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Apple's first foldable iPhone, the $1,999 iPhone Duo, sold out within minutes of preorders opening, with every configuration slipping to late January 2027. "All color and storage combinations show an estimated ship date of January 25," reports 9to5Mac. "Some users are even seeing January 29 for their estimated shipping date." From the report: This is a combination of strong demand and severely constrained supply for iPhone Duo. It's impossible to know the exact balance between the two, though. Going into the launch, there were multiple reports suggesting iPhone Duo would be in short supply as Apple was still ramping up production. A report from Nikkei Asia last month said Apple was making just a few hundred iPhone Duo units per day, significantly behind the ramp of a normal iPhone launch.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phoronix: The feature-packed and polished Plasma 6.8 KDE desktop is now available. Making this release all the more special is that it coincides with the 30th anniversary of the KDE project. KDE Plasma 6.8 ships many exciting improvements including vRAM usage optimizations, dwell clicker support on Wayland, Wayland commit-timing protocol support for KWin, improvements for the Union theme engine, better remote desktop support, multi-GPU handling improvements, the new kscreenctl tool, server-side drop shadow support, multi-monitor improvements, and a lot of other polishing throughout. Especially from the Wayland angle there has been a lot of polishing and fine tuning for Plasma 6.8. Accompanying the release is a new film, The KDE Documentary, which "tells the story of the pioneering open source community that gave computer users a free and open alternative to proprietary desktops like Windows." The documentary is available to stream for free on YouTube.

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Version:next-20261016 (linux-next) Released:2026-10-16

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: A proxyjacking campaign has impacted devices in 34 countries, monetizing victims' internet connections through a commercial residential proxy network. The operator installed Pawns.app, a legitimate bandwidth-sharing application that lets users earn money by sharing their internet connections, on devices without the owners' consent. Pawns.app account holders are rewarded for allowing traffic from other users to flow through their network, provided it runs on trusted, non-blocking IP addresses. By installing the app on multiple systems, the attacker likely accumulated larger payouts. Threat intelligence company GreyNoise discovered the campaign while investigating suspicious activity at an unnamed organization, and identified at least 143 compromised devices worldwide. According to researchers, the attacker exploited known vulnerabilities in D-Link ShareCenter NAS (CVE-2024-3272 and CVE-2024-3273), Ubiquiti UniFi Video NVR (CVE-2021-44228), and SAP NetWeaver Visual Composer (CVE-2025-31324) to install the Pawns.app software. Hikvision and Dahua DVR/NVR devices were also targeted, though the specific vulnerabilities exploited were not identified. In some cases, the report says the attackers configured SSH key authentication to maintain backup access to the compromised systems.

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Timekeepers have officially voted to eliminate the leap second, allowing Coordinated Universal Time to drift as much as one hour from Earth's rotation before a correction is needed. The change ends decades of occasionally adding or subtracting seconds and replaces it with a hypothetical "leap hour" that likely wouldn't be necessary for hundreds or even thousands of years. Smithsonian Magazine reports: "It's kind of a philosophical discussion, because if a leap hour happens, it won't be for a very, very long time," Christian Bizouard, director of the IERS Earth Orientation Center in France, tells the Guardian's Ian Sample. "What we are doing is pushing back the decision." The move caps off 30 years of debate, as the leap second has been highly controversial in the world of timekeeping. Leap seconds aren't nearly as smooth of a fix as leap years are, and they can cause computer and website issues. Reddit famously crashed when a leap second was added on June 30, 2012. It's "always been a problem," Judah Levine, a former researcher at the NIST's Time and Frequency Division, tells Scientific American's Emma Gometz. Instead of adding the entire second all at once, companies such as Google and Meta add the extra time in smaller segments in a tactic called "smearing," according to the Conversation. It's not a simple task, however, and companies that employ smearing have long lobbied to get rid of the leap second. What's more, with Earth's recent spin acceleration, timekeepers around the world were facing the possibility of the world's first negative leap second, in which a second would be subtracted from UTC. This sparked fears, akin to those surrounding Y2K, that our modern technologies wouldn't be able to handle such a change. "It's never happened before, and therefore the software for that has never been tested," Darryl Veitch, a researcher who leads the Timing Lab at the University of Technology Sydney, tells the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Ellen Phiddian. But others argued that it wouldn't be much of a problem. The vote means that in the future, UTC will be allowed to diverge from astronomical time more than ever before.

