By ckasprzak | TkOut
| July 6, 2026 |
Software
The Hot Take: Unix trying to come back from the grave? Or just a patent troll wanting another pay day?
The ancient dispute over ownership of UNIX, and perhaps Linux too, has returned to court. Again. As The Register has explained many, many, times since this matter first went to court in 2003, the roots of the case are the 1998 alliance between IBM and a company called the Santa Cruz Operation which sold a version of UNIX for x86 CPUs. Those two companies, plus Intel and Sequent, created âProject Monterreyâ â an effort to create a unified version of UNIX that could run on multiple processors. By 2001, Project Monterrey was close to delivering a unified UNIX, an achievement made possible by blending code from IBM and SCO. By then, a little project called âLinuxâ already ran on multiple processors. Big Blue decided Linux was the future and bailed from Project Monterrey â then allegedly contributed some Monterrey code to the open-source project and to its own AIX and Z operating systems. SCO felt it owned some of that code, so sued IBM. SCO and its successors struggled to survive, but interested parties kept the lawsuit alive because the chance to emerge as owner of parts of the Linux codebase, and IBMâs code, had the potential to turn into a colossal payday. The case and its successors ended in 2021, with a settlement that saw litigants agree to end the matter without IBM admitting fault. But by then, SCO had sold its software to a biz called Xinuos that decided to fight on. The Xinuos case has burbled along quietly since, and on June 22nd reached the milestone of a hearing. The matter has become a little more modern, if only because this hearing was held online and the presiding judge appeared to unwittingly be on mute at one point. But the arguments otherwise seemed to revisit Project Monterrey, debated the relevance of past litigation, contested who owned what, when they owned it, and how they could prove it. Xinuos argued IBM never had a license for SCO code. Big Blue argued that it did nothing wrong. The core issue seems to be whether Xinuos even has the right to litigate the matter, or if some ancient legalese in the original agreements means the window for legal argument has long since expired. The matter continues and appears likely to do so until either the heat death of the universe or the year of Linux on the desktop â whichever comes sooner. ÂŽ
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The Hot Take: New Micro-FAB? Jim Keller involvement, interesting.
Atomic Semi, the semiconductor tooling startup founded by chip architect Jim Keller and DIY fabrication pioneer Sam Zeloof, has rebranded as Fab2 and moved its operations to Texas, according to the company's new site at fab2.com. The rebrand recasts the company around the idea they're calling a "fab fab," a factory that mass-produces small semiconductor fabs and the tools inside them.Fab2 designs and builds every tool in its fabs in-house, from pumps, valves, and gas lines to lithography and the vacuum chambers that house it. The company assembles those components into machines, the machines into complete fabs, and then aims to mass-produce the fabs themselves. It pairs the hardware with Studio, an in-browser, collaborative EDA tool for layout, schematic, and simulation work, previously branded as Atomic Studio.Rather than moving 300mm wafers through ginormous production lines, Fab2 targets small, software-defined fabs that pattern chips far smaller than a wafer and turn prototypes around in hours. Zeloof built the concept's proof point as a teenager, fabricating lithographic chips in his parents' garage down to roughly 300nm features before co-founding this company with Keller in 2022.The method's main constraint, however, is throughput. Electron-beam lithography writes patterns directly rather than projecting them through a mask, which makes it slow: a single patterning step on a small chip can take far longer than an EUV scanner needs to expose an entire 300mm wafer. That's a big tradeoff that only really suits prototyping and low-volume runs rather than high-volume production at commercial foundries.Fab2 now operates three sites: a 120,000 square foot facility in Austin serves as the new headquarters for research and production, a 30,000 square foot site in Lockhart houses the "fab fab" itself, and the original 25,000 square foot "garage fab" remains in San Francisco. Fab2 said it shifted its hiring focus to Texas after four years in California, and Tracxn lists the company at around 84 employees as of May 2026. The startup raised a reported $15 million seed round in 2023, led by the OpenAI Startup Fund, at a valuation of about $100 million, with angel backing from Naval Ravikant, Nat Friedman, and Fred Ehrsam.In moving to Texas, Fab2's model of many small, printable fabs now sits beside the likes of Tesla and SpaceX, which announced Terafab back in March, a single Austin megafab targeting a terawatt of annual compute at a cost of up to $119 billion. The contrasting businesses are clearly not competitors; Fab2 sells small fabs and prototyping speed, while Terafab is built for high-volume AI. But they represent competing answers to the same question of how the U.S. should expand its chipmaking capacity â consolidate everything in massive manufacturing campuses, or distribute production across many small, replicable fabs?
