Planet Me

Zlib-rs as the Rust programming language implementation of Zlib from the Trifetca Tech Foundation is out with a shiny new release (actually, releases) today...

ASUS desktop motherboards have been seeing broader sensor monitoring support on Linux in recent years. ASUS motherboards for Intel and AMD processors have been seeing more support added thanks to the open-source community with new additions to the likes of the ASUS-EC-Sensors driver and other hardware monitoring (HWMON) driver code. This is continuing for Linux 7.1...

Armbian 26.02 has been released released for this Debian-derived Linux distribution primarily focused on supporting a range of Arm and RISC-V platforms. With Armbian 26.02 there is yet more new boards added while moving to the Linux 6.18 LTS kernel and also adding a RISC-V Xfce desktop install option...

Intel kicked off the new month by releasing the latest version of LLM Scaler vLLM (llm-scaler-vllm) as their Docker-based solution for running vLLM on Intel Battlemage GPUs for AI inferencing...

Valve just published the latest Steam Survey monthly figures to provide insight on various software and hardware trends across this dominant gaming ecosystem. One of the most interesting measurements is the monthly changes in the size of the Linux gaming marketshare...

AMD is using Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona this week to announce new Ryzen AI PRO 400 Series products, including Ryzen AI PRO 400 desktop processors...

Python is (in)famous for its "batteries included" approach to a standard library, but it's not that notable that it has plenty of standard data structures, like dicts. Nor is in surprising that dicts have all sorts of useful methods, like pop, which removes a key from the dict and returns its value.

Because you're here, reading this site, you'll also be unsurprised that this doesn't stop developers from re-implementing that built-in function, badly. Karen sends us this:

def parse_message(message):
    def pop(key):
        if key in data:
            result = data[key]
            del data[key]
            return result
        return ''

    data = json.loads(message)
    some_value = pop("some_key")
    # <snip>...multiple uses of pop()...</snip>

Here, they create an inner method, and they exploit variable hoisting. While pop appears in the code before data is declared, all variable declarations are "hoisted" to the top. When pop references data, it's getting that from the enclosing scope. Which while this isn't a global variable, it's still letting a variable cross between two scopes, which is always messy.

Also, this pop returns a default value, which is also something the built-in method can do. It's just the built-in version requires you to explicitly pass the value, e.g.: some_value = data.pop("some_key", "")

Karen briefly wondered if this was a result of the Python 2 to 3 conversion, but no, pop has been part of dict for a long time. I wondered if this was just an exercise in code golf, writing a shorthand function, but even then- you could just wrap the built-in pop with your shorthand version (not that I'd recommend such a thing). No, I think the developer responsible simply didn't know the function was there, and just reimplemented a built-in method badly, as so often happens.

The second weekly release candidate of Linux 7.0 is now available for testing...

A big set of kernel patches look like they will be submitted for the Linux 7.1 kernel cycle this spring to optimize the scheduler HRTICK timer and in turn allowing it to be enabled by default...

There's been a recent lull in activity around the open-source Linux driver for ASUS devices with the HID interface used for supporting various features. But developer Denis Benato who has worked on the ASUS Armoury Linux driver and the like is working on advancing the ASUS HID driver for Linux systems...

During the last month on Phoronix there were 289 original open-source/Linux-related news articles and another 20 featured articles as in Linux hardware reviews and multi-page benchmark articles. There was a lot of interesting software and hardware happenings the past month but standing out the most was the Linux 7.0 merge window developments and the ramp of Intel Panther Lake Linux testing...

After hearing last month that GNU Hurd is "almost there" with x86_64 support, it was exciting to kickoff today by seeing a developer headline "The 64-bit Hurd is Here!" GNU Hurd 64-bit support is now said to be ready but SMP support for multiple processor cores and the like remain still in development...

Last July Intel sadly ended their Clear Linux distribution amid cost-cutting measures at the company. Clear Linux for a decade served at the forefront of Linux performance innovations and was consistently the fastest out-of-the-box Linux x86_64 distribution until Intel ended the Linux distribution without any advanced notice for its users. Intel had kept up the ClearLinux.org website online to download the final releases and access other technical content and forum discussions, etc. Sadly, that too was recently taken offline...

AerynOS 2026.02 was released for closing out February as the newest alpha release for this Linux distribution formerly known as Serpent OS. In AerynOS 2026.02 are many package updates plus continued work on the tooling and other innovations around this Linux distribution...

