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Links 16/7/2017: Mesa 17.1.5, FreeBSD 11.1 RC3





GNOME bluefish

Contents





GNU/Linux



  • How I put Linux in the enterprise
    I used to work in higher ed. In the late 1990s, we moved to a new student records system. We created an "add-on" web registration system, so students could register on-line—still a new idea in 1998. But when we finally went live, the load crushed the web servers. No one could register. We tried to fix it, but nothing worked.


  • Desktop





  • Kernel Space



    • Linux 4.12.2
      I'm announcing the release of the 4.12.2 kernel.

      All users of the 4.12 kernel series must upgrade.

      The updated 4.12.y git tree can be found at: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-4.12.y and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser: http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-st...


    • Linux 4.11.11
    • Linux 4.9.38
    • Linux 4.4.77
    • Linux 3.18.61


    • UBIFS Gets Statx Support, Better Encryption In Linux 4.13
      The Linux 4.13 kernel changes for the UBIFS file-system have been submitted.

      UBIFS, as a reminder, is the Unsorted Block Image File-System deigned for flash memory devices off the UBI layer. UBIFS in Linux 4.10 gained file-encryption support making use of the fscrypt functionality used as well by F2FS and EXT4. With Linux 4.13, there are UBIFS related encryption updates and fixes.


    • Linux 4.13 Thermal Management Sees Some Improvements For CPU_Cooling
      The thermal management updates have landed in the Linux 4.13 code-base.


    • Linux 4.13-rc1 Kernel Released


    • Merge window over - Linux 4.13-rc1 out
      Ok, normally I do this on Sunday afternoon, but occasionally it happens a day early like now to avoid people timing me.

      In fact, I was planning on doing it yesterday evening this time around because I was so annoyed with lots of late pull requests on Friday (and some today), but ended up going to dinner and not getting everything done, so it's only one day early. Next time...


    • The New Changes & Features Of The Linux 4.13 Kernel
      With Linux 4.13-rc1 having been released, here's my original look at the new features coming for the Linux 4.13 kernel and the other changes merged over the past two weeks of this new cycle.



    • Please pull NFS client changes for Linux 4.13


    • Graphics Stack



      • Mesa 17.1.5 Brings More Fixes To Open-Source GPU Driver Users
        Andres Gomez of Igalia has announced Mesa 17.1.5 as the newest point release to the current Mesa 3D stable series.

        Mesa 17.1.5 fixes a potential crash in core Mesa, has Vulkan / SPIR-V fixes, the usual notable fixes in the Intel i965 and RadeonSI drivers, and some smaller fixes to Etnaviv, OpenSWR, SVGA, and other parts of this massive user-space 3D graphics stack.


      • [Mesa-announce] [ANNOUNCE] mesa 17.1.5
        In Mesa Core we include a fix to prevent a potential crash.


      • Mesa 17.1.5 Linux Graphics Stack Released, Improves AMD Radeon & Intel Drivers
        After teasing us a couple of days ago with the upcoming availability of the fifth maintenance update to the Mesa 17.1 3D Graphics Stack for GNU/Linux distributions, Mesa developer Andres Gomez is now announcing the final release of Mesa 17.1.5.

        Mesa 17.1.5 comes only two weeks after the Mesa 17.1.4 update that probably many of you are using right now on your Linux distros, and it's here to add an extra layer of improvements for those using AMD Radeon or Intel graphics cards. First off, Mesa 17.1.5 fixes a potential crash in Mesa Core, adds better support for the GLSL and SPIR-V compilers, and solves a linking problem with standalone Android builds.


      • Vulkan 1.0.54 Lands In Mesa For Intel ANV, Some RADV Extensions
        It's fabulous to see how promptly the Mesa Vulkan drivers are receiving support for new extensions.

        Vulkan 1.0.54 was released on Thursday. This updated promoted the external memory and semaphores extensions from experimental to stable. They also added new extensions for 16-bit storage, dedicated allocation, storage buffer storage class, variable pointers, new memory requirements query, and external fences for external memory.


