#lwn — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #lwn, aggregated by home.social.
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[$] LWN.net Weekly Edition for August 20, 2026
The LWN.net Weekly Edition for August 20, 2026 is available.
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[$] Debian weighs eight options in vote on LLM usage
The Debian Project is voting on the usage of large language models (LLMs) to make contributions to the project. The first proposal, sent in late July by Matthias Geiger, would expr [...]
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[$] Representing Python paths using pathlib
At the outset of his PyCon US 2026 talk, Trey Hunner said that his goal was for attendees to stop representing filesystem paths as strings and to use pathlib instead. That's kind [...]
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[$] Fedora prepares for the end of AF_ALG
The Linux kernel's user-space interface (AF_ALG) to the Crypto API has been linked to a number of recent high-profile security problems, including Copy Fail and successor vulnerabi [...]
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[$] Development statistics for the 7.2 kernel
Linus Torvalds released the 7.2 kernel on August 17, after noting that the number of fixes coming in was still "bigger than I would have wished for". In fact, 7.2 was one of the b [...]
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[$] Bootstrappable builds: how and why
This year's edition of the Free and Open Source Software Yearly conference, better known as "FOSSY", moved north to the beautiful (and enormous) campus of the University of British [...]
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Mark J. Wielaard receives Distinguished Service Award in Software Freedom
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[$] BPF, continuous testing, and stable kernels
Ihor Solodrai and Shung-Hsi Yu wrapped up the BPF track at the 2026 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit with a pair of sessions related to testing. Solodr [...]
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Domas: Bypassing memory protection with AMD's memory controllers
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[$] 128-Bit page tables for Arm
The size of a processor's page-table entries directly limits how much physical memory that processor is able to access. Back in the 32-bit days, that limit was 4GB, an amount of m [...]
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Linux Weekly News <lwn.net> is one of the best ways a professional programmer can spend some money (US$9 per month, US$98 per year). You really do get A$3.20 value per issue.
This week's LWN references this wonderful quote, of a situation familiar to anyone who gives away software:
"I am very sorry that the software that I created and put online for free, without any warranty, explicit or implied, has not met your expectations. You are entitled to a full refund. I have taken the liberty to initiate it. You should already have it.
"No, I am not changing my project’s license from AGPLv3-or-later to MIT. I am very sorry that “impacts” your ability to use my package in your “product.” No, I don’t care about my “reach.” Feel free to take back that star.
"Thank you for your pull request. Yes, that does seem like a useful feature, but you shouldn’t have, and I mean you really shouldn’t have. I read all 3700 words of the PR description (I appreciated the bulletpoints and bolded sections throughout), and god only knows why, I also reviewed the commits. I see the commits say they were co-authored by Claude, but from having read the code, I think you haven’t given Claude enough credit. I have now turned off PRs for everyone who isn’t on the approved list of contributors. Yes, that list only has me and my friend Kyla, who doesn’t really write any code. Thank you for your contribution.
"Yes, I know that other project has implemented this feature, and many others that have been on my backlog. If you want to depend on people who have no taste in software, you are welcome to use their project instead of mine. Open source is not a competition. Yes, I know they support Windows, which we don’t. PRs welcome. No, not from you, and definitely not from them. We do support Plan 9, because one day I ate the mushrooms my friend Kyla gave me for my birthday, and realised we needed that to heal the Universe.
"Yes, I know they have about ten times more stars than me. Their project is on GitHub, and mine is on Codeberg, where every star is worth 100 on GitHub. Sure, whatever, it doesn’t work that way. The point is, I don’t care. I have other values. Those stars don’t pay the bills anyway. I know because I tried, and was told I had to stop.
…"
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[$] LWN.net Weekly Edition for August 13, 2026
The LWN.net Weekly Edition for August 13, 2026 is available.
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[$] Block-layer error injection
Storage code has to cope with hardware that fails in inconvenient ways, but coaxing a healthy disk into producing those failures on demand, for testing, is usually not possible. Th [...]
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[$] A look at CrossPoint e-reader firmware
There are a number of small, inexpensive, low-powered e-reader or e-paper devices that have promise as ebook readers with one minor problem: the firmware they ship with does not re [...]
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[$] KVM planes head for takeoff
Virtualization places a guest system into a separate security domain, typically with less privileges than software running directly on the host. Increasingly, there is interest in [...]