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Links 6/11/2019: RHEL Release, Shadow of the Tomb Raider Definitive Edition, Git 2.24.0



  • GNU/Linux

    • Desktop

      • My Search For The Perfect Linux OS Just Ended — With An Unexpected Surprise

        I began my Linux journey 16 months ago with only one certainty: I didn’t want to use Windows for the rest of my life. I’ve remained in a constant state of exploration and discovery in the pursuit of finding that “forever distro.” You know, the one to rule them all. The perfect Linux OS that’s stable, checks all those feature boxes, slides effortlessly into every scenario and is just plain fun to use on a daily basis.

        I greet you today with a sobering and unexpected conclusion: it doesn’t exist. At least not for me.

        This is obviously a subjective statement, but give me a few minutes to explain what’s changed my mind, and why I’m starting to view this “distro hunt” mentality through a different lens.

      • The Second Window of the Pinebook Pro Pre-Order has been Announced

        The Pinebook Pro is not like other computer manufacturers, they are not stacked in a warehouse for regular sale.

        They are produced in batches based on sales. So don’t miss the sale if you really want to buy it.

        The Pinebook Pro costs $199.99 with additional shipping charges.

        The pre-orders are estimated dispatch in December 2019.

        In some bad cases, don’t worry if you missed it or sold it, the next pre-order window will be available in early 2020.

      • PinePhone “Brave Heart Edition” pre-orders open Nov 15th (Cheap Linux smartphone)

        The PinePhone is a $149 smartphone designed to run free and open source operating systems such as PostmarketOS, Ubuntu Touch, KDE Plasma Mobile, LuneOS, or Sailfish OS.

        First unveiled in January, the PinePhone has been under development ever since — and the first pre-production phones were supposed to ship to developers in September.

        After encountering several delays, Pine64 says those developer phones are going to start shipping this week — and on November 15th the company will begin taking pre-orders for the first PinePhone 64 Brave Heart Edition smartphones, which are set to ship in December.

      • Google's Linux-Based Chrome OS Now Officially Supports Virtual Workspaces

        Google announced today that its Linux-based Chrome OS operating system for Chromebooks now finally supports virtual workspaces with the latest release. With the upcoming Chrome OS 78 release, the Linux-powered Chromebook operating system will finally bring support for virtual desktops. A multitask feature, virtual workspaces has been around for years on Linux, Mac, and Windows operating systems, helping users better organize their workspaces and be more productive, but Chrome OS is just getting Virtual Desks now.

        "Use this feature to create helpful boundaries between projects or activities. If you’re working on multiple projects, you can dedicate a desk to each one. Or if you like to take a break during the workday, you could create a desk for web browsing or gaming. If you’re a student, you can create a different desk for each class," said Alexander Kuscher, Director of Chrome OS Software at Google.

      • Winners of Superfan 3: Mission to Thelio

        Bill Zaumen submitted multiple entries as well. Our favorite was an application he created that can encrypt his information to a backup device using GNU Privacy Guard (GPG). As he explains in his email submission: “The drive contains a very large encrypted file containing a LUKS file system, a long (32 byte) LUKS key that was created with a random number generator and that is encrypted using GPG, plus a directory that can be used as the mount point.”

    • Server

      • IBM

        • OpenShift Developer experience feedback: Take the survey, join community sessions

          We’ve recently added several feedback loops aimed at increasing customer and community involvement in order to better understand how developers create, build, manage, test, and deploy their applications on and for Red Hat OpenShift.

        • Open by nature: What building a platform for activists taught me about playful development

          Participating in a design sprint with colleagues at Greenpeace reminded me of that. As I explained in the first two parts of this series, learning to think, plan, and work the open way is helping us build something truly great—a new, global platform for engaging activists who want to take action on behalf of our planet.

          The sprint experience (part of a collaboration with Red Hat) reinforced several lessons about openness I've learned throughout my career as an advocate for open source, an architect of change, and a community organizer.

        • From the core to the edge: How Red Hat is helping to drive accelerated AI into the mainstream

          In the face of changing technology demands, local municipalities and federal governments alike can struggle to keep existing infrastructure operational while striving to meet the growing need to support their communities with advanced technologies. These can include 5G, artificial intelligence (AI) / machine learning (ML) and Internet of Things (IoT), all critical pieces that meet constituent demands for better, faster and more efficient services, but also come with steep IT requirements. 5G infrastructure alone necessitates an unprecedented physical footprint at a street and building level in order to serve the number of IoT devices anticipated to be operating on 5G networks. That number is projected to be as high as 1,000,000 devices per square kilometer (roughly the size of four city blocks).

