Linux Kernel 6.13 is Released: This is What's New for Compute Express Link (CXL)

A Step-by-Step Guide on Using Cloud Images with QEMU 9 on Ubuntu 24.04

• Steve Scargall
• How to , Linux

Introduction

Cloud images are pre-configured, optimized templates of operating systems designed specifically for cloud and virtualized environments. Cloud images are essentially vanilla operating system installations, such as Ubuntu, with the addition of the cloud-init package. This package enables run-time configuration of the OS through user data, such as text files on an ISO filesystem or cloud provider metadata. Using cloud images significantly reduces the time and effort required to set up a new virtual machine. Unlike ISO images, which require a full installation process, cloud images boot up immediately with the OS pre-installed

Into the 3MF Specification Wilderness: Reading 1000+ Pages of Specifications

• Steve Scargall
• 3 d printing

Series: Building lib3mf-rs

This post is part of a 5-part series on building a comprehensive 3MF library in Rust:

1. Part 1: My Journey Building a 3MF Native Rust Library from Scratch
2. Part 2: The Library Landscape - Why Build Another One?
3. Part 3: Into the 3MF Specification Wilderness - Reading 1000+ Pages of Specifications
4. Part 4: Design for Developers - Features, Flags, and the CLI
5. Part 5: Reflections and What’s Next - Lessons from Building lib3mf-rs

“How hard can it be? It’s just a file format.”

That’s what I thought before I started reading the 3MF specifications. After reading, re-reading, and getting AI to help summarize and dig deeper into the interpretations and understandings, I was ready to begin.

Is Your Application Really Using Persistent Memory? Here’s How to Tell.

• Steve Scargall
• Linux , Storage

Persistent memory (PMEM), especially when accessed via technologies like CXL, promises the best of both worlds: DRAM-like speed with the durability of an SSD. When you set up a filesystem like XFS or EXT4 in FSDAX (File System Direct Access) mode on a PMEM device, you’re paving a superhighway for your applications, allowing them to map files directly into their address space and bypass the kernel’s page cache entirely.

But here’s the crucial question: after all the setup and configuration, how do you prove that your application’s data is physically residing on the PMEM device and not just in regular RAM? I’ve run into this question myself, so I wrote a small Python script to get a definitive answer using SQLite3 as an example application. However, before we proceed with the script, let’s examine how you can verify this manually.