One of the interesting commercial differences between RISC-V and Arm is that Arm makes deals that let you ship ISA features first if you contribute a lot to the spec. They've done this with several companies in the past, where companies contribute a lot of design work to the ISA (and, often, patents to the associated patent pool) and, in exchange, they get to ship things that implement it a year or so before anyone else. This has two big advantages:

• Arm gets the feature in the ISA and everyone can implement it.
• The company that goes first has first-mover advantage but can promise their customers a second source if it's actually a useful feature (which makes adoption easier).

RISC-V has no analogue of this. Companies that ship useful extensions either:

• Do a load of work in public. It can take a year or so to get a spec ratified and other people can easily start working on it long before then and get access to it early.
• Ship the extension as a vendor-specific extension and then work to get it ratified. During ratification, even if nothing changes in the semantics, the encodings of the instructions will move from the vendor space to the standard space and so the thing that you've shipped will not be binary compatible with the standard version.

I'm curious where those different incentives will take the two ecosystems.

Users of w3m and lynx browsers will be asked to identify and fix a bug in the mm subsystem before they are allowed to access git kernel.org.

git.kernel.org and lore.kernel.org now require proof of work. Big thanks to Anubis developers for filling this important need.

Another email sent to the Linux Plumbers mailing list:

"Hi there,

This is Jacob Bryant and I came across the helpful information you shared on the lpc.events website and was wondering if you were open to adding new resources to your page.

Unfortunately, plumbers are at a higher risk of being diagnosed with mesothelioma, a rare cancer caused from exposure to asbestos that takes 20-50 years to develop. It’s extremely important that those who have and are working in plumbing are aware of this type of cancer. That's why we made a guide that covers everything you need to know about mesothelioma as a plumber."

Microsoft have pulled the plug on 6 of its AI datacenter plans in 4 countries, including the UK. Good.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-04-03/microsoft-pulls-back-on-data-centers-from-chicago-to-jakarta?embedded-checkout=true

I've been saying this for years: ebikes should have USB-C PD ports for charging!

Finally a manufacturer has actually done it. In this case using 140W power delivery, which is way higher power than any ebike charger I've ever used. And USB-C PD now supports up to 240W, which is more than enough for ebikes.

I hope this becomes the norm:

https://www.theverge.com/news/639681/usb-c-charging-e-bike-ampler-nova-specs-price

I'm sad to say that we're following the lead of many others and putting in proof-of-work proxies into place to protect ourselves against "AI" crawler bots. Yes, I hate this as much as you, but all other options are currently worse (such as locking us into specific vendors).

We'll be rolling it out on lore.kernel.org and git.kernel.org in the next week or so.

I was devastated to learn that Dave Täht passed away. Wrote a bit about it.

https://blog.tohojo.dk/2025/04/remembering-dave-t%C3%A4ht.html

Dave Täht RIP

https://lwn.net/Articles/1016109/ #LWN

turns out Qualcomm dropped the sources for talking to their Embedded USB Debug (EUD) peripheral, and it works on the OnePlus 6!

This means we get JTAG access directly via the USB port, yes seriously! There is also a UART peripheral which we can hook up (so far untested).

Basically you write 1 to a magic register (typically from the Linux driver but i have been testing from U-Boot) and all of a sudden a 7-port USB hub appears on your PC (in addition to whatever USB gadget you had set up) with a single device which is the EUD control interface.

Now that the code to talk to it is public (and functional with this openocd fork https://github.com/linux-msm/openocd) you can get JTAG access to the device for easier debugging of the kernel or U-Boot!

It seems like this works "by accident" on the OnePlus 6, likely the same debug policy misconfiguration that causes the device to go to crashdump instead of just rebooting (so it's unlikely to work on say, the PocoPhone F1, but maybe worth a try!).

There seem to be protections in place so you can't escalate to EL2 or EL3, when in EL2 all registers read as 0

New tool! Meet the iFixit ESD-Safe Hammer.

We hear you: sometimes you need a little more oomph to finish your fix. So, we engineered the world’s first hammer designed for electronics repair. It's built with a non-conductive handle, ESD-safe head, and just enough heft to "persuade" stubborn components.

Perfect for:
🔋 Glued-in batteries
🪛 Stripped screws
🔌Soldered memory
💥 Stress relief

Now unavailable at iFixit.com.

#iFixit #FixWithForce #AprilFools

Localization is hard.

Google Titan costs 35 euros in Europe. 35 USD in the US.

They launched in Norway this weekend. What's the price?

35 NOK (3 EUR/USD).

How many can you buy? 10!

I'm really loving how Mastodon has become a refuge for all the grizzled seafarers on the ocean of the internet. They pop up in my feed and their bios all say something like

"I've been online for longer than the internet. I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. 56k modems on fire in the light of Usenet. I watched IRC forks glitter in the dark near the Gateway 3000. All those moments will be lost in slop, like tears in rain. Time to deshittify."

The #Portland #Linux #Kernel Meetup is tonight Thursday, March 27th, at the Lucky Labrador Beer Hall on NW Quimby St https://www.meetup.com/portland-linux-kernel-meetup/events/306813644/ #PDX #LinuxKernel

"WTF... oh, they saw /crypto/ in the URL."

A new home for kernel.org

https://lwn.net/Articles/1015555/ #LWN

Registration and the Call for Proposals are now open for DebConf25. This year's event will be held in Brest, back in France its place of origin, and will offer talks, hacking sessions, activities and discussions. We are looking forward to a Cheese & Wine party in the right country this year ;-), and an additional Crêpes and Cider evening, a tribute to Brittany https://debconf25.debconf.org/news/2025-03-24-dc25-registration-cfp-open/ #debian #debconf25 #brest #france

Red Hat has an opening for a @fedora Quality Engineer https://redhat.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/jobs/job/Software-Quality-Engineer---Fedora-Linux_R-045047-1

The original Dear Abby was a badass, esp for her time, she was a champion for queer acceptance in her column and was very big on telling parents to listen and accept their children instead of punishing and fighting with them. But also this response is a banger. Top 10 advice columnist responses of all time.

Linaro’s Toolchain team is one of the leading contributors to #Arm support in #GNU #toolchain projects. In this blog we look at a year's worth of Linaro's CI results for the #GDB testsuite: https://ow.ly/n7KT50V3xJH