          IoT and 5G technologies are key components in creating smart cities, where data from sensors, cameras, and specialized connected devices must be processed in real-time to provide insight and assistance with traffic congestion management, crime prevention, and asset and property maintenance. But smart cities are just one symptom of a growing challenge facing public sector organizations. The bigger question is: How do these organizations address the need for computing demand outside their core datacenter, at the literal edge of the network? Adding to this complexity is the proliferation of microservices-based, cloud native applications running on container management Kubernetes platforms, a wholesale sea of change in how traditional IT operations are conducted.

        • What’s new in RHEL 8.1: Kernel patching, more Insights, and right on time

          Last week we celebrated the 25th anniversary of Red Hat’s inaugural Halloween release. This week? We’ve got Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.1 hitting the streets on schedule and ready to take on your toughest workloads. In RHEL 8.1 we have some new tools, live kernel patching, a new system role, and more. Here’s a quick preview of the highlights in RHEL 8.1.

        • What’s new in Red Hat Insights for November, 2019?

          For Red Hat Insights, 2019 has been an exceptional year. Insights provides proactive management and remediation guidance as a Software-as-a-Services (SaaS) solution, and this has become available as part of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) subscription to add new value to this already strong subscription. Our customers are showing their appreciation for this value as we can see in its robust growth in adoption. Since being announced at Red Hat Summit, we have continued to innovate on Insights and I want to update you on some key enhancements.

          [...]

          Once you register the Insights client, you can browse the rules section to see specific risks on your own environments. You can also look on a system-by-system basis to see which systems have matched these rules and most require your attention. As shown in the screenshot below, you can uncheck the "Show rules with hits" box at the top if you want to see the breadth of these 1,000+ rules, regardless of whether there is a match for them on your RHEL environments. (See Figure 1.)

        • Red Hat announces RHEL 8.1 with predictable release cadence

          Red Hat has just today announced the availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8.1, promising improvements in manageability, security and performance.

          RHEL 8.1 will enhance the company’s open hybrid-cloud portfolio and continue to provide a consistent user experience between on-premises and public-cloud deployments.

        • Red Hat Ups the IQ of the Intelligent Operating System with the Latest Release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8

          Red Hat, Inc., the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.1, the latest version of the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform. The first minor release of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.1 enhances the manageability, security and performance of the operating system underpinning the open hybrid cloud while also adding new capabilities to drive developer innovation.

        • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.1 Officially Released, Here's What's New

          Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.1 is here to deliver more intelligent management through enhanced automation, new enterprise-grade security enhancements, updated drivers for better hardware support, greater developer productivity, as well as yet another layer of performance enhancements to keep the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 operating system a reliable, stable, and secure platform for hybrid clouds and other enterprise environments.

          Highlights of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.1 include container-centric SELinux profiles to allow system administrators to create security policies that are more tailored to their needs for better control over container access of a host system's resources, such as compute, network, and storage, as well as application whitelisting, which lets sysadmins be more selective of the applications that are allowed to be launched on a machine, reducing the risk of malicious apps.

        • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.1 Released With Kernel Live-Patching Support

          Red Hat this morning announced the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.1, the first update to RHEL8 since its general availability in May.

          Arguably most notable with RHEL 8.1 is that kernel live-patching is now officially supported on RHEL for applying kernel security updates without reboots. This comes after Red Hat for years has worked on Kpatch and the in-kernel live-patching infrastructure.

        • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.1 Debuts With Added Developer Tools, Security & Automation

          Red Hat, Inc. today announced the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.1, the latest version of the world's leading enterprise Linux platform. The first minor release of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.1 enhances the manageability, security and performance of the operating system underpinning the open hybrid cloud while also adding new capabilities to drive developer innovatio

        • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.1 adds live Linux kernel patching

          Six months after Red Hat released the most recent major update of its flagship operating system, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8, the first minor RHEL 8 release of the RHEL 8.1 brings significant improvements to manageability, security, and hybrid cloud performance.

          First and foremost, in my mind, RHEL 8.1 8.1 now has full support for live kernel patching. You can now update your Linux kernel for Critical or Important Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) without needing to go to the trouble of a system reboot. This keeps your system up and running even serious security bugs are patched behind the scenes.

        • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.1 released

          Red Hat has announced the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.1. This is the first update in what is planned to be a 6 month cadence for minor releases. The release notes contain more information.