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Tesla has unveiled a dramatically redesigned Roadster concept capable of performing midair flips, controlled landings, and a claimed 0-60 mph sprint in just 0.81 seconds. CarScoops reports: Tonight, Tesla debuted the new Roadster by driving it up a vertical ramp that then went horizontal. Then, it repeated the feat but drove off of the ramp and used thrusters to flip itself over and make a controlled landing on the ground. After that, it did a barrel roll over the rest of the Tesla lineup and again landed without issue on the ground. Then, it did 0-60 mph in 0.81 seconds according to Tesla. All of that sounds amazing, and indeed, watching it happen was pretty spectacular, but boy do we have a lot to unpack. It's been nearly a decade since Tesla first showed us the Roadster. The company unveiled what it's simply calling the Roadster. Not Roadster 2.0, not CyberRoadster, just Roadster, as if it's a direct successor to the original Tesla. In terms of design, it's quite a bit different from the car we saw in 2017. Rather than be a somewhat curvaceous sports car, it's considerably more angular. If a Cybertruck and a Lamborghini Reventon had a runt of a baby, this would be that car. Still, at this stage, we're still just touching on what we saw and what it looks like. Let's get into the details. Developed in collaboration with SpaceX, the Roadster uses 10 cold-gas thrusters powered by two 600-liter compressed-air tanks to accelerate and maneuver in mid-air. Underbody suction fans reportedly generate up to 2Gs of downforce even while stationary, while an active rear spoiler adjusts aerodynamics in real time. Other features include steer-by-wire, brake-by-wire, and throttle-by-wire technology. Tesla plans three variants: Performance, which requires a $50,000 deposit; Thrust, a $250,000 model capable of sub-one-second acceleration; and Rocket, an invite-only, single-seat version capable of flying. Production isn't expected until 2028, and Tesla has yet to disclose key specifications, including range, horsepower, battery capacity, and motor configuration. A recording of the event can be viewed on X.

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Slashdot reader alternative_right shares a story that has drawn international attention for being potentially the first documented instance of a robot being used directly in a sexual assault. According to the Associated Press, German police have opened a sexual harassment investigation after a robot allegedly touched a 16-year-old girl's buttocks and made thrusting motions while two young men reportedly filmed and streamed the incident. Investigators seized the robot and the suspects' phones and are trying to determine whether the movements were preprogrammed or controlled in real time. From the report: Cologne police spokesman Christoph Bermel said the two male teenagers have not been charged but are considered suspects, and investigators were examining whether the robot's movements were preprogrammed or controlled in real time. Police were unfamiliar with this type of incident, he said. "We have not been aware of this phenomenon so far," Bermel told The Associated Press, saying it was "new territory for us." [...] The robot, said to be 120 centimeters (about 3 ft 11 inches) tall, was dressed in a white tank top, black sweatpants and wearing a gold chain and sunglasses. It also had what appears to be a fake mustache. Videos circulated on the internet show two young men escorting the robot toward a group of women, bumping into one and hugging others, on a lively nighttime street.

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NGINX has patched flaws that could let request data bypass a size limit or allow an encrypted session to be forged.

An X.509 certificate names an identity and its public key; libraries can disagree over whether the issuer was allowed to certify that name.

