[$] Hastening process cleanup with process_mrelease()

One of the fundamental invariants of computing is that, regardless of how
much memory is installed in a system, it is never enough. This is
especially true of systems with tight performance constraints, where every
page of memory is allocated a…

Kernel prepatch 5.14-rc3

The third 5.14 kernel prepatch is out for
testing.

Here we are, a week later. After a relatively big rc2, things seem
to have calmed down and rc3 looks pretty normal. Most of the fixes
here are small, and the diffstat looks largely flat. An…

K-9 5.800 released

After a long pause, the K-9 Android mail client project has released version
5.800. “The user interface has been redesigned. Some of you will
love it, some will hate it. You’re welcome and sorry.” There are
also a number of improvements to mak…

[$] Using DAMON for proactive reclaim

The DAMON patch set was first covered here
in early 2020; this work, now in its
34th revision, enables the efficient collection of information about
memory-usage patterns on Linux systems. That data can then be used to
influence the kernel’s me…

[$] The core of the -stable debate

Disagreements over which patches should find their way into stable updates
are not new — or uncommon. So when the topic came up again recently, there
was little reason to expect anything but more of the same. And, for the
most part, that is wh…

Rosenzweig: Reverse-engineering the Mali G78

Alyssa Rosenzweig goes
into the details of the reverse-engineering of the Mali “Valhall” GPU
instruction set.

Valhall linearizes Bifrost, removing the Very Long Instruction Word
mechanisms of its predecessors. Valhall replaces the compiler’s…

Stockfish sues ChessBase

The Stockfish project, which
distributes a chess engine under GPLv3, has announced
the filing of a GPL-enforcement lawsuit against ChessBase, which has been
(and evidently still is) distributing proprietary versions of the Stockfish
code.

In …