NVIDIA Drops Pascal Support On Linux, Causing Chaos On Arch Linux

December 26, 2025 by Maya Posch 75 Comments

It’s no surprise that NVIDIA is gradually dropping support for older videocards, with the Pascal (GTX 10xx) GPUs most recently getting axed. What’s more surprising is the terrible way that this is being handled by certain Linux distributions, with Arch Linux currently a prime example.

On these systems, updating the OS with a Pascal, Maxwell or similarly unsupported GPU will result in the new driver failing to load and thus the user getting kicked back to the CLI to try and sort things back out there. This issue is summarized by [Brodie Robertson] in a recent video.

Here the ‘solution’ is to switch to a legacy option that comes from the Arch User Repository (AUR), which feels somewhat sketchy. Worse is that using this legacy option breaks Steam as it relies on official NVIDIA dependencies, which requires an additional series of hacks to hopefully restore this functionality. Fortunately the Arch Wiki provides a starting point on what to do.

It’s also worth noting that this legacy driver on the AUR is being maintained by [ventureo] of the CachyOS project, whose efforts are the sole reason why these older NVIDIA cards are still supported at all on Linux with the official drivers. While there’s also the Nouveau driver, this is effectively a reverse-engineering project with all of the problems that come with such an effort, even if it may be ‘good enough’ for older GPUs.

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Treating Functions As Vectors In Hilbert Space

December 25, 2025 by Maya Posch 29 Comments

Perhaps the most beautiful aspect of mathematics is that it applies to literally everything, even things that do not exist in this Universe. In addition to this there are a number of alternative ways to represent reality, with Fourier space and its related transforms being one of the most well-known examples. An alternative to Euclidian vector space is called Hilbert space, as a real or complex inner product space, which is used in e.g. mathematical proofs. In relation to this, [Eli Bendersky] came up with the idea of treating programming language functions as vectors of a sort, so that linear algebra methods can be applied to them.

Of course, to get really nitpicky, by the time you take a function with its arguments and produce an output, it is no longer a vector, but a scalar of some description. Using real numbers as indices also somewhat defeats the whole point and claim of working in a vector space, never mind Hilbert space.

As with anything that touches upon mathematics there are sure to be many highly divisive views, so we’ll leave it at this and allow our esteemed readers to flex their intellectual muscles on this topic. Do you think that the claims made hold water? Does applying linear algebra to every day functions make sense in this manner, perhaps even hold some kind of benefit?

FibreSeeker 3: Continuous Carbon Fiber Vs Chopped CF

December 25, 2025 by Maya Posch 8 Comments

Although you can purchase many types of FDM filaments containing ‘carbon fiber’ these days, they are in no way related to the carbon fiber (CF) composite materials used for rocket hulls and light-weight bicycles. This is because the latter use continuous fibers, often in weaved CF mats, whereas the FDM filaments just use small, chopped, fragments of CF. Obviously this will not result in the same outcome, which makes it interesting that a company called Fibre Seek is now running a KickStarter for a very affordable co-extrusion FDM printer that can add continuous CF to any part. They also sent a few test parts to [Dr. Igor Gaspar] for testing against regular FDM CF prints.

It should be noted here that continuous CF with FDM is not new, as Markforged already does something similar, though at a ‘Contact us for a price quote’ level. The advantage of the Fibre Seek solution is then the co-extrusion that would make printing with continuous CF much more flexible and affordable. Based on the (sponsored) [CNC Kitchen] video of a few weeks ago at a tradeshow, the FibreSeeker 3 printer is effectively a standard CoreXY FDM printer, with the special co-extrusion dual print head that allows for CF to be coated with the target thermoplastic before being printed as normal.

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Born To Burn: The Battle Born LFP Battery

December 25, 2025 by Maya Posch 39 Comments

Would you feel confident in buying US-made LiFePO₄ (LFP) batteries? While the answer here is generally expected to be ‘yes’, especially compared to getting an unbranded LFP battery off eBay from a random seller, the outcome may not be that different. Case in point the 100 Ah, 12 VDC LFP Battle Born battery that [Will Prowse] took a look at to see why its positive terminal gets positively crispy.

Battle Born battery positive terminal. (Credit: Will Prowse, YouTube)

Once the lid was cut off, it’s easy to see what the problem is: the positive terminal is only loosely attached to the bus bar, leading to extremely poor contact. It also appears that there’s a plastic spacer which has properly melted already in this well-used battery that [Will] obtained from a viewer.

This overheating issue with Battle Born batteries has been reported for years now, which makes it a great idea to take a good look at any Battle Born LFP batteries you may have kicking around, as they may be plagued by the same design flaw. Trying to make use of the manufacturer’s warranty could be complicated based on the commentators in the DIY Solar Forum thread, as Battle Born likes to claim that the overheating issue is an external problem and not a design flaw.