A set of patches recently posted to the Linux kernel mailing list have now been queued up to a tip/tip.git branch for planned introduction in Linux 7.1. These patches are for enhancing the Linux perf subsystem support for AMD Instruction-Based Sampling (IBS) improvements with next-gen Zen 6 processors...

The first DRM-Misc-Next pull request was submitted this week to DRM-Next as new kernel graphics/display driver features to begin queuing for the Linux 7.1 kernel that will release mid-year. Among the early code for DRM-Next are two new drivers...

The Servo project has issued their January 2026 development report that highlights all the interesting changes they made to this open-source browser layout engine last month. With Servo 0.0.5 they have landed many improvements to this engine and also continuing to enhance its ability to embed Servo inside other applications...

For those on the current FreeBSD 14 series with no immediate plans to move to FreeBSD 15 that debuted at the end of 2025, FreeBSD developers have been preparing for the release of FreeBSD 14.4. Released overnight was the first release candidate of FreeBSD 14.4...

KDE Plasma 6.7 development continues heating up following the Plasma 6.6 desktop release earlier this month...

If you are cloning from a GNOME repository on their GitLab and now finding your Git traffic being redirected to GitHub, you are not alone. GNOME's infrastructure team is now redirecting Git traffic from the GNOME.org GitLab over to GitHub mirrors for reducing bandwidth costs...

Catching me by surprise today was a new Intel CPU microcode drop "20260227" for Linux users/administrators outside of their typical Patch Tuesday alignment for CPU microcode releases...

Hyprland 0.54 was released today as what's described as a "a massive update with no understatement" to this Wayland compositor...

What do you do when the code for a variable initialization is complicated? Do you move it to another method or write inside the current scope? Bartlomiej Filipek presents a trick that allows computing a value for a variable, even a const variable, with a compact notation.

IIFE for Complex Initialization

by Bartlomiej Filipek

In this article:

I hope you’re initializing most variables as const (so that the code is more explicit, and also compiler can reason better about the code and optimize).

For example, it’s easy to write:

const int myParam = inputParam * 10 + 5; 

or even:

const int myParam = bCondition ? inputParam*2 : inputParam + 10; 

But what about complex expressions? When we have to use several lines of code, or when the ? operator is not sufficient.

‘It’s easy’ you say: you can wrap that initialization into a separate function.

While that’s the right answer in most cases, I’ve noticed that in reality a lot of people write code in the current scope. That forces you to stop using const and code is a bit uglier.

For those looking to build a rackmount-ready server or workstation that can handle up to an SSI-EEB motherboard and capable of fitting a large liquid cooling setup, the RM4A is a new option from SilverStone that can fit up to a 360mm radiator while still fitting an SSI-EEB motherboard and up to eight expansion slots within 4U size constraints.

While at the end of February, today Intel released the Intel Media Driver 2025Q4 release as well as the latest VPL GPU Runtime for their media stack...

Canonical put out a new blog post today highlighting their RISC-V work over 2025 that included switching to the RVA23 profile baseline for Ubuntu 25.10 and moving forward. Now with RVA23-compatible RISC-V hardware coming to market this year, Canonical is talking up the RISC-V possibilities when paired with the upcoming Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release...

If all goes well, Mesa developers are hoping to reach a consensus or at least some common ground on an AI policy in March. Mesa is the latest open-source project making considerations around the growing activity around AI coding agents and the like and how to deal with them for this project that is crucial to the Linux desktop and open-source 3D graphics drivers at large...

Sent out today were all of the DRM/accel driver fixes for the week, ahead of the Linux 7.0-rc2 kernel release due out on Sunday...

Genode OS 26.02 is out as the latest feature update to this open-source operating system framework that also serves as the basis for their Sculpt general purpose OS...

Pike pike pike pike Pike pike pike.

Lincoln KC repeated "I never knew Bank of America Bank of America Bank of America was among the major partners of Bank of America."

 

"Extra tokens, or just a stutter?" asks Joel "An errant alt-tab caused a needless google search, but thankfully Gemini's AI summary got straight-to-the-point(less) info. It is nice to see the world's supply of Oxford commas all in once place. "

 

Alessandro M. isn't the first one to call us out on our WTFs. "It’s adorable how the site proudly supports GitHub OAuth right up until the moment you actually try to use it. It’s like a door with a ‘Welcome’ sign that opens onto a brick wall." Meep meep.

 

Float follies found Daniel W. doubly-precise. "Had to go check on something in M365 Admin Center, and when I was on the OneDrive tab, I noticed Microsoft was calculating back past the bit. We're in quantum space at this point."

