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Just about every Windows and Linux device vulnerable to new LogoFAIL firmware attack
by Peter Reutemann 07 Dec '23

07 Dec '23

'Hundreds of Windows and Linux computer models from virtually all hardware makers are vulnerable to a new attack that executes malicious firmware early in the boot-up sequence, a feat that allows infections that are nearly impossible to detect or remove using current defense mechanisms. The attack—dubbed LogoFAIL by the researchers who devised it—is notable for the relative ease in carrying it out, the breadth of both consumer- and enterprise-grade models that are susceptible, and the high level of control it gains over them. In many cases, LogoFAIL can be remotely executed in post-exploit situations using techniques that can’t be spotted by traditional endpoint security products. And because exploits run during the earliest stages of the boot process, they are able to bypass a host of defenses, including the industry-wide Secure Boot, Intel’s Secure Boot, and similar protections from other companies that are devised to prevent so-called bootkit infections. LogoFAIL is a constellation of two dozen newly discovered vulnerabilities that have lurked for years, if not decades, in Unified Extensible Firmware Interfaces responsible for booting modern devices that run Windows or Linux. The vulnerabilities are the product of almost a year’s worth of work by Binarly, a firm that helps customers identify and secure vulnerable firmware. The vulnerabilities are the subject of a coordinated mass disclosure released Wednesday. The participating companies comprise nearly the entirety of the x64 and ARM CPU ecosystem, starting with UEFI suppliers AMI, Insyde, and Phoenix (sometimes still called IBVs or independent BIOS vendors); device manufacturers such as Lenovo, Dell, and HP; and the makers of the CPUs that go inside the devices, usually Intel, AMD or designers of ARM CPUs. The researchers unveiled the attack on Wednesday at the Black Hat Security Conference in London. The affected parties are releasing advisories that disclose which of their products are vulnerable and where to obtain security patches. Links to advisories and a list of vulnerability designations appears at the end of this article. [...] LogoFAIL vulnerabilities are tracked under the following designations: - CVE-2023-5058 - CVE-2023-39538 - CVE-2023-39539 - CVE-2023-40238' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/security/2023/12/just-about-every-windows-and-linux… Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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“Ready, Fire! Aim.”
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 07 Dec '23

07 Dec '23

NASA’s OSIRIS REx mission successfully returned a sample to Earth from the asteroid Bennu back in September, three years after it was collected. However, it could so easily have gone wrong, due to a little oopsie, according to <https://arstechnica.com/space/2023/12/nasas-asteroid-mission-struck-its-tar…>. What was supposed to happen was, at an altitude of 100,000 feet, the return capsule should have deployed its drogue chute. Then, five minutes later, the cord for this chute would be cut, allowing the main chute to unfurl, after the drogue had done its part in slowing down the capsule descent. Instead, due to a case of (literal) crossed wires, the signal sent at 100,000 feet triggered the cutting (intead of the deployment) of the drogue chute cord, while it was still packed inside the capsule. Then, at 9,000 feet, the release of the main chute caused the drogue chute to pop out first, and immediately fall away. Luckily, there was sufficient margin in the design of the main chute that it was able to cope with the higher descent speed, and bring the capsule down to a safe landing even with this complete failure of the drogue chute. And it was all down to insufficiently clear assembly instructions: "In the design plans for the system, the word 'main' was used inconsistently between the device that sends the electric signals, and the device that receives the signals," NASA said in a written statement. "On the signal side, 'main' meant the main parachute. In contrast, on the receiver side 'main' was used as a reference to a pyrotechnic that fires to release the parachute canister cover and deploy the drogue. "Engineers connected the two mains, causing the parachute deployment actions to occur out of order," NASA said. See, it’s not just software (and hardware) that needs debugging; documentation does, too.

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Veteran Editors Notepad++ and Geany Hit Milestone Versions
by Peter Reutemann 07 Dec '23

07 Dec '23

'Liam Proven reports via The Register: One of the best FOSS text editors for Windows, Notepad++, is turning 20, while cross platform Geany just hit version 2.0 as it turns 18 years old. Notepad++'s version 8.6 is the twentieth anniversary release of one of the go-to FOSS text editors for Windows. [...] If you use an Arm-powered Windows machine, such as the ThinkPad X13S, there is now a native Arm64 version. It still supports x86-32 as well, and there are portable versions which work without being installed locally -- handy if you don't have admin rights. There is even a usefully recent version for Windows XP if you are still using that geriatric OS. This release adds multi-select, allowing you to manipulate multiple instances of the same text at once, which looks confusing but very powerful. It is a staple on all of the Reg FOSS desk's Windows partitions, thanks to its inclusion in the essential Windows post-install setup tool Ninite. Ninite will install -- and update -- a whole swath of FOSS and freeware tools for Windows, making setup of a new machine doable in just a couple of clicks. And if you keep the Ninite installer file around, you can re-run it later and it will update everything it installed first time around. Ninite does offer other programmers' editors, such as Eclipse and Microsoft Visual Studio Code -- but they are behemoths by comparison. VSCode is implemented as an Electron app, meaning that it's huge, embeds an entire copy of Chromium, and scoffs RAM like it's going out of fashion. Notepad++ is a native Win32 app, making it tiny and fast: the download is less than 5MB, one twentieth the size of VSCode. Sluggish, bloated editors are not just a problem on Windows. Gargantuan Electron apps are distressingly prevalent on Linux and macOS as well. This vulture is guilty of using some, and even recommending them -- because some of them can do things that nothing else can. That's not true in the case of plain text editors, though. You don't have to put up with apps that take a good fraction of a gigabyte for this. Geany is a good example. It straddles the line between a text editor and an IDE: it can manage multi-project files, automatically call out to compilers and suchlike, and parse their output to highlight errors. We last mentioned it nearly a decade ago but the project recently reached voting age -- at least for humans -- and after this milestone in maturity its developers called the latest release version 2.0. It has better support for dark mode, a new tree view in its sidebar, adds a bunch of new supported file types, and can detect if the user changes the type of a file and re-do its syntax highlighting to match. ' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/23/12/06/2153200 Yes, Notepad++ and 7zip are usually the first things I install on Windows boxes, to get something more usable than the built-in tools. Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Developers Trust AI-Written Code Too Much
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 06 Dec '23

06 Dec '23

Some worrying results from a survey <https://devclass.com/2023/12/05/ai-assistants-write-insecure-code-that-huma…> of the increasing use of AI-generated program code. The survey references a study ... from late last year which looked at “how developers choose to interact with AI code assistants and the ways in which those interactions cause security mistakes,” though the study was limited to university students. There are some shocks here, including the willingness of the AI assistant to generate SQL “that built the query string via string concatenation,” a sure route to SQL injection vulnerabilities. And also a very common feature in code written by PHP developers. Perhaps that kind of code figured very prominently in the training sets for these AIs? Also note this: A key problem is that human intuition seems inclined to trust AI engines more than their known limitations merit. It is known that generative AI is not reliable; yet a lifetime of learning that computers are more logical than humans is hard to overcome. Surely this is just the stereotypical, simplistic Hollywood movie/TV view of computers? Can people in the real world be that dumb? Those of us with experience of computers realize that “more logical than humans” merely means “being able to follow longer logical inference chains than humans”. But if the assumptions the computer is starting from are wrong, the inferences it draws are going to be just as wrong: “Garbage In, Garbage Out” as the old saying goes. And bugs in the algorithms for following those inference chains (e.g. incorrect coding of calculation formulas) just make things worse.

