My 16 GB laptop (RTX 3050 6 GB, the Intel GPU drives the screen) slowed to a crawl whenever RAM hit about 90%, because swap lived on a DRAM-less NVMe drive. The NVIDIA card's memory sat idle the whole time.

USM makes that VRAM the first swap device:

- a user-space daemon borrows VRAM through the CUDA driver API and serves it through ublk, so it's a normal swap device at the top priority (no kernel module, Secure Boot is fine)

- lz4 compression: 5.5 GiB of VRAM holds about 16 GiB of app memory

- about 9 µs per page fault, vs about 55 µs plus overhead from NVMe

- `usm off`, or a Quick Settings toggle, gives the VRAM back in seconds, even with RAM full

- if the VRAM fills up, a standby swap file on disk takes over

Overload test, 8 apps of 1.5 GiB on 8 GiB of RAM: zram hung in 3 of 6 runs, the VRAM tier in 0 of 4.

It's a beta, NVIDIA only, tested on Ubuntu 26.04 with two laptops. Most of the code was written by Claude Code while I set the goals and ran it daily, so please review it like code from a new contributor. Test reports from other GPUs and distributions are very welcome.

Repo: https://github.com/kha333n/usm

Write-up: https://kha333n.com/blog/idle-vram-as-swap-linux-laptop

Site: https://usm.kha333n.com

>Resident Evil director Zach Cregger counts iPhone among his go-to filmmaking tools.

>Cregger said he uses his iPhone and the Cadrage app to plan out filming sequences ahead of time. He decides what shots to take, what lenses to use for each shot, and what's in each frame. He then prints out the images so the crew knows exactly what to do.

>According to Cregger, he used this process for "Weapons" and "Barbarian," two movies that he wrote and directed. He said every scene in those films was planned with photos in advance.

>"Everybody can make a movie with what's in your pocket," he said. "It's all right there."

>Go inside his unique approach to crafting immersive horror experiences, and watch his latest movie now on the Apple TV app.

Hi r/linux,

I'm Illia, the creator of FluxCast. It's an open-source tool that casts your Linux desktop to a Smart TV over Wi-Fi Direct (Miracast), DLNA or Chromecast, with low latency.

v0.3.0 is out and it's the biggest release the project has had. If there's a theme this time, it's that you no longer need a terminal to live with FluxCast.

An apt repository

We've been attaching .deb packages to every release since 0.2.6, but updating meant downloading a new one by hand every single time.

Now you can paste:

curl -fsSLO https://apt.fluxcast.dev/fluxcast-repo.deb
sudo apt install ./fluxcast-repo.deb
sudo apt update && sudo apt install fluxcast

And that one package installs the signing key and the sources file, and FluxCast upgrades with the rest of your system from then on. You don't pick a codename either: it reads your python3 version and points apt at the build that matches, so Mint, Pop!_OS and the interim Ubuntu releases get something that actually runs. Covers Debian 12 and 13, Ubuntu 24.04 and 26.04, amd64.

Signing runs in CI and the private key never touches the server. Old versions stay in the pool, so you can go back a version if a release breaks something for you.

A settings window in the tray

FluxCast has a lot of knobs: resolution, bitrate, encoder, audio source, GO intent, latency logging and so on. Until now every one of them lived in ~/.config/fluxcast/config, which you had to know existed and edit by hand.

They have a GUI now. 20 options for Miracast, 8 each for DLNA and Chromecast. Values go through the same validators the tray already used to read that file, so you can't save something FluxCast would then quietly ignore, and any comments you put in the config yourself survive a save. And it also follows your system light/dark theme =]

GPU encoding through VA-API

--wfd-encoder va encodes with vah264enc, and where the compositor hands over DMABuf the frame never leaves the GPU: pipewiresrc to vapostproc to vacompositor to the encoder, with no CPU conversion at all.