      • Difficulties and Success Stories
        This hints to a fundamental issue with our approach of using the Present extension in Xwayland. The extension was written with hardware in mind. It assumes a flip happens directly on a screen. There is no intermediate link like a Wayland compositor and if a flip has happened the old buffer is not on the screen anymore. Why do we still try to leverage the Present extension support in Xwayland then? There are two important features of a Wayland compositor we want to have with Xwayland: A tear-free experience for the user and the ability to output a buffer rendered by a direct rendering client on a hardware plane without any copies in between. Every frame is perfect should also remain valid when using some legacy application and that we want no unnecessary copies is simply a question of performance improvements. This is especially important for many of the more demanding games out there, which won’t be Wayland native in the short term and some of them maybe never. Both features need the the full Present extension support in the Xwayland DDX. Without it a direct rendering application would still use the Present extension but only with its fallback code path of copying the Pixmap’s content. And for a tear-free experience we would at least need to sync these copies to the frame events sent by the Wayland compositor or better directly allow multiple buffers, otherwise we would limit our frame rate. In both cases this means again to increase the Present extension support.


      • It Looks Like Intel Could Begin Pushing Graphics Tech More Seriously
        It's been a while now since last seeing some major graphics advancements on Intel CPUs. With Skylake/Kabylake we are on "Gen 9" graphics, Kabylake-Refresh / Coffeelake is still Gen9 graphics, Broadwell was on Gen8, Haswell on Gen7.5, and IvyBridge on Gen 7. But with upcoming launches past Kabylake-Refresh/Coffeelake, it looks like we'll be stamping out Gen 10, Gen 11, and Gen 12.


      • Codeplay Release “clspv”, an OpenCL Tool for Vulkan Enabled Devices
        In collaboration with Google, Codeplay is proud to announce the release of a new open-source tool allowing the compilation of OpenCL C language kernels to run on the Vulkan API.






  • Applications



  • Desktop Environments/WMs



    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt



      • digiKam GSoC Students in Egypt


        It was nice meeting Ahmed and Shaza @ faculty of Engineering, Ain Shams University in Cairo. I am proud to mentor them in Google Summer of Code.

        Ahmed is working on implementing a DLNA server in digiKam core to export photo and video hosted in physical and virtual collections. The server is ready and he working on the configuration panel UI. See more here.



      • Best be precise
        KSysGuard — the system monitor — on FreeBSD seems oddly precise.


      • Plasma Wayland and Qt 5.9 and beyond
        As you might know Qt 5.8 created challenging problems for our Wayland session and threw our efforts back quite a bit. In this post I want to discuss the actual problems it created, how we are addressing them and looking into the future.


      • The Regressed State Of KDE Plasma On Wayland, But Things Should Get Better
        KWin maintainer Martin Gräßlin has written a blog post explaining the issues they've run into with KDE Plasma on Wayland and how changes to Qt have set them back months in their Wayland session support.


      • Akademy Schedule
        The workshops and lightning talks and BoFs are being planned, too. I’m glad Anu Mittal has mentioned her QML + JS workshop, it’s a great topic for getting started with application development. QML is something I’ve never gotten in to, but should, so I’ve penciled this workshop into my schedule as well.


      • [Krita] GSoC’17-Week #4


      • KF5 Applications Porting


        Next week, KDE developers will release the beta of KDE Applications 17.08. This release will again have more applications and nearly all games ported to Qt5/KF5. While Qt4 is already no longer supported for over a year, KDE has decided to support Qt4/kdelibs4-based applications a bit longer.

        The 17.08 release, however, will be the last to include Qt4/kdelibs4-based applications. This means, 17.12 will only include applications that are based on Qt5/KF5. See this mailing list discussion.


      • Kdenlive 17.04.3 released
        In comparison to previous versions this was the least exciting development cycle, in terms of new features, since all focus has been on the code refactoring which will bring more stability and new features. Don’t miss the next Café to keep track on the progress and share your thoughts if you like.






  • Distributions



    • Reviews



      • Solus 2017.04.18.0 review - Second time lucky?
        Solus 2017 looks like a nice distro, with some obvious visual caveats and tiny functional quirks. It's reasonable enough than I'm determined to test it on non-UEFI hardware, where I'll hopefully have more luck. But on a UEFI platform, it seems hopeless. I don't know there should be a problem when so many other distros do just fine without any issues. Solus seems to be a special snowflake, and it does not cooperate well with a modern and complex system.

