In this article. I am going to explain the different steps the I/O manager follows when initializing an I/O operation starting from determining the right target, choosing the right path and finally sending the request to be processed by the right drivers. To make it easier I choose to focus on read requests only since the major steps are common by all types of requests.

↫ Win-Ware

A very in-depth look at Windows’ I/O Manager.

At OSNews, we love us a hobby operating system project.

I started a small experiment: writing a very basic kernel in Swift, and running on QEMU.

The goal is obviously not to replace Linux or any other popular kernel, but just to have fun and understand what is required to make a program run without an operating system underneath it. Actually I made a similar experiment years before with arOS 10 years ago.

For the moment, the kernel does only one thing: it prints a message through QEMU and then waits forever, which is enough for a first deep dive.

↫ Carette Antonin

This is effectively a “hello world” kernel, as it doesn’t actually do much else at this point. Still, there’s a ton of details in the article for the aspiring kernel developers among you.

Chimera Linux is a relatively new Linux distribution, and quite a unique on at that, as it combines the core tools from FreeBSD, the LLVM toolchain, and the Musl C library instead of the usual suspects. Despite being relatively new, it still has some serious pedigree as the project was started by Nina “q66”, who was part of the Void Linux team. At Void, she maintained the various PowerPC/POWER ports of the distribution until Chimera became her sole focus.

Nina published a detailed blog post today about how the Chimera team builds the tooling for their distribution, as well as the goals it’s trying to achieve. It covers everything from a bit of personal history, the rationale behind the project, who it’s catering to, how its tooling works and why, and the infrastructure they’ve built that underpins it all. There’s a lot to process here, with one of the most interesting little details – at least to me, as someone who has two POWER9 machines – the fact that Chimera started with the ppc64le target only.

The article is an incredibly interesting look at not just the how of Chimera, but also the why, which makes for some really fascinating reading.

KDE contributor and developer Niccolò Venerandi has published an article about COSMIC, System76’s brand new desktop environment.

It’s been almost a year since I’ve last tried COSMIC; though development since then has mostly been centered around stability (going from late alpha to stable releases now!) there have been a fair bit of user-facing changes too which I adore. I thus have to ask myself: should I switch to COSMIC? The answer obviously is no, but that’s just because I got addicted to KDE Plasma, so let’s try to be more objective here.

↫ Niccolò Venerandi

Honestly, this is one of the best “reviews” I’ve seen of COSMIC, and paints System76’s hard work in a really positive light. Venerandi spots countless really nice touches he’d love to see adopted by KDE, while also hitting on what I agree is COSMIC’s biggest shortcoming at this point: there’s basically no ecosystem around it. COSMIC uses its own Rust-based toolkit instead of GTK or Qt, but of course, there’s very few other applications that actually use said toolkit.

The end result is that if you run COSMIC, you’re going to have to supplement it with countless GTK and Qt application, none of which will inherit all the nice features, touches, and graphics from COSMIC. This isn’t really a complaint about COSMIC itself or the work its developers are putting into it, but more a fact of life for such a new desktop environment using an otherwise unpopular (as of right now) toolkit. This may very well change in the future, but for now, if you choose to run COSMIC, you’re going to have to accept a very inconsistent and messy desktop.

This won’t matter to everyone, but it sure does matter to me, and it’s the one reason why at this point I have zero interest in running COSMIC. I really hope this changes in the future – competition is good – but it’s going to be a long road.

To this day, Windows retains full support for the old MS-DOS 8.3 filename limitation, and it does this by creating 8.3 aliases for files with longer names. Apparently, this has a measurable effect on performance, so naturally, people are going to turn it off to make their Windows installations perform better.

According to the user, this resulted in noticeably smoother scrolling in Tile view. They subsequently repeated the process on several folders they regularly use and reported that searching through files became much faster. The user also claimed that external hard drives became faster and that browsing an Android directory over USB or FTP behaved more like a regular Windows folder, including when copying large numbers of music files.

↫ Sayan Sen at Neowin

You can disable this legacy feature in Windows per volume or globally, but Microsoft is warning users not to do so. Even in 2026, applications and registry entries may depend on 8.3 filenames being available, so removing them can lead to unexpected outcomes. It’s just one of those things you wouldn’t expect to still be around or have a measurable impact in the days of fast SSDs, but there’s enough credibly evidence out there to suggest that yes, it actually does negatively affect performance.

