipped the Plasma 6.8 beta as version 6.7.90 on September 10, 2026. It adds Kup as the desktop's backup scheduler, with stable due October 14.
Dev Stack
COSMIC Epoch 1.8 ships tablet grab, Bluetooth renaming
COSMIC Epoch 1.8 shipped two weeks after 1.7 with tablet grab support and Bluetooth device renaming, but System76's own changelog is still pending.
Dev Stack
GNOME 51 adds custom pointer acceleration profiles
GNOME 51, shipping September 16, 2026, lets users define a custom pointer acceleration curve instead of picking one fixed speed profile.
Dev Stack
Open-source firmware boots on a consumer AMD desktop board
Coreboot and AMD's openSIL now run on the MSI B850P, a real desktop AM5 board. It cuts closed-source firmware code by 79.1%, but it ships as a paid product, not a free download.
Dev Stack
Nouveau boots on Nvidia's DGX Spark GB10, unofficially
A Red Hat engineer got the open-source Nouveau driver and NVK running on Nvidia's DGX Spark GB10. It took about 100 patches, and upstreaming isn't settled yet.
Dev Stack
YSERVER 1.5 adds Reverse PRIME to its Rust X11 server
YSERVER 1.5, an X11 server written from scratch in Rust, adds Reverse PRIME multi-GPU support and 40 other fixes. Claude Code helped write its early code.
Coding
AMD Zen 6 makes Linux's SafeRET mitigation unnecessary
A kernel patch drops the SafeRET software fix on AMD Zen 6, because the chip isolates branch predictions in hardware. User-to-user attacks still need IBPB.
Dev Stack
TryNix runs any Nix package in a browser tab
TryNix boots a Linux kernel compiled to WebAssembly and runs any of 310,083 nixpkgs versions in a tab. Python 3 takes 7.5 seconds on a first visit.
Coding
Debian Code Search drops its last cgo dependency
Michael Stapelberg replaced a 7-year-old C library with pure Go using the experimental SIMD package, and matched the C version's speed.
Coding
A tampered strip binary can backdoor all of NixOS
Researchers built Ken Thompson's trusting-trust attack out of GNU strip, not a compiler, and used it to backdoor almost every binary in a NixOS installer.
Dev Stack
Asahi Linux now officially supports M3 series Macs
Asahi Linux has merged M3, M3 Pro and M3 Max support into its installer. Wi-Fi, USB 3 and AV1 decoding work. Sleep, HDMI and fast 3D do not.
Dev Stack
Kubernetes 1.37 promotes rootless mode to beta
Kubernetes 1.37 moves KubeletInUserNamespace to beta. The kubelet, container runtimes, CNI plugins and kube-proxy can now all run as a non-root user.
Dev Stack
Babashka 1.13.220 adds FFI for calling native libraries
Babashka 1.13.220 adds an FFI built on Java's Panama API, so a Clojure script can call a native library without writing a pod or any Java.
Coding
GNOME drafts an RFC process for big technical decisions
A 14-day comment period, named stakeholders and a merge request: GNOME has drafted a formal way to settle the decisions it now makes in chat.
Dev Stack
Audacity 4.0 rewrites the editor in Qt, drops scripting for now
Audacity 4.0 ships a full Qt rewrite with a new clip-editing model and project format. Eight features, including scripting and plugin hosting, are gone for now.
Dev Stack
CERN migrates 2,200 industrial computers from RHEL to Debian 13
CERN is moving more than 2,200 industrial and embedded computers from RHEL to Debian 13, after a RHEL default compiler setting threatened to lock out older hardware.
Dev Stack
Omarchy 4.0.1 undoes AI agent defaults that skipped safety checks
Omarchy 4.0.1 shipped 11 security fixes on August 25, 2026. The largest one stops launching Claude Code and Codex with their approval prompts turned off.
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