linux

652 Articles

Ancient SoundBlaster Cards Just Got A Driver Update

June 28, 2025 by 11 Comments

Old hardware tends to get less support as the years go by, from both manufacturers and the open-source community alike. And yet, every now and then, we hear about fresh attention for an ancient device. Consider the ancient SoundBlaster sound card that first hit the market 31 years ago. [Mark] noticed that a recent update squashed a new bug on an old piece of gear.

Jump over to the Linux kernel archive, and you’ll find a pull request for v6.16-rc3 from [Takashi Iwai]. The update featured fixes for a number of sound devices, but one stands out amongst the rest. It’s the SoundBlaster AWE32 ISA sound card, with [Iwai] noting “we still got a bug report after 25 years.” The bug in question appears to have been reported in 2023 by a user running Fedora 39 on a 120 MHz Pentium-based machine.

The fixes themselves are not particularly interesting. They merely concern minutiae about the DMA modes used with the old hardware. The new updates ensure that DMA modes cannot be changed while the AWE32 is playing a PCM audio stream, and that DMA setups are disabled when changing modes. This helps avoid system lockups and/or ugly noises emanating from the output of the soundcard.

It’s incredibly unlikely this update will affect you, unless you’re one of a handful of users still using an ISA soundcard in 2025. Still, if you are — and good on you — you’ll be pleased someone still cares about your user experience. Meanwhile, if you’re aware of any other obscure old-school driver updates going on out there, don’t hesitate to let us know on the tips line. Want to relive your ISA card’s glory days? Plug it into USB.

Image credit: Gona.eu, CC BY-SA 3.0

[Thanks to Meek Mark for the tip!]

Rust Drives A Linux USB Device

June 26, 2025 by 13 Comments

In theory, writing a Linux device driver shouldn’t be that hard, but it is harder than it looks. However, using libusb, you can easily deal with USB devices from user space, which, for many purposes, is fine.  [Crescentrose] didn’t know anything about writing user-space USB drivers until they wrote one and documented it for us. Oh, the code is in Rust, for which there aren’t as many examples.

The device in question was a USB hub with some extra lights and gadgets. So the real issue, it seems to us, wasn’t the code, but figuring out the protocol and the USB stack. The post covers that, too, explaining configurations, interfaces, and endpoints.

There are other ancillary topics, too, like setting up udev. This lets you load things when a USB device (or something else) plugs in.

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If Your Kernel Development Is A Little Rusty

June 21, 2025 by 40 Comments

To paraphrase an old joke: How do you know if someone is a Rust developer? Don’t worry, they’ll tell you. There is a move to put Rust everywhere, even in the Linux kernel. Not going fast enough for you? Then check out Asterinas — an effort to create a Linux-compatible kernel totally in Rust.

The goal is to improve memory safety and, to that end, the project describes what they call a “framekernel.” Historically kernels have been either monolithic, all in one piece, or employ a microkernel architecture where only bits and pieces load.

A framekernel is similar to a microkernel, but some services are not allowed to use “unsafe” Rust. This minimizes the amount of code that — in theory — could crash memory safety. If you want to know more, there is impressive documentation. You can find the code on GitHub.

Will it work? It is certainly possible. Is it worth it? Time will tell. Our experience is that no matter how many safeguards you put on code, there’s no cure-all that prevents bad programming. Of course, to take the contrary argument, seat belts don’t stop all traffic fatalities, but you could just choose not to have accidents. So we do have seat belts. If Rust can prevent some mistakes or malicious intent, maybe it’s worth it even if it isn’t perfect.

Want to understand Rust? Got ten minutes?

My Winter Of ’99: The Year Of The Linux Desktop Is Always Next Year

June 3, 2025 by 231 Comments

Growing up as a kid in the 1990s was an almost magical time. We had the best game consoles, increasingly faster computers at a pace not seen before, the rise of the Internet and World Wide Web, as well the best fashion and styles possible between neon and pastel colors, translucent plastic and also this little thing called Windows 95 that’d take the world by storm.

Yet as great as Windows 95 and its successor Windows 98 were, you had to be one of the lucky folks who ended up with a stable Windows 9x installation. The prebuilt (Daewoo) Intel Celeron 400 rig with 64 MB SDRAM that I had splurged on with money earned from summer jobs was not one of those lucky systems, resulting in regular Windows reinstalls.

As a relatively nerdy individual, I was aware of this little community-built operating system called ‘Linux’, with the online forums and the Dutch PC magazine that I read convincing me that it would be a superior alternative to this unstable ‘M$’ Windows 98 SE mess that I was dealing with. Thus it was in the Year of the Linux Desktop (1999) that I went into a computer store and bought a boxed disc set of SuSE 6.3 with included manual.

Fast-forward to 2025, and Windows is installed on all my primary desktop systems, raising the question of what went wrong in ’99. Wasn’t Linux the future of desktop operating systems?

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FLOSS Weekly Episode 834: It Was Cool In 2006

May 28, 2025 by 2 Comments

This week Jonathan chats with Ben Meadors and Rob Campbell about the boatload of software Microsoft just released as Open Source! What’s the motivation, why is the new Edit interesting, and what’s up with Copilot? Watch to find out!

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