        All in all, I cannot recommend the distro, because the outcome may still be harmful. If a distro cannot install properly, the results can be unpredictable. My testing shows some very favorable things, and Budgie looks quite all right now, but as a package, Solus just doesn't handle UEFI well. I'll report back after a third, and hopefully lucky test, but you are warned to carefully proceed until the hardware side has been polished. Double sigh. Maybe another another time.


      • A Short Review of Linux Mint 18.2 "Sonya" Cinnamon LTS




    • New Releases



      • Introducing Endless OS 3.2
        This major release brings some exciting changes with a refreshed desktop, great visual improvements, and more offline apps for our users in Southeast Asia to enjoy. Since this is a major release, make sure to update your OS (Settings > Details > Check for updates now), before you update your apps from the App Center!




    • Red Hat Family



    • Debian Family





  • Devices/Embedded





Free Software/Open Source



  • Web Browsers



    • Mozilla



      • Pale Moon browser new release, better media support


        I have updated my palemoon.SlackBuild and have uploaded fresh Slackware packages for this new Pale Moon 27.4.0. As previously shared with you, I diverge from the official developers’ recommendations about how to compile this browser on Linux. For instance the gcc compiler I used on Slackware 14.2 is gcc-5.3.0 (which is part of this distro release). On -current I failed compiling with the gcc-7.1.0 compiler which is the default there and I had to create a “gcc5” package for gcc-5.4.0 (which was an earlier gcc version in slackware-current). I wrote an article on this very blog about that gcc5 package if you are interested, it can be installed in parallel with Slackware’s own gcc-7. There are some other differences, mainly in the way I optimize my build.






  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice



    • LibreOffice 5.3.4 Released and Available via PPA for Ubuntu/Linux Mint
      LibreOffice is the power-packed free, libre and open source personal productivity suite for Windows, Macintosh and GNU/Linux, that gives you six feature-rich applications for all your document production and data processing needs: Writer, the word processor, Calc, the spreadsheet application, Impress, the presentation engine, Draw, our drawing and flowcharting application, Base, our database and database frontend, and Math for editing mathematics. Its clean interface and powerful tools let you unleash your creativity and grow your productivity. Support and documentation is free from our large, dedicated community of users, contributors and developers.




  • BSD



    • NAS4Free 11.1.0.4.4485 Released


    • FreeBSD 11.1-RC3 Available
      The third RC build for the FreeBSD 11.1 release cycle is now available. ISO images for the amd64, armv6, i386, aarch64, powerpc, powerpc64 and sparc64 architectures are available on most of our FreeBSD mirror sites.


    • FreeBSD 11.1-RC3 Now Available
      The third RC build of the 11.1-RELEASE release cycle is now available. This is expected to be the final RC build of the 11.1-RELEASE cycle.


    • FreeBSD 11.1 RC3 Released As The Final Build Is Near
      FreeBSD 11.1 remains on track for releasing later this month.

      FreeBSD 11.1 RC3 is available this weekend as what should be the final release candidate for this minor update to FreeBSD 11. Changes found in FreeBSD 11.1 RC3 include adding deprecation notices to gdb/kgdb/sicontrol/wlconfig and other drivers that will be removed in FreeBSD 12.0, Capsicum support in the Bhyve virtualization code, and various other fixes and clean-ups.




  • Licensing/Legal



    • EUPL v1.2 becomes OSI approved

      "The OSI has approved EUPL v1.2. It will be added to the public list of OSI-approved licenses in due course. As with EUPL 1.1, the approval extends to all the official language versions of the license."