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The Hot Take: Yes! No new case possibly.
The company confirmed it in an unusual way, but it seems legit, and as per the announcement, the coolers should arrive soon. Noctua Announces NL-LC1 Chromax.Black AIO Series Despite Exclusion From the Roadmap; The New Variant is Expected to Arrive This Year The Noctua's latest and first-ever AIO cooler series was dropped two weeks ago. The NL-LC1 is what Noctua aims for, superior cooling, which is available in various form factors. Whether you want to cool a mid-range or a high-end CPU, it offers the AIO in various sizes, including 240mm, 360mm, and 420mm for enthusiast-grade PCs. Built using the [âŚ]Read full article at https://wccftech.com/noctua-confirms-nl-lc1-chromax-black-aio-series/
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The Hot Take: I really wonder if this will deflate the Ai bubble even a little bit.
The x86 Ecosystem Advisory Group led by Intel and AMD recently firmed up the AI Compute Extensions (ACE) specification for optimizing x86 for AI computation tasks around matrix multiplication and the like for machine learning workloads. The cross-vendor ACE extension is ultimately a successor to Intel's Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX). Posted to the GCC mailing list today by Intel engineers are the initial patches in preparing the compiler support for ACE...
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The Hot Take: Intel Ramping things up to play catch up and win volume from TSMC.
Intel this week initiated expansion of its Bowers Campus in Santa Clara, California, in a bid to produce more photomasks (reticles) in the U.S. The company intends to build a new manufacturing facility and a new utility building at the site, which will reinforce the site's position as a key producer of photomasks for Intel.Go deeper with TH Premium: Chipmaking(Image credit: tsmc)A deeper look at the chipmaking supply chainTSMC's $165 billion U.S. investments examinedChina reportedly reverse-engineers EUV toolChina bets on DUV, as EUV blockade reshapes chipmakingEarlier this year Intel obtained approval to build a new 107,000 square feet (9,940 square meters) manufacturing facility with Class 1 cleanroom at its Bowers Campus, and this week it formally began construction on the expansion, which it kicked off at a ceremony attended by its top executives and Santa Clara mayor Lisa Gilmor. The new facility will be able to write 6-inch Ă 6-inch photomasks both for DUV and EUV layers and a variety of nodes (from 32nm down 1.4nm-class), though the primary focus of the facility is to produce reticles for leading-edge process technologies â such as Intel's 18A, 18A-P, 14A, and more advanced â that rely on advanced DUV, EUV and eventually High-NA EUV tools and require more advanced photomasks, such as those that feature extremely dense patterns and use curvilinear optical proximity correction (OPC) with curved geometric shape.(Image credit: Intel)Intel is one of a few leading chipmakers in the world that still maintains a world-class mask writing shop â which is important, as every advanced product requires hundreds of masks, and every mask revision directly affects production schedules. In addition, producing masks in-house is getting particularly important when it comes to reticles for EUV layers as EUV tools tend to damage masks over time (despite usage of protective pellicles), so having the ability to make new masks in a short amount of time is crucial. Furthermore, Intel is the only semiconductor producer to make its own tools for photomasks writing at its IMS Nanofabrication subsidiary. Historically, reticles were patterned using a single e-beam tool, which was slow. By contrast, IMS produces multi-beam mask writers (MBMWs) that project 262,144 independently programmable electron beams simultaneously, which increases throughput by orders of magnitude at a nanometer-scale placement accuracy.(Image credit: Intel)"Santa Clara has been home to some of Intel's most important manufacturing innovations for decades," said Dr. Frank Abboud, VP Intel Foundry & GM of Intel Mask Operations. "By expanding the Bowers campus mask operations, we're strengthening a critical capability that supports advanced process technology production around the world and reinforces Intel Foundry's commitment to advancing U.S. semiconductor manufacturing leadership."Intel's Bowers Campus in Santa Clara has been dedicated to mask production since 1986. The site forms the company's primary mask manufacturing infrastructure supporting together with the company's facility in Hillsboro, Oregon. Production of non-critical masks has historically been outsourced, though we do not know whether the company still does that.IntelIntel
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The Hot Take: Nore more docker on Windows? Interesting.
