The groundwork for Rust modules in Linux was laid with kernel 6.1, and by version 6.8, the first experimental Rust drivers, ...

The landscape of desktop operating systems has witnessed a notable transformation in 2025. Linux, once considered a niche ...

ALSA stands for the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture. It consists of a set of kernel drivers, an application programming interface (API) library and utility programs for supporting sound under Linux.

On Linux kernel programming mailing lists oriented toward new developers (see the on-line Resources), a number of common questions are asked. Almost every time one of these questions is asked, the ...

Editors' Note: This article has been updated since its original posting. Software and hardware engineers who have to deal with byte and bit order issues know the process is like walking a maze. Though ...

In the quest to make small devices cost effective, manufacturers often need to think about reducing the memory size. One option is to find alternative implementations of the abstract data types (ADTs) ...

Nowadays, high-performance server software (for example, the HTTP accelerator) in most cases runs on multicore machines. Modern hardware could provide 32, 64 or more CPU cores. In such highly ...

The load-average calculation is best thought of as a moving average of processes in Linux's run queue marked running or uninterruptible. The words “thought of” were chosen for a reason: that is how ...

In last month's article, we saw how the Linux input subsystem worked inside the kernel, ending with a quick mention of the event handlers. Each handler essentially provides a different user-space API, ...

But many other data compression tools are available to choose from in Linux. See the comprehensive compression and decompression benchmarks in Figures 2 and 3. As with gzip, the best performers are in ...

Popular memory-consistency models include x86's process consistency, in which writes from a given CPU are seen in order by all CPUs, and weak consistency, which permits arbitrary reorderings limited ...

In this article, we explore the optimization levels provided by the GCC compiler toolchain, including the specific optimizations provided in each. We also identify optimizations that require explicit ...