    • Audiocasts/Shows

      • 2019-11-05 | Linux Headlines

        Open source code that can listen to songs and tear them apart, longer lifespans for some Chromebooks, and new Google partnership to build an open hardware root of trust.

    • Kernel Space

      • Years Late: Linux 5.5 To Offer Mainline Support For SGI's Octane MIPS Workstations

        The Linux 5.5 kernel due out as stable in early 2020 will finally have mainline support for the MIPS-powered SGI Octane and Octane II workstations that originally ran with SGI's IRIX operating system about two decades ago.

        There have been out-of-tree patches for running Linux on the SGI Octane MIPS-based systems while Linux 5.5 is set to finally have this support mainlined for these two decade old workstations should you still be running the hardware and looking for something else besides IRIX or support in other platforms like OpenBSD. Mind you, these workstations were already succeeded by the SGI Octane III a decade ago with Intel x86.

      • The Linux Kernel Seeing Backport Progress Finally For The "$1.5 Million Dollar Bug"

        Several weeks ago we wrote about a kernel fix for Linux 5.4 to address performance issues for highly-threaded Linux software running under CFS quotas. The fix can yield up to a 30x improvement in performance and one company estimated the impact of the bug cost them at least $1.5 million USD in extra resources/hardware. But now it looks like it will soon appear in a Linux 5.3 point release and possible back-ports to earlier kernels.

        The CFS quota performance issue was spotted with Kubernetes workloads that make use of a CFS scheduler quota to restrict CPU shared resources. The bug was highly-threaded software in turn not getting their fair access to the CPU leading to higher latency and lower performance.

    • Applications

    • Instructionals/Technical

    • Games

      • The end of the beginning — Shadow of the Tomb Raider Definitive Edition released on macOS and Linux

        In the grand finale to the Tomb Raider origins trilogy, players take on the role of Lara Croft as she battles through the impenetrable jungles of Central America, explores underwater environments filled with crevasses and tunnels, and takes on the deadly organisation known as Trinity.

      • Shadow of the Tomb Raider Officially Released for Linux and Mac, Download Now

        UK-based video games publisher Feral Interactive announced today that official availability of the Shadow of the Tomb Raider video game on Linux and macOS platforms.

        Developed by Crystal Dynamics and Eidos-Montréal, Shadow of the Tomb Raider was launched on September 14, 2018, as the last instalment in the spectacular and thrilling action-adventure puzzle game Tomb Raider origins trilogy. It's also the twelfth title in the Tomb Raider series featuring the famous character Lara Croft.

        In this game, players will adventure into a Maya apocalypse world where they need shape Lara's destiny to become the Tomb Raider. As of today, Linux and Mac users can download and play Shadow of the Tomb Raider on their computers thanks to Feral Interactive, which ported it to these platforms.

      • Shadow of the Tomb Raider Now Officially Available For Linux

        Feral Interactive has just shipped their Linux (and macOS) port of Shadow of the Tomb Raider Definitive Edition.

        While Shadow of the Tomb Raider could previously play under Steam Play, this latest Tomb Raider title now has a native Linux port that is backed using the Vulkan graphics API.

      • Shadow of the Tomb Raider Definitive Edition released with Linux support

        Shadow of the Tomb Raider Definitive Edition from Crystal Dynamics, Eidos Montréal and Square Enix has been released today with a Linux port available from Feral Interactive.

        If you're in the camp of preferring the first Tomb Raider reboot to Rise of the Tomb Raider, fear not, as Shadow of the Tomb Raider is apparently much better. However, I think you're all rather odd as I thoroughly enjoyed the first two games. That's okay though, different opinions on fun are what keep the world going. It's fantastic to see Linux get the full trilogy, since we often miss out.

      • Bridge Constructor Portal is getting a Portal Proficiency DLC where you place the portals

        Bridge Constructor Portal was a surprise highlight when it released in 2017, an unlikely crossover between two completely different games and it worked. Thanks to the positive reception, more is coming with a twist.

      • Fix up some pipes the puzzler game Flux Caves, now temporarily free

        Flux Caves is like playing with a massive set of marbles, only someone came along and pulled a bunch of pieces out and you have to put it back together.

        Quite a relaxing puzzle game, not too taxing on the mind and it's quite nice to look at too. Watching the balls roll through the tunnels, as you appreciate a job well done on fixing it. It released earlier this year and it has Linux support, however like a lot of indie games it flew under the radar for most. Not seen it? There's a brief trailer you can see below:

    • Desktop Environments/WMs

      • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

        • Qt Creator 4.10.2 released

          We are happy to announce the release of Qt Creator 4.10.2 !