Windows 11 can now build, run, and manage Linux containers on its own, without Docker Desktop in the background. Microsoft calls this WSL Containers, and after installing the preview and running a few real workloads through it, here is what works, what still needs Docker, and how to get it running on your own PC.
WSL Container should not be confused with the next version of WSL 2, as we already covered how Microsoft shut down the WSL 3 rumors. It has now shipped as a public preview, so we installed it, built a custom container image from scratch, and pushed it through a few workflows to see where it holds up.
What is WSL Container in Windows 11
WSL Container is a built-in feature of the Windows Subsystem for Linux that lets you create, run, and manage Linux containers directly from Windows, without installing Docker Desktop, Podman Desktop, or any other third-party runtime. It ships in two parts:
The first is wslc.exe, a command-line tool that is added to your PATH as soon as you update WSL. Microsoft also ships an alias called container.exe, so both commands point to the same binary. Anyone who has used Docker before will recognize the syntax, since commands like wslc run, wslc build, and wslc container list look like Dockerâs own structure almost one-for-one.
The second part is a WSL Container API, distributed as a NuGet package with support for C, C++, and C#. Windows application developers can use it to embed Linux containers directly into their own apps.
Instead of asking users to install a separate runtime, a Windows app can quietly spin up a Linux container in the background to run a piece of Linux-only code, then tear it down when the task finishes. Microsoft demoed this with Moonray, an open-source Linux rendering engine used on films like The Wild Robot, running inside a Windows executable with no visible sign that Linux was involved at all.
Moonray is a Linux-based rendering engine that can run inside Windows through WSL Container
Every Windows application that uses the API gets its own Hyper-V-backed virtual machine, separate from every other appâs container. The CLI flow gets its own VM too. Docker Desktop, however, runs every container inside one shared VM, which as youâd expect is more efficient.
WSL Containers trade some resource efficiency for a hard isolation boundary between apps, which explains why Microsoft is pitching this as enterprise-ready.
That said, both entry points talk to the same WSL service that already manages your regular distros, and inside the Linux VM, the container runtime doing the real work is Moby, the open-source engine that also powers Docker. Note that WSL Containers is not reinventing containers. It is, instead, giving Windows a first-party front door to them.
How to install WSL Container on Windows 11
WSL Container only ships in the pre-release channel of WSL for now, so you will need to opt into that before wslc shows up on your PC.
Open Windows Terminal or PowerShell as an administrator.
Run wsl âupdate âpre-release and let it finish downloading.
Restart WSL with wsl âshutdown command, then close and reopen your terminal.
Confirm the install with wslc âversion. You should see the version number 2.9.3.0, which confirms WSL Container is installed.
Run wslc âhelp to see the full command reference and confirm the binary is working.
In our test machine, the update took under two minutes over a decent connection. If wslc is not recognized right after the update, restart your terminal, and if that does not help, restart the PC. Since itâs in the pre-release channel, there might be some rough edges, as a few developers on Microsoftâs own devblog reported a Catastrophic failure, Error code: E_UNEXPECTED when running their first container. Fortunately, we didnât face the issue.
In case you are wondering, you do not need a Copilot+ PC to try this since WSL Container ships as a plain WSL component, but the Hyper-V-backed isolation model needs the support of modern virtualization, so a recent CPU with virtualization enabled in BIOS or UEFI counts for more here than it does for a regular WSL distro.
Building and running a container with wslc
Once wslc was working, we skipped the basic hello-world example everyone else is running and went straight to something closer to real use, building a custom image from a Containerfile and exposing a working service from it.
Creating a project folder for WSL container test
First, a quick sanity check. We pulled and ran a Debian container interactively:
wslc run -it debian:latest
Inside the container, running uname -a returned a Linux kernel string tied to WSL2, confirming we were sitting inside a real Linux environment instead of some translation layer.
