Linux NewsAge Verification: Protection Tool or Surveillance in Disguise?
As more governments push age checks into our apps and operating systems, the dystopian future doesn't feel so far off anymore.
[$] The ongoing quest for atomic buffered writes
There are many applications that need to be able to write multi-block chunks of data to disk with the assurance that the operation will either complete successfully or fail altogether — that the write will not be partially completed (or "torn"), in other words. For years, kernel developers have worked on providing atomic writes as a way of satisfying that need; see, for example, sessions from the Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF (LSFMM+BPF) Summit from 2023, 2024, and 2025 (twice). While atomic direct I/O is now supported by some filesystems, atomic buffered I/O still is not. Filling that gap seems certain to be a 2026 LSFMM+BPF topic but, thanks to an early discussion, the shape of a solution might already be coming into focus.
Motorola Announces Partnership With Open Source GrapheneOS
Motorola is partnering with the open source GrapheneOS Foundation to enhance mobile security and develop future devices with GrapheneOS compatibility.
Høiland-Jørgensen: The inner workings of TCP zero-copy
Toke Høiland-Jørgensen has posted an overview of how zero-copy networking works in the Linux kernel. Since the memory is being copied directly from userspace to the network device, the userspace application has to keep it around unmodified, until it has finished sending. The sendmsg() syscall itself is asynchronous, and will return without waiting for this. Instead, once the memory buffers are no longer needed by the stack, the kernel will return a notification to userspace that the buffers can be reused.
Gentoo Starts Exit from GitHub’s Microsoft and Copilot‑Infested Walled Garden
When Microsoft turned up the AI pressure on GitHub, Gentoo started packing for Codeberg, putting open source principles ahead of platform convenience. The post Gentoo Starts Exit from GitHub’s Microsoft and Copilot‑Infested Walled Garden appeared first on FOSS Force.
Sad News! AI's RAM Hunger Finds a New Victim in the Orange Pi Neo Linux Handheld
Two years of work now sits on a shelf because AI needs the RAM more.
GIMP 3.2 RC3 Released In Preparation For The Stable GIMP 3.2
Ahead of the stable GIMP 3.2 release hopefully happening soon, GIMP 3.2 RC3 was released this evening for testing...
Texinfo 7.3 released
Version 7.3 of Texinfo, the GNU documentation-formatting system, has been released. It contains a number of new features, performance improvements, and enhancements.
AMD EPYC Turin 128 Core Comparison: EPYC 9745 "Zen 5C" vs. EPYC 9755 "Zen 5"
The AMD EPYC 9755 128-core Zen 5 server processor has been benchmarked a lot at Phoronix since the EPYC 9005 "Turin" launch as their top-end Zen 5 server processor with "full fat" cores compared to the denser Zen 5C cores that extend up to the EPYC 9965 at 192 cores. For those eyeing the 128 core per socket sweet spot, there is also the EPYC 9745 that is made up of 128 Zen 5C cores that allows for a 400 Watt TDP compared to the 500 Watt EPYC 9755. Today's benchmarking is comparing the EPYC 9745 and EPYC 9755 performance and power difference.
The internet is disappearing, so I repurposed an old laptop to save it
This open source app let me turn a useless old laptop into my archiving center.
Why I switched from Ubuntu to Garuda Linux
How a niche distro made me realize to never settle.
[$] The exploitation paradox in open source
The free and open-source software (FOSS) movements have always been about giving freedom and power to individuals and organizations; throughout that history, though, there have also been actors trying to exploit FOSS to their own advantage. At Configuration Management Camp (CfgMgmtCamp) 2026 in Ghent, Belgium, Richard Fontana described the "exploitation paradox" of open source: the recurring pattern of crises when actors exploit loopholes to restrict freedoms or gain the upper hand over others in the community. He also talked about the attempts to close those loopholes as well as the need to look beyond licenses as a means of keeping freedom alive.
Motorola announces a partnership with the GrapheneOS Foundation
Motorola has announced that it will be working with the GrapheneOS Foundation, a producer of a security-enhanced Android distribution. "Together, Motorola and the GrapheneOS Foundation will work to strengthen smartphone security and collaborate on future devices engineered with GrapheneOS compatibility.". LWN looked at GrapheneOS last July.
Gram 1.0 released
Version 1.0 of Gram, an "opinionated fork of the Zed code editor", has been released. Gram removes telemetry, AI features, collaboration features, and more. It adds built-in documentation, support for additional languages, and tab-completion features similar to the Supertab plugin for Vim. The mission statement for the project explains: At first, I tried to build some other efforts I found online to make Zed work without the AI features just so I could check it out, but didn't manage to get them to work. At some point, the curiosity turned into spite. I became determined to not only get the editor to run without all of the misfeatures, but to make it a full-blown fork of the project. Independent of corporate control, in the spirit of Vim and the late Bram Moolenaar who could have added subscription fees and abusive license agreements had he so wanted, but instead gave his work as a gift to the world and asked only for donations to a good cause close to his heart in return. This is the
Stay productive on any distro: 6 portable Linux apps I always keep on me
Some I just throw on a USB drive so I can plug in an run them on any Linux computer.