          In this release we fixed deployment of applications to iOS 13 devices, and added the experimental SerialTerminal plugin to our prebuilt binaries.

          Find a more detailed overview of the other fixes that are included in 4.10.2 in our change log.

        • KDE Plasma 5.17 Released

          KDE plasma is one of the most featured-rich and beautiful Linux desktop environments. It is also the most customizable desktop environment that I have ever used. Recently, it received a new update Plasma 5.17 with a number of new features and improvements.

        • News from KDE PIM in September-October 2019

          We’re in autumn for a little while now and not quite winter yet… It’s time for another post about KDE PIM! I’ll be your host to cover September and October and will try to follow in the footsteps of my peers who did a great job the past few months. Unlike Franck, I won’t start with the stats though, you’ll get that at the end. Is it obvious that I’m trying to make sure the stats addicts read through. ;-)

        • History of LabPlot

          After the recent release was finalised, there is some time now to have a (very) short break in the development, to take care of some organizational topics around the project and to set the development priorities for the next release. But there is also some time now to look back at where we started several years ago and where we are now. In this blog post we want to look at the history of the code base.

          LabPlot is quite an old project started long time ago, back in KDE3 times. One of the important milestones of this project was the complete rewrite using Qt4/KDELibs4 in 2008. This is when new developers joined the project, at least for a certain period in time, and when the jump from 1.x to 2.x release versioning was done for LabPlot. Starting from zero and lacking a lot of features in the 2.0 release, we gradually evolved release by release by implementing new features and by improving the code base.

        • First Notarized macOS Build of Krita

          What happens is this: we build Krita, then we create an app bundle. Then we zip up the krita.app bundle and transfer the zip file to Apple, which then checks whether Krita uses any forbidden API’s or contains its own html rendering engine and other such things that are highly dangerous for the well-being of the computers it allows its customers to use. Then we get a long string of numbers and letters back, which we can use to periodically check whether Apple is done checking. This can take ages, or happen relatively quickly. Then we need to execute a command to “staple” Apple’s imprimatur to the app bundle.

      • GNOME Desktop/GTK

        • GNOME Conference GUADEC 2020 to Take Place in Zacatecas, Mexico, for GNOME 3.38

          With the GNOME 3.34 "Thessaloniki" release out the door and the upcoming GNOME 3.36 "Gresik" in the works, the GNOME Project is planning on the next GUADEC conferences, namely GUADEC 2020 and GUADEC 2021, which will take place in the summer of 2020 and 2021 in Zacatecas, Mexico, and Riga, Latvia, respectively.

          "Recognizing our flagship conference as something that should move throughout the world is important. We hope to not only make it easier for people from North, Central, and South America to attend, but to help kick-start local participation in the GNOME project," said Neil McGovern, the GNOME Executive Director.

    • Distributions

      • Endeavour OS 2019.09.15 : Based on Arch Linux and Using Xfce Desktop 4.14

        EndeavourOS is an Arch Linux-based distribution featuring a pre-configured Xfce desktop 4.14 and the Calamares graphical installer. The project’s latest snapshot, 2019.09.15, features many package updates, a more complete Arch-x icon set, and the NVIDIA driver installer is included by default.

        “The September release has arrived. As of today, you can download our latest ISO with an updated offline installer. The ISO contains Linux kernel 5.2.14; mesa 19.1.6; systemd 243.0; Firefox 69 (Quantum); Arc-x-icons, a more complete and updated version than the Arc icon set used previously.

      • Screenshots/Screencasts

      • SUSE/OpenSUSE

      • Fedora Family

        • Xwayland randr resolution change emulation now available in Fedora 31

          As mentioned in an earlier blogpost, I have been working on fixing many games showing a small image centered on a black background when they are run fullscreen under Wayland. In that blogpost I was moslty looking at how to solve this for native Wayland games. But for various reasons almost all games still use X11, so instead I've ended up focussing on fixing this for games using Xwayland.

          Xwayland now has support for emulating resolution changes requested by an app through the randr or vidmode extensions. If a client makes a resolution change requests this is remembered and if the client then creates a window located at the monitor's origin and sized to exactly that resolution, then Xwayland will ask the compositor to scale it to fill the entire monitor.

          For apps which use _NET_WM_FULLLSCREEN (e.g. SDL2, SFML or OGRE based apps) to go fullscreen some help from the compositor is necessary. This is currently implemented in mutter. If you are a developer of another compositor and have questions about this, please drop me an email.

