The Daily Brief — Tech Edition

Daily tech news, edited and dated.

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Tuesday, 25 August 2026

73 stories filed.

New AF_ALG Restrictions With Linux 7.3 Due To The Security & Maintenance Nightmare

Phoronix ·

The past few Linux kernel cycles have chipped away at AF_ALG functionality for that interface for user-space programs to access the kernel's internal cryptography API. Linux has been dropping AF_ALG features like zero-copy support and offloading. AF_ALG was quickly deprecated in Linux 7.2 while now for Linux 7.3 it's being further restricted...

IPFS Maintainers Winding Down

Hacker News ·

Article URL: https://ipshipyard.com/blog/2026-the-end-of-ipfs-at-shipyard/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49421489 Points: 249 # Comments: 121

Discussion: Hacker News thread →

Early Linux 7.3 Kernel Benchmarks Show Some Performance Improvements, Some Regressions

Phoronix ·

Being halfway through the Linux 7.3 kernel merge window and prior to wrapping up and sending back the HP Z4 G6i workstation powered by the Xeon 678X Granite Rapids WS processor, I decided to run some benchmarks to see how Linux 7.3 Git is performing relative to the prior stable kernel series. Here are the first benchmarks of this early state of Linux 7.3 with some performance improvements as…

Intel Engineers Propose DRM Fabric For Linux

Phoronix ·

Coincidentally just days after AMD posted their big UALink patch series for Linux, Intel engineers today announced a proposal called DRM Fabric...

Linux 7.3 Adds Support For Several Newer RISC-V Extensions

Phoronix ·

With the in-development Linux 7.3 is support for discovering and enumerating support for several newer RISC-V ISA extensions. Plus there are improvements to its control flow integrity Shadow Stack handling, CPU context switch support for QoS tagging, using UEFI runtime services for restart and powering off, and other improvements...

AMD k10temp Driver Adds EPYC Zen 5 Per-CCD Temperature Monitoring With Linux 7.3

Phoronix ·

Merged last week for the Linux 7.3 kernel were all the hardware monitoring (HWMON) driver updates for Linux 7.3, which included supporting several more ASUS desktop motherboards, a few AIO liquid cooling products, more Lenovo system support, and per-CCD temperature monitoring on AMD EPYC 9005 server processors...

Executable Is a SQLite Database

Hacker News ·

Article URL: https://fzakaria.com/2026/08/23/your-executable-is-a-sqlite-database Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49415271 Points: 417 # Comments: 85

Discussion: Hacker News thread →

Linux 7.3 Improving RAID 5/6 Benchmark-Based Algorithm Selection

Phoronix ·

Following the main set of memory management "MM" changes submitted for Linux 7.3, Andrew Morton sent in his "non-MM" pull request of the other patches he's been collecting from various developers for this next Linux kernel release. Standing out there were some improvements to the RAID 5/6 benchmark-based algorithm selection...

Linux 7.3 Delivers Graphics Driver Improvements From Old GPUs To Next-Gen Hardware

Phoronix ·

The Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) subsystem updates have been merged for the ongoing Linux 7.3 merge window. There is a lot of exciting GPU kernel driver improvements this cycle ranging from some notable enhancements to old AMD Radeon graphics hardware up through enabling support for some next-generation AMD graphics IP blocks to over on the Intel side where Nova Lake S graphics are being…

Volcanoes that made history

Ars Technica ·

Enormous eruptions altered Earth’s climate and societies all over the globe.

GCC Patch Adjusting AMD Zen 5 Misprediction Cost Nets 12% Win In Benchmark

Phoronix ·

An AMD compiler engineer posted a patch on Saturday for the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC). The two-line patch adjusts the misprediction cost for Zen 4 and Zen 5 processors, which ends up yielding a 12% improvement in one SPEC CPU benchmark on Zen 5 and a 9% improvement on Zen 4...

Linux 7.3 Introduces New AES Encryption APIs - Will Open Up More Performance

Phoronix ·

Eric Biggers of Google continues carrying out great work on the Linux kernel crypto code. For Linux 7.3 he's landed work on new library APIs for most of the AES encryption modes used within the kernel. Moving forward this will open the door to more performance optimizations, reducing code duplication, and other enhancements...

Longtime Linux CIFS/SMB3 Maintainer Passes Away

Phoronix ·

There is a changing of the guard with Linux 7.3 as the maintainer of the Common Internet File System (CIFS) / SMB3 code within the Linux kernel. Longtime maintainer, principal Linux CIFS author, and current Microsoft employee Steve French has stepped down due to health reasons...

eCryptfs Sees Fixes For Potential Malicious Intent, Some Dating Back To Its 2006 Debut

Phoronix ·

The eCryptfs stacked cryptographic filesystem implementation for the Linux kernel to transparently encrypt files saw a number of bug fixes for the Linux 7.3 kernel. A number of these bug fixes deal with potential maliciously-crafted data and vulnerable going back to the 2006 introduction of eCryptfs as this option known for its use on Ubuntu home directory encryption and Chrome OS...