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Firefox On the Brink?
by Peter Reutemann 06 Dec '23

06 Dec '23

'An anonymous reader shares a report: A somewhat obscure guideline for developers of U.S. government websites may be about to accelerate the long, sad decline of Mozilla's Firefox browser. There already are plenty of large entities, both public and private, whose websites lack proper support for Firefox; and that will get only worse in the near future, because the 'fox's auburn paws are perilously close to the lip of the proverbial slippery slope. The U.S. Web Design System (USWDS) provides a comprehensive set of standards which guide those who build the U.S. government's many websites. Its documentation for developers borrows a "2% rule" from its British counterpart: "... we officially support any browser above 2% usage as observed by analytics.usa.gov." (Firefox's market share was 2.2%, per the traffic for the previous ninety days.) [...] "So what?" you may wonder. "That's just for web developers in the U.S. government. It doesn't affect any other web devs." Actually, it very well could. Here's how I envision the dominoes falling: 1. Once Firefox slips below the 2% threshold in the government's visitor analytics, USWDS tells government web devs they don't have to support Firefox anymore. 2. When that word gets out, it spreads quickly to not only the front-end dev community but also the corporate IT departments for whom some web devs work. Many corporations do a lot of business with the government and, thus, whatever the government does from an IT standpoint is going to influence what corporations do. 3. Corporations see this change as an opportunity to lower dev costs and delivery times, in that it provides an excuse to remove some testing (and, in rare cases, specific coding) from their development workflow.' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/23/12/05/0745251 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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OpenZFS Fixes Data Corruption Issue
by Peter Reutemann 05 Dec '23

05 Dec '23

'A pull request has been merged to fix a data corruption issue in OpenZFS (the open-source implementation of the ZFS file system and volume manager). "OpenZFS 2.2.2 and 2.1.14 released with fix in place," reports a Thursday comment on GitHub. Earlier this week, jd (Slashdot reader #1,658) wrote: All versions of OpenZFS 2.2 suffer from a defect that can corrupt the data. Attempts to mitigate the bug have reduced the likelihood of it occurring, but so far nobody has been able to pinpoint what is going wrong or why. Phoronix reported on Monday: Over the US holiday weekend it became more clear that this OpenZFS data corruption bug isn't isolated to just the v2.2 release — older versions are also susceptible — and that v2.2.1 is still prone to possible data corruption. The good news at least is that data corruption in real-world scenarios is believed to be limited but with some scripting help the corruption can be reproduced. It's also now believed that the OpenZFS 2.2 block cloning feature just makes encountering the problem more likely. ' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/23/12/03/0134224 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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RHEL 10 Plans To Drop X.Org Server Except For XWayland
by Peter Reutemann 01 Dec '23

01 Dec '23

'"Red Hat is going to do away with the X.Org server and support Wayland and XWayland for apps that currently (or only) run on X11," writes Slashdot reader motang. Red Hat's Carlos Soriano Sanchez confirmed on the Red Hat blog: "The result of this evaluation is that, while there are still some gaps and applications that need some level of adaptation, we believe the Wayland infrastructure and ecosystem are in good shape, and that we're on a good path for the identified blockers to be resolved by the time RHEL 10 is out, planned to be released on the first half of 2025. With this, we've decided to remove Xorg server and other X servers (except Xwayland) from RHEL 10 and the following releases. Xwayland should be able to handle most X11 clients that won't immediately be ported to Wayland, and if needed, our customers will be able to stay on RHEL 9 for its full life cycle while resolving the specifics needed for transitioning to a Wayland ecosystem. It's important to note that "Xorg Server" and "X11" are not synonymous, X11 is a protocol that will continue to be supported through Xwayland, while the Xorg Server is one of the implementations of the X11 protocol. [...] This decision will allow us to focus our efforts starting from RHEL 10 solely on a modern stack and ecosystem. This means we will be able to tackle problems such as HDR, increased security, setups with mixed low and high density displays or very high density displays, better GPU/Display hot-plugging, better gestures and scrolling, and so on. We are confident that Wayland will provide a solid platform and we're excited to work with the community and all of our partners and customers on building the future for Linux." ' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/23/11/29/0559207 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Don Hopkins Blog
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 30 Nov '23

30 Nov '23

Following some random link (as you do) left me ending up at a collection of postings on Medium <https://donhopkins.medium.com/> by one Don Hopkins. His brief bio on that page starts “User interface flower child”, and his personal network includes such luminaries as Alan Kay and bright sparks at Sun Microsystems and elsewhere. (You can tell from those names that he’s been around a while.) Here <https://donhopkins.medium.com/alan-kay-on-should-web-browsers-have-stuck-to…> is an example of the kind of freewheeling discussion he and his mates get into, over the connections between web browsers, the PostScript printing language, Apple’s old HyperCard and AppleScript technologies, Xerox PARC, SimCity (!) and other fun stuff. Including some concepts that might have been, but never were.

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ownCloud vulnerability with maximum 10 severity score comes under “mass” exploitation
by Peter Reutemann 30 Nov '23

30 Nov '23

'Security researchers are tracking what they say is the “mass exploitation” of a security vulnerability that makes it possible to take full control of servers running ownCloud, a widely used open source file-sharing server app. The vulnerability, which carries the maximum severity rating of 10, makes it possible to obtain passwords and cryptographic keys allowing administrative control of a vulnerable server by sending a simple Web request to a static URL, ownCloud officials warned last week. Within four days of the November 21 disclosure, researchers at security firm Greynoise said, they began observing “mass exploitation” in their honeypot servers, which masqueraded as vulnerable ownCloud servers to track attempts to exploit the vulnerability. The number of IP addresses sending the web requests has slowly risen since then. At the time this post went live on Ars, it had reached 13. “We're seeing hits to the specific endpoint that exposes sensitive information, which would be considered exploitation,” Glenn Thorpe, senior director of security research & detection engineering at Greynoise, said in an interview on Mastodon. “At the moment, we've seen 13 IPs that are hitting our unadvertised sensors, which indicates that they are pretty much spraying it across the internet to see what hits.” CVE-2023-49103 resides in versions 0.2.0 and 0.3.0 of graphapi, an app that runs in some ownCloud deployments, depending on the way they’re configured. A third-party code library used by the app provides a URL that, when accessed, reveals configuration details from the PHP-based environment. In last week’s disclosure, ownCloud officials said that in containerized configurations—such as those using the Docker virtualization tool—the URL can reveal data used to log in to the vulnerable server. The officials went on to warn that simply disabling the app in such cases wasn’t sufficient to lock down a vulnerable server.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/security/2023/11/owncloud-vulnerability-with-a-maxi… Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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FFmpeg 6.1 “Heaviside”
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 29 Nov '23

29 Nov '23

Seems there is another numbered-version release of FFmpeg <https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/24/ffmpeg_6_1/>. I didn’t even notice: I did a fresh build a few days ago, and I fetch my upstream from <git://source.ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg>, and it appears that repo now actually points to <http://git.videolan.org/?p=ffmpeg.git>. And I just build whatever happens to be at the head of the master branch at the time. This FFmpeg version is named “Heaviside”, after Oliver Heaviside, a major figure in the whole 19th-century ferment over electromagnetic theory, Maxwell’s equations, the development of the associated mathematical techniques of vector analysis, quaternions and all that jazz. If you are interested, here <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M12CJIuX8D4> is an entertaining exposition on the very human figures involved in these developments, from a presenter who combines an enthusiasm for the subject with the patience to dig up a remarkable amount of detail (including personal foibles, naturally) about what went on. Why build FFmpeg yourself? Because then you can enable combinations of options that are not legally allowed in any prebuilt binary package. For example, you can have both “--enable-gpl” and “--enable-nonfree”, and end up with a build that is marked “unredistributable”. FFmpeg is both a set of command-line tools, and a set of libraries underlying them, that can also be built into other custom applications. For those intimidated by the truly breathtaking array of options in the command-line tools, there are GUI front-ends to make the functionality more approachable. I hear HandBrake is quite popular. Though I was disappointed to discover that, instead of being a simple GUI wrapper around the command-line tools, it builds its own application directly around the libraries. The downsides of this are that it limits the functionality it can make available, and also makes it harder to keep up with changes to that functionality.

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Roll On The ARM-Based Supers
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 29 Nov '23

29 Nov '23

Report on the status of ARM-based supercomputing <https://www.nextplatform.com/2023/11/28/hpc-pioneers-pave-the-way-for-a-flo…>. The Fugaku machine was top of the Top500 list from June 2020 to November 2021, which was a pretty decent run. That Fujitsu A64FX chip also powers other supers on the list. But now more entrants are on the way. In terms of user experience, the article reports quite a mixed bag. Some apps are yet to be tuned to wring maximum performance out of ARM hardware, while others build and run nicely without any drama at all. And of course, at some point we should see the first RISC-V machine(s) enter the list.

