IT & infrastructure
8 items · 13 articles in this topic
The Linux 7.4 cycle dominated, with AI-assisted contributions as the recurring theme. Operations news included Let's Encrypt's shorter certificates and the end of the 7.2 stable series.
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Linux 7.4-rc1 is out with performance improvements, AMD Ryzen Zen 6 preparations and AMDGPU HDMI 2.1 enabled by default. Phoronix calls the merge window the largest in kernel history, with AI/LLM-driven contributions cited as a factor.
NotablePhoronix ↗
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Linux 7.4 includes and backports several OverlayFS union mount fixes produced with AI-assisted code review.
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Let's Encrypt is moving to 64-day certificate lifetimes. The article questions whether ACME clients actually renew correctly, so check renewal timing and failure alerting.
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Greg Kroah-Hartman released Linux 7.2.15, the final stable update for 7.2.y. The series is end-of-life and users should move to 7.3.y.
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KDE Linux is nearing its beta milestone and now ships with NTSYNC enabled by default, per Nate Graham's monthly update.
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Kwi, a new KDE terminal emulator built on the Ghostty library, is in development as a Konsole alternative with claimed speedups of 3x to 35x.
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Enlightenment 0.28.0 has been released. Separately, OmniDiff is a new AGPLv3 Rust diff tool covering 25 code languages plus configs, images, PDFs and archives.
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Development continues on GEFS, the Good Enough File System for OpenBSD. The summary gives no detail on status.
Lobsters ↗3 min read
More in IT & infrastructure · 5 articles›
Linus Torvalds announced Linux 7.4-rc1, closing a notably large merge window with many AI-assisted changes.
LWN.netlinuxkernelai-toolsFeed excerpt
The 7.4-rc1 kernel prepatch is out, and the merge window is closed for this development cycle. This is a *BIG* merge window. I think the reason is the by now obvious one, but I'm actually taking it as a good sign: I'm *much* happier with the flood of AI triggered work going into the merge window than it showing up mainly as extra fixes during the -rc period. So I'm hoping that this merge window being larger than usual is a sign that the AI fixes are becoming more part of the "normal development" than a flood of fixes that go into the whole stabilization phase. I think that's a much healthier model. There were 18,591 non-merge changesets brought in during this merge window — this is not just a record, but it nearly matches the patch volume during the entire (record-setting) 7.3 development cycle. So far, 2,678 developers have contributed to 7.4; 625 of them are first-time kernel contributors. Subscribers can find more details in the KSDB 7.4 page.
Linus Torvalds says the Linux kernel has left its stabilization phase and adopted a healthier process for AI-generated patches.
The Registerlinuxkernelopen-sourceai-contributionsFeed excerpt
Yet machine-made patches ‘often get rewritten’
OmniDiff is a new open-source AGPLv3 Rust diff tool that handles 25 code languages plus configs, images, PDFs, and archives.
Hacker News (front page)rustopen-sourcedeveloper-toolsFeed excerpt
I have been researching what the ultimate diff tool would look like, based on actual diffs in open source repositories. OmniDiff can diff: code (25 languages), config, images, PDFs, archives, cursors, fonts... It's fast. It can diff C++ files of tens of thousands of lines in under 100ms, on a 2023 ThinkPad T14s. It's open source. AGPLv3. It's based on real diffs. I looked at the 7400 repositories that are listed in Gentoo packages, sampled 2000 diffs and solved them manually to get a good understanding of what is needed, before putting together the diff pipelines for each content type. Incidentally, this also forms the basis of the CI pipeline, so the robustness of the codebase is quite high. I'm still developing it. It's v0.3.0 at this time. But I have been using it daily as my git difftool for months now, and it works well. AI Disclosure: Yes, I do use AI. No, I do not vibecode. Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50325253 Points: 37 # Comments: 19
The Linux 7.4 merge window is the largest in kernel history, with AI/LLM-driven contributions cited as a factor.
Phoronixlinuxkernelmerge-windowFeed excerpt
After writing this morning with some stats about the size of the Linux 7.4 merge window and the kernel's source tree approaching 42 million lines, I was curious to run some numbers for putting the size of the merge window into perspective against the major kernel releases of the past 15 years. This shows the definite recent uptick due to AI/LLM activity...
Tyrtulia is a headless terminal forum that uses passwordless authentication.
Lobstersterminalopen-sourceforumsFeed excerpt
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