Bonum Certa Men Certa

Links 20/06/2023: DeVault Promising a 'Reform', Libreboot Promising No-microcode ROMs



  • GNU/Linux

    • Audiocasts/Shows

      • Jupiter BroadcastingHam Sandwich | LINUX Unplugged 515

        Is Ham Radio a natural hobby for Linux users? An old friend joins us to explain where the two overlap. Special Guest: Noah Chelliah.

    • Kernel Space

      • Richard W.M. Jones: Follow up to “I booted Linux 292,612 times”

        Well that blew up. It was supposed to be just a silly off-the-cuff comment about how some bugs are very tedious to bisect.

        To answer a few questions people had, here’s what actually happened. As they say, don’t believe everything you read in the press.



        [...]

        At that point I thought I had the right commit, but Paolo Bonzini suggested to me that I boot the kernel in parallel, in a loop, for 24 hours at the point immediately before the commit, to try to show that there was no latent issue in the kernel before. (As it turns out while this is a good idea, this analysis is subtly flawed as we’ll see).

        So I did just that. After 21 hours I got bored (plus this is using a lot of electricity and generating huge amounts of heat, and we’re in the middle of a heatwave here in the UK). I killed the test after 292,612 successful boots.

        I had a commit that looked suspicious, but what to do now? I posted my findings on LKML.

        We still didn’t fully understand how to trigger the hang, except it was annoying and rare, seemed to happen with different frequencies on AMD and Intel, could be reproduced by several independent people, but crucially kernel developer Peter Zijlstra could not reproduce it.

    • Applications

      • Linux LinksEasy Effects – enhance your audio

        If you find your home computer setup needs an EQ, Easy Effects might just be the ticket.

        Easy Effects is GTK4 audio manipulation software which includes a range of tools. Besides an EQ, there are many other tools incorporated including a limiter, compressor, and a reverberation tool. There’s a built-in spectrum analyzer too.

        It’s free and open source software.

    • Instructionals/Technical

    • Games

    • Desktop Environments/WMs

      • DebugPointCinnamon 5.8 Desktop: Best New Features

        Feature highlights of the recently released Cinnamon 5.8 desktop environment. The highly anticipated Cinnamon 5.8 desktop environment was released just a few days ago.

      • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

        • Write.asUnifying the KRunner sorting mechanisms for Plasma6 & further plans

          In Plasma5, we had different sorting implementations for KRunner and Kicker. This had historical reasons, because Kicker only used a subset of the available KRunner plugins. Due to the increased reliability, we decided to allow all available plugins to be loaded. However, the model still hard-coded the order in which the categories are displayed. This was reported in this bug which received numerous duplicates.

          To address this concern, I focused on refactoring and cleaning up KRunner as part of KDE Frameworks 6. Among the significant architectural changes was the integration of KRunner's model responsible for sorting into the KRunner framework itself. This integration enabled easier code sharing and simplified code maintenance. Consequently, the custom sorting logic previously present in Kicker could be removed.

  • Distributions and Operating Systems

    • Gentoo Family

      • GentooBonding period 1 – Modernization of Portage
        Bonding period 1 – Modernization of Portage

        Hello everyone,

        I am Berin Aniesh, one of the four contributors for Gentoo through GSOC 2023. You can read more about us here. In this post, I want to talk about the project I am working on and the first two€  weeks of the community bonding period

        Title and Project Scope

        The title of the project is “Modernization of portage codebase by refactoring and rewriting performance critical parts as C++ extensions”.

        Portage is probably the most versatile package manager on the planet and this has been its boon and bane at the same time This versatility combined with portage’s feature richness has made it possible for not only gentoo users, but projects like chromium OS, Flatcar container linux, a numerous downstream projects and many more. In linux, it can support any underlying stack (eg. glibc vs musl, hardened systems, systemd vs openrc, etc). Other than linux, it can also run on BSD and MacOS. It supports compile time feature selection through USE flags. Taking all these factors into€  account, together with the fact that portage supports numerous architectures, seeing portage€  perform its duties as it was designed to is a huge feat of engineering. And above all, everything of€  portage is written by passionate volunteers. If anything, understanding the landscape of gentoo has€  brought me huge respect towards the gentoo developers and the community.