Running uname -a inside a WSL container confirms it is a real Linux kernel, not a translation layer
Detaching with Ctrl+P, Ctrl+Q and running wslc ps -a listed the container by its autogenerated name (mossy_sawtooth), alongside how long ago it started and its current status.
wslc ps -a lists every container, whether it is running or has already stopped
Reattaching with wslc attach mossy_sawtooth dropped us straight back into the same shell.
reattaching to the container name mossy_sawtooth
Next, we wrote a Containerfile, which works the same way a Dockerfile does, to package a small Linux inspection utility that runs file, exiftool, and binutils against whatever gets dropped into it.
The Containerfile packages a small Linux inspection tool, working the same way a Dockerfile does
Here is roughly what that file looked like:
FROM python:3.12-slim
RUN apt-get update && \
   apt-get install -y âno-install-recommends \
       file exiftool binutils bsdmainutils coreutils && \
   rm -rf /var/lib/apt/lists/*
WORKDIR /app
COPY requirements.txt .
RUN pip install âno-cache-dir -r requirements.txt
COPY app.py .
EXPOSE 5000
CMD [âpythonâ, âapp.pyâ]
Building it was one command:
wslc build -t my-linux-inspector .
Building the custom image with wslc build
The build cached its base layers, so a rebuild finished in seconds instead of minutes. Running wslc image ls confirmed the image existed locally with a fresh timestamp.
wslc image ls confirms the custom image built successfully
From there, we started the container with a port mapping so the Flask server running inside Linux could be reached from Windows:
wslc run -d -p 5000:5000 âname inspector my-linux-inspector
Loading 127.0.0.1:5000 in a browser on the Windows side brought up the toolâs web interface without any extra networking setup.
The Flask server inside the Linux container, reached through localhost on Windows with no extra networking setup
A service running on a Linux kernel, reachable through localhost on Windows, with zero third-party software installed, sums up WSL Container in one sentence.
Testing GPU access inside a WSL container
GPU passthrough is the feature most developers doing AI or machine learning work will care about most, since it decides whether a Linux container can reach the graphics card instead of running on the CPU alone. WSL Container supports this through a --gpus all flag, the same syntax Docker users already know:
wslc run --rm --gpus all pytorch/pytorch:2.5.1-cuda12.4-cudnn9-runtime \
python -c "import torch; print(torch.cuda.is_available())"
The clip below shows this in action, a container reaching the GPU directly, then racing a compiled PyTorch model against the same model running in plain eager mode. The gap between the two is not subtle.
https://www.windowslatest.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/testing-GPU-access-inside-a-WSL-container.mp4
WSL Container for enterprise environments
Microsoft is pitching WSL Container as enterprise-ready from the preview stage.
Microsoft Defender for Endpointâs existing WSL plugin now understands container events, so security teams monitoring WSL distros get the same visibility into containers without deploying separate tooling, though the feature is currently limited to a private preview with its own signup form.
IT admins can already control WSL Container today through Group Policy and an ADMX policy, with two capabilities that count most in a managed fleet:
First, admins can decide whether people in their organization are allowed to use WSL distros, containers, or both.
Second, and this is the one Microsoft says came up constantly in customer requests, admins can set an allowlist of which container registries are permitted, so a company can restrict pulls to an internal or approved registry instead of leaving Docker Hub wide open.
We expect full Intune dashboard support for these settings within a few weeks of the preview shipping.
VS Codeâs Dev Containers extension also picked up wslc support starting in version 0.462.0-pre-release. Switching to it just means opening Dev Container settings, finding the Docker Path field, and changing it to wslc, no need to reinstall extensions or reconfigure projects.
What is still missing from WSL Container
WSL Container does not ship with anything resembling Docker Compose at this stage, so multi-service projects that use a compose.yaml file to bring up a database, a backend, and a cache together are not a good fit yet. Every container we tested had to be started individually.
And of course, the biggest omission is that there is also no GUI dashboard, or anything like Docker Scout for scanning images. Also, the extensive plugin ecosystem that Docker Desktop has built up over the years does not exist here. WSL Container is not meant to replace Docker Desktop, Podman Desktop, or Rancher Desktop, and all three of those tools stand to benefit from the same low-level platform work, including the new virtiofs file system that Microsoft says makes Windows file access twice as fast inside containers.
