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The Raspberry Pi 5 Gets an AI Upgrade
by Peter Reutemann 05 Jun '24

05 Jun '24

'Today, Raspberry Pi introduced a new kit that adds AI functionality to the Raspberry Pi 5. ZDNet reports: The Raspberry Pi AI kit combines an M.2-format Hailo 8L AI accelerator with the Raspberry Pi M.2 HAT+ to create a powerful yet power-efficient solution. The Hailo-8L NPU (Neural Processing Unit) chip, capable of 13 trillion operations per second (TOPS), is built into an M.2 2242 form factor module that attaches to the M.2 HAT+. When connected to a Raspberry Pi 5 board running the latest Raspberry Pi OS, the NPU is automatically available for AI computing tasks. The AI module also has direct access to the Raspberry Pi's camera software stack and works with both first-party and third-party cameras. The NPU allows the Raspberry Pi 5 to perform AI tasks such as object and facial recognition, human pose analysis, and more. Using an NPU frees up the Raspberry Pi 5's CPU, allowing it to focus on other tasks, making your projects more efficient and powerful. The Raspberry Pi AI kit is also compatible with the Raspberry Pi Active Cooler, ensuring optimal performance without overheating. Additionally, you can purchase a clear protective layer to prevent damage to the board, giving you peace of mind while working on your projects. The AI kit is priced at $70. It's available from Raspberry Pi Approved Resellers, including PiHut, PiShop.us, and CanaKit. ' -- source: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/24/06/04/2037238 Cheers, Peter

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CentOS 7’s Final Countdown: 30 Days Left Until Support Ends
by Peter Reutemann 04 Jun '24

04 Jun '24

'In just 30 days, we’ll witness the end of an era for Linux with the cessation of support for CentOS 7—the last supported version of this once-dominant server operating system still receiving updates. Let’s take a quick look back at its journey. Ten years ago, on July 7, 2014, CentOS 7 was released as a fully compatible fork of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7. Since its initial CentOS 2 version in 2004, the distribution has become extremely popular, establishing itself as the go-to server operating system over the last decade. After nine minor version updates, the latest being CentOS 7.9, in November 2020, Red Hat made a significant announcement. It marked the end of CentOS as a server operating system and transitioned it to CentOS Stream—a rolling release distro and upstream public development branch for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). To complicate things further, CentOS 8, expected to receive updates until 2029, was prematurely retired at the end of December 2021. This leaves only CentOS 7 as the only version to complete its entire maintenance period, which ends in just 30 days on June 30, 2024. So, consider this as a final reminder if you’re still using CentOS 7 and haven’t yet migrated your system. Time is running out, and here are some alternative options to switch to a RHEL-compatible and supported replacement.' -- source: https://linuxiac.com/centos-7-has-30-days-left-until-support-ends/ Cheers, Peter

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Fun With The du Command
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 29 May '24

29 May '24

Looking at the space taken up by my copy of the Blender source code: ldo(a)theon:projects> du -ks blender 1444272 blender Most of that is in the commit history: ldo(a)theon:projects> du -ks blender/.git 1139640 blender/.git So how much isn’t? ldo(a)theon:projects> du -ks blender/.git blender 1139640 blender/.git 304632 blender Do you see what happened there? If you specify a directory, and then its containing directory on the same command, du will subtract the usage of the former from the latter. This gives you an easy way of determining the space taken up by a directory, not including particular subdirectories. This can be broken down even more: ldo(a)theon:projects> du -ks blender/.git blender/extern blender/intern blender/source blender 1139640 blender/.git 40536 blender/extern 15712 blender/intern 105188 blender/source 143196 blender Here, “extern” is various open-source libraries from other sources, that have been copied into the Blender source tree, while “intern” is code that originated from Blender itself, that has been organized into its own libraries. And as you can see, there is still a whole bunch left in other subdirectories. Does this work recursively? ldo(a)theon:projects> du -ks blender/.git blender/intern/cycles blender/intern blender 1139640 blender/.git 8880 blender/intern/cycles 6832 blender/intern 288920 blender Yes it does. Here we can see that the Cycles renderer makes up a bit over half the contents of “intern”.

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datamash - basic numeric, textual and statistical operations
by Peter Reutemann 28 May '24

28 May '24

Hi everyone I quite often need to do some quick and dirty statistical calculations on the command-line and I typically use cat and sed to extract the data that I need from text files. In the past, I've then switched to LibreOffice Calc for some basic statistics like mean/stdev. Today, I finally spent a bit more time having a look around what else I can use directly on the command-line and came across the following that fits the bill perfectly: datamash - https://www.gnu.org/software/datamash/ With that tool, I can finally apply a single command-line to textual output for generating a quick mean/stdev: ... | datamash mean 1 sstdev 1 --header-out mean(field-1) sstdev(field-1) 577.62815533981 128.99238940453 Cheers, Peter

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Memory Sealing 'mseal' System Call Merged For Linux 6.10
by Peter Reutemann 27 May '24

27 May '24

'"Merged this Friday evening into the Linux 6.10 kernel is the new mseal() system call for memory sealing," reports Phoronix: The mseal system call was led by Jeff Xu of Google's Chrome team. The goal with memory sealing is to also protect the memory mapping itself against modification. The new mseal Linux documentation explains: "Modern CPUs support memory permissions such as RW and NX bits. The memory permission feature improves security stance on memory corruption bugs, i.e. the attacker can't just write to arbitrary memory and point the code to it, the memory has to be marked with X bit, or else an exception will happen. Memory sealing additionally protects the mapping itself against modifications. This is useful to mitigate memory corruption issues where a corrupted pointer is passed to a memory management system... Memory sealing can automatically be applied by the runtime loader to seal .text and .rodata pages and applications can additionally seal security-critical data at runtime. A similar feature already exists in the XNU kernel with the VM_FLAGS_PERMANENT flag and on OpenBSD with the mimmutable syscall." The mseal system call is designed to be used by the likes of the GNU C Library "glibc" while loading ELF executables to seal non-writable memory segments or by the Google Chrome web browser and other browsers for protecting security sensitive data structures.' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/24/05/26/2117251 Cheers, Peter