        • Fedora 31 Released

          As I stated above that the Fedora focuses on providing cutting-edge technology in each new release. In Fedora 31 also, there is not much that users will notice instantly after installing/upgrading. But that should not stop anyone from upgrading to Fedora 31. It has got all the latest software, bug fixes, and security fixes.

        • NeuroFedora Computational Neuroscience ISO image is now available

          The Fedora community generates a bunch of deliverables for users. The main ones, of course, are the primary editions: the workstation, the server edition, CoreOS, Silverblue, IoT. They can all be obtained from the community website at https://getfedora.org.

          All of these are ready to use and have gone through a thorough development cycle that includes a stringent Quality Assurance (QA) cycle. These are "live", so they can either either be used directly off the ISO image without having to install them, or they can be used to install a Fedora based system. Them being "live" makes them a great tool for temporary work---grab an ISO, start up a virtual machine, use Fedora to do your work, destroy the virtual machine when done.

          While these are the main deliverables, the Fedora community also generates other media for our diverse user base. These are classified as Spins and Labs. While the Workstation is based on the GNOME desktop environment, Spins provide Fedora users other desktop environment based images: KDE, LXQT, XFCE, Mate, Cinnamon, Sugar on a stick (SAOS). Labs are similar, but instead of focussing on the desktop environment, they include customised sets of software required for particular purposes: Astronomy, Design, Python, Security, Robotics.

        • Linux Day 2019 @ Bari: A Retrospective

          How about Fedora? Well, Fedora was ever present during the event. We placed gadgets on the registration desk, dedicated a special lunch menu entry, tried to install it everywhere we could put our hands on people PCs. We also used Fedora to win a Cybersecurity challenge! You may ask: how did we do so many things? Don’t worry, let’s see them with some quick photos 🙂

      • Canonical/Ubuntu Family

        • Canonical's Kernel Livepatch Ubuntu Advantage Client Is Out for Ubuntu 14.04 ESM

          Canonical's Ubuntu Advantage client is a command-line client pre-installed on all Ubuntu Linux releases that works via single-token access to allow users to access Canonical's Ubuntu Advantage for Infrastructure services, such as Extended Security Maintenance (ESM) and Kernel Livepatch, which include patches for high and critical security vulnerabilities.

          "The UA client for ‘Trusty Tahr’ enables easy access to Extended Security Maintenance (ESM) and Kernel Livepatch (requires HWE kernel). ESM provides fixes for high and critical CVEs for the most commonly used server packages in the Ubuntu main archive, and Livepatch permits users to apply critical kernel patches without rebooting," said Canonical.

        • UA services deployed from the command line with UA client

          Canonical is happy to announce an updated Ubuntu Advantage (UA) client that provides users a more efficient and consistent command-line interface via single-token access to Ubuntu Advantage for Infrastructure services for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.

          The UA client comes pre-installed on Ubuntu systems, with the updated client available for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS users and coming soon for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and 18.04 LTS. For users with updated 14.04 systems, simply run the ua command to quickly get started with key security and compliance services and tools. All users are entitled to a free account for up to three machines, and up to 50 machines for Ubuntu community members.

          The UA client for ‘Trusty Tahr’ enables easy access to Extended Security Maintenance (ESM) and Kernel Livepatch (requires HWE kernel). ESM provides fixes for high and critical CVEs for the most commonly used server packages in the Ubuntu main archive, and Livepatch permits users to apply critical kernel patches without rebooting. Access to these services ensures systems remain patched against security vulnerabilities.

    • Devices/Embedded

    • Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

      • Linux Foundation

        • LF Edge Organized Its First EdgeX Foundry Hackathon

          LF Edge, the host of EdgeX Foundry project, collaborated with RILA to organize a two-day hackathon for developers to build IoT solutions for the retail-use cases. The goal of the hackathon was to use EdgeX Foundry and other open source projects to solve some of the most pressing retail problems in the most innovative and creative manner.

      • Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

        • 15 Excellent Free Books to Learn LaTeX

          LaTeX is a professional document preparation system and document markup language written by Leslie Lamport. It’s a very mature system with development starting more than 30 years ago.

          LaTeX is widely used in the publication of scientific documents in many disciplines, such as mathematics, statistics, physics, economics, political science. It helps an author produce professional looking documents, papers, and books that are perfectly typeset. The formatted works are consistent, accurate, and reusable. It’s particularly suited to the production of long articles and books, as it has facilities for the automatic numbering of chapters, sections, theorems, equations etc., and also has facilities for cross-referencing. LaTeX is not a WYSIWYG system.