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MyACC Offline After “Fraudulent Activity”
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 29 Nov '23

29 Nov '23

ACC’s self-service web portal for accident victims has been temporarily taken down after “apparent fraudulent access” <https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/myacc-offline-after-fraudulent-activity…>. Here’s hoping it’s not yet another mass compromise of user data ...

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OpenZFS Data-Corruption Bug
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 29 Nov '23

29 Nov '23

Seems OpenZFS has a problem which, under rare conditions, can turn parts of your data into rubbish <https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/27/openzfs_2_2_0_data_corruption/>. Initially it was thought this bug was introduced in version 2.2.0, but now there is some indication that it goes back much earlier. It certainly seems difficult to reproduce, and at least one commenter on the article is saying not to worry about it, it’s not going to affect most “traditional” users (whatever that means). It seems the issue does date back to after Oracle closed the source on the original ZFS project and made it proprietary again. Open-source ZFS has long been a controversial issue. Linus Torvalds is not impressed with its performance, for example <https://list.waikato.ac.nz/archives/list/wlug(a)list.waikato.ac.nz/thread/C…>. Also, many have said that the licence it uses, the CDDL, is deliberately designed to be incompatible with the GPL used by the Linux kernel and many other projects. Ubuntu seem to disagree, and are happy to include OpenZFS with their Linux distro. Interestingly, Oracle also offer a Linux distro. And they have never offered ZFS with that, even though there is clearly demand for such a feature. Some interpret this as a tacit admission that the licence _is_ indeed GPL-incompatible. Because if Oracle bundled CDDL-licensed software with that made available under the GPL, then under the terms of the latter, they also give permission to anybody else to do the same. The implication is, they don’t want to do that.

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PHP 8.0 End of Life Is Today, November 26, 2023
by Peter Reutemann 27 Nov '23

27 Nov '23

'Slashdot reader sysadminafterdark writes: Released on November 26, 2020, PHP 8 brought many optimizations and powerful features to the language.Fast forward to today, and PHP 8 is getting the boot in favor of 8.1, 8.2, and 8.3 with 8.4 in development. This leaves some websites at risk of breaking and potential security issues. Hearing of this news, I upgraded my own blog and wrote an article on how to add the Remi repository and update. I run Enterprise Linux (The best distro out there) so if you are standing up new boxes, just keep in mind the PHP in the repo is deprecated.' -- source: https://developers.slashdot.org/story/23/11/26/1826247 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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util-linux Collection
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 26 Nov '23

26 Nov '23

I was looking at the source repository for the util-linux package <https://github.com/util-linux/util-linux>, and discovered that the collection of tools is larger than I thought. There are also a few items listed that aren’t (yet?) in the installed package on my Debian Unstable system. For example, I recently discovered that the “mount” command not only does mounting and unmounting of volumes, but without any options it will also output a list of all current mounts, and this can be done by nonprivileged users. But util-linux includes a more powerful command for this purpose called “findmnt”, which includes more elaborate options for obtaining information about mounted filesystems, including monitoring changes to them. In that repo, I also found “lsfd”, which is meant to be a replacement for “lsof” that takes advantage of newer capabilities specific to the Linux kernel. Also there is “lsns”, which displays information about namespaces. Firefox, in particular, seems to use a whole lot of these, presumably as part of its mechanisms for isolating its processes from each other. This is in addition to other useful ones like “lscpu”, “lspci” “lsusb”, “lsmem”, “lsblk”, “lslocks” and “lsirq”. Interesting that quite a few of these commands support JSON output format. If you don’t want to go this far, you can explicitly specify which columns are included in the output; this is recommended if you want to parse the output in scripts, instead of relying on the default output format not changing. And yes, I have seen some over-elaborate scripts that went to a whole lot of trouble to extract the information they needed from some command, instead of using options in the command to output that information directly.

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Microsoft Windows And The “USB Cart Of Death”
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 26 Nov '23

26 Nov '23

For all Microsoft’s efforts, it seems Windows and USB have never sat entirely easily together. Here <https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/25/windows_usb_cart_of_death/> is a story from the early days, of how QA people (remember when Microsoft had QA people?) would torment kernel developers by wheeling in a cart laden with USB devices, all daisy-chained together, plugging them in to the test machine, pulling the plug out again, and watching the resulting crash. "The goal," said Chen, "was to get it to the point where you could plug in the USB Cart of Death and unplug it anytime you wanted, and everything would still work... and I think they made it." Note that “I think”. I suppose things are better nowadays, somewhat. I remember when I was starting to learn Android development, I was bemused to discover that Windows required a special USB driver in order to allow live debugging on a connected Android device. This was not necessary on any other platform--their built-in USB support was quite sufficient. And wouldn’t you know it, that limitation still applies to current versions of Windows <https://developer.android.com/studio/run/win-usb>.

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Microsoft’s “Project Silica”: Glass-Based Archival Storage
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 24 Nov '23

24 Nov '23

A group at Microsoft is researching the potential of being able to store data in slabs of quartz glass, at densities comparable to hard drives or even higher <https://blocksandfiles.com/2023/11/22/microsoft-silica-glass-based-storage/>. The data is encoded optically in the glass, using femtosecond laser pulses. There can be hundreds of layers of data within a single block of glass. However, reading back the data involves processing scanned images of the glass layers through a “machine learning algorithm”. This can take some time. That means verification of a backup you just did is going to be just as slow.

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Firefox 120 Ready With Global Privacy Control, WebAssembly GC On By Default
by Peter Reutemann 24 Nov '23

24 Nov '23

'Firefox 120 will be available tomorrow, bringing support for the Global Privacy Control "Sec-GPC" request header to indicate whether a user consents to a website or service selling or sharing their personal information with third parties. It's also enabling the WebAssembly GC extension by default, opening up new languages like Dart and Kotlin to run in the browser. Phoronix's Michael Larabel highlights some of the other features included in this release: - Ubuntu Linux users now have the ability to import data from Chromium when both are installed as Snap packages. - Picture-in-Picture mode now supports corner snapping on Windows and Linux. - Support for the light-dark() CSS color function that allows setting of colors for both light and dark without needing to use the prefers-color-scheme media feature. This allows conveniently specifying the preferred light color theme value followed by the dark color theme value. - CSS support for the lh and rlh line height units. ' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/23/11/20/2132231 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Ditching an IDE for hacking on Inkscape
by Ben Cottrell 23 Nov '23

23 Nov '23

I’ve acquainted myself with many IDE’s: Visual Studio, Qt Creator, CLion, and I’ve found it counter-productive to reconfigure projects and/or build environments within an IDE. Instead, I can use nvim, the MSYS MINGW x64 shell and environment (I use OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, but I have the misfortune of choosing an NVIDIA GPU, so, GNU/Windows is my mainstay). I don’t mind IDE’s if the project can be well defined within a ‘solution’ file, but even so, with Visual Studio, you may have to go through many config windows to pass the correct build flags. Other IDE’s like Qt Creator are pretty similar where you have to recreate config cache files for minor build setting changes. I feel better to forgo the latter in favour of text editors, like Notepad++ or NeoVim, even if you lose autocomplete and fancy highlighting and a nice GUI inspectors for piece-wise debugging. Building and hacking on Inkscape is going easier this way. Do you use an IDE often, or do you prefer using a special emacs setup or something similar, please share 😊 Cheers, Ben

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Itanium Is Done--Stick A Fork In It
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 22 Nov '23

22 Nov '23

Looks like Itanium support is finally well and truly being dropped from the Linux kernel <https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/21/saving_linux_on_itanium/>. I think Linus has done the right thing, by challenging the complainers to put their money where their mouth is: if they can take up the job of keeping patches up-to-date outside the mainline kernel for a year, he will look at bringing it back in again. But he doesn’t believe that will happen. I can remember in the early days of Itanium, an Intel executive said that Linux was the first OS they got going on the new architecture. And now it is the last one to abandon ship. (Microsoft gave up a long time ago.) What I find difficulty in believing is that anybody would have continued using such machines in business-essential roles, once it became clear they had no future. Every time this sort of thing comes up in a discussion, I ask: would you entrust mission-critical business functions to obsolete, unsupported hardware/software?