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Ubuntu 24.04 Now Runs on the Nintendo Switch (Unofficially)
by Peter Reutemann 27 May '24

27 May '24

'"The fact it's possible at all is a credit to the ingenuity of the open-source community," writes the blog OMG Ubuntu: Switchroot is an open-source project that allows Android and Linux-based distros like Ubuntu to run on the Nintendo Switch — absolutely not something Nintendo approves of much less supports, endorses, or encourages, etc! I covered the loophole that made this possible back in 2018. Back then the NVIDIA Tegra X1-powered Nintendo Switch was still new and Linux support for much of the console's internal hardware in a formative state (a polite way to say 'not everything worked'). But as the popularity of Nintendo's handheld console ballooned (to understate it) so the 'alternative OS' Switch scene grew, and before long Linux support for Switch hardware was in full bloom... A number of Linux for Switchroot (L4S) distributions have since been released, designated as Linux for Tegra (L4T) builds. As these can boot from a microSD card it's even possible to dualboot the Switch OS with Linux, which is neat! Recently, a fresh set of L4T Ubuntu images were released based on the newest Ubuntu 24.04 LTS release. These builds work on all Switch versions, from the OG (exploit-friendly) unit through to newer, patched models (where a modchip is required)... I'm told all of the Nintendo Switch internal hardware now works under Linux, including Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, sleep mode, accelerated graphics, the official dock... Everything, basically. And despite being a 7 year old ARM device the performance is said to remain decent. "Upstream snafus have delayed the release of builds with GNOME Shell..."' -- source: https://games.slashdot.org/story/24/05/26/035202 Cheers, Peter

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Disabling Google Search (Mis)Features
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 26 May '24

26 May '24

This article <https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/05/google-searchs-udm14-trick-lets-you…> explains how you can add an option to a Google search URL to turn off the new AI functionality. Another option lets you specify that you want a verbatim search on what you typed, rather than a “fuzzy” search. It also describes how you can configure your browser for more convenient invocation of these options.

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Sovereign Tech Fund Backs FFmpeg Project with a €157K Infusion
by Peter Reutemann 24 May '24

24 May '24

'Sovereign Tech Fund, a funding pot supported financially by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action, has once again shown itself to be one of Open Source’s great friends and supporters. After providing €1 million in financial support to GNOME at the end of last year and investing more than €200K in the GStreamer project earlier this year, the company is continuing its support for multimedia projects by funding FFmpeg. In light of this, last week, FFmpeg announced its first governmental sponsorship, Germany’s Sovereign Tech Fund, which has stepped forward to support the maintenance and sustainability of FFmpeg, a cornerstone software in the multimedia industry, by investing €157K in the project.' -- source: https://linuxiac.com/sovereign-tech-fund-backs-ffmpeg-project/ Cheers, Peter

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RISC-V Now Supports Rust In the Linux Kernel
by Peter Reutemann 24 May '24

24 May '24

'Michael Larabel reports via Phoronix: The latest RISC-V port updates have been merged for the in-development Linux 6.10 kernel. Most notable with today's RISC-V merge to Linux 6.10 is now supporting the Rust programming language within the Linux kernel. RISC-V joins the likes of x86_64, LoongArch, and ARM64 already supporting the use of the in-kernel Rust language support. The use of Rust within the mainline Linux kernel is still rather limited with just a few basic drivers so far and a lot of infrastructure work taking place, but there are a number of new drivers and other subsystem support on the horizon. RISC-V now supporting Rust within the Linux kernel will become more important moving forward. The RISC-V updates for Linux 6.10 also add byte/half-word compare-and-exchange, support for Zihintpause within hwprobe, a PR_RISCV_SET_ICACHE_FLUSH_CTX prctl(), and support for lockless lockrefs. More details on these RISC-V updates for Linux 6.10 via this Git merge. ' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/24/05/22/2337254 Cheers, Peter

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A Root-Server at the Internet's Core Lost Touch With Its Peers. We Still Don't Know Why.
by Peter Reutemann 24 May '24

24 May '24

'A server maintained by Cogent Communications, one of the 13 root servers crucial to the Internet's domain name system, fell out of sync with its peers for over four days due to an unexplained glitch. This issue, which could have caused worldwide stability and security problems, was resolved on Wednesday. The root servers store cryptographic keys necessary for authenticating intermediate servers under the DNSSEC mechanism. Inconsistencies in these keys across the 13 servers could lead to an increased risk of attacks such as DNS cache poisoning. Engineers postponed planned updates to the .gov and .int domain name servers' DNSSEC to use ECDSA cryptographic keys until the situation stabilized. Cogent stated that it became aware of the issue on Tuesday and resolved it within 25 hours. ArsTechnica, which has a great writeup about the incident, adds: Initially, some people speculated that the depeering of Tata Communications, the c-root site outage, and the update errors to the c-root itself were all connected somehow. Given the vagueness of the statement, the relation of those events still isn't entirely clear.' -- source: https://it.slashdot.org/story/24/05/23/1745246 Cheers, Peter

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