        • Proposal to conveniently highlight and inspect styles in LibreOffice Writer

          Styles are the essence of a text processor. And while experts love to unleash the power of LibreOffice Writer, it’s at the same time a major source of nuisance. In particular when you receive documents from other people, it can be quite difficult to understand the applied formatting and to fix issues around. This posting presents two ideas for improved feedback.

        • Tender for consultancy on implementing ODF 1.3 conformance in LibreOffice (#201911-01)

          The Document Foundation (TDF), the charitable entity behind the world’s leading free office suite LibreOffice, seeks for companies or individuals to

          provide consultancy on implementing ODF 1.3 conformance in LibreOffice

          to start work as soon as possible. TDF is looking for an individual or company to give technical consultancy on ensuring that LibreOffice will properly implement the Open Document Format (ODF) version 1.3 for both importing and exporting.

      • Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

      • BSD

        • FreeBSD 12.1 operating system released with major updates

          FreeBSD is a Unix-like operating system that includes security, native ZFS file system, built-in DTrace, Jails, and excellent network performance. Many companies have customized their own products based on FreeBSD’s system layer. Some of the big names include macOS, iOS, OPNsense, pfSense, FreeNAS among others.

          Especially after the release of the 12.0 version of the software, the entire system has very good stability and has been significantly improved in performance.

          Now, FreeBSD 12.1 has been released as the first incremental update to last year’s FreeBSD 12. The current FreeBSD already supports the latest desktop environments such as KDE Plasma 5.17.x / Wayland / Gnome 3.28.x. It is more convenient to use as a personal workstation system with the package manager.

        • Netflix Optimized FreeBSD's Network Stack More Than Doubled AMD EPYC Performance

          Drew Gallatin of Netflix presented at the recent EuroBSDcon 2019 conference in Norway on the company's network stack optimizations to FreeBSD. Netflix was working on being able to deliver 200Gb/s network performance for video streaming out of Intel Xeon and AMD EPYC servers, to which they are now at 190Gb/s+ and in the process that doubled the potential of EPYC Naples/Rome servers and also very hefty upgrades too for Intel.

          Netflix has long been known to be using FreeBSD in their data centers particularly where network performance is concerned. But in wanting to deliver 200Gb/s throughput from individual servers led them to making NUMA optimizations to the FreeBSD network stack. Allocating NUMA local memory for kernel TLS crypto buffers and for backing files sent via sentfile were among their optimizations. Changes to network connection handling and dealing with incoming connections to Nginx were also made.

        • Netflix Is An Example Of A Great Open-Source Corporate Patron To FreeBSD

          With yesterday's article about the NUMA improvements to FreeBSD's network stack made by Netflix in their quest to serve 200Gb/s encrypted video content per server, in no time the forum comments were quick to theorize whether those changes would work their way back upstream to all FreeBSD users or due to the BSD license would be held as a guarded secret by the company. Fortunately, Netflix continues to impress when it comes to their open-source contributions.

      • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

        • GNU Toolchain Moves Ahead In Obsoleting Solaris 10 Support

          Beyond GCC 9 having deprecated Solaris 10 support and that code now removed ahead of the GCC 10 release in a few months, the GNU Debugger (GDB) is also moving forward with its plan to obsolete Solaris 10.

          Developer Rainer Orth re-affirmed plans last month to obsolete the Solaris 10 support after originally initiating the discussion last year. For the GDB 9.1 release is when he plans to have the Solaris 10 support removed.

        • LibrePlanet 2020:Free the Future, March 14-15, Boston area, MA

          The Free Software Foundation's conference on technology and social justice, LibrePlanet 2020: Free the Future, will be held on March 14-15, in the Boston area.

        • Register now for LibrePlanet 2020: "Free the Future", in Boston area, MA

          Registration has officially opened for LibrePlanet 2020! Mark your calendars: the conference will be held on March 14 and 15, 2020, in the Boston area. Scholarship applications, exhibitor registration, and sponsor opportunities are also open now. For those of you who haven't been to the LibrePlanet conference before: expect a friendly, social, community-focused event with two days of inspiring talks and workshops from some of the most prominent people in the free software community.

        • Flying with SeaGL, blasting GNU Radio, and more from the Working Together for Free Software Fund

          Free software is software that you can run, copy, distribute, study, change, and improve as you please. While these freedoms are rights that belong to the individual, they are also intrinsically linked to the concept of community and sharing. It's imperative that we be permitted to use, examine, and alter software as we choose, but we also demand the right to share our improvements with the wider community.