A curl vulnerability can let a malicious upload server run commands on the computer sending it data.

prisoninmate shares a report from 9to5Linux: Ubuntu 26.10 (Stonking Stingray) has been released today, and it is now available for download for those eager to update their Ubuntu systems to a newer release. Powered by the upcoming Linux 7.3 kernel series, Ubuntu 26.10 ships with the latest GNOME 51 desktop environment, TPM-backed full disk encryption (FDE) support on computers without a hardware root of trust, updated Settings to show whether a computer is certified for Ubuntu, and 100% Rust coreutils. There are several App Center enhancements in Ubuntu 26.10, such as a unified app-details view for Snap and Debian packages, a dedicated Drivers page where you can review the available graphics drivers, including NVIDIA driver branches, and support for installing codecs for one-time playback when a media file uses a codec that's not installed.' Other additions include an optional, locally processed AI-powered speech-to-text tool called Myna, system-wide controls for disabling Ubuntu Insights data collection, and better integration with Microsoft Entra ID. Also worth mentioning are the security and software updates that will be available for nine months, through July 2027.

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"Along with the dangers of continuing cyberattacks, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) reports that the threat of an AI market crash is putting the global markets at risk," writes Slashdot reader databasecowgirl, citing the IMF's latest semiannual Global Financial Stability Report. Here's a summary: Three salient risks could trigger a sharp tightening of financial conditions and market turmoil. Weaker or less durable investment and profitability in artificial intelligence could lead to a correction in AI-related asset prices, amplified by rising leverage and concentrated exposures. Resurgent inflation or fiscal concerns could drive a sharp rise in sovereign bond yields, with potentially broad repercussions across financial markets. Meanwhile, increasingly sophisticated cyber threats pose growing risks as finance becomes more digital and interconnected. Underlying financial vulnerabilities could amplify these risks and turn market stress into systemic events. Although the global banking system remains broadly resilient, pockets of weaker banks persist. Liquidity mismatches among insurers and pension funds have increased, while rising leverage and contingent liquidity risks in private credit could amplify stress. While hedge funds support market functioning in calm times, their use of leverage and exposure to crowded trades could exacerbate market stress too and create spillovers to prime brokers. Some emerging markets have seen policy buffers erode, and frontier economies have increasingly relied on less transparent forms of financing. Finally, although markets for tokenized assets remain small and could offer efficiency gains in several areas, they can create new channels for the buildup of leverage and mismatches in liquidity and maturity, in addition to elevating risks related to technology and infrastructure. These vulnerabilities underscore the need for policies that strengthen resilience, enhance transparency, contain excessive leverage, and improve preparedness for future shocks. The full report can be found here (PDF).

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Flock's founder and CEO Garrett Langley doesn't think the risks of introducing surveillance technology at scale outweigh the rewards. "If we want to live in a society where, if you commit a crime, you have a higher probability of being held accountable, we shouldn't pause progress," Langley said, speaking onstage during a panel at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 in San Francisco on Wednesday. During the interview, the controversial founder of the surveillance maker of license plate cameras and other recording devices deflected hard questions about the criticism Flock now faces -- which has since led to canceled contracts and even layoffs. Instead, Langley tended to respond to questions with anecdotes from conversations with police chiefs and city leaders across the United States, and tales of the supposed numerous crimes Flock has solved, rather than offer tangible solutions to people's concerns. In doing so, Langley positioned Flock as an advance in technology that was somewhat inevitable. He stressed that if people wanted to live in a better society -- that is, one with reduced crime -- they would have to offer up their privacy in return. [...] "Technology, at its core, in its definition, is just doing things better. It's not doing things perfect," he said. "Driverless cars, I think, is a fair analogy. Driverless cars, I think, are definitively safer than human drivers. And when there's one accident, I don't think the answer is to shut down driverless cars. The answer is to say, 'Hey, let's talk about how we prevent more accidents in the future.'" [...] From Langley's answers, it's clear that the ethics around how Flock should be used is a decision he would much rather leave up to others. "We don't want to tell city leaders how to do their job," he noted. "We will provide recommendations, we'll provide defaults, but we're going to minimize the number of mandated features, functions, and policies," he said. Langley went on to argue that society too often judges technology "not on how it compares to the past, but how it compares to perfect." He acknowledged that "Flock is far from perfect" but maintained that its technology helps police departments compensate for staffing shortages and improve public safety. When pressed about potential abuse and privacy concerns, Langley offered few specifics, instead arguing that safeguards could be implemented without disrupting police operations. He insisted the benefits of what Flock offers outweigh the controversy. "There's millions and millions of people who have a better life today because [of] Flock," he said, adding that "it's worth it because one day they might be a victim."

