Ddos 
The departing year proved exceptionally eventful for Linux kernel developers. Rust has firmly established itself within the kernel, the Bcachefs file system was removed from the mainline branch, and Linus Torvalds, as ever, did not mince his words.
One of the year’s most unexpected revelations was that Meta is using a task scheduler on its servers that was originally developed for Valve’s portable gaming console, the Steam Deck. At first glance, a handheld gaming device and hyperscale data centers seem worlds apart. Yet it turned out that the scheduler adapts remarkably well and performs flawlessly in a hyperscaler environment.
The undisputed centerpiece of the year was the Rust programming language. The experiment to integrate Rust into the kernel has officially concluded—Rust is now a fully fledged part of Linux. Miguel Ojeda, the lead developer of the Rust for Linux project, published a patch formally closing the experimental chapter. Greg Kroah-Hartman, second only to Torvalds in the kernel development hierarchy, has been actively advocating for new drivers to be written in Rust. Torvalds, for his part, made it clear that he is willing to accept Rust code even over the objections of individual maintainers. The transition was not without drama: kernel maintainer Christoph Hellwig famously called multilingualism a “cancer” for the system and subsequently stepped down as maintainer of the DMA helpers following disputes over Rust bindings. Adding to this sense of maturation, Rust code in the kernel received its first CVE vulnerability—an ironic milestone of adulthood. Amid these tensions, discussions arose within the community about potential forks and even alternative operating systems written from scratch in Rust. Meanwhile, Hector Martin, lead developer of Asahi Linux, announced his departure from the project, citing burnout and pressure from Torvalds.
Red Hat engineers introduced a new Rust-based driver for NVIDIA graphics cards, dubbed NOVA. Intended as the successor to Nouveau, it supports GPUs starting from the RTX 20 (Turing) series, which include a GPU System Processor with the required firmware. Development of NOVA continues in kernel version 6.17 alongside other Rust-driven innovations.
The Bcachefs file system endured a turbulent year. Torvalds initially accepted changes into version 6.16, while warning that the paths would eventually diverge. In 6.17, Bcachefs was marked as “externally maintained,” and in 6.18 its code was removed entirely from the mainline kernel. Bcachefs creator Kent Overstreet responded by releasing a DKMS module which, according to tests, runs twice as fast as the version excised by Torvalds. At the same time, it emerged that Btrfs has saved Meta* billions of dollars in infrastructure costs.
Among the year’s technical innovations was a proposal for a multicore architecture capable of running multiple independent kernel instances on a single machine. This opens intriguing possibilities, such as running a real-time kernel on dedicated CPU cores. Google engineers revived work on Address Space Isolation to mitigate speculative execution attacks, reducing performance penalties from 70 percent to just 13 percent. The NTSYNC driver significantly improved the performance of Windows games running under Wine and Proton. In a particularly audacious experiment, developer Joel Sevier ported the Linux kernel to WebAssembly, making it possible to run it directly in a browser—though stability remains a work in progress.
Major algorithmic trading firm XTX Markets, which processes $250 billion in trades daily, open-sourced its distributed file system, TernFS. Meanwhile, ByteDance proposed a novel inter-process communication paradigm called Run Process As Library, which has delivered impressive benchmark results.
The year also brought notable personnel losses. The sole maintainer of the Wi-Fi drivers announced his departure without naming a successor. Josef Bacik, a longtime Btrfs developer, left Meta and stepped back from active kernel development.
Throughout the year, Linus Torvalds remained unmistakably himself. He rejected changes for the RISC-V architecture in version 6.17, dismissing parts of the code as garbage. He criticized test code in graphics drivers that left behind unnecessary files. He voiced strong opinions on non-block-based file systems and the pointless use of Link tags in commit messages. Even the eccentric formatting of Rust code prompted targeted fixes in version 6.18, implemented specifically in response to Torvalds’ remarks.
Adding a final note of intrigue was the report of a mysterious corporation using x86 opcodes that appear in neither Intel nor AMD processors. Who they are remains an open question.
Related Posts:
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- Linus Torvalds Slams Google Engineer’s Code as ‘Garbage’ and Rejects It for Linux 6.17
- Linux Kernel 6.16-rc4 Released: Focus on Filesystem Fixes, Driver Improvements, & Hardware Support
- Rust Lands in Windows 11 Kernel: A New Era for OS Security?
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