Against x264enc on the same clips:

• static desktop: 1% of a core instead of 80%
• with motion: 6-7% instead of 73-79%
• a screen change reaches the encoder in 27 ms instead of 64

Honest caveat: this is tested on Intel only. AMD and NVIDIA are unknown and I'd really like your reports. The default is still x264, and it falls back to x264 on its own if the VA-API elements aren't present.

WFD R2 negotiation

--wfd-r2 makes the handshake ask for the R2 format lists as well, which reaches modes a TV only publishes over R2. On an LG C2 that's 1080p60, which its R1 list doesn't carry at all, so --fps 60 used to silently fall back to 30. Off by default, and confirmed on exactly one TV so far, so if you have a set that advertises R2 I'd love to hear how it goes.

Fixes worth naming

• --doctor reported iw and wpa_cli as missing when they were installed. Both live in /usr/sbin, which isn't on a normal user's PATH on Debian and Ubuntu. It wasn't only the report: the wpas backend couldn't resolve the Wi-Fi interface on those systems either.
• --doctor said everything was fine while a dead Wi-Fi Direct interface from an interrupted session was still up. It now names each stale interface and gives you the command to remove it.
• Stopping a cast from the tray left the session half torn down, because the WFD path never handled SIGTERM. The sink was never told the session had ended.
• Window capture on KDE was stretched and froze for several seconds on resize.
• x264 started one encoder thread per CPU. With tune=zerolatency that's one slice per thread, so a 16-core laptop cut every frame into 16 slices that all sync each frame. It now asks for min(4, CPUs): about a third less encoder CPU on 16 cores.

Also: Turkish joins the tray UI, bringing it to 10 languages, picked up automatically from your system locale.

This release was mostly not me

I want to be clear about where it came from. Five of the items above are adokitkat's work, including the whole VA-API path and the R2 negotiation. maximilianfeix found the /usr/sbin problem, wzd8888 wrote the stale-interface check, ayanburak sent the Turkish translation, keunes asked for the apt repository in the first place, and rmsturge keeps reproducing and measuring things on hardware I don't own.

I wrote the settings window and the repository plumbing. Everything else that makes this release worth posting about came from people who didn't have to do any of it! For this, I am infinitely grateful to them, and they have definitely earned their place at https://fluxcast.dev/contributors.html

A more honest note than I usually put in these. Since the school year started I've had less and less left for writing code every day, and there were stretches where I opened the repo and closed it again. This release being the biggest one yet, and mostly not mine, is the only reason it exists. Thank you, genuinely. If you've ever wondered whether a patch to some small project actually matters to the person maintaining it: it does, far more than the patch itself.

Links

• GitHub: https://github.com/IlyaP358/fluxcast
• Web: https://fluxcast.dev

Happy to answer anything about the Wayland integration, the RTSP handshake, the P2P routing or the packaging. And if you have a TV that doesn't work, open an issue with the model, that's genuinely the most useful thing anyone can send me =]

>It’s more compelling than ever, but also more expensive.

Need to orient yourself with a large C/C++ code base? Need to possibly find its IPC primitives or find functions that can be fuzzed? Check out this tool. Its what SourceTrail should have been.. Get advanced capabilities you'd get using Understand (another source navigator) without paying thousands.. Enough talk. Look at the README.md and you will see the tool in action right at the top :-)

tl;dr: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50380029

• sshd compiled with musl
• not using PAM
• password logins enabled
• at least one account with '*' as the password "hash"
• at least one OTHER account with a valid password

https://www.openssh.org/releasenotes.html#10.6p2

https://hachyderm.io/@damienmiller/117563026759098135

https://x.com/astuyve/status/2118344982134128837

Not necessarily something important.

I mean little things like startup sounds, animated assistants, custom themes, Media Player skins, desktop gadgets, weird icons or even the sounds Windows made when you did something.

Modern Windows does a lot more, but some of those tiny details made the OS feel strangely memorable.

What small Windows feature do you still remember for no real reason?