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FreeBSD 14 Released
by Peter Reutemann 22 Nov '23

22 Nov '23

'FreeBSD 14 has been officially released. You can get it from FreeBSD.org, or via freebsd-update and source update methods for existing systems. Some highlights: - OpenSSH version 9.5p1 - OpenSSL version 3.0.12, a major upgrade from OpenSSL 1.1.1t in FreeBSD 13.2 - OpenZFS release 2.2 - The bhyve hypervisor now supports TPM and GPU passthrough This version will now create user home directories in /home by default, instead of the traditional /usr/home. More information on the release and changes can be found via the release announcement page. ' -- source: https://bsd.slashdot.org/story/23/11/21/0512225 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Can AI Be Used to Fine-Tune Linux Kernel Performance?
by Peter Reutemann 21 Nov '23

21 Nov '23

'ZDNet: At the Linux Plumbers Conference, the invite-only meeting for the top Linux kernel developers, ByteDance Linux Kernel Engineer Cong Wang, proposed that we use AI and machine learning to tune the Linux kernel for the maximum results for specific workloads... There are thousands of parameters. Even for a Linux expert, tuning them for optimal performance is a long, hard job. And, of course, different workloads require different tunings for different sets of Linux kernel parameters... What ByteDance is working on is a first attempt to automate the entire Linux kernel parameter tuning process with minimal engineering efforts. Specifically, ByteDance is working on tuning Linux memory management. ByteDance has found that with machine learning algorithms, such as Bayesian optimization, automated tuning could even beat most Linux kernel engineers. Why? Well, the idea, as Wang wryly put it, "is not to put Linux kernel engineers out of business." No, the goal is "to liberate human engineers from tuning performance for each individual workload. While making better decisions with historical data, which humans often struggle with. And, last, but never least, find better solutions than those we come up with using our current trial and error, heuristic methods. In short, ByteDance's system optimizes resource usage by making real-time adjustments to things like CPU frequency scaling and memory management.' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/23/11/20/0153201 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Linux Foundation Announces Intent to Form 'High Performance Software Foundation'
by Peter Reutemann 20 Nov '23

20 Nov '23

'This week the Linux Foundation "announced the intention to form the High Performance Software Foundation. "Through a series of technical projects, the High Performance Software Foundation aims to build, promote, and advance a portable software stack for high performance computing by increasing adoption, lowering barriers to contribution, and supporting development efforts." As use of high performance computing becomes ubiquitous in scientific computing and digital engineering, and AI use cases multiply, more and more data centers deploy GPUs and other compute accelerators. The High Performance Software Foundation intends to leverage investments made by the United States Department of Energy's Exascale Computing Project, the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking, and other international projects in accelerated high performance computing to exploit the performance of this diversifying set of architectures. As an umbrella project under the Linux Foundation, HPSF intends to provide a neutral space for pivotal projects in the high performance software ecosystem, enabling industry, academia, and government entities to collaborate together on the scientific software stack. The High Performance Software Foundation already benefits from strong support across the high performance computing landscape, including leading companies and organizations like Amazon Web Services, Argonne National Laboratory, CEA, CIQ, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Intel, Kitware, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, NVIDIA, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratory, and the University of Oregon. Its first open source technical projects include: - Spack: the high performance computing package manager - Kokkos: a performance-portable programming model for writing modern C++ applications in a hardware-agnostic way. - AMReX: a performance-portable software framework designed to accelerate solving partial differential equations on block-structured, adaptively refined meshes. - WarpX: a performance-portable Particle-in-Cell code with advanced algorithms that won the 2022 Gordon Bell Prize - Trilinos: a collection of reusable scientific software libraries, known in particular for linear, non-linear, and transient solvers, as well as optimization and uncertainty quantification. - Apptainer: a container system and image format specifically designed for secure high-performance computing. - VTK-m: a toolkit of scientific visualization algorithms for accelerator architectures. - HPCToolkit: performance measurement and analysis tools for computers ranging from laptops to the world's largest GPU-accelerated supercomputers. - E4S: the Extreme-scale Scientific Software Stack - Charliecloud: high performance computing-tailored, lightweight, fully unprivileged container implementation.' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/23/11/19/1920250 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

Governments turn to Open Source for sovereignty
by Peter Reutemann 20 Nov '23

20 Nov '23

Came across this news item on my Mastodon feed: 'The German government has launched a new Open Source software project called openDesk, which aims to reduce the country’s dependency on proprietary software vendors and support transparency and interoperability. openDesk is a collection of Open Source software modules that are important for day-to-day work in the public sector, such as text creation, file collaboration, project management, email, calendar and messaging. While the initial focus is on public administration in Germany, The source code is publicly available on a government-provided GitLab called openCoDE, making it available, free of charge, for use by other organizations, industries and geographical location. Discussions are taking place with other European countries; France and Austria in particular have already expressed interest. Commissioned by the German Federal Ministry of the Interior and Home Affairs (BMI), under the project leadership of a newly created Center for Digital Sovereignty, ZenDiS.' -- source: https://mastodon.social/@janvlug/111438616208935401 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

2 1

Rust in Linux: Maturing with Support from Cisco, Samsung, Canonical
by Peter Reutemann 20 Nov '23

20 Nov '23

'ZDNet shares on update on "Rust in Linux: Where we are and where we're going next," citing a talk at the Linux Plumbers Conference in Richmond, Virginia by Linux/Rust developer Miguel Ojeda: In brief, Rust Linux is continuing to mature and is getting strong support from developers and vendors, such as Cisco, Samsung, and Canonical... Rust is taking the steps it needs to become — along with C — a fully-fledged member of the Linux language toolchain... That's not to say that we're ready to retire C for Rust just yet. In fact, that day is unlikely ever to come. But Rust is definitely on its way to becoming an important language for Linux development... As for the day-to-day work that's required to make Rust fully integrated with Linux, the "official" website of the initiative is now the self-explanatory Rust for Linux. This site is your one-stop source for all things Rust on Linux... However, the move forward has not been straightforward. Rust on Linux developers have discovered some problems along the way. For example, while deadlocks, when two or more threads are waiting on the other to finish, are safe in Rust, because they don't result in undefined behavior, they're not safe in the Linux kernel. The programmers are working on fixing this issue... A related issue is that there's growing interest in backporting Rust support into long-term support (LTS) versions of Linux, specifically 5.15 and 6.1. Some people are especially showing interest in the super LTS Linux 6.1 kernel. However, Linux doesn't generally allow backports into LTS Linuxes. So, if you really, really want fully featured Rust support in an older LTS kernel, you're going to need to pay for it in one way or the other. Another general rule that Rust developers have decided they're going to try to "break" is the rule against duplicate drivers. Usually, no one wants anyone wasting time reinventing the wheel, but some maintainers are open to the idea of experimenting with Rust, by starting simple with a driver they're already familiar with... These movements are small steps forward, but they're all critical for making Rust equal to C as a Linux programming language.' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/23/11/18/012228 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

Raspberry Pi OS, elementary OS Will Default to Wayland
by Peter Reutemann 20 Nov '23

20 Nov '23

'Recently the Register pointed out that the new (Debian-based) Raspberry Pi OS 5.0 has "a completely new Wayland desktop environment replacing PIXEL, the older desktop based on LXDE and X.org, augmented with Mutter in its previous release." And when elementary OS 8 finally arrives, "the development team plans to finally shift to the Wayland display server by default," reports Linux magazine (adding "If you'd like to get early access to daily builds, you can do so by becoming an elementary OS sponsor on GitHub.") "This is a transition that we have been planning and working towards for several years," writes CEO/co-founder Danielle Foré, "and we're finally in the home stretch... Wayland will bring us improved performance, better app security, and opens the doors to support more complex display setups like mixed DPI multi-monitor setups." There are other things that we're experimenting with, like the possibility of an immutable OS, and there are more mundane things that will certainly happen like shipping Pipewire. You'll also see on the project board that we're looking to replace the onscreen keyboard and it's time to re-evaluate some things like SystemD Boot. You can expect lots more little features to be detailed over the coming months. Meanwhile, Linux Mint is getting "experimental" Wayland support next month. And also in December, Firefox will let Wayland support be enabled by default. And last month the Register noted a merge request for GNOME to remove the gnome-xorg.desktop file. "To put this in context, the Fedora project is considering a comparable change: removing or hiding the GNOME on X.org session from the login menu, which is already the plan for the Fedora KDE spin when it moves to KDE version 6, which is still in development."' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/23/11/18/039221 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