 

Weinliebhaber Michael R. sagt "Our German linguists here will spot the WTF immediately where my local wine shop has not. Weiẞer != WEIBER. Those words mean really different things." Is that 20 euro per kilo, or per the piece?

 

Canonical today released LXD 6.7 as the latest feature update to this system container and virtual machine manager commonly used in Ubuntu Linux environments...

The fourth and final monthly snapshot of Ubuntu 26.04 "Resolute Raccoon" is now available for testing. This alternative to the Ubuntu 26.04 daily ISOs is a monthly test release that also helps exercise the Ubuntu Linux release automation processes...

On recent builds of Ubuntu 26.04 when being prompted by sudo for the password, password feedback is now enabled by default to show asterisk (*) characters when inputting your password. Traditionally sudo has not provided password feedback in the name of security to not divulge the length of your password in case anyone is looking/capturing your screen. But upstream sudo-rs has now changed the default behavior in the name of an improved UX...

Microsoft has published a new version of its open-source DirectX Shader Compiler. Besides adding Shader Model 6.9 production support, making this DX Compiler update interesting to us are the SPIR-V back-end improvements and enhancing interoperability with Vulkan drivers...

For those curious how far Intel laptop CPU performance has evolved over the past nearly two decades, here are power and performance numbers when re-benchmarking all of the Intel-powered laptop CPUs I have on hand that are still operational from Penryn to Panther Lake. A ThinkPad from 2008 with the Core 2 Duo T9300 "Penryn" was still firing up and working with the latest upstream Intel open-source Linux driver support on Ubuntu 26.04 development. On a geo mean basis over the past 18 years from Penryn to Panther Lake, the performance was at 21.5x in over 150 benchmarks. At the most extreme was a 95x difference going from Intel's 45nm Penryn to the 18A Panther Lake.

The Linux kernel continues seeing more open-source kernel drivers emerge for supporting different AI accelerators / NPUs. The newest open-source driver breaking cover today is from NXP and is for enabling their Neutron neural processing unit...

While the Linux 7.0 feature merge window ended this past weekend and that next kernel release won't debut as stable until April, there are already features out on the horizon that are being positioned for likely merging into the Linux 7.1 kernel assuming no issues appear or objections raised by Linus Torvalds. One of the features already looking like it will be submitted for Linux 7.1 is supporting extended attributes on sockets...

Fwupd/LVFS lead developer Richard Hughes of Red Hat today released Fwupd 2.0.20 with continuing to advance firmware updating on Linux systems...

Merged yesterday to Mesa 26.1 for the open-source NVIDIA Vulkan driver "NVK" is ZCULL support for more efficient rendering and bringing some small performance gains to this open-source NVIDIA driver stack...

Merged to Mesa 26.1-devel this week is a minor improvement to the Intel "ANV" Vulkan driver providing some slight enhancements to DirectX 12 games running on Linux by way of Valve's Steam Play with VKD3D-Proton...

AlmaLinux as one of the leading, modern and community-minded alternatives to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) continues enjoying very nice growth. In their 2025 Year In Review they provided a look at their growth with now having more than two million systems per week checking in for software updates...

Building off January's GStreamer 1.28 release with many new features, GStreamer 1.28.1 was released today as a point release bringing various fixes and minor additions to this open-source multimedia framework...

Industrial machines are generally accompanied by "Human Machine Interfaces", HMIs. This is industrial slang for a little computerized box you use to control the industrial machine. All the key logic and core functionality and especially the safety functionality is handled at a deeper computer layer in the system. The HMI is just buttons users can push to interact with the machine.

Purchasers of those pieces of industrial equipment often want to customize that user interface. They want to guide users away from functions they don't need, or make their specific workflow clear, or even just brand the UI. This means that the vendor needs to publish an API for their HMI.

Which brings us to Wendy. She works for a manufacturing company which wants to customize the HMI on a piece of industrial equipment in a factory. That means Wendy has been reading the docs and poking at the open-sourced portions of the code, and these raise more questions than they answer.

For example, the HMI's API provides its own set of collection types, in C#. We can wonder why they'd do such a thing, which is certainly a WTF in itself, but this representative line raises even more questions than that:

Int32 Count { get; set; }

What happens if you use the public set operation on the count of items in a collection? I don't know. Wendy doesn't either, as she writes:

I'm really tempted to set the count but I fear the consequences.

All I can hear in my head when I think about "setting the Count" is: "One! One null reference exception! Two! TWO null reference exceptions! HA HA HA HA!"

By http://muppet.wikia.com/wiki/Count_von_Count

Following the Firefox 148 release with the new AI controls, Mozilla promoted Firefox 149 to beta today...

