Torvalds hails the removal of a relic from Linux’s early days

Linux creator Linus Torvalds has hailed the removal of defunct addressing function set_fs() in 5.10 which has featured in the kernel since its early days.

In his weekly kernel update, Torvalds said:

“The most interesting - to me - change here is Christoph's setf_fs() removal (it got merged through Al Viro, as you can see in my mergelog below).

It's not a _huge_ change, but it's interesting because the whole model of set_fs() to specify whether a userspace copy...

26 October 2020 | Linux

Windows 10 will soon support Linux GUI apps along with GPU acceleration

Microsoft has announced that full Linux GUI apps will soon be supported in Windows 10 along with GPU acceleration.

During this year’s BUILD, the first to be entirely virtual due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Microsoft pledged to improve its Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) with full GUI app support and GPU hardware acceleration.

Microsoft had already announced that it would be adding a full Linux kernel to Windows 10 with version two of WSL later this month, but the GUI...

20 May 2020 | Linux

Brad Smith: Microsoft was ‘on the wrong side of history’ with open-source

Microsoft president Brad Smith has admitted the company was "on the wrong side of history" when it comes to open-source software.

Redmond has had a rocky relationship with open-source software, especially Linux. Back in 2001, former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer famously called Linux “a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches.”

Microsoft has a very different attitude to open-source today. In fact, the company is now the...

19 May 2020 | Developer