The FSF Condemns Unauthorized Derivatives of GNU Licenses
by Peter Reutemann 20 Nov '23

20 Nov '23

'The Free Sofware Foundation issued a clarifying blog post this week, saying the organization is "pleased when people use GNU licenses to distribute and license software." But "we condemn the use of unauthorized, confusing derivatives of the licenses." Unfortunately, some authors engage in confusing practices by drafting licenses using existing terms and conditions of GNU free software licenses, without the intention of granting all four freedoms to users. For example, we have long seen attempts to add restrictions to the license text itself, placed in the LICENSE file, or included elsewhere in the program's release. An example is the so-called "Commons Clause," which, when applied to a free software license, affirms that the program is covered by the license. But, at the same time, is contradicting in its meaning by asserting that selling copies of the program or implementing a commercial service with the program is prohibited. The immediate consequence of the practice of inserting a restriction into a GNU license in this way is the confusion it causes for the community. Users still see the name of the original license, with its preamble and terms and conditions intact, transmitting a strong message that the purpose of the license is to enable users — grant users — their essential software freedoms. This message is clear from the license's text, and is bolstered from the renown accrued by the FSF and GNU trademarks, and their decades of free software advocacy. At the same time, these same users see a contradictory statement of the "Commons Clause," which is clearly contrary to the sprit of the free software movement and the Free Software Definition... [T]o make it even clearer that added restrictions are incompatible with our license, we gave users the right to delete such added restrictions [in 2007] and preserve the program's freedom. But we at the FSF have another legal tool against attempts to release programs under GNU General Public Licenses that have been wrongly altered to become nonfree licenses. The FSF holds copyrights and common law trademarks to the GNU family of General Public Licenses. Moreover, the FSF holds registered trademarks for "FSF," "Free Software Foundation," and "GNU." [...] We can't control the drafting by others of proprietary software licenses, but we can and do forbid doing this in a way that misleadingly associates those licenses with GNU or GNU licenses... [W]e are entitled to legally enforce our copyright and trademark for FSF licenses that have been altered by added restrictions to a verbatim GNU license... Licenses that confuse users about the freedoms they grant are damaging to the free software movement because they threaten to dilute the value and power of these licenses. When GNU licenses are misused through such confusing practices, it harms the renown accrued by the GNU project and the FSF over decades of free software advocacy. It is our duty to all computer users to stop these practices, and, if necessary, we will use our legal rights to this end. ' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/23/11/19/1826218 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

Microsoft Runs Ubuntu
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 16 Nov '23

16 Nov '23

The November list of the top 500 supercomputers in the world, released a few days ago <https://top500.org/lists/top500/2023/11/> has, at number 3, a machine called “Eagle”, which is apparently part of Microsoft’s Azure cloud. Looking into the details of this <https://top500.org/system/180236/>, the OS is listed as “Ubuntu 22.04”. And there is another Microsoft-based super at number 15 <https://top500.org/system/180171/>, obviously older because its OS is listed as “Ubuntu 20.04”. And at number 23 <https://top500.org/system/180024/>, we have one running “Ubuntu 18.04 LTS”. Then a few more, even older, down in the 50s, all on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. Conclusion: they won’t even use their own Windows-based Hyper-V virtualization architecture on high-performance installations. The ARM-based Fugaku machine, which was top of the list not so long ago, has dropped to number 4. Apart from that and two IBM POWER-based entries, the rest of the top 10 is currently all x86-based.

1 0

Firefox Going To Ship With Wayland Enabled By Default
by Peter Reutemann 16 Nov '23

16 Nov '23

'Michael Larabel reports via Phoronix: Guardrails have been in place where the Firefox browser has enabled Wayland by default (when running on recent GTK versions) but as of today that code has been removed... Firefox will try to move forward with stable releases where Wayland will ship by default! Mozilla Bug 1752398 to "ship the Wayland backend to release" has been closed this evening! After the ticket was open for the past two years, it's now deemed ready to hopefully ship enabled for Firefox 121! This patch drops the "early beta or earlier" check to let Wayland support be enabled by default when running on recent GTK versions (GTK 3.24.30 threshold). Firefox 121 is due for release around 19 December and if all continues to hold, it will finally ship with the Wayland back-end enabled by default as another big step forward. ' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/23/11/15/2116232 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

Proposed Acquisition Of Serato By Pioneer DJ Ruffling Feathers
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 15 Nov '23

15 Nov '23

Serato is an NZ-based company that produces a software product that allows “scratching” of audio files on a computer. They provide special vinyl records that contain, not music, but a special time code that the software can recognize whether it is played forwards or backwards or fast or slow at whatever point, and keep the audio in sync. And if and when the vinyl wears out, you can just get new discs--your precious audio data remains pristine, free from the imperfections of being actually being encoded on vinyl. Now, an international company wants to buy them out <https://www.1news.co.nz/2023/11/15/kiwi-start-up-caught-up-in-controversial…>. And another international company, InMusic, is concerned enough about the deal here in little old NZ, to raise an objection. By the way, I find it a bit odd to find Serato described as a “start-up” in the subhead, but as a “software giant” just a few lines further down. I first heard of them about a quarter-century ago, so they are hardly newcomers. I suppose a hundred-million-odd turnover makes them a “giant” in NZ terms, yet the prospect of becoming part of a much larger company could make the present operation seem like a minnow in comparison. Or maybe not: maybe their present size already gives them a huge fraction of what is a fairly niche market. And sure enough, after all this time, there are open-source alternatives <https://alternativeto.net/software/serato-dj/>. I had a quick look at the info on Mixxx <https://mixxx.org/>, and they do mention “vinyl record control”, where you “use turntables with timecode vinyl records to control playback and scratch your digital music files as if they were pressed on vinyl”. Some more info on timecode vinyl is here <https://mixxx.org/news/2021-11-21-dvs-internals-pt1/>. Among the formats supported is the Serato one, and discs are apparently available from the company for “£10-20 each” <http://xwax.org/overview.html>. By the way, Debian includes packages in its standard repo for both Mixxx and xwax.

1 0

Intel Fixes High-Severity CPU Bug That Causes 'Very Strange Behavior'
by Peter Reutemann 15 Nov '23

15 Nov '23

'Ars Technica: Intel on Tuesday pushed microcode updates to fix a high-severity CPU bug that has the potential to be maliciously exploited against cloud-based hosts. The flaw, affecting virtually all modern Intel CPUs, causes them to "enter a glitch state where the normal rules don't apply," Tavis Ormandy, one of several security researchers inside Google who discovered the bug, reported. Once triggered, the glitch state results in unexpected and potentially serious behavior, most notably system crashes that occur even when untrusted code is executed within a guest account of a virtual machine, which, under most cloud security models, is assumed to be safe from such faults. Escalation of privileges is also a possibility. The bug, tracked under the common name Reptar and the designation CVE-2023-23583, is related to how affected CPUs manage prefixes, which change the behavior of instructions sent by running software. Intel x64 decoding generally allows redundant prefixes -- meaning those that don't make sense in a given context -- to be ignored without consequence. During testing in August, Ormandy noticed that the REX prefix was generating "unexpected results" when running on Intel CPUs that support a newer feature known as fast short repeat move, which was introduced in the Ice Lake architecture to fix microcoding bottlenecks. The unexpected behavior occurred when adding the redundant rex.r prefixes to the FSRM-optimized rep mov operation. [...] Intel's official bulletin lists two classes of affected products: those that were already fixed and those that are fixed using microcode updates released Tuesday. An exhaustive list of affected CPUs is available here. As usual, the microcode updates will be available from device or motherboard manufacturers. While individuals aren't likely to face any immediate threat from this vulnerability, they should check with the manufacturer for a fix. People with expertise in x86 instruction and decoding should read Ormandy's post in its entirety. For everyone else, the most important takeaway is this: "However, we simply don't know if we can control the corruption precisely enough to achieve privilege escalation." That means it's not possible for people outside of Intel to know the true extent of the vulnerability severity. That said, anytime code running inside a virtual machine can crash the hypervisor the VM runs on, cloud providers like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and others are going to immediately take notice.' -- source: https://it.slashdot.org/story/23/11/14/2257235 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

