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The Dirty Carbon Secret Behind Solid State Memory Drives
by Peter Reutemann 03 Aug '22

03 Aug '22

'Solid state drives use far less power than hard disc drives. But a new study unexpectedly reveals that their lifetime carbon footprint is much higher than their hard disc cousins, raising difficult questions for the computer industry. From a report: The benefits of SSDs over HDDs are legion. They are smaller, mechanically simpler, faster to read and write data than their hard disc cousins. They are also more energy efficient. So with many computer manufacturers and datacenter operators looking to reduce their carbon footprints, it's easy to imagine that all this makes the choice of memory easy. But all is not as it seems, say Swamit Tannu at University of Wisconsin in Madison and Prashant Nair at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. SSDs have a dirty secret. Tannu and Nair have measured the carbon footprint per gigabyte of these devices across their entire lifetimes and, unexpectedly, it turns out that SSDs are significantly dirtier. "Compared to SSDs, the embodied [carbon] cost of HDDs is at least an order of magnitude lower," say the researchers. Tannu and Nair come to their conclusion by adding up the amount of carbon emitted throughout the estimated 10-year lifespans of these devices. This includes the carbon emitted during manufacture, during operation, for transportation and for disposal. The carbon emitted during operation is straightforward to calculate. To read and write data, HDDs consume 4.2 Watts versus 1.3W for SSDs. The researchers calculate that a 1 terabyte HDD emits the equivalent of 159 kilograms of carbon dioxide during a 10-year operating lifespan. By comparison, a 1 terabyte SSD emits just 49.2 kg over 10 years. But SSDs are significantly more carbon intensive to manufacture. That's because the chip fabrication facilities for SSDs operate at extreme temperatures and pressures that are energy intensive to maintain. And bigger memories require more chips, which increases the footprint accordingly. All this adds up to a significant carbon footprint for SSD manufacture. Tannu and Nair calculate that manufacturing a 1 terabyte SSD emits the equivalent of 320 kg of carbon dioxide. By comparison, a similar HDD emits just 40 kg. So the lifetime footprint for a 1 terabyte SSD is 369.2 kg of carbon dioxide equivalent versus 199 kg for an HDD. So HDDs are much cleaner. That's a counterintuitive result with important implications. At the very least, it suggests that computer manufacturers and cloud data storage operators should reconsider the way they use SSDs and HDDs. For example, almost 40 per cent of the carbon footprint of a desktop computer comes from its SSD, compared to just 4 per cent from the CPU and 11 per cent from the GPU.' -- source: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/22/08/02/1837229 I wish my drives would last 10 years, neither HDD or SSD seem to last that long... Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 (office) +64 (7) 577-5304 (home office) https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Linus Torvalds Releases Linux 5.19 - From an Apple Silicon MacBook
by Peter Reutemann 01 Aug '22

01 Aug '22

'"Linus Torvalds just released Linux 5.19 as stable for the newest version of the Linux kernel..." reports Phoronix. But they also note that on the Linux kernel mailing list, "Torvalds went on to write about his Arm-based MacBook [running an AArch64 Apple M1 SoC]... now under Linux thanks to the work of the Asahi Linux project." Torvalds wrote: [T]he most interesting part here is that I did the release (and am writing this) on an arm64 laptop. It's something I've been waiting for for a _loong_ time, and it's finally reality, thanks to the Asahi team. We've had arm64 hardware around running Linux for a long time, but none of it has really been usable as a development platform until now. It's the third time I'm using Apple hardware for Linux development — I did it many years ago for powerpc development on a ppc970 machine. And then a decade+ ago when the Macbook Air was the only real thin-and-lite around. And now as an arm64 platform. Not that I've used it for any real work, I literally have only been doing test builds and boots and now the actual release tagging. But I'm trying to make sure that the next time I travel, I can travel with this as a laptop and finally dogfooding the arm64 side too. ' -- source: https://apple.slashdot.org/story/22/07/31/2326216 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 (office) +64 (7) 577-5304 (home office) https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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What's New in Linux Mint 21 Cinnamon
by Peter Reutemann 01 Aug '22