If you’re doing a lot of file operations in Windows, it might be worthwhile to do some testing of your own to see if you can speed things up. Or, you know, you can just not use a house of cards disguised as a serious operating system.

Apple’s macOS has a Full Disk Access permission, designed to allow backup applications full access to, well, the disk, so they can perform their job properly. Apple posted a notice on its website that it’s going to further restrict this permission, because some applications were abusing this permission to gain access to users’ messages, emails, and so on, which it obviously isn’t intended for.

What kind of applications, you may ask?

Going forward, we will introduce additional controls to ensure that users who genuinely wish to grant an app this extraordinary level of access can only do so with very explicit user action. Addressing this is critical. As AI agents become increasingly capable and autonomous, the risks associated with this level of access will grow substantially. We are committed to ensuring users clearly understand these risks before granting such access, so they can make informed decisions about their own data and privacy.

↫ Announcement from Apple

This was prompted by a story a few weeks ago, where Facebook’s Muse “AI” tool was apparently reading people’s private messages and other data, and even sent messages on users’ behalf, without informing its users. It’s incredibly naive to think Facebook software in 2026 would not do creepy things, so I’m honestly not at all surprised. It makes sense in Apple’s worldview to further restrict permissions in response, but I’m sure more experienced macOS users are not going to like this.

I like squirrels. Apparently, there’s a SquirrelOS. It’s a small hobby OS learning project from five years ago, developed by Immanuel Daviel A. Garcia.

A simple DOS like OS made in Assembly and C with a ported version of Stephen Brennan’s Shell.

↫ SquirrelOS GitHub page

Why do I like squirrels? I don’t know man, they’re just cute.

Google launched its Googlebooks platform a week ago, and a lot of people were wondering what this meant for Chrome OS and Chromebooks. Since Googlebooks and its Android-based Googlebook OS lack the management frameworks markets like schools require, Chromebooks will continue to be available for now, until such time Googlebooks catch up in that regard. However, in a support document, Google states that update support for all Chromebook devices will end in 2034:

ChromeOS devices will continue to receive regular updates and security patches through mid-2034. For qualifying devices purchased today whose 10-year support lifecycle extends beyond 2034, Google is committed to supporting your transition to Googlebook OS, with many devices offering direct migration paths.

↫ Google support document

Google promised 10 years of updates for all Chromebooks, and it’s now breaking that promise for anyone buying a Chromebook between now and whenever the last Chromebook rolls off the production line. Sadly, we live in a world where corporations are free to make and break whatever promises they want virtually free of consequences, and as society we’re so used to it that anti-consumer behaviour like this barely elicits a shrug.

Google does state that “many newer commercial Chromebook models will be capable of upgrading to Googlebook OS”, but that, too, is just another promise – and a vague, one at that – so who knows how many devices will actually be capable of upgrading out in the real world. On top of that, we have no idea if Googlebooks will just be yet another in a long line of quickly abandoned Google tablet/laptop projects, further adding to the uncertainty.

Stuff like this should not be legal.

A brand new Tcl/Tk release, in the form of Tcl/Tk 9.1. The new features in Tcl are a bit difficult for me to properly parse as a non-developer, but Tk’s improvements are easy to understand: it brings supports for screen readers, initial supports for bidirectional and RTL scripts, improved listbox selection colours, and more. It also happens to drop support for Windows XP appearances, if that’s something that matters to you.

Microsoft has announced WSL containers for developers who aren’t already using Docker, Podman, or Rancher on their Windows workstations.

WSL containers is now generally available! Check out this blog post to learn more about this overall feature enabling seamless access to Linux containers on Windows via the new “wslc.exe” command. This new Linux container platform comes with multiple architectures changes compared to WSL, which we’ll detail in this post.

↫ Pierre Boulay at the Microsoft Dev Blogs

If you already have WSL installed, you can run wsl -update to get this new container feature, or you can download it straight from GitHub.