Leftovers



Recent Techrights' Posts

Microsoft Windows Falls to 19% in Congo, Only About 1 in 8 Windows Users (or 2-3% of Web Users) Are on Vista 11
The estimated share of Vista 11 fell sharply this past month
Twitter as X-Rated Hatred: Criticising Microsoft is Not OK, Calling for Beheadings (With Bounties on People's Heads) is OK
Twitter automation missed 'hit job' advertising
 
Another Case Study Regarding Edge's Death
people adopt Chrome and a lot more people use obscure browsers than adopt the latest Edge
[Meme] A Question of Interests
'The Internet? We are not interested in it.' -Bill Gates, 1993
In the Romanian Browser Market, Microsoft is the 2% (Edge Down to 2.3%)
the Wintel era has ended
Gemini Links 17/08/2024: Selfishness and Offline BBSing
Links for the day
Frans Pop & Debian Day 2024: 31 years of deception and modern slavery
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, August 16, 2024
IRC logs for Friday, August 16, 2024
Links 16/08/2024: YouTube Bans and Surveillance Expanded
Links for the day
We Were Right All Along and the Collaborators of Microsoft Helped Competition Crimes of Microsoft
Once again vindicated regarding UEFI "secure boot"
[Meme] The New Windows Slogan
stat me up
Addendum: Associate's Notes on Free Software as a Labour Issue and the Connectivity Swindles
these are related issues/causes
Microsofters Infiltrating Roles of Authority and Government Positions to Protect Microsoft and to FUD Microsoft's Competition
friends of Microsofters who bully me and my wife
Links 16/08/2024: UK Skills Deficit and Kim Dotcom to be Extradited to the US (for Doing the Same Stuff GAFAM Does)
Links for the day
Gemini Links 16/08/2024: Overgeneralisation and Games
Links for the day
Russia's Yandex 5 Times Bigger Than Microsoft... in Ukraine
They'd rather rely on the Kremlin than on Microsoft
[Meme] Gemini is Different, So What?
different, not worse
Now It's "Official": Over 4,000 Known Gemini Capsules in Lupa
For the first time ever
Clown Computing
Reprinted with permission from Dr. Andy Farnell
[Meme] What Freedom Means to IBM
Free labou
Balancing Activism Against (or With) Basic Necessities and Daniel Cantarín on Our Collective Battle for Software Freedom Around the World
"I'm VERY angry about lots of stuff happening here in Argentina, all of it shielded behind the word "freedom"."
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, August 15, 2024
IRC logs for Thursday, August 15, 2024
From 99% in 2012 to 27% in 2024: How Microsoft Lost Georgia
What we're seeing is a migration from Windows to other platforms, notably GNU/Linux
To Understand Cisco's Mass Layoffs Look at the Company's Soaring Debt (Same at Microsoft)
Look what's happening to Intel - down almost 60% since the start of the year, 57% to be precise
Windows Flying Low at 25%
It's another all-time low
[Meme] Long Texts You Never Bother Reading (Because Life is Too Short, Unlike Those Texts)
The devil is in the terms of service
Links 15/08/2024: Monkeypox Hysteria and Modern Homesteaders Living Off the Grid
Links for the day
Gemini Links 15/08/2024: Confession of a Convention Game Master and Some Release nostalgia
Links for the day
Congratulations to Romania, Where Windows is Now "Minority Market Share" Platform
Time will tell if GNU/Linux can pass 5% on the desktop/laptop "form factor" there
Why It Matters That 4,000 Gemini Capsules Are Known to Lupa and Why Gemini Protocol Matters to Us
I have no doubt Gemini Protocol will continue to expand because it solves a real problem
Links 15/08/2024: Avast Surveillance Scandal Unsolved and Facebook Still Censors Terror Sympathisers
Links for the day
Daniel Cantarín's Response to Alexandre Oliva's Talk on Achieving Software Freedom in the Age of Platform Decay
Soylent News caught up with the series
4,000 Gemini Capsules
it's basically one capsule short of 4,000
"Microsoft is a Sponsor of The New Stack."
Many articles turn out to be just ads
New Highs for Android in Russia, But It's Reportedly Working on Its Own Linux-Based Operating Systems (GAFAM-Free)
statCounter isn't equipped to properly parse user agents or to keep up
Upcoming Series: Terms of Service (TOS) Under the Microscope, FSF Party, GitHub Scandals, Clowns, and More
Right now we have way more material than we have time to cover. But that's a good thing.
Gemini Links 15/08/2024: Lies of Therapy and Web Applications
Links for the day
Software Freedom in Perspective - Part 5 - When Richard Stallman Came to Argentina
It might seem a bit harsh, but a discussion at the end of this series will tie things together and explain why those things were said
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, August 14, 2024
IRC logs for Wednesday, August 14, 2024