The b4 tool used for managing patch workflows to the Linux kernel has been seeing a lot of work recently on b4 review as the text user interface (TUI) to help expedite the patch review process for the Linux kernel. The b4 review TUI has been integrating AI agent code review helpers powered by the likes of Claude Code too for trying to help enhance the efficiency for Linux kernel patch reviews. That b4 review work is quickly approaching a pre-alpha state...

Greg Kroah-Hartman today extended the planned maintenance periods of the latest Linux 6.18, Linux 6.12, and Linux 6.6 Long Term Support (LTS) kernel series...

With yesterday's stable release of the LLVM Clang 22 compiler it didn't take long for Phoronix readers to begin asking about the performance of this half-year feature update to this prominent open-source C/C++ compiler. What I am seeing so far are no big surprises with the performance largely being similar to Clang 21 across various open-source C/C++ workloads in the testing thus far. This initial round of reference benchmark results between LLVM Clang 22, Clang 21, and Clang 20 were done on an AMD EPYC Turin (Zen 5) Linux server.

Mesa 26.0.1 is now available as the first point release of this quarter's Mesa 26.0 series. Besides the usual bug fixing, Mesa 26.0.1 is more pressing than usual since it contains a security fix for possible out-of-bounds memory access in WebGPU contexts from web browsers...

The first release candidate of systemd 260 is now available for testing. Systemd 260 finally does away with System V service scripts support. Also notable to systemd 260 is the work around the new "mstack" feature...

While there are many great Linux 7.0 features with that still-young development cycle, looking ahead to Linux 7.1 this summer there's an interesting feature on track: cgroup sub-scheduler support for sched_ext...

The EPYC 9005 series for high-end Zen 5 server processors is a year and a half old and then at the lower-end of the spectrum is the EPYC 4005 series AM5 server processors that launched last year. On the embedded side is also the EPYC Embedded 2005 series. AMD has now filled the void between with the long-awaited EPYC 8005 series...

The embargo just lifted on an interesting new industry consortium... CoreCollective. The CoreCollective consortium is focused on open collaboration in the Arm software ecosystem and to a large extent what Linaro has already been doing for the past decade and a half. Interestingly though with CoreCollective for open collaboration in the Arm software ecosystem, AMD is now onboard as a founding member along with various other vendors...

Matthias Clasen shared an update today concerning the state of Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) within GNOME's GTK toolkit...

Josef Bacik, of Btrfs notoriety before leaving Meta and stepping back from kernel development last year, announced the release of Systing 1.0. Systing is a newer eBPF-tracing tool for Linux complete with AI integration...

Following the big OpenZFS 2.4 release back in December, OpenZFS 2.4.1 was released overnight to ship support for the latest Linux 6.19 stable kernel plus a variety of different bug fixes...

For those making use of the open-source FreeRDP project for your Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) needs, FreeRDP 3.23 is out today with 11 CVEs addressed in taking care of various security-related issues that have been uncovered...

I've had the misfortune of working in places which did source-control via comments. Like one place which required that, with each section of code changed, you needed to add a comment with your name, the ticket number, and the reason the change was made. You know, the kind of thing you can just get from your source control service.

In their defense, that policy was invented for mainframe developers and then extended to everyone else, and their source control system was in Visual Source Safe. VSS was a) terrible, and b) a perennial destroyer of history, so maybe they weren't entirely wrong and VSS was the real WTF. I still hated it.

In any case, Alice's team uses more modern source control than that, which is why she's able to explain to us the story of this function:

public function calculateMassGrossPay(array $employees, Payroll $payroll): array
{
    // it shouldn't enter here, but if it does by any change, do nth
    return [];
}

Once upon a time, this function actually contained logic, a big pile of fairly complicated logic. Eventually, a different method was created which streamlined the functionality, but had a different signature and logic. All the callers were updated to use that method instead- by commenting out the line which called this one. This function had a comment added to the top: // it shouldn't enter here.

Then, the body of this function got commented out, and the return was turned into an empty array. The comment was expanded to what you see above. Then, eventually, the commented-out callers were all deleted. Years after that, the commented out body of this function was also deleted, leaving behind the skeleton you see here.

This function is not referenced anywhere else, not even in a comment. It's truly impossible for code to "enter here".

Alice writes: "Version control by commented out code does not work very well."

Indeed, it does not.

It's quite a mouthful but today AMD posted Linux kernel patches for preparing SEV-SNP BTB isolation support for further enhancing the security of virtual machines (VMs) for confidential computing...