          Working Together for Free Software is one of our initiatives that focuses on the broader world of free software: the community, programs, and funding that we?re coalescing to mount the crucial resistance to the abuses of proprietary software. This is a category that covers a lot of people and a lot of work, and the Working Together for Free Software Fund is just one piece of the picture.

          This fund enables important, mission-aligned free software projects to utilize the FSF?s nonprofit infrastructure to enhance their fundraising and other capabilities, without the labor and costs of becoming a 501(c)(3) nonprofit on their own. This gives them access to the organizational strengths of the FSF, plus additional capacity and unique benefits.

          While all of the projects under the umbrella of the Working Together for Free Software Fund are absolutely worthy of your attention and donations, today we're highlighting just a few projects with some noteworthy announcements. Want to know if your free software project qualifies?

      • Programming/Development

        • Is Python the Language for IoT?

          Python is one of the most popular programming languages out there, and entire sites – such as Instagram, Reddit and Mozilla – have been built on it. The main advantages are readability, logical flow and the usage of libraries to get more work done with less code.

          As Python is modular and extensible, it might find a strong match in the Internet of things. Let’s look into the pros and cons of Python when used in IoT systems.

        • Python time Module
        • Understanding OpenGL through Python

          Following this article by Muhammad Junaid Khalid, where basic OpenGL concepts and setup was explained, now we'll be looking at how to make more complex objects and how to animate them.

          OpenGL is very old, and you won't find many tutorials online on how to properly use it and understand it because all the top dogs are already knee-deep in new technologies.

          To understand modern OpenGL code, you have to first understand the ancient concepts that were written on stone tablets by the wise Mayan game developers.

        • Cool New Features in Python 3.8

          In this course, you’ll get a look into the newest version of Python. On October 14th, 2019 the first official version of Python 3.8 became ready.

        • CFP Deadline for PyCon 2020 Coming Up!

          Call for Proposal deadlines are fast approaching. PyCon US is looking for speakers of all experience levels and backgrounds to contribute to our conference program. We want you and your ideas at PyCon US!

          Be sure to create your account on us.pycon.org/2020 in order to access all the submission forms.

          More information about speaking at PyCon can be found here.

        • PyCoder’s Weekly: Issue #393 (Nov. 5, 2019)
        • Git v2.24.0
          The latest feature release Git v2.24.0 is now available at the
          usual places.  It is comprised of 544 non-merge commits since
          v2.23.0, contributed by 78 people, 21 of which are new faces.
          
          

          The tarballs are found at:

          https://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/

          The following public repositories all have a copy of the 'v2.24.0' tag and the 'master' branch that the tag points at:

          url = https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git url = git://repo.or.cz/alt-git.git url = https://github.com/gitster/git

          New contributors whose contributions weren't in v2.23.0 are as follows. Welcome to the Git development community!

          Alexandr Miloslavskiy, Ali Utku Selen, Ben Milman, Cameron Steffen, CB Bailey, Christopher Diaz Riveros, Garima Singh, Hervé Beraud, Jakob Jarmar, kdnakt, Kunal Tyagi, Maxim Belsky, Max Rothman, Norman Rasmussen, Paul Wise, Pedro Sousa, Philip.McGraw, Pratyush Yadav, Thomas Klaeger, William Baker, and YanKe.

          Returning contributors who helped this release are as follows. Thanks for your continued support.

          Adam Roben, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason, Alessandro Menti, Alexander Shopov, Alex Henrie, Andrey Mazo, Beat Bolli, Ben Wijen, Bert Wesarg, Birger Skogeng Pedersen, brian m. carlson, Carlo Marcelo Arenas Belón, Christian Couder, Clément Chigot, Corentin BOMPARD, David Turner, Denton Liu, Derrick Stolee, Elijah Newren, Emily Shaffer, Eric Wong, Gabriele Mazzotta, Jean-Noël Avila, Jeff Hostetler, Jeff King, Jiang Xin, Johannes Schindelin, Johannes Sixt, Jonathan Tan, Jon Simons, Jordi Mas, Josh Steadmon, Junio C Hamano, Martin Ã…gren, Masaya Suzuki, Matheus Tavares, Matthew DeVore, Matthias Rüster, Michael J Gruber, Mike Hommey, Mischa POSLAWSKY, Paul Mackerras, Peter Krefting, Phillip Wood, René Scharfe, Robert Luberda, Stephen Boyd, Stephen P. Smith, Sun Chao, SZEDER Gábor, Tanay Abhra, Taylor Blau, Thomas Gummerer, Tobias Klauser, Torsten Bögershausen, Trần Ngọc Quân, and Varun Naik.