01 Aug '22

'Today saw the release of Linux Mint 21 "Vanessa" Cinnamon Edition, a long term support release (supported until 2027). Release notes at LinuxMint.com promise that it comes with "refinements and many new features to make your desktop experience more comfortable." Among the highlights: its Bluetooth manager is now Blueman (instead of Blueberry). Blueberry depended on gnome-bluetooth, which was developed exclusively for GNOME. In contrast, Blueman relies on the standard Bluez stack which works everywhere and can even be used or queried from the command line. The Blueman manager and tray icon provide many features that weren't available in Blueberry and a lot more information which can be used to monitor your connection or troubleshoot Bluetooth issues. Out of the box Blueman features better connectivity, especially when it comes to headsets and audio profiles. In preparation for Linux Mint 21 the Blueman user interface was improved and received support for symbolic icons. Upstream, Blueman and Bluez are actively developed and used in many environments. The lack of thumbnails for some common file types was identified as a usability issue. To address it a new Xapp project called xapp-thumbnailers was started and is now featured in Linux Mint 21. The project brings support for the following mimetypes: - AppImage - ePub - MP3 (album cover) - RAW pictures (most formats) - Webp Automated tasks are great to keep your computer safe but they can sometimes affect the system's performance while you're working on it. A little process monitor was added to Linux Mint to detect automated updates and automated system snapshots running in the background. Whenever an automated task is running the monitor places an icon in your system tray. Your computer might still become slow momentarily during an update or a snapshot, but with a quick look on the tray you'll immediately know what's going on.... Linux Mint 21 uses IPP, also known as Driverless Printing and Scanning (i.e. a standard protocol which communicates with printers/scanners without using drivers). For most printers and scanners no drivers are needed, and the device is detected automatically. And there's also a fabulous collection of new backgrounds.' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/22/07/31/1922217 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 (office) +64 (7) 577-5304 (home office) https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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meeting next month
by Peter Reutemann 29 Jul '22

29 Jul '22

Hi everyone For next month's meeting (I know, I'm early this time round!), I was thinking of the following topic: Essential command-line tools like find, grep, cat, less/more, bc, head/tail, etc. Rather than just one person demoing tools, I'm thinking more of a joint effort, where everyone can demo one or more tools. Doesn't matter if the same tool comes up more than once. There will be always useful options to hear about! Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 (office) +64 (7) 577-5304 (home office) https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Costs Of Mobile Data By Country
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 27 Jul '22

27 Jul '22

Report on a table compiled in the UK <https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/26/mobile_data_survey/>, on comparative mobile data costs in different countries, puts NZ at 210th place out of 233 countries surveyed. We are paying USD6.72 per gigabyte (NZD11.00), with entries lower down going to over USD40, while ones at the top go down to mere cents. Australia is paying about a tenth of what we are.

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Discovery of new UEFI rootkit exposes an ugly truth: The attacks are invisible to us
by Peter Reutemann 27 Jul '22

27 Jul '22

'Researchers have unpacked a major cybersecurity find—a malicious UEFI-based rootkit used in the wild since 2016 to ensure computers remained infected even if an operating system is reinstalled or a hard drive is completely replaced. The firmware compromises the UEFI, the low-level and highly opaque chain of firmware required to boot up nearly every modern computer. As the software that bridges a PC’s device firmware with its operating system, the UEFI—short for Unified Extensible Firmware Interface—is an OS in its own right. It’s located in an SPI-connected flash storage chip soldered onto the computer motherboard, making it difficult to inspect or patch the code. Because it’s the first thing to run when a computer is turned on, it influences the OS, security apps, and all other software that follows. On Monday, researchers from Kaspersky profiled CosmicStrand, the security firm’s name for a sophisticated UEFI rootkit that the company detected and obtained through its antivirus software. The find is among only a handful of such UEFI threats known to have been used in the wild. Until recently, researchers assumed that the technical demands required to develop UEFI malware of this caliber put it out of reach of most threat actors. Now, with Kaspersky attributing CosmicStrand to an unknown Chinese-speaking hacking group with possible ties to cryptominer malware, this type of malware may not be so rare after all. “The most striking aspect of this report is that this UEFI implant seems to have been used in the wild since the end of 2016—long before UEFI attacks started being publicly described,” Kaspersky researchers wrote. “This discovery begs a final question: If this is what the attackers were using back then, what are they using today?” While researchers from fellow security firm Qihoo360 reported on an earlier variant of the rootkit in 2017, Kaspersky and most other Western-based security firms didn’t take notice. Kaspersky’s newer research describes in detail how the rootkit—found in firmware images of some Gigabyte or Asus motherboards—is able to hijack the boot process of infected machines. The technical underpinnings attest to the sophistication of the malware.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/07/researchers-unpack-u… Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 (office) +64 (7) 577-5304 (home office) https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Fedora Sours On Creative Commons 'No Rights Reserved' License
by Peter Reutemann 27 Jul '22