Either way, it looks like an incredibly sketchy way to design a battery terminal on an LFP battery that is supposed to surge 100+A. [Will] is requesting that anyone affected posts details in the forum or similar to get all information together, as he looks to push Battle Born on this issue.

What makes this issue worse is that shortly after releasing that first video, Battle Born responded to some concerned customers with a response that claims that their terminal design is a ‘thermal fail-safe’, but as can be seen in [Will]’s follow-up video, it absolutely doesn’t look like one.

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Printing With Metal On The Ender 3 Using Only A Friction Wheel

December 24, 2025 by Maya Posch 9 Comments

Printing metal as easily as it is to print with thermoplastics has been a dream for a very long time, with options for hobbyists being very scarce. This is something which [Rotoforge] seeks to change, using little more than an old Ender 3 FDM printer and some ingenuity. Best of all is that the approach on which they have been working for the past year does not require high temperature, molten metals and no fussing about with powdered metal.

Additive manufacturing using friction welding. (Credit: Ruishan Xie, et al., j.mtcomm, 2021)

Rather than an extruder that melts a thermoplastic filament, their setup uses metal wire that is fed into a friction welding tool head, the details of which are covered in the video as well as on the GitHub project page. Unlike their previous setup which we reported on last year, this new setup is both safer and much riskier. While there’s no more molten metal, instead a very loud and very fast spinning disk is used to provide the friction required for friction welding, specifically friction and rolling-based additive manufacturing (FRAM) as in the cited 2021 paper by [Ruishan Xie] et al. in Materials Today Communications. By the same lead author there’s also a 2025 paper that explores more complex implementations of FRAM.

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Abusing X86 SIMD Instructions To Optimize PlayStation 3 Emulation

December 24, 2025 by Maya Posch 6 Comments

Key to efficient hardware emulation is an efficient mapping to the underlying CPU’s opcodes. Here one is free to target opcodes that may or may not have been imagined for that particular use. For emulators like the RPCS3 PlayStation 3 emulator this has led to some interesting mappings, as detailed in a video by [Whatcookie].

It’s important to remember here that the Cell processor in the PlayStation 3 is a bit of an odd duck, using a single regular PowerPC core (PPE) along with multiple much more simple co-processors called synergistic processing elements (SPEs) all connected with a high-speed bus. A lot of the focus with Cell was on floating point vector – i.e. SIMD – processing, which is part of why for a while the PlayStation 3 was not going to have a dedicated GPU.

As a result, it makes perfect sense to do creative mapping between the Cell’s SIMD instructions and those of e.g. SSE and AVX, even if Intel removing AVX-512 for a while caused major headaches. Fortunately some of those reappeared in AVX2.

The video goes through a whole range of Cell-specific instructions, how they work, and what x86 SIMD instructions they were mapped to and why. The SUBD instruction for example is mapped to VPDPBUSD as well as VDBPSADBW in AVX-512, the latter of which mostly targets things like video encoding. In the end it’s the result that matters, even if it also shows why the Cell processor was so interesting for high-performance compute clusters back in the day.

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Silicon-Based MEMS Resonators Offer Accuracy In Little Space

December 24, 2025 by Maya Posch 2 Comments

Currently quartz crystal-based oscillators are among the most common type of clock source in electronics, providing a reasonably accurate source in a cheap and small package. Unfortunately for high accuracy applications, atomic clocks aren’t quite compact enough to fit into the typical quartz-based temperature-compensated crystal oscillators (TCXOs) and even quartz-based solutions are rather large. The focus therefore has been on developing doped silicon MEMS solutions that can provide a similar low-drift solution as the best compensated quartz crystal oscillators, with the IEEE Spectrum magazine recently covering one such solution.

Part of the DARPA H6 program, [Everestus Ezike] et al. developed a solution that was stable to ±25 parts per billion (ppb) over the course of eight hours. This can be contrasted with a commercially available TCXO like the Microchip MX-503, which boasts a frequency stability of ±30 ppb.

Higher accuracy is achievable by swapping the TCXO for an oven-controlled crystal oscillator (OCXO), with the internal temperature of the oscillator not compensated for, but rather controlled with an active heater. There are many existing OCXOs that offer down to sub-1 ppb stability, albeit in quite a big package, such as the OX-171 with a sizable 28×38 mm footprint.

With a MEMS silicon-based oscillator in OXCO configuration [Yutao Xu] et al. were able to achieve a frequency stability of ±14 ppb, which puts it pretty close to the better quartz-based oscillators, yet within a fraction of the space. As these devices mature, we may see them eventually compete with even the traditional OCXO offerings, though the hyperbolic premise of the IEEE Spectrum article of them competing with atomic clocks should be taken with at least a few kilograms of salt.

Thanks to [anfractuosity] for the tip.