      • GentooWeek 3 – Modernization of Portage
        Week 3 – Modernization of Portage

        It is the third week of the coding period. It is mostly an uneventful week. Most part was spent on€  trying to understand the dependency resolution algorithm. In the second part of the week I also did€  some refactoring and some type hints.

        Update on the blog posts

        I lost my password to access this blog and also had troubles resetting the password. That is why I€  have not been able to post per week. With help from BlueKnight, I got my access back. So, I am dumping the blog posts I have written, all at once. From next week, I expect posts to be at regular intervals (one per week). Sorry about the bulk posting, hope you don’t mind.

      • GentooWeek 1 – Modernization of Portage

        Week 1 – Modernization of Portage

        Coding period starts

        So, it’s the first week of the official coding period and I wanted to write some code and get it€  merged into the master branch (I understand it’s a bit over ambitious of me, but a man can wish).€  As I said in the first blog post, portage is relied up on by many people for different use cases and if€  something were a simple fix, the gentoo developers would have done it already. I just can’t storm in and make changes, expect things to work.

        So, we tried to find a place which has very little impact on the portage’s running and ended up at emerge --version.



      • GentooBonding Period 2 – Modernization of Portage
        Bonding Period 2 – Modernization of Portage
        Context

        In order to get familiar with the portage codebase, we decided that I’d fix a few bugs. This blog post talks about the second half of the community bonding period (weeks 3 and 4) where I try to do that.

        Bugs, bugs and more bugs

        When it comes to bugs, the paradox of choice is real. To choose from, there is a heap of them (1439 at the moment of writing). Most of the bugs are quality of life improvements as the portage team€  has put in a lot of effort to make sure portage does it’s jobs without many errors. After searching, we decided to work on bug 634576.

      • GentooWeek 2 – Modernization of Portage
        Week 2 – Modernization of Portage

        It is the second week of coding period and it has been a productive one. It started according to the€  plans and diverged in the second half for the good. The first half was towards type annotation and the second half was dummy_threading deprecation.

        Type annotation

        In the words of Sam, my mentor, “I’d considere a GSOC project complete if some 50% of the€  codebase is just type annotated”. Many portage developers were excited when we were talking€  about adding type hints and docstrings.

        Adding type hints and tidying up the codebase will also give me more exposure to the underlying functions. So, we decided, this week I’ll do type annotations.

        Deciding on the type hints style

        Python 3.9 adds a simpler “native” style type annotation, but portage has a minimum supported python version of 3.7.

      • GentooWeek 3 report on porting Gentoo packages to modern C

        Hello all,

        I’m here with my week 3 report for Modern C porting of Gentoo’s
        packages. For this week I diverted from my initial idea a bit and
        focused on the “C++17 does not allow register storage class specific” type
        error. Basically, C++14 deprecated the register storage class and it has
        been completely removed in C++17, thus resulting in C++ packages that
        use register keywords with this kind of error. A general fix is it
        either removes the keywords or replaces them with *int* where applicable.

        For example, in this PR [1] for the fox toolkit, I’m using sed to remove
        register keywords from various folders of the source. Whenever possible
        I’m sending patches upstream as well, for example, I’ve sent this [2]
        patch upstream while also applying it Gentoo tree.

    • Fedora Family / IBM

      • Red HatDebugging in GDB: Create custom stack winders

        In this article, we will walk through the process of creating a custom stack unwinder for the GNU Project Debugger (GDB) using GDB's Python API. We'll first explore when writing such an unwinder might be necessary, then create a small example application that demonstrates a need for a custom unwinder before finally writing a custom unwinder for our application inside the debugger.