In a First, Cryptographic Keys Protecting SSH Connections Stolen in New Attack
by Peter Reutemann 15 Nov '23

15 Nov '23

'For the first time, researchers have demonstrated that a large portion of cryptographic keys used to protect data in computer-to-server SSH traffic are vulnerable to complete compromise when naturally occurring computational errors occur while the connection is being established. ArsTechnica: Underscoring the importance of their discovery, the researchers used their findings to calculate the private portion of almost 200 unique SSH keys they observed in public Internet scans taken over the past seven years. The researchers suspect keys used in IPsec connections could suffer the same fate. SSH is the cryptographic protocol used in secure shell connections that allows computers to remotely access servers, usually in security-sensitive enterprise environments. IPsec is a protocol used by virtual private networks that route traffic through an encrypted tunnel. The vulnerability occurs when there are errors during the signature generation that takes place when a client and server are establishing a connection. It affects only keys using the RSA cryptographic algorithm, which the researchers found in roughly a third of the SSH signatures they examined. That translates to roughly 1 billion signatures out of the 3.2 billion signatures examined. Of the roughly 1 billion RSA signatures, about one in a million exposed the private key of the host. While the percentage is infinitesimally small, the finding is nonetheless surprising for several reasons -- most notably because most SSH software in use has deployed a countermeasure for decades that checks for signature faults before sending a signature over the Internet. Another reason for the surprise is that until now, researchers believed that signature faults exposed only RSA keys used in the TLS -- or Transport Layer Security -- protocol encrypting Web and email connections. They believed SSH traffic was immune from such attacks because passive attackers -- meaning adversaries simply observing traffic as it goes by -- couldn't see some of the necessary information when the errors happened.' -- source: https://it.slashdot.org/story/23/11/13/1446217 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

2 1

Asahi: Not Just A Distro
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 14 Nov '23

14 Nov '23

The Ubuntu Summit that recently took place had discussions about running Ubuntu on ARM and RISC-V processors <https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/13/ubuntu_for_arm64_laptops/>. One interesting thing in that article is that the Asahi project, which was getting Linux running on Apple’s ARM-based machines, is no longer confined to Arch Linux. It is now also working with Ubuntu, with the help of a developer from, of all things, the OpenBSD project. And there are other alternatives, including Fedora and Debian. Also interesting to read how Apple makes the little speakers in its laptops sound better than they should, by carefully driving them beyond what would normally be considered their “safe” power limits, based on the frequency characteristics of the signal at any moment. This technique has been recreated in an open-source program called “speakersafetyd”.

1 0

I Wonder If This Is A WordPress Thing ...
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 14 Nov '23

14 Nov '23

You may not notice it, but a remarkable number of sites are built on WordPress. Seems the ability to customize the layout of such sites is limitless. But I think one of the clues that WordPress lies underneath is sometimes you see image URLs that look like MHMA5269-copy-1698399489.jpg?resize=770,513&quality=80 I think this is characteristic of some image-manipulation plugin that resizes the image for embedding in the page. In this case, I tried the part from the “?” onwards, and ended up with a much larger and higher-quality image file.

1 0

Why Chrome Enabled WebAssembly Garbage Collection (WasmGC) By Default
by Peter Reutemann 13 Nov '23

13 Nov '23

'In Chrome, JavaScript (and WebAssembly) code are both executed by Google's open source V8 engine — which already has garbage-collecting capabilities. "This means developers making use of, for example, PHP compiled to Wasm, end up shipping a garbage collector implementation of the ported language (PHP) to the browser that already has a garbage collector," writes Google developer advocate Thomas Steiner, "which is as wasteful as it sounds." "This is where WasmGC comes in." WebAssembly Garbage Collection (or WasmGC) is a proposal of the WebAssembly Community Group [which] adds struct and array heap types, which means support for non-linear memory allocation... In simplified terms, this means that with WasmGC, porting a programming language to WebAssembly means the programming language's garbage collector no longer needs to be part of the port, but instead the existing garbage collector can be used. Sometime on Halloween, Steiner wrote that in Chrome, WebAssembly garbage collection is now enabled by default. But then he explored what this means for high-level programming languages (with their own built-in garbage collection) being compiled into WebAssembly: To verify the real-world impact of this improvement, Chrome's Wasm team has compiled versions of the Fannkuch benchmark (which allocates data structures as it works) from C, Rust, and Java. The C and Rust binaries could be anywhere from 6.1 K to 9.6 K depending on the various compiler flags, while the Java version is much smaller at only 2.3 K! C and Rust do not include a garbage collector, but they do still bundle malloc/free to manage memory, and the reason Java is smaller here is because it doesn't need to bundle any memory management code at all. This is just one specific example, but it shows that WasmGC binaries have the potential of being very small, and this is even before any significant work on optimizing for size. The blog post includes two examples of WasmGC-ported programming languages in action: - "One of the first programming languages that has been ported to Wasm thanks to WasmGC is Kotlin in the form of Kotlin/Wasm." - "The Dart and Flutter teams at Google are also preparing support for WasmGC. The Dart-to-Wasm compilation work is almost complete, and the team is working on tooling support for delivering Flutter web applications compiled to WebAssembly."' -- source: https://developers.slashdot.org/story/23/11/12/0456220 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

3 4

Remote desktop without using x protocols
by David Nicholls 10 Nov '23

10 Nov '23

I have noticed a number of distros are starting to drop support for x11. This becomes annoying if you are wanting to remote into a Linux box (itth a GUI) RDP style prior to logging in as all the documented solutions that don't require a cloud, docker or server seem to need xrdp, xvnc or similar x based solution installed. Can anyone point me to a cross platform project that does not require x11? -- Cheers... David Nicholls

2 2

Canonical Reveals More Details About Ubuntu Core Desktop
by Peter Reutemann 09 Nov '23

09 Nov '23

'Next April a new LTS Ubuntu arrives, and alongside it will be a whole new immutable desktop edition. At this year's Ubuntu conference in Riga, Latvia, Canonical revealed more details about its forthcoming immutable desktop distro. From a report: Core Desktop is not the next version of Ubuntu itself. Ordinary desktop and server Ubuntu aren't going anywhere, and the next release, numbered 24.04 and codenamed Noble Numbat as we mentioned last month, will be the default and come with all the usual editions and flavors. Nor is this a whole new product: it is a graphical desktop edition of the existing Ubuntu Core distro, as we examined on its release in June last year, a couple of months after 22.04. Ubuntu Core is Canonical's Internet of Things (IoT) distro, intended to be embedded on edge devices, such as digital signs and smart displays. It is an immutable distro, meaning that the root filesystem is read-only and there's no conventional package manager. Rather than being a basis for customization, like a conventional Linux, the idea is that immutable distros are rolled out and updated more like a phone or tablet OS: there's a single fixed and heavily tested OS image, and it's deployed onto the devices out in the field without modification. Updates are monolithic: a whole fresh image is pushed out, and all the OS components are upgraded in a single operation to the same combination. That isn't unique. Most of the major Linux vendors have immutable offerings, and The Reg has looked at several over the years, including MicroOS, the basis of SUSE's next-gen enterprise OS ALP. As well as the well-known ChromeOS, another immutable desktop is the educational distro Endless OS. [...] Canonical believes it has some unique new angles. Core Desktop is constructed as additional layers on top of the existing Ubuntu Core distro, and like Core, it's entirely built with a single packaging system: Ubuntu's Snap. While Snap remains controversial, it does have some compelling advantages over both SUSE and Red Hat's tooling. SUSE's transactional_update tool, while simpler than its rivals in implementation, requires a snapshot-capable filesystem, meaning that its immutable distros must use Btrfs. While it has many admirers, the number and the contents of the orange and red cells in the feature tables here in its own documentation reflect the FOSS desk's serious reservations about Btrfs.' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/23/11/08/1957249 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

1 0

Mozilla Abandons Mercurial
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 08 Nov '23

08 Nov '23

Up to now, Mozilla has been supporting the use of both Git and Mercurial DVCSes by its contributors <https://devclass.com/2023/11/07/mozilla-will-move-firefox-development-from-…>. But no more: it is giving up on Mercurial, and making things exclusively Git-based. Furthermore, it is moving to use GitHub for hosting its repos. I can remember the discussion over which distributed VCS they should switch to about a decade ago, back when I was new to Git myself. Even then, the momentum was clearly on the side of Git. However, the Mozilla crew wanted something that would work well on Windows, not just on Linux, and back then the process-heavy execution model of Git gave poor performance on Windows. Hence they went for Mercurial. Presumably that objection no longer applies; suitable compromises have been made in the architecture of Git to cater for the platform that thinks 26 drive letters ought to be enough for anybody. (I can’t remember what Mozilla were using before that; probably Subversion.) Using GitHub, on the other hand, seems in some ways like a step backwards for distributed development. Linus Torvalds famously pilloried their lame pull-request system <https://github.com/torvalds/linux/pull/17#issuecomment-5654674>, which just happens to be the one feature of your GitHub repos that you cannot turn off.

