Enlarge / Cans of Tab diet soda on display in 2011. Tab was discontinued in 2020. There has never been a soda named "Spaces" that had a cult following. (credit: Getty Images)

Anybody can contribute to the Linux kernel, but any person's commit suggestion can become the subject of the kernel's master and namesake, Linus Torvalds. Torvalds is famously not overly committed to niceness , though he has been working on it since 2018 . You can see glimpses of this newer, less curse-laden approach in how Torvalds recently addressed a commit with which he vehemently disagreed. It involves tabs.

The commit last week changed exactly one thing on one line , replacing a tab character with a space: "It helps Kconfig parsers to read file without error." Torvalds responded with a commit of his own, as spotted by The Register , which would " add some hidden tabs on purpose ." Trying to smooth over a tabs-versus-spaces matter seemed to awaken Torvalds to the need to have tab-detecting failures be "more obvious." Torvalds would have added more, he wrote, but didn't "want to make things uglier than necessary. But it *might* be necessary if it turns out we see more of this kind of silly tooling."

If you've read this far and don't understand what's happening, please allow me, a failed CS minor, to offer a quick explanation: Tabs Versus Spaces will never be truly resolved, codified, or set right by standards, and the energy spent on the issue over time could, if harnessed, likely power one or more small nations. Still, the Linux kernel has its own coding style , and it directly cites "K&R," or Kernighan & Ritchie , the authors of the coding bible The C Programming Language, which is a tabs book. If you are submitting kernel code, it had better use tabs (eight-character tabs, ideally, though that is tied in part to teletype and line-printer history ).

Enlarge / A portion of the cover letter attached to Hans Reiser's response to Fredrick Brennan's prompt about his filesystem's obsolescence. (credit: Fredrick Brennan)

With the ReiserFS recently considered obsolete and slated for removal from the Linux kernel entirely , Fredrick R. Brennan , font designer and (now regretful) founder of 8chan, wrote to the filesystem's creator, Hans Reiser, asking if he wanted to reply to the discussion on the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML).

Reiser, 59, serving a potential life sentence in a California prison for the 2006 murder of his estranged wife, Nina Reiser, wrote back with more than 6,500 words, which Brennan then forwarded to the LKML . It's not often you see somebody apologize for killing their wife, explain their coding decisions around balanced trees versus extensible hashing, and suggest that elementary schools offer the same kinds of emotional intelligence curriculum that they've worked through in prison, in a software mailing list. It's quite a document.

What follows is a relative summary of Reiser's letter, dated November 26, 2023, which we first saw on the Phoronix blog , and which, by all appearances, is authentic (or would otherwise be an epic bit of minutely detailed fraud for no particular reason). It covers, broadly, why Reiser believes his system failed to gain mindshare among Linux users, beyond the most obvious reason. This leads Reiser to detail the technical possibilities, his interpersonal and leadership failings and development, some lingering regrets about dealings with SUSE and Oracle and the Linux community at large, and other topics, including modern Russian geopolitics.

Enlarge (credit: Intel)

Officially, Intel's Itanium chips and their IA-64 architecture died back in 2021 , when the company shipped its last processors. But failed technology often dies a million little deaths. To name just a few: Itanium also died in 2013, when Intel effectively decided to stop improving it ; in 2017, when the last new Itanium CPUs shipped ; in 2020, when the last Itanium-compatible version of Windows Server stopped getting updates ; and in 2003, when AMD introduced a 64-bit processor lineup that didn't break compatibility with existing 32-bit x86 operating systems and applications.

Itanium is dying another death in the next version of the Linux kernel. According to Phoronix , all code related to Itanium support is being removed from the kernel in the upcoming 6.7 release after several months of deliberation. Linus Torvalds removed some 65,219 lines of Itanium-supporting code in a commit earlier this week, giving the architecture a "well-earned retirement as planned."

The first Itanium processors were released in mid-2001, the result of years of collaboration between Intel and HP. The initial designs were made for servers, where their parallelized design would (theoretically) be able to speed things up by executing multiple instructions simultaneously. From there, the instruction set would eventually migrate into lower-end servers and then to consumer PCs.

Enlarge / The Ubuntu 23.10 desktop, working just fine before you start messing with it.