        By the end of this tutorial, you'll be able to use our custom stack unwinder to allow GDB to create a full backtrace for our application.

        What is an unwinder?

        An unwinder is how GDB figures out the call stack of an inferior, for example, GDB's backtrace command: [...]

      • Red HatMy advice for designing features for the hybrid cloud

        Hybrid clouds are mixed computing environments that allow applications to use a combination of compute, networking, storage, and services in public clouds and private clouds, including clouds running on-premise or at a plethora of edge locations.

        To accomplish this, hybrid cloud platforms must be designed to expose the best of the public clouds they support and present the advantages of private clouds while presenting a cohesive interface to the application developer—and preferably the cloud admin, too. A cloud admin can install a cloud instance called a cluster, consisting of a control plane (at least one instance) to manage the cluster and multiple compute instances that run applications on them.

        In the rest of this article, "developer" specifically refers to a hybrid cloud platform developer, not an application developer.€  As a developer working on OpenShift, Red Hat’s hybrid cloud platform, I have found that designing features around a few key tenets ensures the cohesiveness that hybrid cloud platforms wish to achieve.

      • Red HatFine-tune large language models using OpenShift Data Science

        As an Ansible Lightspeed engineer, my team works on the cloud service that interacts with Watson Code Assistant large language models for Ansible task generation. Curious to learn more about the mechanics of training such a model, I set out to create my own, very basic Ansible tasks model. I decided to do this using Red Hat OpenShift Data Science, which made it easy to configure and launch an environment pre-configured with everything I needed to train my model. I’ll walk through the steps I took here.

    • Debian Family

      • Microsoft shill C.J. Collier: First taste of Debian 12

        As some of you may know, the Debian project released v12, bookworm to stable on the 10th of this month. I haven’t had a reason to try it yet, but I’m downloading it now. My first thought is that it’s much larger than I expected. The normal sized version used to fit on a CD-ROM disk, so around 650MB. The netinst has until now been even smaller, with the most recent versions being about 256MB if I recall correctly. The netinst, now with proprietary firmware, weighs in over 700MB: [...]

    • Canonical/Ubuntu Family

      • 9to5LinuxLinux Mint 21.2 Beta Is Now Available for Download with Cinnamon 5.8

        Dubbed “Victoria”, Linux Mint 21.2 is the third installment in the Linux Mint 21 series, which is based on Canonical’s long-term supported Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) operating system series and powered by Linux kernel 5.15 LTS.

        Linux Mint 21.2 Beta is available in three editions with the Cinnamon 5.8, Xfce 4.18, and MATE 1.26 desktop environments preinstalled. As expected, the Cinnamon edition remains the flagship and it brings the most interesting changes and new features.

      • OMG UbuntuUbuntu 22.04 Fixes Window Snapping Memory Bug

        >Users of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS who make use of window snapping to enhance their productivity will be interested in a bug fixes coming down the update pipes shortly.

    • Devices/Embedded

      • Linux GizmosRockchip-based SBC runs on Android 12

        As shown above, the carrier board includes a Mini PCIe socket with a Nano SIM card port enabling the use of a 4G LTE modem for cellular connectivity.

        The HDMI 2.1 port offers support for up to 8K resolution at 60 frames per second (8Kp60). On the other hand, the MIPI DSI interface provides support for up to 4K resolution at 60 frames per second (4Kp60) through a 26-pin header. For audio, the SBC features a 3.5mm audio jack and supports 8-channel audio output via HDMI.

        The Software section located on the Idea3588S product page indicates that Boardcon will provide software support for Android 12 (i.e. Kernel, Drivers, Debug tools, etc.).

    • Open Hardware/Modding

      • Tom's HardwareRaspberry Pi Two-Wheeled Bot Self-Balances Using AI

        Luwu Dynamics is working on a Raspberry Pi CM4-powered robot that uses two wheels to locomote capable of self-balancing.

