IT & infrastructure
8 items · 16 articles in this topic
OpenBSD 8.0 shipped and the Linux 7.4 merge window is producing steady storage and memory changes. On the operations side, Microsoft retracted a VPN fix claim and Google Cloud's London zone suffered a power outage.
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OpenBSD 8.0 is out with arm64 hibernate support, a 512GB amd64 kernel address space, qwx Wi-Fi 6 improvements, Intel Arc graphics support and 64-vCPU guests.
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Microsoft admitted it wrongly marked an Always On VPN connection bug as fixed in the October 2026 Windows 11 cumulative updates. The bug remains open.
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A power event in Google Cloud's London zone caused an outage affecting banks, a parcel firm and property sites. Google expected recovery later the same day.
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Linux 7.4 merge-window changes: Meta fixed Kernfs scalability bottlenecks that stalled daemons on its fleet, Dynamic PAMT cuts Intel TDX memory overhead, XFS checksummed reads get lazy bounce buffering, and the obsolete BFS filesystem is removed.
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SUSE's Thorsten Kukuk outlined a plan to disable setuid and setgid binaries system-wide on Linux, and the remaining hurdles, at All Systems Go! 2026.
NotableLWN.net ↗
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Mozilla is keeping Firefox security patch tests private for at least a week before public release.
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Meta's Prometheus AI supercluster reportedly keeps tens of thousands of Nvidia GPUs idle as spares, as it aims to sustain a million GPUs.
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Jepsen published a distributed-systems safety analysis of Orkes Conductor 5.3.2. The summary does not list the findings.
More in IT & infrastructure · 8 articles›
Dynamic PAMT, a feature reducing memory overhead on Intel TDX servers, has been merged into Linux 7.4.
PhoronixlinuxintelkernelvirtualizationFeed excerpt
Dynamic PAMT has made it for Linux 7.4! Dynamic PAMT is a new feature for reducing memory overhead on Intel TDX servers where there may not be many concurrent virtual machines occupying a majority of the system. In today's world with high memory prices and tight availability, Dynamic PAMT provides nice memory overhead reduction for modern Intel Xeon servers...
OpenBSD 8.0 is released with Intel Arc graphics support, ARM64 hibernation, and 64-vCPU guest support.
Ars TechnicaopenbsdreleaselinuxFeed excerpt
OpenBSD 8.0 lands with Intel Arc support, ARM64 hibernation, and 64-vCPU guests
Linux 7.4 VFS pull adds lazy bounce buffering for checksummed reads, improving XFS checksumming performance and reducing resource usage.
PhoronixlinuxxfskernelfilesystemsFeed excerpt
Among the many VFS pull requests merged as the initial material for the in-development Linux 7.4, the VFS IOmap pull introduced lazy bounce buffering for checksummed reads. This improvement is benefiting checksumming on XFS with improved performance and lower resource usage...
Daniel Gomez led a Kangrejos 2026 discussion on rewriting parts of the Linux kernel XArray in Rust to reduce XFS bugs.
LWN.netlinuxrustxfskernelFeed excerpt
The work to support block sizes larger than the page size on XFS has been difficult. Many users of XFS run stable kernels, which means that they aren't testing new XFS code as it is released. That has made Daniel Gomez wonder whether adopting Rust for some of the data structures underlying XFS, particularly XArrays, could reduce the number of bugs lurking in the code. At Kangrejos 2026, he led a discussion about the potential problems with converting XArray to Rust. The assembled kernel developers had a number of reasons to be cautious about replacing the XArray code, but Gomez was determined to experiment with the possibility, citing both security and performance improvements.
Linux 7.4 merge window removes the BFS filesystem, an obsolete UnixWare-era filesystem, from the mainline kernel.
PhoronixlinuxkernelfilesystemFeed excerpt
Linus Torvalds began honoring pull requests overnight of new code entering the Linux 7.4 kernel -- as well as removing old code. BFS is the latest obsolete file-system removed from the mainline kernel...
Fwupd developers are working on improved Android integration for firmware updates via LVFS.
PhoronixfwupdlinuxfirmwareandroidFeed excerpt
Google Chromebooks already have a mandate for nice Fwupd support with the Linux Vendor Firmware (LVFS) while now there is work on improving the Android integration for Fwupd/LVFS...
AMD released HIPRT 3.2, its first HIP ray-tracing library update this year, adding Medusa APU support.
Phoronixamdgpuray-tracingFeed excerpt
AMD HIPRT 3.2 released today as the first update to this HIP ray-tracing library since the beginning of 2026...
The XFS file system received minor performance optimizations and bug fixes queued for the Linux 7.4 kernel.
PhoronixlinuxxfskernelFeed excerpt
The XFS file-system updates have landed for the in-development Linux 7.4 kernel...