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Epic just announced the upcoming version 2 of their Linux implementation of Easy Anti-Cheat. It’s based on using the Linux eBPF security module to monitor what’s happening, and then a bunch of extra infrastructure to make sure this can’t be bypassed. The core part of this is requiring secure boot be enabled (ensuring that modified kernels can’t be used), using measured boot to verify that secure boot is enabled and which keys are used (to prevent you from just signing your own modified kernel), and then doing remote attestation, a mechanism where the TPM generates a signed copy of the boot measurements and passes that off to a server which verifies it came from a real TPM, verifies that you have secure boot enabled and are using the right keys, and presumably then allows you into the game.

This is all fine as long as you can prove that the measurements provided are real, and that’s actually a lot harder than you might think. First, we can simply make up our own quote signed with our own key and say that it came from a TPM. This is avoided by every TPM having an Endorsement Key (or EK) and an associated certificate, with that certificate being signed by the TPM vendor. If you have a list of all the legitimate TPM vendors and their CA keys, you can verify that the measurements came from a real TPM. Easy enough. So we need to get the measurements from a real TPM, and the one on our motherboard contains the measurements that were generated by the firmware and bootloader, and we can’t reset those at runtime without resetting the TPM, which… oh huh there’s actually nothing stopping us from doing that at runtime, as long as we have access to the hardware. Many desktop boards have the TPM on a small plugin module with a standard pinout that includes a reset pin. Simply short that to ground briefly and the TPM is back in its initial state, and userland can write whatever measurements it wants to it. Boot a modified kernel which lies to the eBPF code? As long as you replay the expected log values from a boot with secure boot on and a trusted kernel, the TPM will still happily provide a legitimate set of measurements that’ll satisfy the checker.

What if the TPM is less accessible, either because it’s mounted directly to the motherboard or it’s inside the CPU or chipset? That’s going to be trickier. But here’s the thing. The quote needs to come from a TPM, but not necessarily the TPM on your motherboard. TPMs these days are usually connected via the Serial Peripheral Interface, usually referred to as SPI. Microchip make a USB to SPI bridge, and there’s a Linux driver. Wire one of those up with an appropriate header and you can plug in an easily available TPM module intended for plugging into a motherboard, and now we tell the kernel to ignore the motherboard TPM and make /dev/tpmrm0 point at the USB one and program it with a set of trusted measurements and once again everything is going to look just fine (yes obviously the eBPF code can look for this, but we’re running a modified kernel so we can just lie to the eBPF code).

Remote attestation on PCs just doesn’t work that well in environments where you can’t associate a specific TPM with a specific system, which is basically everywhere except enterprises. But maybe that doesn’t matter and cheaters wouldn’t be willing to spend the $20 or so it’d take to produce one of these things? That would seem somewhat surprising, but it’s not impossible. And obviously any server-side cheat detection that triggers could then block that specific TPM, meaning they’d need to go and get another TPM, and maybe that ends up being enough to discourage people from bothering. From a practical level, this may be sufficient. But at a technical level? It’s not great.