2 2

Android 14’s storage disaster gets patched, but your data might be gone
by Peter Reutemann 08 Nov '23

08 Nov '23

'It's the start of November, and that means a new Android security patch. Google claims this one is fixing a high-profile Android 14 storage bug that was locking some people out of their devices. The November Security Bulletin contains the usual pile of security fixes, while consumer-oriented Pixel patch notes list a few user-facing changes. The important line is "Fix for issue occasionally causing devices with multiple users enabled to show out of space or be in a reboot loop." A footnote points out that this is for the "Pixel 6, Pixel 6a, 6 Pro, 7, 7 Pro, 7a, Tablet, Fold, Pixel 8, Pixel 8 Pro." We're on about day 33 of the Android 14 storage bug. For devices with multiple users set up, there is some kind of storage issue that is locking users out of their device. Some are completely unusable, with the phone bootlooping constantly and never reaching the home screen. Others are able to boot up the device but don't have access to lock storage, which causes a huge amount of issues. Some users likened the bug to "ransomware," a type of malware that encrypts your local storage and then demands money for your data. One fix is to completely erase your device with a factory reset, but a lot of users don't want to do that. The earliest reports of this started just days after the October 4 launch date. Google usually rolls updates out slowly so it can pull them if issues like this pop up to minimize damage. That didn't happen here, though. Google failed to respond quickly to initial reports and just let the bug roll out to everyone. Some people even report being freshly hit with the bug just four days ago because Google 1) let the update roll out without stopping it and 2) can't patch its software quickly enough. The biggest issue tracker thread on this bug is up to 1,000-plus likes and 850 comments of people locked out of their devices, and it took two separate rounds of news coverage for Google to acknowledge the bug after about 20 days. Google promised a rescue patch, which is now arriving, though the company said only "some" data would be recoverable and that "this update may not enable data to be recovered for devices that are repeatedly rebooting." That seems to line up with what people are experiencing now that the OTA is out. People who can boot up report fixed devices, while bootloopers aren't getting anywhere. Some users are still in the support thread hoping for some kind of data recovery for bootlooping devices, but it doesn't seem like that is going to happen.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/11/android-14-patches-ransomware-stora… Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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When Linux Spooked Microsoft: Remembering 1998's Leaked 'Halloween Documents'
by Peter Reutemann 06 Nov '23

06 Nov '23

't happened a quarter of a century ago. The New York Times wrote that "An internal memorandum reflecting the views of some of Microsoft's top executives and software development managers reveals deep concern about the threat of free software and proposes a number of strategies for competing against free programs that have recently been gaining in popularity." The memo warns that the quality of free software can meet or exceed that of commercial programs and describes it as a potentially serious threat to Microsoft. The document was sent anonymously last week to Eric Raymond, a key figure in a loosely knit group of software developers who collaboratively create and distribute free programs ranging from operating systems to Web browsers. Microsoft executives acknowledged that the document was authentic... In addition to acknowledging that free programs can compete with commercial software in terms of quality, the memorandum calls the free software movement a "long-term credible" threat and warns that employing a traditional Microsoft marketing strategy known as "FUD," an acronym for "fear, uncertainty and doubt," will not succeed against the developers of free software. The memorandum also voices concern that Linux is rapidly becoming the dominant version of Unix for computers powered by Intel microprocessors. The competitive issues, the note warns, go beyond the fact that the software is free. It is also part of the open-source software, or O.S.S., movement, which encourages widespread, rapid development efforts by making the source code — that is, the original lines of code written by programmers — readily available to anyone. This enables programmers the world over to continually write or suggest improvements or to warn of bugs that need to be fixed. The memorandum notes that open software presents a threat because of its ability to mobilize thousands of programmers. "The ability of the O.S.S. process to collect and harness the collective I.Q. of thousands of individuals across the Internet is simply amazing," the memo states. "More importantly, O.S.S. evangelization scales with the size of the Internet much faster than our own evangelization efforts appear to scale." Back in 1998, Slashdot's CmdrTaco covered the whole brouhaha — including this CNN article: A second internal Microsoft memo on the threat Linux poses to Windows NT calls the operating system "a best-of-breed Unix" and wonders aloud if the open-source operating system's momentum could be slowed in the courts. As with the first "Halloween Document," the memo — written by product manager Vinod Valloppillil and another Microsoft employee, Josh Cohen — was obtained by Linux developer Eric Raymond and posted on the Internet. In it, Cohen and Valloppillil, who also authored the first "Halloween Document," appear to suggest that Microsoft could slow the open-source development of Linux with legal battles. "The effect of patents and copyright in combating Linux remains to be investigated," the duo wrote. Microsoft's slogain in 1998 was "Where do you want to go today?" So Eric Raymond published the documents on his web site under the headline "Where will Microsoft try to drag you today? Do you really want to go there?" 25 years later, and it's all still up there and preserved for posterity on Raymond's web page — a collection of leaked Microsoft documents and related materials known collectively as "the Halloween documents." And Raymond made a point of thanking the writers of the documents, "for authoring such remarkable and effective testimonials to the excellence of Linux and open-source software in general."' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/23/11/05/046247 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Update/upgrade
by john 03 Nov '23

03 Nov '23

For some time I have been receiving a message regarding missing firmware. I do have an onboard AMD GPU do I need to go hunting or am I suffering from fomo? W: Possible missing firmware /lib/firmware/amdgpu/ip_discovery.bin for module amdgpu W: Possible missing firmware /lib/firmware/amdgpu/vega10_cap.bin for module amdgpu W: Possible missing firmware /lib/firmware/amdgpu/sienna_cichlid_cap.bin for module amdgpu W: Possible missing firmware /lib/firmware/amdgpu/navi12_cap.bin for module amdgpu W: Possible missing firmware /lib/firmware/amdgpu/psp_13_0_10_ta.bin for module amdgpu W: Possible missing firmware /lib/firmware/amdgpu/psp_13_0_10_sos.bin for module amdgpu W: Possible missing firmware /lib/firmware/amdgpu/aldebaran_cap.bin for module amdgpu W: Possible missing firmware /lib/firmware/amdgpu/aldebaran_sjt_mec2.bin for module amdgpu W: Possible missing firmware /lib/firmware/amdgpu/aldebaran_sjt_mec.bin for module amdgpu W: Possible missing firmware /lib/firmware/amdgpu/gc_11_0_3_imu.bin for module amdgpu W: Possible missing firmware /lib/firmware/amdgpu/gc_11_0_3_rlc.bin for module amdgpu W: Possible missing firmware /lib/firmware/amdgpu/gc_11_0_3_mec.bin for module amdgpu W: Possible missing firmware /lib/firmware/amdgpu/gc_11_0_3_me.bin for module amdgpu W: Possible missing firmware /lib/firmware/amdgpu/gc_11_0_3_pfp.bin for module amdgpu W: Possible missing firmware /lib/firmware/amdgpu/gc_11_0_0_toc.bin for module amdgpu W: Possible missing firmware /lib/firmware/amdgpu/sdma_6_0_3.bin for module amdgpu W: Possible missing firmware /lib/firmware/amdgpu/sienna_cichlid_mes1.bin for module amdgpu W: Possible missing firmware /lib/firmware/amdgpu/sienna_cichlid_mes.bin for module amdgpu W: Possible missing firmware /lib/firmware/amdgpu/navi10_mes.bin for module amdgpu W: Possible missing firmware /lib/firmware/amdgpu/gc_11_0_3_mes1.bin for module amdgpu W: Possible missing firmware /lib/firmware/amdgpu/gc_11_0_3_mes_2.bin for module amdgpu W: Possible missing firmware /lib/firmware/amdgpu/gc_11_0_3_mes.bin for module amdgpu W: Possible missing firmware /lib/firmware/amdgpu/smu_13_0_10.bin for module amdgpu Cheers John..

