lwn-rss/lwn-features.xml

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<title>LWN.net featured content</title>
<link>https://lwn.net/Articles/</link>
<description>This feed contains pointers to all feature articles (those
containing LWN original content and posted as standalone items) found on
the site.
</description>
<language>en-us</language>
<pubDate>Sat, 09 Nov 2024 01:01:01 +0000</pubDate>
<lastBuildDate>Sat, 09 Nov 2024 01:01:01 +0000</lastBuildDate>
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<item>
<title>LWN.net Weekly Edition for October 31, 2024</title>
<link>https://lwn.net/Articles/995490/</link>
<guid>https://lwn.net/Articles/995490/</guid>
<dc:creator>corbet</dc:creator>
<description>The LWN.net Weekly Edition for October 31, 2024 is available.
</description>
<pubDate>Thu, 31 Oct 2024 00:42:27 +0000</pubDate>
</item>
<item>
<title>An update on Apple M1/M2 GPU drivers</title>
<link>https://lwn.net/Articles/995383/</link>
<guid>https://lwn.net/Articles/995383/</guid>
<dc:creator>jake</dc:creator>
<description>The kernel graphics driver for the Apple M1 and M2 GPUs is, rather
famously, written in Rust, but it has achieved conformance with
various graphics standards, which is also noteworthy. At the &lt;a
href="https://indico.freedesktop.org/event/6/"&gt;X.Org Developers Conference
(XDC)&amp;nbsp;2024&lt;/a&gt;, Alyssa Rosenzweig gave an update on the status of the
driver, along with some news about the kinds of games it can support (&lt;a
href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TtLP5sAXYKo"&gt;YouTube video&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href="https://indico.freedesktop.org/event/6/contributions/284/attachments/230/310/slides.pdf "&gt;slides&lt;/a&gt;).
There has been lots of progress since her talk at XDC last year (&lt;a
href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O36VFNdQHsE"&gt;YouTube video&lt;/a&gt;),
with, of course, still more to come.
</description>
<pubDate>Wed, 30 Oct 2024 16:23:29 +0000</pubDate>
</item>
<item>
<title>A new approach to validating test suites</title>
<link>https://lwn.net/Articles/995276/</link>
<guid>https://lwn.net/Articles/995276/</guid>
<dc:creator>daroc</dc:creator>
<description>&lt;p&gt;
The first program that Martin Pool ever wrote, he said, had bugs; the ones he's writing
now most likely have bugs too. The talk Pool gave at
&lt;a href="https://rustconf.com/"&gt;RustConf&lt;/a&gt; this year was about a way to try
to write programs with fewer bugs. He has developed a tool called
&lt;a href="https://mutants.rs/"&gt;
cargo-mutants&lt;/a&gt; that highlights gaps in test coverage by identifying
functions that can be broken without causing any tests to fail.
This can be a valuable complement to other testing techniques,
he explained.
&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
<pubDate>Tue, 29 Oct 2024 17:01:12 +0000</pubDate>
</item>
<item>
<title>The performance of the Rust compiler</title>
<link>https://lwn.net/Articles/995125/</link>
<guid>https://lwn.net/Articles/995125/</guid>
<dc:creator>daroc</dc:creator>
<description>&lt;p&gt;
Sparrow Li presented virtually at
&lt;a href="https://rustconf.com"&gt;
RustConf&lt;/a&gt;&amp;nbsp;2024 about the current state of and
future plans for the Rust compiler's performance. The compiler is relatively slow to compile
large programs, although it has been getting better over time. The next big
performance improvement to come will be parallelizing the compiler's parsing,
type-checking, and related operations, but even after that, the project has
several avenues left to explore.
