@lwn DAMON LSF/MM/BPF discussions covered by LWN! It was a productive and fantastic time! Thanks again to the conference organizers, and huge thanks to LWN for covering the discussions!

#linux #kernel #damon

RE: https://fedi.lwn.net/@lwn/116539161262678640

Bad things can happen if you leak pointers out of RCU read-side critical sections. What can you do about it?
https://people.kernel.org/paulmck/stupid-rcu-tricks-detecting-pointer-leaks

Typical ML argument: "If I can read something legally, why can't I train an LLM on it?"

Humans are capable of reading things and later writing a similar thing that is still a copyright violation. If I go and write a book that follows the plot line of Star Wars, that's still a copyright violation, even if no text is literally the same. If I play the melody to a song on my piano and release it without the appropriate mechanical cover license, that's also a copyright violation.

The reason this does not happen often is that, as humans, we are aware that that's plagiarism and there are rules. Sometimes it happens by accident, and people still get sued and lose.

LLMs have no such awareness and routinely output things which are blatant copyright violations when appropriately prompted. That means the model weights encode that work, and therefore, are themselves a derivative work.

Your brain encodes a massive amount of copyrighted information. You are not a walking copyright violation because humans aren't data, can't be copied and distributed en masse, have human rights, etc. This is why "mind reading machines" are a classic dystopian plot point (monetizing your thoughts etc).

An LLM is not a human, does not have human rights, nor human privileges. It is data, and if it encodes copyrighted information, that's a derivative work. If you aren't following the license of the training data, that's a copyright violation.

Using AI chatbots for even just for 10 minutes may have a shockingly negative impact on people’s ability to think and problem-solve, according to a new study from researchers at Carnegie Mellon, MIT, Oxford, and UCLA.

https://ai-project-website.github.io/AI-assistance-reduces-persistence/

it is quite confusing that the floor index start from zero here in Zagreb

I need a break, but I can't take off so just zoning out for 30 minutes

LSF/MM/BPF preliminary schedule [1] is shared [2]. Seems there will be two DAMON topic sessions. Time to really focus on the preparation.

[2] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1mGEdDrWskp7Ua91jGXzquQGinorcD58DAVXhOiRp2Gg/edit?gid=1852749899#gid=1852749899
[2] https://lore.kernel.org/all/20260423-auseinander-steigen-b80ee53079a8@brauner/

#linux #kernel #damon #lsfmmbpf

when I open Mastodon, and think "hmm, there's a name and profile picture that I don't recognize. who is it?"

and then I realize: oh wait, it's @lkundrak !

the last few names I remember is "hammer smashed filesystem" and "pope of nope"

I don't find code commentary helpful unless it explains the design first, because these days the implementation is way too complicated for readers to grasp the design by reading the implementation.

Oftentimes such code commentary mechanically describes list of statements, rather than explaining the idea behind it.

A well-written document should try to describe the idea behind the implementation, rather than the implementation itself. (Yeah, that's challenging)

They don't save much time compared to directly reading the code.

(some random rant of the day)

I used think that using en/em dashes in writing is pretty elegant... until LLMs started ruining them, and now using them makes it look like it was generated by an LLM.

Someone asked me to sign their gpg key so I did. Am I doing this gpg thing right?

2006: talk is cheap, show me the code!
2026: code is cheap, show me the talk!

Red Hat unions against layoffs !

https://solidairesinformatique.org/2026/04/16/red-hat-unions-against-lay-offs/

#RedHat

EU traffic to lore.kernel.org is now served by two OVH-hosted nodes, one in Strasbourg, another in Warsaw.

Huge thanks to OVH for their support!

slab: support for compiler-assisted type-based slab cache partitioning

@melver posted a kernel patch that provides an alternative mode to RANDOM_KMALLOC_CACHES called TYPED_KMALLOC_CACHES.

The new mode leverages a Clang 22 feature called "allocation tokens". Unlike RANDOM_KMALLOC_CACHES, this mode deterministically assigns caches to allocations based on their types, and not allocation sites.

https://lore.kernel.org/all/20260331111240.153913-1-elver@google.com/

I wake up and start the day, thinking "okay, this feature is now ready. I'm just doing the last review & test now before submitting it", then find a new bug, fix it, review others code, investigate another issue, then repeat this tomorrow...

#Linux 7.0 is out:

https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/CAHk-=wj2WqpPBwpAXo8bj_Hx-NxKMRVTVMUaQis7+Vm6XLRZiw@mail.gmail.com/

For a list of new features, see:
* the LWN brief news entry – https://lwn.net/Articles/1067279/ (Screenshotted below)

* the LWN merge-window summaries – https://lwn.net/Articles/1057769/ and https://lwn.net/Articles/1058664/

* the KernelNewbies 7.0 page – https://kernelnewbies.org/Linux_7.0

And reminder: the jump from 6.19 to 7.0 does not mean anything apart from "Linus ran out of fingers and toes to count on."

#kernel #LinuxKernel

oops my back suddenly hurts today. what's wrong!

the feeling when you start watching youtube after work but no sound comes out cuz you're running an experimental kernel without audio driver

@lwn oh no lwn.net is down