- Add opt-in Apple Time Machine support
Implement the AAPL negotiation and related Finder, stream,
COPYCHUNK, sparse-file, CHANGE_NOTIFY, and RPC compatibility
required for Time Machine shares, allowing macOS backupd to use
ksmbd for backups
Over my life I have found that with any Apple technology it may work great with anything outside Apple's control... Until it doesn't, usually out of nowhere.
My father is mostly on Apply and tries to use his iPad as a PC, ie with files and "the filesystem", he tries to get out of using extra iCloud for pictures (using Proton, or he asks me about Immich, or he wants to use an external HDD, or use Synology Photos and backup). But I recent told him: Just give up. Buy the storage, you are too depended on me, there is always something with the non-Apple solutions. Yes, your iTunes library is a mess on the filesystem, just don't look at it through anything else than "Music". I'm sorry, it's either Linux and I can help set some things up, or full Apple. Choose. They current approach is just pure unexpected pain, every time again.
Gotta say, using SMB with Apple clients is a massive pain in the ass. I imagine a large part of that is just Microsoft cruft, leaving you to deal with limitations designed around Windows. And you don't really have another option after Apple deprecated AFP.
> This release is a record-breaker on all fronts; it brought in 18,765 non-merge commits from 3,021 developers, 807 of whom were first-time kernel developers.
hopefully without kernel-slops :P good job everyone btw!
I think this is yet another case where Linus is leading the pack and showing the industry how to adapt to new technology, and indeed, adopt standard best practices for its application.
I'm in the "AI is great!" optimist camp myself, which is how I felt in the very early days of "this little crappy hobbyist Linux kernel thing that'll never go anywhere important" minix-list flamewars.
Once again, Linus demonstrating that those who understand the code, own the code.
Please stop with the "AI assisted development" = "Vibe coding slop" narrative. It comes across as pretty dumb nowadays. Please experiment with LLMs, find your way, learn to talk about it in an informed way and don't post obviously inflammatory one liners that are essentially just "AI is bad m'kay".
There are intelligent arguments against using AI, your comment is not referring to any of them.
Failfs is a pretty cool pseudo-filesystem where every path lookup fails. So if yu place a statically-linked process into failfs with ONLY pre-allocated file-descriptors at process birth, close down unneeded sockets and enforce a default-deny firewall discipline, compromised applications are effectively isolated and unable to access local files or spawn shells during an exploit. An attacker can NOT move adjacently from the exploited process to other parts of the system because to do so they'll need to navigate from root and that would fail since yu set root as failfs and you've got yourself a pure, isolated data-processing pipe that can only interact via the exact file descriptors it was given!!
Unfortunately, yu can't use dynamically-linked apps anyway since failfs would break absolute path resolution loading system libraries.
A process which is chrooted into failfs cannot open new files. It is limited to the set of filesystem file descriptors it already has open (presumably set up before the chroot or inherited into the process from some container runtime).
I'd love if chrooting would become easier. In particular a
requirement to have bash or a specific shell is annoying;
imo a simple REPL should suffice already there. I wrote one
that works years ago, need to look into what is all needed
for a chroot (I always used bash for this but I'd also want
to change to my own shell eventually).
We wanted capabilities[1]. Instead we get this over-complicated series of system calls with no design consistency that you have to use very carefully, else they can be bypassed (see the list of caveats on the failfs page).
SMB improvements (https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...), I've moved to borg, but depending on how this goes may give time machine another try:
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.3-KSMBDStill sucks that it has to be reverse-engineered
Over my life I have found that with any Apple technology it may work great with anything outside Apple's control... Until it doesn't, usually out of nowhere.
My father is mostly on Apply and tries to use his iPad as a PC, ie with files and "the filesystem", he tries to get out of using extra iCloud for pictures (using Proton, or he asks me about Immich, or he wants to use an external HDD, or use Synology Photos and backup). But I recent told him: Just give up. Buy the storage, you are too depended on me, there is always something with the non-Apple solutions. Yes, your iTunes library is a mess on the filesystem, just don't look at it through anything else than "Music". I'm sorry, it's either Linux and I can help set some things up, or full Apple. Choose. They current approach is just pure unexpected pain, every time again.
Gotta say, using SMB with Apple clients is a massive pain in the ass. I imagine a large part of that is just Microsoft cruft, leaving you to deal with limitations designed around Windows. And you don't really have another option after Apple deprecated AFP.
Wait so Time Machine works over SMB? Huh
Yep. My household backs up to a Synology NAS via Time Machine: https://kb.synology.com/en-global/DSM/tutorial/How_to_back_u...
[delayed]
> This release is a record-breaker on all fronts; it brought in 18,765 non-merge commits from 3,021 developers, 807 of whom were first-time kernel developers.
hopefully without kernel-slops :P good job everyone btw!
Is Linus still checking every commit?
I believe this is the first vibe coded or slop release of the kernel from Linus using AI.
Update accordingly.
It might be written by the LLM, but I'm pretty sure Linus hasn't vibe coded it. Do you think he won't look at the output and nitpick to death?
I think this is yet another case where Linus is leading the pack and showing the industry how to adapt to new technology, and indeed, adopt standard best practices for its application.
I'm in the "AI is great!" optimist camp myself, which is how I felt in the very early days of "this little crappy hobbyist Linux kernel thing that'll never go anywhere important" minix-list flamewars.
Once again, Linus demonstrating that those who understand the code, own the code.
There was a recent proof that he did
Please stop with the "AI assisted development" = "Vibe coding slop" narrative. It comes across as pretty dumb nowadays. Please experiment with LLMs, find your way, learn to talk about it in an informed way and don't post obviously inflammatory one liners that are essentially just "AI is bad m'kay".
There are intelligent arguments against using AI, your comment is not referring to any of them.
First time hearing about failfs. Does it have a niche use case or is it just for testing?
Failfs is a pretty cool pseudo-filesystem where every path lookup fails. So if yu place a statically-linked process into failfs with ONLY pre-allocated file-descriptors at process birth, close down unneeded sockets and enforce a default-deny firewall discipline, compromised applications are effectively isolated and unable to access local files or spawn shells during an exploit. An attacker can NOT move adjacently from the exploited process to other parts of the system because to do so they'll need to navigate from root and that would fail since yu set root as failfs and you've got yourself a pure, isolated data-processing pipe that can only interact via the exact file descriptors it was given!!
Unfortunately, yu can't use dynamically-linked apps anyway since failfs would break absolute path resolution loading system libraries.
For sandboxing: https://hackaday.com/2026/08/07/this-filesystem-is-born-to-f...
A process which is chrooted into failfs cannot open new files. It is limited to the set of filesystem file descriptors it already has open (presumably set up before the chroot or inherited into the process from some container runtime).
So basically more fine tuned jail controls.
I'd love if chrooting would become easier. In particular a requirement to have bash or a specific shell is annoying; imo a simple REPL should suffice already there. I wrote one that works years ago, need to look into what is all needed for a chroot (I always used bash for this but I'd also want to change to my own shell eventually).
We wanted capabilities[1]. Instead we get this over-complicated series of system calls with no design consistency that you have to use very carefully, else they can be bypassed (see the list of caveats on the failfs page).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability-based_security
It looks like it's useful for sandboxing by preventing any possible filesystem movement.
https://docs.kernel.org/next/filesystems/failfs.html
Reading the description, looks like a stricter chroot for purely-network applications, maybe?
Linux has an in-kernel SMB server like Solaris? When the hell did this happen?
~2021: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28355754