&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
<pubDate>Mon, 28 Oct 2024 16:10:27 +0000</pubDate>
</item>
<item>
<title>AutoFDO and Propeller</title>
<link>https://lwn.net/Articles/995397/</link>
<guid>https://lwn.net/Articles/995397/</guid>
<dc:creator>jake</dc:creator>
<description>Rong Xu and
Han Shen described the kernel-optimization techniques that Google uses in the &lt;a
href="https://lpc.events/event/18/sessions/180/#20240918"&gt;toolchains
track&lt;/a&gt; at the &lt;a
href="https://lpc.events/event/18/page/224-lpc-2024-overview"&gt;2024 Linux
Plumbers Conference&lt;/a&gt;.
They talked about &lt;a
href="https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//pubs/archive/45290.pdf"&gt;automatic
feedback-directed optimization&lt;/a&gt; (AutoFDO), which can be used with the &lt;a
href="https://research.google/pubs/propeller-a-profile-guided-relinking-optimizer-for-warehouse-scale-applications/"&gt;Propeller&lt;/a&gt;
optimizer to produce kernels with better performance using profile
information gathered from real workloads. There is a fair amount of
overlap between these tools and the &lt;a
href="https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/tree/main/bolt#bolt"&gt;BOLT&lt;/a&gt;
post-link optimizer, which was the subject of a &lt;a
href="https://lwn.net/Articles/993828/"&gt;talk&lt;/a&gt; that directly preceded this session.
</description>
<pubDate>Mon, 28 Oct 2024 15:15:19 +0000</pubDate>
</item>
<item>
<title>OSI readies controversial Open AI definition</title>
<link>https://lwn.net/Articles/995159/</link>
<guid>https://lwn.net/Articles/995159/</guid>
<dc:creator>jzb</dc:creator>
<description>&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href="https://opensource.org/"&gt;Open Source Initiative&lt;/a&gt;
(OSI) has been working on defining &lt;a
href="https://opensource.org/ai"&gt;Open Source AI&lt;/a&gt;&amp;mdash;that is what
constitutes an AI system that can be used, studied, modified, and
shared for any purpose&amp;mdash;for almost two
years. Its &lt;a
href="https://opensource.org/about/board-of-directors"&gt;board&lt;/a&gt; will
be voting on the &lt;a href="https://opensource.org/ai/drafts/the-open-source-ai-definition-1-0-rc2"&gt;Open Source AI Definition&lt;/a&gt; (OSAID) on Sunday,
October&amp;nbsp;27, with the 1.0 version slated to be published on
October&amp;nbsp;28. It is never possible to please &lt;em&gt;everyone&lt;/em&gt; in
such an endeavor, and it would be folly to make that a goal. However,
a number of prominent figures in the open-source community have voiced
concerns that OSI is setting the bar too low with the OSAID&amp;mdash;which
will undo decades of community work to cajole vendors into adhering to
or respecting the original &lt;a href="https://opensource.org/osd"&gt;Open Source
Definition&lt;/a&gt; (OSD).&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
<pubDate>Fri, 25 Oct 2024 21:02:36 +0000</pubDate>
</item>
<item>
<title>Kernel optimization with BOLT</title>
<link>https://lwn.net/Articles/993828/</link>
<guid>https://lwn.net/Articles/993828/</guid>
<dc:creator>jake</dc:creator>
<description>A pair of talks in the &lt;a
href="https://lpc.events/event/18/sessions/180/#20240918"&gt;toolchains
track&lt;/a&gt; at the &lt;a
href="https://lpc.events/event/18/page/224-lpc-2024-overview"&gt;2024 Linux
Plumbers Conference&lt;/a&gt; covered different tools that can be used to
optimize the kernel. First up was Maksim Panchenko to describe the &lt;a
href="https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/tree/main/bolt#bolt"&gt;binary
optimization and layout tool&lt;/a&gt; (BOLT) that Meta uses on its production
kernels. It optimizes the kernel binary by rearranging it to improve its
code locality for
better performance. A &lt;a href="https://lwn.net/Articles/995397/"&gt;subsequent article&lt;/a&gt; will cover the second talk, which
looked at &lt;a
href="https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//pubs/archive/45290.pdf"&gt;automatic
feedback-directed optimization&lt;/a&gt; (AutoFDO) and other related techniques
that are used to optimize Google's kernels.
