fidzu : Operating Systems

Enlightenment, the long-running desktop environment and associated libraries and frameworks, just released version 0.28.0. It brings initial support for NetBSD, support for Network Manager and a whole slew of related changes and fixes to make that possible, as well as native PipeWire support. There's also a brand new clipboard manager, which brings with it modernisations and bug fixes for related UI elements. This release also reworks a ton code related to battery management, AC polling, and more, adding features like setting battery thresholds, ACPI power profile support, and so on. Of course, there's also the long list of smaller fixes and changes. You can download the release and build it yourself, or wait for your distribution of BSD variant to package it.

02 Nov 2026 8:31pm GMT

A little while ago, we talked about 9front's Good Enough File System being ported to OpenBSD. A lot of progress has been made on this front lately. Aside from fixing bugs and porting over fixes from the 9front side, there's also been a ton more substantial changes. Some userspace tools have been done (you can now mkfs on openbsd!), but snapshot control hasn't. I'm thinking we have a userspace 'gefs' program that lets you handle this, trying to keep the interface similar to the 9front ctl file. ↫ Ori Bernstein There's still some major hurdles to overcome, some of which have already been addressed on the 9front side, but the progress is clear. Considering OpenBSD desperately needs a more modern file system, this is great news. A fun sidenote is that I'm actually posting this news item from OpenBSD.

02 Nov 2026 8:23pm GMT

"From a global allocation perspective, actually, it's quite terrible to have everybody have a bunch of the world's limited supply of DRAM sitting in their own computer and being used 5% of the time," Altman said. "You want maximum utilization in the cloud if you're trying to deal with this very supply-constrained environment. And somehow many people's intuition is the opposite of that." ↫ Andrew E. Freedman at Tom's Hardware I'm installing a 32bit operating system without support for physical address extension on my laptop with 64GB of RAM, just because I can.

02 Nov 2026 4:35pm GMT

Sculpt OS 26.10 brings quite a few new features, like scalable cursors, support for UK keyboards, better webcam support, and more, but the real meat of this release is much tastier. First, Sculpt 26.10 is the first version based on Genode's custom microkernel instead of relying on a 3rd-party kernel. This kernel - designed from the ground up for the needs of Genode and Sculpt OS in particular - is not only more "micro" than any other of the microkernels supported by Genode, it also solves long-standing deficiencies concerning CPU scheduling and kernel-memory management. Sculpt OS finally stands on Genode's own footing! Finally, Sculpt OS 26.10 pays tribute to this year's overall theme of "building bridges" by featuring our software development kit (Goa SDK) running directly on Sculpt OS without virtualization. This entails a wealth of tooling including GCC, Binutils, Git, Sequoia, Expect, Curl, man, Make, and CMake having landed on Genode. Although still young and not time-tested yet, it shows what's possible today and allows us developers to gradually shift more and more development routine into this self-hosted environment, stressing the general-purpose qualities of Genode and motivating further optimizations. ↫ Sculpt OS release 26.10 announcement This new release also completes the transition from XML to Genode's own HID language for configuration, moves from VirtualBox 6 to 7, and upgrades a whole slew of its Linux-based drivers

31 Oct 2026 8:02am GMT

Raymond Chen published another story from the Windows development trenches, this time about what happens when you hold down the power button. If you hold a PC's power button for 12 seconds, it will turn off at the hardware level without notifying the operating system. This is a safety feature so that you can turn of the computer even if the operating system's "Shut down" command isn't working. After eight seconds of the power button being held down, the Windows kernel realizes that the user is trying to do a force-power-off of the system, and it quickly takes a kernel dump that can be uploaded to the Windows Error Reporting service the next time you turn the system on. ↫ Raymond Chen I'm a bit confused by these numbers, because I have never seen a PC take this long to power off when holding down the power button; usually it takes only a few seconds to do so, meaning Windows would never generate said kernel dump. I tried reading through the various ATX specification documents to find more information on this, but then I remembered I'm not an electrical engineer so I have no idea what I'm looking at. The baseline is that ATX always provides standby power to the motherboard, and pressing the power button shorts the power button pin to ground, telling the PSU to power on fully. Pressing the power button if the computer is running tells the operating system to initiate a shutdown (although you can change this behaviour), but if you hold the button down for a certain number of seconds, it forces a power-off. So far, so good; basic information. It seems that the length of time you need to hold down the power button to force a power-off is dependent on the motherboard in question, handled by a microcontroller or some other IC. Virtually every source I can find says this timing is set to about 4-5 seconds, which is quite a bit shorter than the number of seconds given by Chen. Perhaps motherboard manufacturers consider the 12 seconds to be too long, and just do their own thing, regardless what the ATX specification suggests? What further complicates matters is that Chen details how the kernel dumps created after pressing the power button for 8 seconds do, in fact, get sent to Microsoft once the computer turns on again. In fact, he is one of the people who gets to see these dumps and respond to them, so obviously they are indeed rolling in. Does this mean there's a huge number of computers out there that require you to hold down the power button for 12 seconds to force a shutdown that nobody's ever seen? These emergency kernel dumps are internally classified as "long power button hold" (LPBH) failures. One of the pieces of information recorded in these emergency kernel dumps is whether the screen consists entirely of black pixels. Those failures are sub-classified as "black screen LPBH", and they go to a special virtual team for analysis. (I happen to be a member of this black screen LPBH team.) ↫ Raymond Chen What's going on here? Obviously, I'm not going to doubt Chen, so there must be something here I don't quite understand or that I'm missing. The ATX specification might suggest 12 seconds, but could Windows perhaps adapt its kernel dump behaviour - dumping much sooner than 8 seconds - based on the motherboard it's running on, maybe through information provided by the chipset drivers? I would love it if someone more knowledgeable than me can help us unravel this small mystery.