Ubuntu 23.10 , codenamed Mantic Minotaur, is the 39th Ubuntu release , and it's one of the three smaller interim releases Canonical puts out between long-term support (LTS) versions. This last interim before the next LTS doesn't stand out with bold features you can identify at a glance. But it does set up some useful options and upgrades that should persist in Ubuntu for some time.

Your new installation options in Ubuntu 23.10. Neither of them is "Minimal," but that might be coming.

Slimmed down and Flutter-ed up

Two of the biggest changes in Ubuntu 23.10 are in the installer. Ubuntu now defaults to a "Default installation," which is quite different from what the "default" was even just one release prior. "Default" is described as "Just the essentials, web browser, and basic utilities," while "Full" is "An offline-friendly selection of office tools, utilities, web browser, and games." "Default" is somewhat similar to what "Minimal" used to be in prior versions, while "Full" is intended for those who are offline or have slow connections or just want as many options as possible right away.

At the moment, most people won't be saving much, assuming they install off an ISO file. The ISO for Ubuntu 23.10 is 4.6GB, which is smaller than the 4.9GB ISO of Ubuntu 23.04, but not drastically so. This may change, however; Ubuntu staffers note that they have bigger plans for provisioning and install options , which may make it into 24.04. For now, it's a way to avoid clutter in your app search, at least, if not your disk overall.

Enlarge / Linux 6.0, implemented in a Fienix distribution on dedicated Amiga user xeno74's desktop. (credit: xeno74 / Hyperion Entertainment )

The last commercial Amiga computer available for sale was the AmigaOne X5000 , a PowerPC-based revival machine released in 2017. The Amiga platform itself is 37 years old , but you'd better believe Amiga fans have the latest Linux kernel, 6.0, up and running on newer Amiga machines. The first true PC for creatives has a dedicated posse.

On the forums of Amiga OS developer Hyperion Entertainment , user Christian, aka xeno74, announced the availability of a final kernel 6.0 for AmigaOne X5000 and X1000 machines. The announcement featured the requisite images of 3D games like Cro-Mag Rally and Otto Mattic , along with system profile images to verify the up-to-date kernel. Work has already started on alpha builds of the 6.1 kernel further in the thread.

By itself, "Linux is available on quirky hardware" might not be that surprising, but there are other encouraging developments in the Amiga realms worth noting.

Enlarge / It's not specific to Framework, but a number of Framework-owning Linux enthusiasts saw a kernel quirk set their screens flickering this week, potentially with lasting damage. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

For desktop Linux users, updating to a new Linux kernel typically carries relatively small, contained risks: wonky drivers, GRUB pain, maybe a full wipe and reinstall. For one subset of laptop owners on rolling release distributions, however, kernel version 5.19.2 could cause actual LCD screen damage.

"After looking at some logs we do end up with potentially bogus panel power sequencing delays, which may harm the LCD panel," wrote Intel engineer Ville Syrjälä in a discussion on the issue . "I recommend immediate revert of this stuff, and new stable release ASAP. Plus a recommendation that no one using laptops with Intel GPUs run 5.19.2."

One day later, kernel 5.19.13 was released. But there's a distribution chain between kernel work and distribution desktops, and certain laptop owners were caught up in it.

Enlarge / A second-generation Epyc server chip from AMD, one that may have been running 2002-era Linux code slowing it down. (credit: Getty Images)

AMD has come a long way since 2002 , but the Linux kernel still treats modern Threadrippers like Athlon-era systems—at least in one potentially lag-inducing respect.

AMD engineer Prateek Nayak recently submitted a patch to Linux's processor idle drivers that would "skip dummy wait for processors based on the Zen microarchitecture." When ACPI support was added to the Linux kernel in 2002—written by Andy Grover, committed by Linus Torvalds—it included a "dummy wait op." The system essentially read data with no purpose other than delaying the next instruction until the CPU could fully stop with the STPCLK# command. This allowed for some power saving and compatibility during the early days of ACPI implementation when some chipsets wouldn't move to an idle state when one would expect it.

But today's Zen-based AMD chips don't need this workaround, and, as Nayak writes, it's hurting them, at least in specific workloads on Linux. Testing with instruction-based sampling (IBS) workloads shows that "a significant amount of time is spent in the dummy op, which incorrectly gets accounted as C-State residency." The CPU, seeing all this low-effort dummy work, can push into deeper, slower C-State, which then makes the CPU take longer to "wake up," especially on jobs that require lots of switching between busy and idle states.