Windows 11 received its September update on the 8^th of this month, and within days Microsoft had acknowledged or investigated problems involving Remote Desktop, USB audio, Linux and WSL-based apps like Claude Cowork, and enterprise domain issues. Windows Latest also found File History failures, Explorer.exe crashes, and AMD GPU instability, with an emergency update following on September 14 that still did not fix everything.

This got us curious, and we looked back across the nine monthly updates released from January through September 2026 and, rather unsurprisingly, Windows 10 update history isn’t infected with nearly as many bugs as that of Windows 11.

↫ Abhijith M B at Windows Latest

Of course, Windows 10 also isn’t getting nearly as much attention from Microsoft, but that’s kind of the whole point, isn’t it? Whenever Microsoft touches something, especially over the last 5 years or so, it’s one cascade of failures after the other, eroding trust in Windows’ updates even more (if that’s even possible). In that light, why would you want to use Windows 11 and all the headaches that come with it, when Windows 10 is right there, still being supported, albeit without the latest bells and whistles that only seem to break Windows 11 anyway?

If you really do need or want to use Windows, consider switching back to Windows 10 whenever the usual Windows reinstallation time draws near. You won’t lose much, but will gain quite a bit in the process. Of course, this won’t be a responsible or usable choice forever, but at this point in time, I definitely think it’s the optimal choice for quite a few people.

One of the unwritten rules of the Internet seems to be that whenever something Amiga-related is mentioned, at least one Amiga fan (myself included) must show up and try to explain the concept of screens. Amiga screens can have different resolutions, we’ll tell you, and one can drag them, we’ll say, and other Amiga users rally in agreement, while non-Amiga users probably still don’t get what’s so great about screens. Until now, when this text has been written, in the hope of converting unsuspecting normies into full-blown Amiga screen lovers.

↫ Carl Svensson

A deeply technical look at not just how the Amiga managed to achieve this stunning functionality way back in the ’80s on machines with 7MHz and less RAM than a keyfob, but also how this functionality can be useful. I’ve always found the concept of screens on the Amiga quite interesting, and Svensson’s article does a great job at demystifying the whole concept.

Of course, expect a lot of lovely Amiga OS screenshots.

Can you run an operating system with a graphical user interface and applications on the Atari Jaguar? Well, you can.

A long time running idea and work-in-progress, I’d like to finally announce the current version of JagOS ‘Spot’ for the Atari Jaguar, running from the RetroHQ GameDrive.

I’m slow at releasing things and try not to announce in-progress stuff due to lack of free time but would like to push this along. Maybe it’ll motivate me to work on it more if the interest is there or just release it as-is if not. The idea is based on the unreleased Atari Jaguar Painter Computer prototype, that a merged Falcon with Jaguar chipset-based computer would have found its way into consumer hands after the Falcon030.

↫ Clint Thompson

The screenshots and YouTube video are quite impressive, but as it’s not actually released, it’s difficult to really say anything more about this project for now. I hope there’s enough interest to get this project’s code out there so it can be further improved and expanded.

Qualcomm, yesterday, promising Linux support for the new Snapdragon X2 processors:

Linux on Snapdragon X2 Series is moving from early bring-up toward a more complete upstream developer experience. Core support is landing, Hexagon NPU and Adreno GPU work is progressing, and real laptops with Snapdragon X2 Series processors are already beginning to boot Linux.

↫ Qualcomm’s promises from 2026

Interesting, but I feel like I’ve heard these exact words before. Qualcomm, two years ago, promising Linux support for the then-new Snapdragon X processors:

It’s been our priority not only to support Linux on our premium-tier SoCs, but to support it pronto. In fact, within one or two days of publicly announcing each generation of Snapdragon 8, we’ve posted the initial patchset for Linux kernel support. Snapdragon X Elite was no exception: we announced on October 23 of last year and posted the patchset the next day. That was the result of a lot of pre-announcement work to get everything up and running on Linux and Debian.

↫ Qualcomm’s empty promises from 2024

These promises were not at all kept. Two years later, Linux support for Snapdragon X laptops is still spotty, broken, and limited, confined to just a few bespoke Ubuntu builds, which don’t even offer full support either. It’s a complete mess, effectively unusable, and highlights once again that big technology companies are compulsive liars. I have little faith in these new promises, but who knows – maybe this time it’ll be different.

Probably not, though.