      • HackadayA Simple Guide To Bit Banged I2C On The 6502

        We covered [Anders Nielsen]’s 65duino project a short while ago, and now he’s back with an update video showing some more details of bit-banging I2C using plain old 6502 assembly language.

      • HackadayMarvin Minsky’s 2500 Logo Computer

        [Prof. Marvin Minsky] is a very well-known figure in the field of computing, having co-founded the MIT AI lab, published extensively on AI and computational intelligence, and, let’s not forget, inventing the confocal microscope and, of course, the useless machine. But did you know he also was a co-developer of the first Logo “turtle,” and developed a computer intended to run Logo applications in an educational environment? After dredging some PDP-10 tapes owned by the MIT Media Lab, the original schematics for his machine, the Turtle Terminal TT2500 (a reference to the target price of $2500, in 1970 terms), are now available for you to examine.

  • Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

    • Gaël Duval: Declaration of Duties of Man and Citizen.

      Let's work together for a better world? Introducing the Declaration of Duties of Man and Citizen, a complementary document to the Declaration of Human Rights, emphasizing our responsibilities and obligations. >

    • Drew DeVault Reforming the free software message



      Several weeks ago, I wrote The Free Software Foundation is dying, wherein I enumerated a number of problems with the Free Software Foundation. Some of my criticisms focused on the message: fsf.org and gnu.org together suffer from no small degree of incomprehensibility and inaccessibility which makes it difficult for new participants to learn about the movement and apply it in practice to their own projects.

      This is something which is relatively easily fixed! I have a background in writing documentation and a thorough understanding of free software philosophy and practice. Enter writefreesoftware.org: a comprehensive introduction to free software philosophy and implementation.

    • LWNDeVault: Reforming the free software message

      Drew DeVault has announced the launch of a new web site that is intended to be a better introduction to the free-software community.

    • LibreBootLibreboot – No-microcode ROMs available in next Libreboot release (new stable release soon!)
    • Medevel10 Open-source Free-to-use Telegram Bots For Developers

      As of January 2021, Telegram has more than 500 million active users worldwide. It is an instant messaging app that is widely used due to its various features. These include the ability to create bots, which are programs that can carry out various tasks within the Telegram app.

      What are

    • Web Browsers/Web Servers

      • Mozilla

        • Five ways we can make LibreOffice and Thunderbird work better together

          LibreOffice doesn’t include an email program, but there are many excellent free and open source software clients that work well alongside it. One prominent example is Mozilla Thunderbird – a sister project to the Firefox web browser.

          We know that many people use LibreOffice and Thunderbird as part of their daily workflows – so how can we make them work better together? We reached out on social media to hear from our users – on Mastodon and Twitter (and the Thunderbird project posted on their Mastodon and Twitter accounts too).

    • Programming/Development

      • HackadayToo Much Git? Try Gitless

        Git has been a powerful tool for software development and version control since the mid ’00s, gaining widespread popularity since then. Originally built by none other than Linus Torvalds for handling Linux kernel development, it’s branched out for use with all kinds of other projects. That being said, it is not the easiest thing to learn how to use, with tons of options, abstract ideas, and non-linear workflows to keep track of. So if you’re new to the system or don’t need all of its vast swath of features, you might want to try out an alternative like Gitless.

      • Dirk EddelbuettelDirk Eddelbuettel: spdl 0.0.5 on CRAN: Small Extension

        Another quick update to the still somewhat new package spdl is now om CRAN, and will go to Debian soon too. The key focus of spdl is to offer the exact same interface to logging from both R and C++ by relying on spdlog via my RcppSpdlog package. Usage examples are shown on the RcppSpdlog docs

        This release add support for the wrappers init() and log() wrapping the existing setup() function but requiring only the level argument. This requires version 0.0.13 of RcppSpdlog which was released to CRAN yesterday.

  • Leftovers



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