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LWN.net

[$] MOT: a tool to fight openwashing in AI

Many large language models (LLMs) are described as open source, but if one looks a bit deeper it turns out that is not actually so; the model may be free to download, it may be "open weight", but it does not fit the Open Source Initiative (OSI) Open Source Definition (OSD). Assessing the actual openness of models is not easy, as Arnaud Le Hors explained in his talk about the Model Openness Tool (MOT) at Open Source Summit North America 2026. The tool is designed to help users of LLMs understand to what degree a model is (or is not) open, and to combat the openwashing that is prevalent with LLMs.

LWN.net

Andrew Morton's 2004 OLS keynote

I recently presented a brief tribute to Andrew Morton at the 2026 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit; it included a suggestion that reading (or re-reading) his 2004 Ottawa Linux Symposium keynote would be instructive. This talk, given immediately after the Kernel Summit session that decided to fundamentally change the kernel's development model, tells a lot about how the kernel project got to where it is today. The text of that speech was hosted on Groklaw, and has since been replaced by crypto spam, which is rather less useful. In the hopes of preserving this seminal moment, the transcript has been rescued from the Wayback Machine and is presented here.

OMG! Ubuntu

Canonical Workshop: reproducible, sandboxed dev environments with no fuss

Canonical has released Workshop, a snap package to create self-contained development environments from a single YAML configuration file. The same setup can be reproduced across different machines and hardware setups, reducing dependency headaches and configuration drift within teams. Environments are built from SDKs, packages that install languages, frameworks and tools. Most come from the SDK Store, which provides versioned channels like the Snap Store (which can be pinned for reproducibility). Canonical ships SDKs for Ollama, OpenCode, NVIDIA CUDA and AMD ROCm at launch, but teams can create or define project-specific SDKs that are kept in the project’s .workshop/ folder. The definition file […]

LWN.net

[$] Further progress toward removing the page map count

The mapcount field was created to track the number of mappings (page-table entries) that refer to the given page. Among other things, a mapcount of zero means that the page has no references and can be reclaimed. Maintaining mapcount has become increasingly challenging and expensive as the memory-management system has grown in complexity, so Hildenbrand has been looking for ways to get rid of it. This session was, he said, maybe one of the last times he will have to bring up this topic.

LWN.net

Security updates for Wednesday

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (bind, buildah, compat-libtiff3, compat-openssl11, containernetworking-plugins, crun, delve, dnsmasq, dovecot, edk2, firefox, freeipmi, gdk-pixbuf2, giflib, git-lfs, glib2, go-fdo-client, go-fdo-server, golang, grafana, grafana-pcp, gstreamer1-plugins-bad-free, gstreamer1-plugins-base, gstreamer1-plugins-good, and gstreamer1-plugins-ugly-free, iputils, jq, kernel, krb5, libcap, LibRaw, libsndfile, libsoup, libsoup3, libssh, libtiff, libvirt, linux-sgx, luksmeta, mingw-glib2, NetworkManager, nginx, nginx:1.24, nginx:1.26, openexr, openssh, openssl, opentelemetry-collector, p11-kit, PackageKit, podman, python-jwcrypto, python-markdown, python-tornado, python3.11, python3.12, python3.14, python3.9, qemu-kvm, rsync, skopeo, sudo, systemd, thunderbird, tomcat, unbound, vim, xorg-x11-server, xorg-x11-server-Xwayland, yggdrasil, and yggdrasil-worker-package-manager), Debian (imagemagick, kdenlive, memcached, node-shell-quote, and samba), Fedora (

Phoronix

Linux Developers Looking At Retiring The x32 ABI

The Linux x32 ABI for x86_64 processors allow making use of the full 64-bit register file and wide data path but retaining 32-bit pointers to provide for a smaller memory footprint when not needing 64-bit pointers. Linux x32 came to the party late and didn't enjoy much adoption over the years and is now looking at possible removal from the Linux kernel...