Citizen Lab says it has documented the first publicly confirmed case of zero-click mercenary spyware being delivered through targeted online ads, a technique it calls "AdFection." "There has been a lot of buzz that online ads can be used to identify and automatically hack targets with pinpoint precision, but now for the first time, we have concrete technical evidence showing this process in action," said Bill Marczak, a researcher at Citizen Lab. The Guardian reports: Citizen Lab, a digital investigations research unit at the University of Toronto, said it believed dozens of devices at the Qatari broadcaster Al Jazeera had been compromised by spyware delivered through ads run by Discover-Tech, which describes itself as a specialised digital advertising agency. According to Citizen Lab, Discover-Tech operates a software platform called Controlium that allows its clients to "mass-profile and deanonymize" internet users then covertly hack targets with third-party spyware. Unlike infections that rely on people interacting with links or files, the spyware requires no interaction from the victim to be installed, making it a new delivery technique, Citizen Lab says. The infections happen without a user's knowledge, and in a matter of seconds, according to Citizen Lab. "[The online advertising] ecosystem is being weaponized at a massive scale to profile millions of users, then silently infect targets with zero-click mercenary spyware," the report says. According to the report, Controlium is able to harvest a user's identity and IP address when the user is shown a seemingly benign custom-created ad -- for example, for a digital game or a telecoms service. If the user has been selected as a target for hacking, a mercenary spyware firm can then send a malicious code containing spyware to their device, the researchers say. They say that millions of users worldwide have been served ads by Discover-Tech since 2024, including in Yemen, Brazil, Mexico and Czechia. [...] The full extent of the targeting allegedly enabled by Discover-Tech is unknown. Citizen Lab's findings join mounting evidence that the opaque arrangements underpinning the world of online advertising can be leveraged for surveillance.

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Meta has released Muse Spark Open, an 816-billion-parameter open-weight model optimized to run locally across two 512GB M5 Ultra Mac Studios using Apple's MLX framework. Meta says it's the "most capable U.S. open-weight model to date." MacRumors reports: Muse Spark Open has 816 billion total parameters with 42 billion active parameters and a 1 million-token context window. It is meant for coding and agentic work, and Meta says it excels at extended tasks, multi-step reasoning, and software engineering. The new Muse model was tuned to run on Mac Studio, and Meta says the Mac Studio paired with Muse Spark Open is the "best way to run a powerful model on your own desktop." From Meta: "Apple's unified memory architecture lets the M5 Ultra's integrated GPU use up to 512 GB per Mac Studio, so two machines can hold an entire model. And the chip's 1.2 TB/s of memory bandwidth is fast enough to read the small slice each token needs. The result is two Mac Studios behave like one supercomputer with a terabyte of unified memory." Apple hasn't released the 512GB Mac Studio as of yet, but it's supposed to be coming later this month. It won't be cheap, because the 256GB Mac Studio is already priced over $10,000.

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One of my favourite things in the Python standard library is the ThreadPoolExecutor. It is a very simple way to run a bunch of tasks in parallel, such as converting or repacking a whole bunch of image files from one format to another. You write a pure function that takes two arguments, the input and output file names, and does the conversion. Then you submit a bunch of tasks (basically function and argument pairs) and the executor runs them with maximal parallelism.

I decided to implement this in Pystd. To make things simpler it does not yet support futures for return values. Writing a thread pool executor needs some fundamental building blocks such as threads, mutexes and condition variables. Once those were implemented (and working), writing the actual "business logic" turned out to be fairly simple. In fact, it took less time than writing the PNG processing code with libpng.

First you need to write this helper class to register you task for running. It also stores all arguments etc that the task needs to do its thing. Yes, this has a bit of that "icky 90s Java" feeling to it but OTOH it is fairly simple, has unambiguous ownership semantics and compiles massively faster than your typical template monstrosity.

Using this is just a matter of globbing for png files in the input dir and submitting tasks for them.

The UX is a bit verbose. It could probably be made nicer with a helper method or two. Still, not too shabby for something written by hand in a single afternoon.

For those interested in details, the code for this program is in the pngtest branch.

After my mother passed away I ended up with a big box full of old film negatives containing photos from childhood family trips and similar. So I decided to buy a negative photo scanner and found that the Plustek 8200i was supported under Linux so I bought that. Only to discover that the chipset in the scanner had changed to one that wasn’t supported under Linux anymore. So I had some success making Linux configuration tools for some of my hardware using Claude code, like my Dell Camera controller app so I thought, maybe Claude can help me get a working SANE driver. I basically got stuck and got nowhere for the longest time and even basically gave up on the project for a few Months.