27 Jul '22

'Fedora, the popular Linux distribution, will no longer incorporate software licensed under CC0, the Creative Commons "No Rights Reserved" license. In order to support the wide re-use of copyrighted content in new works, CC0 provides authors "a way to waive all their copyright and related rights in their works to the fullest extent allowed by law." The license arose in response to the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA), which extended the duration of copyright by 20 years at the expense of the public domain. But CC0 explicitly says the licensor does not waive patent rights, which for free and open source software (FOSS) is a potential problem. That means, for instance as described here, if you use CC0-licensed code in your project, and the author of that code later claims your project is infringing a patent they own regarding that code, your defense will be limited. Avoiding the use of CC0-licensed code is one way to steer clear of these so-called submarine patents that could years later torpedo you. In a message to The Fedora Project's mailing list for legal issues, Richard Fontana, a technology lawyer for Red Hat (which sponsors Fedora), explained that while CC0 is cited as a "good license," it won't be for much longer. "We plan to classify CC0 as allowed-content only, so that CC0 would no longer be allowed for code," said Fontana. "This is a fairly unusual change and may have an impact on a nontrivial number of Fedora packages (that is not clear to me right now), and we may grant a carveout for existing packages that include CC0-covered code." Fontana said there's a growing consensus in the FOSS community that licenses without any form of patent licensing or forbearance aren't suitable. CC0, he said, like other Creative Commons licenses, includes a clause that explicitly states no patent rights are waived by the licensor.' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/22/07/26/2028205 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 (office) +64 (7) 577-5304 (home office) https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Coding Mistake Made Intel GPUs 100X Slower in Ray Tracing
by Peter Reutemann 26 Jul '22

26 Jul '22

'Intel Linux GPU driver developers have released an update that results in a massive 100X boost in ray tracing performance. This is something to be celebrated, of course. However, on the flip side, the driver was 100X slower than it should have been because of a memory allocation oversight. Tom's Hardware reports: Linux-centric news site Phoronix reports that a fix merged into the open-source Intel Mesa Vulkan driver was implemented by Intel Linux graphics driver engineering stalwart Lionel Landwerlin on Thursday. The developer wryly commented that the merge request, which already landed in Mesa 22.2, would deliver "Like a 100x (not joking) improvement." Intel has been working on Vulkan raytracing support since late 2020, but this fix is better late than never. Usually, the Vulkan driver would ensure temporary memory used for Vulkan raytracing work would be in local memory, i.e., the very fast graphics memory onboard the discrete GPU. A line of code was missing, so this memory allocation housekeeping task wasn't set. Thus, the Vulkan driver would shift ray tracing data to slower offboard system memory and back. Think of the continued convoluted transfers to this slower memory taking place, slowing down the raytracing performance significantly. It turns out, as per our headline, that setting a flag for "ANV_BO_ALLOC_LOCAL_MEM" ensured that the VRAM would be used instead, and a 100X performance boost was the result. "Mesa 22.2, which includes the new code, is due to be branched in the coming days and will be included in a bundle of other driver refinements, which should reach end-users by the end of August," adds the report.' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/22/07/25/2316244 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 (office) +64 (7) 577-5304 (home office) https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Review: Framework’s next-gen Laptop follows through on its upgradeable promises
by Peter Reutemann 26 Jul '22

26 Jul '22

'It's one thing to say you're making a fully user-serviceable, upgradeable laptop. It's another thing to actually follow through with it. The original Framework Laptop we reviewed last year did a lot of things right. It's easy to open and work on, the ports can be swapped out to suit your needs, and it's sturdy and well-built enough to stand up to traditional, less-upgradeable-and-repairable ultrabooks like Dell's XPS 13 or Lenovo's ThinkPad X1 Carbon. But making "one surprisingly good laptop" isn't the same as creating a laptop ecosystem with upgradeable, interchangeable, user-serviceable parts. To do that, you need to keep up with new component releases. You need to address the shortcomings of your original design (or even release new revisions) without ending support for or breaking compatibility with previous versions of your design. And your small, independent company needs to continue to exist so it can keep getting all that work done, year after year, for a few years. I can't say what the next year or two will bring, but I can say that the second-generation Framework Laptop is still doing almost everything right. It's a lightly revised version of the original chassis designed around a 12th-generation Intel Core CPU rather than an 11th-gen version, and the motherboard exists as a drop-in upgrade for anyone who has already bought a Framework Laptop. The Framework Laptop does have problems, especially when it comes to battery life. But overall, it's a thoughtfully designed computer that treats do-it-yourselfers and PC builders like adults who can make their own decisions. There still isn't another laptop quite like it.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/07/review-frameworks-next-gen-laptop-f… Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 (office) +64 (7) 577-5304 (home office) https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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meeting on Monday
by Peter Reutemann 26 Jul '22

26 Jul '22

Hi everyone We have a meeting on Monday with the following topic: 'Open source software is always about choice. Whereas Windows users can't really do much about the desktop experience that gets dictated by Microsoft, Linux users can choose from a wide variety of desktop environments. Tonight, we will explore a range of these: MATE, Cinnamon, Gnome, KDE, LXDE, XFCE and maybe more. If your favorite environment is not listed, then please join in and demo it!' Details: https://www.meetup.com/waikatolinuxusersgroup/events/283776683/ Virtual meeting link: https://bbb2.nzoss.nz/b/pet-w7y-nxe-vxh Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 (office) +64 (7) 577-5304 (home office) https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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