Networking has also been reworked with an experimental mode called Consomme, which relays Linux traffic through the Windows networking stack instead of the older NAT setup, aimed at fixing the VPN and proxy compatibility issues that have annoyed WSL users for years. Both virtiofs and Consomme are currently exclusive to WSL Container, though Microsoft has said it wants to bring them to regular WSL distros eventually.
Should you switch from Docker Desktop yet
For a single container running a database or a small service during local development, WSL Container already does the job without asking for a separate license. For anything that needs Compose files, multiple linked services, or Dockerâs extension ecosystem, Docker Desktop is still the more complete tool for now.
Microsoft is targeting WSL Containerâs general availability for fall 2026, and given how closely the CLIâs syntax already tracks Dockerâs, most of what is missing looks like a matter of when rather than if.
If you already run Linux container workloads on Windows, running the pre-release build alongside Docker Desktop costs nothing and gives WSL Container a head start before it becomes the default choice.
The post I built a Linux container on Windows 11 without Docker Desktop, and Docker users should pay attention appeared first on Windows Latest
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The Hot Take: Samsung playing catch up and hopefully over take TSMC? Only time will tell.
Korean chip manufacturing giant Samsung is developing simulation technologies for lithography that rely on quantum computing and artificial intelligence, suggests a report from the Korean press. The technology will be used to run simulations of the first stage of the chip manufacturing process, and Samsung will also rely on artificial intelligence to streamline the process. Through the technology, the firm aims to reduce the time and cost of the lithography and etching processes. Samsung Is Developing Algorithms To Boost Its Photolithography, Say Sources In the semiconductor manufacturing process, lithography is the first and most important step. It involves high-end machines, [âŚ]Read full article at https://wccftech.com/samsung-chases-tsmc-with-quantum-powered-chipmaking-as-ai-reshapes-the-most-critical-step-in-fabrication/
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The Hot Take: Oh so the Ultra series aren't just crap then? /smh
It's curious to call this one a leak, exactly, since the original source is direct from AMD and live on the web, but here we go: AMD's Vishal Badole submitted a patch for the Linux Kernel that he describes as adding support for "a Low Power core type, in addition to the existing Performance and Efficiency types." That's pretty clear-cut.
Now,
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The Hot Take: Software development world is condensing fast with Ai....
Microsoft is expected to announce another round of layoffs soon. Less than 2.5% of the company's workforce will be affected, according to sources that spoke with Business Insider. Due Microsoft's size, even that small percentage means thousands of people will be affected.An SEC filing from June 30, 2025 showed Microsoft had about 228,000 employees. That figure has fluctuated since then, but it gives a gauge of the size of Microsoft's full-time workforce.Division cuts & AI infrastructureThis round of layoffs will affect thousands of roles across sales, consulting, and within the Xbox division. Microsoft is expected to announce the layoffs next week, though plans are subject to change.July layoffs have become commonplace for Microsoft because the company's fiscal year starts on July 1. Over 9,000 layoffs were made by Microsoft last July. Microsoft also lays off workers during other times of the year, such as the 6,000 layoffs made in May 2025.Microsoft is one of many tech giants looking to reduce head count and lower expenses in certain areas. Increased AI spending and the rise of AI has affected jobs at several levels.Voluntary retirements lowered the impactThis July will reportedly have fewer layoffs because several employees took voluntary retirement. Microsoft offered buyouts to employees level 67 and below in the United States who had 70 or more combined years of service and years of age (for example, someone who was 50 years old who had worked for Microsoft for 20 years).Roughly 9,000 Microsoft employees were eligible for that buyout and around one third of those eligible took the buyout, according to Business Insider.Xbox restructuringLayoffs have been expected, and not simply because they've become an annual occurrence. Xbox CEO Asha Sharma is overseeing a restructuring of Xbox, much of which will occur within a 100-day reset.As is the case with all layoff-related stories, I understand the business decisions that lead to layoffs but feel bad for the employees affected.Join us on Reddit at r/WindowsCentral to share your insights and discuss our latest news, reviews, and more.
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