A number of problems related to negative directory entries (dentries) were the topic of a filesystem-track session at the 2026 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit. Negative dentries are used to indicate that a file of a given name does not exist in a directory; it is an optimization that short-circuits the lookup of the file name when the answer is already known. Miklos Szeredi led a session that discussed some problems that come from having too many negative dentries for a directory.
Vulkan 1.4.356 is out today and it's interesting for the lone new extension debuting: VK_EXT_shader_ocp_microscaling_types. The VK_EXT_shader_ocp_microscaling_types is for enabling the Open Compute Project's Microscaling MX data types to help with machine learning workloads with Vulkan...
With 3mdeb's Dasharo port of AMD openSIL and Coreboot running on the Gigabyte EPYC motherboard, 3mdeb engineers have been devoting more time to their bring-up of Coreboot+openSIL on the MSI PRO B850-P consumer motherboard for desktop AMD Ryzen. They now even have Microsoft Windows 11 working atop this open-source firmware alternative along with other features implemented...
ClamAV 1.5.3 open-source antivirus engine released with fixes for multiple security vulnerabilities affecting file parsing, archive scanning, and executable unpacking.
While the Rust Coreutils offers better memory safety than GNU Coreutils due to being written in the Rust programming language, subtle incompatibilities continue to be spotted in the Rust Coreutils implementations of the different commands. The latest coming to light this week was the Rust Coreutils cp command breaking Ubuntu image builds due to differences in argument handling...
On Thursday Intel sent out their first batch of Intel kernel graphics driver changes of new feature material targeting the Linux 7.3 kernel. This first batch of drm-intel-next for v7.3 continues to focus heavily on lining up Nova Lake's Xe3P integrated graphics/display support...
NVIDIA's latest Linux kernel mailing list patches are for providing the Device Tree for the baseboard management controller (BMC) of their Vera Rubin VR-NVL server platform. With the Linux kernel patches and also for U-Boot, it's part of the upstreaming effort for supporting the open-source OpenBMC software on their latest hardware...
Some post-merge-window code changes merged overnight ahead of Linux 7.2-rc2 this weekend is hardening the kernel's BPF code against JIT spraying attacks...
Currently measuring in at 32 patches, SUSE engineer Juergen Gross has been leading the effort to end the Linux kernel's usage of their 32-bit model specific register (MSR) interfaces so the more modern 64-bit interfaces can be exclusively used. This allows for better code unification and cleaning up the MSR code...
Calibre 9.11 open-source e-book manager is now available for download with support for exporting annotations as a standalone web page in the HTML format and other changes.
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