Linux Archive

Google is proposing a new mseal() memory sealing system call for the Linux kernel. Google intends for this architecture independent system call to be initially used by the Google Chrome web browser on Chrome OS while experiments are underway for use by Glibc in the dynamic linker to seal all non-writable segments at startup. The discussion is ongoing, so you can read the original proposed patchset and go from there.

Linux is an operating system, similar to Windows, but with many different versions due to the nature of being open source and fully customizable. To install Linux, you must choose an install method and choose a Linux distribution. So that’s a thing.

Nightcap lets you run old Windows screensavers under XScreenSaver, using wine. That’s it. That’s the Github description.

In this guide, we’ll build a very tiny Linux kernel, weighing in at 789 K, and requiring no MMU support. We’ll write some userspace code and this will be deployed on a virtual RISC-V 64-bit machine, without MMU, and we’ll run some tiny programs of our own. As a reminder, please go through the guide for a micro Linux distro to understand the concepts behind what we’re doing today: building the kernel, initramfs, etc. This guide is basically a continuation of that one and an exercise in making an absolutely minimal Linux deployment for (in theory) extremely cheap hardware. This follows up on the mentioned earlier article.

Two unusual companies, Valve Software and Igalia, are working together to improve the Linux-based OS of the Steam Deck handheld games console. The device runs a Linux distro called Steam OS 3.0, but this is a totally different distro from the original Steam OS it announced a decade ago. Steam OS 1 and 2 were based on Debian, but Steam OS 3 is based on Arch Linux, as Igalia developer Alberto García described in a talk entitled How SteamOS is contributing to the Linux ecosystem. Valve’s contributions to desktop Linux cannot be understated. Aside from Proton, the company also does a lot of work on graphics, as well as stuff like mentioned in the article. Without Valve, there would be no gaming on Linux – and it’s gaming that’s driving the recent surge in popularity of desktop Linux. Of course, it’s still small compared to Windows and macOS, but the growth is undeniable.

In this article, we’ll talk about building up a tiny (micro) Linux “distribution” from scratch. This distribution really won’t do much, but it will be built from scratch. We will build the Linux kernel on our own, and write some software to package our micro-distro. Lastly, we are doing this example on the RISC-V architecture, specifically QEMU’s riscv64 virt machine. There’s very little in this article that is specific to this architecture, so you might as well do an almost identical exercise for other architectures like x86. We recently went through the RISC-V boot process with SBI and bare metal programming for RISC-V, so this is just a continuation up the software stack. This is great content, and a very fun exercise for an Autumn weekend.

If you reach this page, you may be interested into this new category of Linux distributions labeled “immutable”. In this category, one can find by age (oldest → youngest) NixOS, Guix, Endless OS, Fedora Silverblue, OpenSUSE MicroOS, Vanilla OS and many new to come. I will give examples of immutability implementation, then detail my thoughts about immutability, and why I think this naming can be misleading. I spent a few months running all of those distributions on my main computers (NAS, Gaming, laptop, workstation) to be able to write this text. I haven’t given any of these a try just yet, but I feel like this is where the Linux desktop is going. I’m not sure if that’s a good or a bad thing – I need both more experience as well as read more informed opinions about it – but I do like the concept.

Back in 2021 Samsung engineers posted KSMBD as an in-kernel SMB3 server alternative to the likes of the user-space Samba server. KSMBD merged into Linux 5.15 as an experimental SMB server while after two years of fixes and other improvements has now dropped its “experimental” marking. The KSMBD in-kernel SMB3 server is now formally declared stable with Linux 6.6 in removing its experimental tag. Neat.

Getting into Nix & Nix flakes can be a challenge. You may have have heard of Nix’s fame for reproducibility or Nix flake’s composability, but weren’t sure where or how to start. While some folks seem to settle for a devShell when it comes to Nix, going just a bit deeper, Nix can fulfill more project architecture requirements than merely delivering tooling. In this post we will follow journey of requirements from environment setup, to building, testing, & distributing a “Hello World” Vim plugin as the guide for learning the Nix flakes’s API. One day, when my kids moved out, I’ll dive into NixOS.

As part of updates to the older file-system drivers for Linux 6.6, the ReiserFS file-system is no longer marked as “Supported” but is officially treated as “Obsolete” within the Linux kernel. The linux-fs merge for the Linux 6.6 cycle now treats ReiserFS as obsolete, the file-system long ago used by default on the likes of SUSE Linux. Last year with Linux 5.18 ReiserFS was deprecated and now with it being obsolete, it will likely be dropped from the mainline Linux kernel within the next two to three years. Last year openSUSE Tumbleweed also ended ReiserFS support as one of the few distributions supporting it as an option. The story of ReiserFS is a sad one – its creator, Hans Reiser, was charged with and convicted of the murder of his wife. The successor to ReiserFS, Reiser5, is still seeing sporadic development, but most likely won’t be mainlined any time soon.

“But does it run Linux?” can now be finally and affirmatively answered for the Commodore C64! There is a catch (rather: a couple) of course: It runs extremely slowly and it needs a RAM Expansion Unit (REU), as there is no chance to fit it all into just 64KiB. It even emulates virtual memory with an MMU. Insanity. A real C64 would take about a week (!) to boot Linux.

ZFSBootMenu is a bootloader that provides a powerful and flexible discovery, manipulation and booting of Linux on ZFS. Originally inspired by the FreeBSD bootloader, ZFSBootMenu leverages the features of modern OpenZFS to allow users to choose among multiple “boot environments” (which may represent different versions of a Linux distribution, earlier snapshots of a common root, or entirely different distributions), manipulate snapshots in a pre-boot environment and, for the adventurous user, even bootstrap a system installation via zfs recv. In essence, ZFSBootMenu is a small, self-contained Linux system that knows how to find other Linux kernels and initramfs images within ZFS filesystems. When a suitable kernel and initramfs are identified (either through an automatic process or direct user selection), ZFSBootMenu launches that kernel using the kexec command. Interesting bootloader, for sure, but I am curious to know how many people use ZFS on Linux. Are there any distributions that use ZFS by default?

Have you ever wanted to do more with your phone, like setting up a Webserver or a Node.js server and running a web app directly on your phone? Or doing some coding on the go? Yes, I have too. With Termux, you can run a full Linux Desktop on your Android device, and here’s how. Even without resorting to a full X desktop, Termux is oretty great. I’m not really a terminal user, so for me it’s just for the novelty of it all, but it certainly seems to work very well on my Galaxy S21.

Alpine Linux remains one of the most popular lightweight Linux distributions built atop musl libc and Busybox. Alpine Linux has found significant use within containers and the embedded space while now sadly the most prolific maintainer of packages for the Linux distribution has decided to step down from her roles. Alice “psykose” who is easily responsible for the highest number of commits per author over the past year has decided to step down from maintaining her packages. This could be a massive hit to Alpine Linux. This distribution is definitely quite popular in its niche, and it always has way better package support than you’d expect from a small distribution like this. I wish Alice all the best, though, and hope for the project itself that the workload can be spread out among other maintainers.