          ----------------------------------------------------------------

          Git 2.24 Release Notes ======================

          Updates since v2.23 -------------------

          Backward compatibility note

          * "filter-branch" is showing its age and alternatives are available. From this release, we started to discourage its use and hint people about filter-repo.

          UI, Workflows & Features

          * We now have an active interim maintainer for the Git-Gui part of the system. Praise and thank Pratyush Yadav for volunteering.

          * The command line parser learned "--end-of-options" notation; the standard convention for scripters to have hardcoded set of options first on the command line, and force the command to treat end-user input as non-options, has been to use "--" as the delimiter, but that would not work for commands that use "--" as a delimiter between revs and pathspec.

          * A mechanism to affect the default setting for a (related) group of configuration variables is introduced.

          * "git fetch" learned "--set-upstream" option to help those who first clone from their private fork they intend to push to, add the true upstream via "git remote add" and then "git fetch" from it.

          * Device-tree files learned their own userdiff patterns. (merge 3c81760bc6 sb/userdiff-dts later to maint).

          * "git rebase --rebase-merges" learned to drive different merge strategies and pass strategy specific options to them.

          * A new "pre-merge-commit" hook has been introduced.

          * Command line completion updates for "git -c var.name=val" have been added.

          * The lazy clone machinery has been taught that there can be more than one promisor remote and consult them in order when downloading missing objects on demand.

          * The list-objects-filter API (used to create a sparse/lazy clone) learned to take a combined filter specification.

          * The documentation and tests for "git format-patch" have been cleaned up.

          * On Windows, the root level of UNC share is now allowed to be used just like any other directory.

          * The command line completion support (in contrib/) learned about the "--skip" option of "git revert" and "git cherry-pick".

          * "git rebase --keep-base <upstream>" tries to find the original base of the topic being rebased and rebase on top of that same base, which is useful when running the "git rebase -i" (and its limited variant "git rebase -x").

          The command also has learned to fast-forward in more cases where it can instead of replaying to recreate identical commits.

          * A configuration variable tells "git fetch" to write the commit graph after finishing.

          * "git add -i" has been taught to show the total number of hunks and the hunks that has been processed so far when showing prompts.

          * "git fetch --jobs=<n>" allowed <n> parallel jobs when fetching submodules, but this did not apply to "git fetch --multiple" that fetches from multiple remote repositories. It now does.

          * The installation instruction for zsh completion script (in contrib/) has been a bit improved.

          Performance, Internal Implementation, Development Support etc.

          * The code to write commit-graph over given commit object names has been made a bit more robust.

          * The first line of verbose output from each test piece now carries the test name and number to help scanning with eyeballs.

          * Further clean-up of the initialization code.

          * xmalloc() used to have a mechanism to ditch memory and address space resources as the last resort upon seeing an allocation failure from the underlying malloc(), which made the code complex and thread-unsafe with dubious benefit, as major memory resource users already do limit their uses with various other mechanisms. It has been simplified away.

          * Unnecessary full-tree diff in "git log -L" machinery has been optimized away.

          * The http transport lacked some optimization the native transports learned to avoid unnecessary ref advertisement, which has been corrected.

          * Preparation for SHA-256 upgrade continues in the test department. (merge 0c37c41d13 bc/hash-independent-tests-part-5 later to maint).

          * The memory ownership model of the "git fast-import" got straightened out.

          * Output from trace2 subsystem is formatted more prettily now.

          * The internal code originally invented for ".gitignore" processing got reshuffled and renamed to make it less tied to "excluding" and stress more that it is about "matching", as it has been reused for things like sparse checkout specification that want to check if a path is "included".

          * "git stash" learned to write refreshed index back to disk.

          * Coccinelle checks are done on more source files than before now.

          * The cache-tree code has been taught to be less aggressive in attempting to see if a tree object it computed already exists in the repository.

          * The code to parse and use the commit-graph file has been made more robust against corrupted input.

          * The hg-to-git script (in contrib/) has been updated to work with Python 3.

          * Update the way build artifacts in t/helper/ directory are ignored.

          * Preparation for SHA-256 upgrade continues.

          * "git log --graph" for an octopus merge is sometimes colored incorrectly, which is demonstrated and documented but not yet fixed.

          * The trace2 output, when sending them to files in a designated directory, can populate the directory with too many files; a mechanism is introduced to set the maximum number of files and discard further logs when the maximum is reached.

          * We have adopted a Code-of-conduct document. (merge 3f9ef874a7 jk/coc later to maint).

        • Highlights from Git 2.24
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