31 Oct 2026 7:54am GMT

From curl 8.12 through 8.16, config files could slice variable values and include other config files without an explicit depth cap. Together, these features let curl simulate any two-counter Minsky program. Under the usual idealization of unbounded strings and resources, this construction was Turing-complete. Curl 8.17.0 added a five-level include cap that breaks this reduction. ↫ Nicolas Seriot Neat.

31 Oct 2026 7:10am GMT

AlpineBSD is an operating system based on the NetBSD kernel with a userspace inspired by Alpine Linux and the objective of making it possible to use as little AI-generated software as possible. There is no LLM output included in the base system or main package repository (AlpineBSD AI policy). ↫ AlpineBSD's website AlpineBSD uses the NetBSD kernel, libc, and essential tools, and combines them with Alpine's apk-tools package manager, busybox, and generlaly preferring GNU tools over their BSD equivalents. It uses the s6 init system, but the project intends to add OpenRC as an alternative. The project is in its very early stages, so don't expect things like an installer; you're on your own, basically.

30 Oct 2026 12:16am GMT

The Nintendo Wii (and its related consoles) were already made to run the PowerPC version of Windows NT as well as Mac OS X, but now we can add another milestone to the list: classic Mac OS. So today I reached a nice milestone in one of my projects: my work porting classic Mac OS to PowerPC systems with what I affectionately call ArtX chipsets (Nintendo GameCube, Wii, eventually Wii U; the GameCube's Flipper integrated chipset was very much designed by ArtX as it was effectively finished when ATI acquired the company, and the Wii's Vegas (and its later revision Bollywood) and Wii U's Latte are effectively straight successors) reached the desktop for the first time, most likely the first time since the CHRP clone era that someone outside of Apple brought up classic Mac OS on a new system to the desktop. Despite still being nowhere near ready for a public release, I want to talk about the challenges I faced with this project so far. ↫ Rairii at Virtuallyfun Various versions of Mac OS boot to the desktop, including Mac OS 9.2.2, the last ever version, but there's still a ton or work to be done before this is ready for release. Still, with Rairii amazing track record of porting all kinds of things to various PowerPC machines, including getting the PowerPC version of Windows NT to run on various PowerPC Macs, I have little doubt they'll manager to get this to a releasable state. I absolutely love this kind of work.

30 Oct 2026 12:09am GMT

I think it's safe to say that Windows' Modern Standby feature isn't exactly free from issues. The biggest problem seems to be that it's not very good at actually determining when to transition between regular sleep and hibernation, often leaving users with an empty battery as they open their laptop's lid. Microsoft has now released an update to hopefully address this long-standing problem. This update improves the adaptive hibernate policy to provide more instant-on resumes from Modern Standby while helping preserve battery life when the charge is low. Noticeable changes include less hibernation while the battery is above 80% and hibernating sooner when the battery is below 10%. ↫ KB5127936 Among other new features and changes this update brings are Cloud Rebuild, a way for devices to install Windows without needing a local image. Cloud Rebuild can be started form within an existing installation, remotely by administrators, or through the Windows Recovery Environment. Obviously, a working internet connection, wired or wireless, is required for this feature to work. This is the same update that introduces CLAT, which we talked about yesterday, to smooth the transition from IPv4 to IPv6.

29 Oct 2026 11:57pm GMT

Flag LinuxNetBSD made a seemingly small, but very welcome announcement today: they're adding a more user-friendly, easier to use command-line text editor to the base install. To ease the transition for new users, NetBSD -current now includes an alternative editor to vi(1) and xedit(1) in its base system, atto(1). It is a modeless screen-based editor similar to nano, pico, xedit, or emacs. It is only 48 kilobytes, making it suitable for inclusion in the rescue system. ↫ NetBSD Foundation on Fedi Most guides and how-to article for operating systems like NetBSD assume the use of vi, and while I don't want to ignite a flamewar, vi isn't exactly the most approachable or friendly piece of software out there. My occassional text editing in the command line is all done through nano, but now I'm definitely curious to give atto a go. While other tech news websites are plastered with articles about a PC maker adding a touch screen to one of their laptops, we're talking about a new CLI text editor in NetBSD's base system. Priorities, folks.