Then I saw a post on X from Tom Crider aka Glorious Eggroll talking about how he had managed to fix a mouse driver using AI tooling. He basically described how he set it up so that the AI agent had full control of a Windows instance to capture data needed to fix the driver. So I pasted his tweet into Claude and asked it to help me set up a windows virtual machine to do the same things Tom as doing for my scanner. I think the combination of having the ability to run scans under windows and capture the USB data while doing so worked wonders, probably combined with improvements to Claude code made a huge difference. Within a few hours I had my first ever working scan under Linux, sure with some quality issues, but 100% recognizable as the image in the negative. Some days later I had a near perfect driver, including support for Infrared scanning ready to go, only to discover that in the time between me giving up and then trying again someone had committed code to SANE to support the scanner already…..it happens sometimes. I also used Claude to write an application for doing negative scanning, which I named Negative Vibes, thought that was a cute name.

Anyway, with the success of my scanner effort I thought, I wonder if I can use this to finally fix the last issues with MIPI camera support on my laptop. So I told claude to re-use the harness I had created and try to fix the MIPI camera on my laptop by updating the kernel driver and libcamera as needed. I started the job in the morning and by the end of the day I had a much improved situation with patches for both the kernel and libcamera ready.

So I thought that this might be worthwhile sharing with the world, and while anyone could start from scratch I did ask Claude to make the harness generic and document it to make the pathway for anyone else who wants to try this on their hardware a little easier. Writing a driver for undocumented hardware has always been tedious. You capture bus traffic, stare at hex dumps, and form hypotheses about what each register or control transfer does. You then test them one at a time, usually for weeks. None of it is conceptually hard, but it takes a lot of patience and skills.

That kind of work suits an AI model well. It can read thousands of lines of USB capture, notice that a sequence repeats with one byte changing, and propose what that byte means. It can write the test to confirm it, and it doesn’t get bored. The human still decides what to build and checks that it works on real hardware, but the slog shrinks a lot.

hw-harness

Be aware that I did not use hw-harness in this form for my projects as this was basically bespoke code at that time, so this project is an attempt to make the harness more generic and shareable from the scripts I was using while doing the work. What hw-harness is meant to help your Claude or Codex session with:

1. Record a reference session. Run the vendor’s Windows driver in a KVM virtual machine, with the real device passed through to the guest.
2. Capture from outside the VM. Record the traffic on the Linux host with usbmon. It sits below the passthrough layer, so the guest can’t see it.
3. Repeat the same operation on Linux with your own driver, and capture that the same way.
4. Diff the two traces. Both come from the same instrument, so they compare directly. The differences are your list of driver bugs.

For devices with no bus to tap, such as an internal MIPI camera, the harness uses Windows-side inspection instead. That means INF files, registry data, ACPI tables and device properties.

The approach should be fine in the sense it doesn’t rely on copying any code instead it observes what the hardware does and only extract configuration data from the Windows drivers, so every constant in the new driver traces back to something recorded.

So for those interested I have 3 short descriptions of the projects I did and what was needed.

Project 1: a SANE backend for the Plustek OpticFilm 8200i

Comparing the driver output of two drivers available.

The first project is a SANE backend for the newer Plustek OpticFilm 8200i. It uses the Genesys GL128 controller (USB 07b3:1825) and had no Linux support. The older model with the same name uses a GL845 and is already handled by SANE.

The backend supports:

• Color, gray, infrared and color+infrared modes
• Resolutions from 300 to 7200 dpi, at 8 or 16 bits per channel
• Dust and scratch removal from the infrared channel
• An exposure multiplier for dense negatives

It’s packaged as a Fedora RPM, built automatically on every push. I mostly tested it with my own Negative Vibes application as there are not that many options under Linux for negative scanning.