</description>
<pubDate>Fri, 25 Oct 2024 19:39:48 +0000</pubDate>
</item>
<item>
<title>realloc() and the oversize importance of zero-size objects</title>
<link>https://lwn.net/Articles/995196/</link>
<guid>https://lwn.net/Articles/995196/</guid>
<dc:creator>corbet</dc:creator>
<description>Small objects can lead to large email threads. In this
case, the GNU C Library (glibc) community has been having an extensive
debate over the handling of zero-byte allocations. Specifically, what
should happen when a program calls &lt;a
href="https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man3/malloc.3.html"&gt;&lt;tt&gt;realloc()&lt;/tt&gt;&lt;/a&gt;
specifying a size of zero? This is, it seems, a topic about which some
people, at least, have strong feelings.
</description>
<pubDate>Thu, 24 Oct 2024 15:36:41 +0000</pubDate>
</item>
<item>
<title>LWN.net Weekly Edition for October 24, 2024</title>
<link>https://lwn.net/Articles/994575/</link>
<guid>https://lwn.net/Articles/994575/</guid>
<dc:creator>corbet</dc:creator>
<description>The LWN.net Weekly Edition for October 24, 2024 is available.
</description>
<pubDate>Thu, 24 Oct 2024 00:42:13 +0000</pubDate>
</item>
<item>
<title>Toward safe transmutation in Rust</title>
<link>https://lwn.net/Articles/994334/</link>
<guid>https://lwn.net/Articles/994334/</guid>
<dc:creator>daroc</dc:creator>
<description>&lt;p&gt;
Currently in Rust, there is no efficient and safe way to turn an array of bytes
into a structure that corresponds to the array. Changing that was the topic of
Jack Wrenn's talk this year at
&lt;a href="https://rustconf.com"&gt;
RustConf&lt;/a&gt;:
&lt;a href="https://jack.wrenn.fyi/blog/safety-goggles-for-alchemists/"&gt;
"Safety Goggles for Alchemists"&lt;/a&gt;. The goal is to be able to "transmute" &#8212;
Rust's name for this kind of conversion &#8212; values into arbitrary user-defined
types in a safer way. Wrenn justified the approach that the project has taken to
accomplish this, and spoke about the future work required to stabilize it.
&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
<pubDate>Wed, 23 Oct 2024 17:40:38 +0000</pubDate>
</item>
<item>
<title>Free-software foundations face fundraising problems</title>
<link>https://lwn.net/Articles/993665/</link>
<guid>https://lwn.net/Articles/993665/</guid>
<dc:creator>jzb</dc:creator>
<description>&lt;p&gt;In July, at the GNOME &lt;a
href="https://lwn.net/Articles/983203/"&gt;annual general meeting&lt;/a&gt; (AGM),
held at &lt;a
href="https://foundation.gnome.org/2023/12/20/guadec-2024-in-denver-colorado/"&gt;GUADEC
2024&lt;/a&gt;,
the message from the GNOME Foundation board was that all was well,
financially speaking. Not &lt;em&gt;great&lt;/em&gt;, but the foundation was on a
break-even budget and expected to go into its next fiscal year with a
similar budget and headcount. On October&amp;nbsp;7, however, the board &lt;a
href="https://foundation.gnome.org/2024/10/07/update-from-the-board-2024-10/"&gt;announced&lt;/a&gt;
that it had had to make some cuts, including reducing its staff by
two people. This is not, however, strictly a GNOME problem: similar
organizations, such as the Python Software Foundation (PSF), KDE&amp;nbsp;e.V.,
and the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) are seeing declines in
fundraising while also being affected by inflation.&lt;/p&gt;
</description>
<pubDate>Wed, 23 Oct 2024 14:52:28 +0000</pubDate>
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