29 Oct 2026 12:38am GMT

Windows 11 25H2, starting with build 26200.9550, now comes with something called CLAT. As organizations move toward IPv6-only and IPv6-mostly networks, some applications still depend on IPv4-only applications or services. Windows CLAT helps those applications continue to work when a network does not provide native IPv4 connectivity. CLAT is the client-side component of 464XLAT. It statelessly translates IPv4 traffic from the Windows client into IPv6 for transport across the network to a provider-side translator (PLAT), which provides stateful NAT64 translation to IPv4. ↫ Jim Alumbaugh at Microsoft's Networking Blog Yet another important component of the long, neverending transition to IPv6. Like endlessly cutting a cucumber in half, you'll never quite run out of cucumber to cut.

29 Oct 2026 12:28am GMT

Do you want a hobby operating system with a desktop for a microcontroller-based computer? Sylphide OS is a new project aiming to build just that. For the last few weeks, I've worked on a new pet project: an operating system for computers based on microcontrollers. There aren't many yet, but I expect them to be more and more common. Why MCU computers ? You get a relatively very simple platform, booting straight to your code (or almost), and you can understand the whole architecture. Exactly as it was with home computers long ago. And not at all what you get with modern computers. Even booting involves lot of very different systems, black magic, and even blog/proprietary software. ↫ Thomas Capricelli It's very early in development, but by building it atop FreeRTOS, Capricelli had a head-start. It's got a basic desktop, one that might need some changes to avoid the lawyers. The code's open source, of course.

29 Oct 2026 12:09am GMT

What's the oldest Windows GUI application you can still run on Windows 11 today, without any modifications? For now, the best answer Boris Popik can come up with is an innocuous application from build 347 of Windows NT 3.1, an early prerelease: CDPLAYER.EXE. You can't go any older than that, because earlier prerelease builds had not yet finalised its PE format and calling convention. Neat find. Popik also mentions a few other contenders, but I won't spoil those here.

27 Oct 2026 12:14am GMT

Another month has crumbled to dust under the oppressive boots of time, so it's time for another month of Redox improvements. This past month, Redox' build system gained support for Clang, SDL2 saw performance improvements, and WebKitGTK3's HTML layout rendering was fixed. Users of Intel Tiger Lake processors can now enjoy external display hot-plugging, and overall system performance has been improved in a variety of ways. And as always, there's the long lists of kernel, relibc, and driver improvements and fixes as well. Redox keeps making big strides every month, and it's definitely one of the few alternative operating systems that actually feels like it might, one day, be an actual contender for general purpose use.

27 Oct 2026 12:06am GMT

Thew day ends in a Y, so Microsoft is launching a new way to build Windows applications. Get excited, Windows application developers! If you caught our session at Microsoft Build 2026 or you've been watching the repo, you've seen this one taking shape in public for a while now, and a lot has changed since Build. Here's the longer tour: Microsoft.UI.Reactor, an experimental C# framework that brings the MVU (Model-View-Update) pattern to WinUI desktop apps. No XAML files, no code-behind, no ViewModels. Two things before the fun part. Reactor is experimental: no support policy, no API guarantees, published this early on purpose because we'd rather hear we got the design wrong now than once people have shipped on it. And it is not a replacement for XAML or MVVM, which we'll come back to. ↫ Alexandre Zollinger Chohfi at Microsoft's Dev Blogs At multiple points in the linked blog post, Microsoft underlines that no, Reactor is not going to replace XAML. I'm sure Windows developers who learned Win32, Silverlight, WinRT XAML, WPF, UWP, WinUI 2 and 3, and all the others, over the past two decades will feel deeply comforted by Microsoft's insistence that Reactor will not replace XAML. Microsoft repeats: this won't replace XAML. They swear.

26 Oct 2026 11:57pm GMT

We've been following along with Carmen Kaiser's Apple Network Server exploits, and by now things are really starting to come together for owners of this machine. When we last left off, the ROM to allow Mac OS to run on the machine which normally runs IBM's AIX, but there were still a number of bugs, limitations, and issues to be worked out. A lot of progress on that front has been made. The good news is, many of the issues with the preproduction ROM in Mac OS can be fixed or worked around in software. So I've fixed or worked around many of them in software: the MACE Ethernet is fixed, the on-board video is now supported, and the ANS can restart properly back into Mac OS. Plus, because it's the preproduction ROM, you can still boot AIX, thus preserving the entire historical reason for Shiner's existence. Here's the first cut of that software and how it was developed. ↫ Cameron Kaiser There's still two issues Kaiser wishes to address - the internal SCSI bays don't work, and the ROM doesn't properly register parity RAM - but the progress here is amazing.

26 Oct 2026 11:48pm GMT