Upstream SANE’s genesys backend also gained support for this scanner in September 2026, so I compared the two. Both resolve the same fine detail at 3600 dpi. Mine is faster at full resolution (34.6 s against 54.4 s) and supports infrared dust removal. Upstream offers more resolution steps. The webpage has an interactive side-by-side comparison you can check out. These are single-unit, single-frame results, so treat them as one data point. Check out the interactive page I made showing the current state of the two drivers, hopefully the discoveries I made can be used by the SANE project to fix some smaller items in the upstream driver. Anyway, I put this project up more as a proof of concept due to that since I expect everyone including myself will use the upstream driver once it reaches parity with this one.

Project 2: Negative Vibes

Full scan of negative completed including infrared cleaning of image.

A driver alone isn’t much use if scanning negatives is still painful, so I built Negative Vibes. It’s a GNOME app, written in Rust, for scanning colour and black-and-white negatives and slides on any film-capable SANE scanner.

The scan is kept exactly as the scanner delivered it: 16-bit, linear, with the infrared plane. Everything else is a stack of non-destructive settings on top, so you can change the look and export again. It includes:

• Density-space negative inversion with film base and dye-crosstalk correction
• Roll-wide settings with per-frame overrides
• Infrared and software dust removal
• IT8 calibration through ArgyllCMS
• Export to TIFF, JPEG, PNG and DNG, with ICC profiles and metadata

It ships as a Flatpak that includes the scanner backend. It’s tested on the 8200i so far. The goal is to support any film scanner SANE supports. For that, SANE needs a standard way to expose infrared channels, which it doesn’t have yet.

Project 3: Fixing the MIPI camera on my ThinkPad

Showing MIPI output before and after fixes. Colors are better than they look as I was sitting in a relatively dark room by the end of the session.

The camera in my Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 14 (Aura Edition) uses a Sony IMX471 sensor behind an Intel IPU7. On Linux it produced dark images with heavy vignetting and a strong yellow-green cast. mipi-fixes-x1-aura collects the fixes. It’s only relevant to this laptop, which is why it isn’t one of the bigger packaged projects, but I have already submitted the kernel patches to Kate Hsuan and the libcamera patches is being reviewed by Wim Taymans for submission to Libcamera.

Kernel (IMX471 driver):

• A crop-selection bug returned an error before storing the crop rectangle, so libcamera assumed the full pixel array.
• The test-pattern register was declared with the wrong width.
• The analogue gain cap was too low, which cost about 1.8 stops of sensitivity.

libcamera software ISP:

• Lens shading correction was missing entirely, leaving the corners about 2.7 stops darker.
• White-balance statistics were summed at the sensor’s native bit depth against an 8-bit black level. That skewed white balance, and the fix applies to any RAW10/RAW12 sensor.

In a controlled low-light test, frame brightness rose from 31.1 to 90.9. The red/green and blue/green ratios moved from 0.890 and 0.672 to 1.047 and 0.823, close to a USB webcam reference. Blue is still about 17% short in low light, which I put down to grey-world white balance. Fedora 44 RPMs are on the releases page.

What I learned

• Reference captures are a big step. Having the AI compare a known-good trace against a failing one turns a vague “it doesn’t work” into a concrete list of differences. For example for the MIPI camera having a USB camera also connected so Claude could compare the two captures was critical.
• The AI is good at the tedium. That covers decoding captures, writing probes and cross-checking constants. I still have to be the one holding the physical hardware.
• Real hardware is the only judge. Every claim above was checked on the actual scanner or laptop.

If you have hardware with no Linux driver, try hw-harness. Thanks again to Glorious Eggroll for the inspiration.

NOTE: I am not claiming that my scans or MIPI camera is perfect now, but the scanner gives me decent looking scans and the MIPI camera looks a lot better than before. So over time I am sure we be able to tweak and polish further, but I am happy that it allowed me to move the needle despite lacking the in-depth knowledge for this type of work.

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Version:6.6.159 (longterm) Released:2026-10-15 Source:linux-6.6.159.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-6.6.159.tar.sign Patch:full (incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-6.6.159

Version:6.1.190 (longterm) Released:2026-10-15 Source:linux-6.1.190.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-6.1.190.tar.sign Patch:full (incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-6.1.190