Unixism: Of consoles and blinking cursors

From Brendan Gregg’s blog: In the future, computers will not crash due to bad software updates, even those updates that involve kernel code. In the future, these updates will push eBPF code. Friday July 19th provided an unprecedented example of the inherent dangers of kernel programming, and has been called the largest outage in the history of information technology.…

From Ruffy’s blog: Now that we’ve covered the basics, let’s have a look at how Linux manages audio. The Linux audio system utilizes a modular and layered architecture to handle audio processing, which provides both abstraction and flexibility. Layering in Linux audio allows for a structured approach to audio management. By separating concerns into different…

Nice website tracking Linux system call development for all (major?) CPU architectures. New system calls get appended to the list. Neat. While not all new kernel features might expose system calls, they are nevertheless a good way to track developments in the Linux kernel. Serious developers need to keep track of which system calls they…

From the Nvidia blog: As for GPU models that are supported: Not every GPU is compatible with the open-source GPU kernel modules. For cutting-edge platforms such as NVIDIA Grace Hopper or NVIDIA Blackwell, you must use the open-source GPU kernel modules. The proprietary drivers are unsupported on these platforms. For newer GPUs from the Turing,…

From Ralf Gommers: You may be wondering by now what “free threading” or “free-threaded CPython” is, and why you should care. In summary: it is a major change to CPython that allows running multiple threads in parallel within the same interpreter. It is becoming available as an experimental feature in CPython 3.13. A free-threaded interpreter…

From Behdad Esfahbod’s blog: In this survey paper, I cover advances in the OpenType standard and the Open Source text stack and applications since 2009. I also discuss the future advances currently underway. In broad strokes, OpenType added support for color fonts, variable fonts, and the Universal Shaping Engine. The Free & Open Source stack…

Continuing on the topic of funding an alternative browser engine, Luca Casonato’s X post talks about a related concern: 🙄

From Jack Kelly’s blog: TL;DR: Chrome is eating the web. I have wanted to help fund a serious alternative browser for quite some time, and while Firefox remains the largest potential alternative, Mozilla has never let me. Since I can’t fund Firefox, I’m going to show there’s money in user-funded web browsers by funding Ladybird instead. You…

Super interesting project. It’s open source, but there’s also an online version that helps you evaluate it quickly. It already supports boards like ESP8266, ESP32, the Pi Pico and more. Web USB and Web Serial are game-changing technologies.

From Bryan Lunduke’s blog: Why not start with a fork of Firefox is a big question. But, more engines welcome.