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Chrome Not Proceeding With Web Integrity API Deemed By Many To Be DRM
by Peter Reutemann 03 Nov '23

03 Nov '23

'Back in July, Google's work on a Web Integrity API emerged and many equated it to DRM. While prototyped, it was only at the proposal stage and the company announced today it's not going ahead with it. With this proposal, Google wanted to give websites a way to confirm the authenticity of the user and their device/browser. The Web Integrity API would let websites "request a token that attests key facts about the environment their client code is running in." It's not all too different from the Play Integrity API (SafetyNet) on Android that Google Wallet and other banking apps use to make sure a device hasn't been tampered with (rooted). ' -- source: https://it.slashdot.org/story/23/11/02/2040234 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Bye-Bye Theora
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 03 Nov '23

03 Nov '23

Seems the old Theora video codec, an early attempt at a freely-licensable algorithm unencumbered by patent restrictions, has largely fallen into disuse <https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/02/theora_video_codec_deprecation/>. In other words, it has served its purpose, and the patent minefields that used to plague video encoding have (to mix metaphors) been effectively defanged. I remember when the Xiph.org foundation came out with the Vorbis audio codec as a free alternative to MP3, back when Fraunhofer was still vigorously enforcing its patents on the latter. Xiph also came up with a multimedia container format called “Ogg”, which could handle both audio and video. But given it was, at least in the early years, only used for audio, quite a lot of people assumed that a “.ogg” file was audio-only. So the video files had to have the “.ogv” file extension (I think there were some “.oga” files to indicate that they were audio-only). The name “Theora” comes from Theora Jones, one of the principal characters in the old “Max Headroom” TV series. “Vorbis” is from a character in Terry Pratchett’s “Discworld” novels. I thought “Ogg” also came from those novels, but Wikipedia says no.

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Arm Acquires Minority Stake in Raspberry Pi
by Peter Reutemann 03 Nov '23

03 Nov '23

'Arm today announced that it has made a strategic investment, a minority stake in Raspberry Pi -- the arm of Raspberry Pi responsible for the new Raspberry Pi 5 and past Raspberry Pi products. From a report: Arm's minority stake extends the long-term partnership between Arm and Raspberry Pi, which has seen Arm CPUs feature in all of the Raspberry Pi and Raspberry Pi Pico SoC. The partnership began way before the Raspberry Pi was available for sale, in 2008 -- when the original board was still just a dream. Fast-forward to 2023 and we have a generation of learners who have taken their first steps with coding, science and electronics thanks to the Raspberry Pi.' -- source: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/23/11/02/1638205 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Jupyter Server Behind Reverse Proxy
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 02 Nov '23

02 Nov '23

I’ve been experimenting with running a Jupyter server inside an LXC container, and making it publicly accessible in a controlled way, via a reverse-proxy setup in Apache. This way, the web server handles all the authentication access, the Jupyter server doesn’t need to impose any restrictions. And being isolated inside a container should help to minimize the impact of a security breach. I found some related documentation here <https://jupyterhub.readthedocs.io/en/stable/howto/configuration/config-prox…>, though it talks about JupyterHub, not Jupyter. This part matched what I initially tried (but didn’t fully work on its own): ProxyPreserveHost on ProxyPass http://«container-host»:«port»/ ProxyPassReverse http://«container-host»:«port»/ This line was not something I did, so I’m not sure it’s really needed: RequestHeader set "X-Forwarded-Proto" expr=%{REQUEST_SCHEME} However, this whole rewrite business I found to be quite unnecessary: RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTP:Connection} Upgrade [NC] RewriteCond %{HTTP:Upgrade} websocket [NC] RewriteRule /(.*) ws://«container-host»:«port»/$1 [P,L] Because the same effect can be achieved much more simply, by one small change to those initial three lines: ProxyPreserveHost on ProxyPass http://«container-host»:«port»/ upgrade=websocket ProxyPassReverse http://«container-host»:«port»/ Notice that “upgrade=websocket” bit? That’s all it took to get the proxying to work.

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Raspberry Pi Smart Vertical Farming Takes Veggies To New Heights
by Peter Reutemann 02 Nov '23

02 Nov '23

'Tanay Tanay has developed a smart vertical farming system using a Raspberry Pi 4 as the central controller, with features such as Bluetooth and Wi-Fi support for remote plant monitoring, precise automated watering based on moisture levels, and environmental factor tracking. Tom's Hardware reports: The end result is a Pi-powered system with tons of cool goodies to take your plant care to the next level. Tanay is able to monitor all sorts of environmental factors like how much light is available, how moist the air is, how much water is in the soil, what the temperature is and much more. The icing on the cake is a user-friendly interface that can be used to manually water the plants. The main board for this project is a Raspberry Pi 4 B. It's connected to an Arduino Nano R3 which is assigned to a specific plant. Some of the sensors confirmed in the design are a soil moisture sensor, an ambient light sensor as well as a water level depth detection sensor. You could always add more or take away modules depending on what you want to do with your vertical farm. For example, a camera could be used to log plant growth progress over time. Tanay explains that ThingSpeak, an IoT platform, was used in the project design. ' -- source: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/23/11/01/0043259 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Another Apple “Innovation” Bites The Dust
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 01 Nov '23

01 Nov '23

This commentary <https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/01/apple_kills_off_touchpad/> on Apple’s latest product introductions mentions, among other things, the company’s abandonment of its “touch bar” technology: Personally, my biggest gripe with the Touch Bar during the two years I used it was the overall lack of tactility. Because it replaced the top row of keys with an indistinct plate of glass, and its contents changed depending on what you were doing, using it required looking away from the screen and down at the keyboard. Am I really the only one to notice the great irony of touchscreens, that they cannot be operated by touch? That, being a featureless flat surface in tactile terms, you have to look at the image being displayed on them to figure out where the buttons are?

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Russia Blocks 167 VPNs, Steps Up OpenVPN and WireGuard Disruption
by Peter Reutemann 01 Nov '23

01 Nov '23

'TorrentFreak reports: The head of the Russian department responsible for identifying threats to the "stability, security and integrity" of the internet, has revealed the extent of the Kremlin's VPN crackdown. Former FSO officer Sergei Khutortsev, a central figure in Russia's 'sovereign internet' project, confirmed that 167 VPN services are now blocked along with over 200 email services. Russia is also reported as stepping up measures against protocols such as OpenVPN, IKEv2 and WireGuard. [...] An in-depth report published by TheIns.ru has details of the monitoring/blocking system reportedly deployed in Russia, how much it costs (4.3 billion rubles/$43 million in 2020, 24.7 billion rubles/$247 million for 2022-2024), and the names of the companies supplying the components. The publication also obtained original documents that apparently show some of the protocols Russia initially intended to block. They include older VPN protocols IPSec, L2TP, and PPTP, plus the BitTorrent protocol still widely used today. The full report on the system, which reveals the use of Intel chips/chipsets in 965 servers manufactured by Huawei and already purchased by Russia, plus another 2400+ servers for 2023/24, is available here.' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/23/10/31/2124234 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Google Plans RISC-V Android Tools In 2024, Wants Developers To 'Be Ready'
by Peter Reutemann 01 Nov '23

01 Nov '23

'Ars Technica reports: Android is slowly entering the RISC-V era. So far we've seen Google say it wants to give the up-and-coming CPU architecture "tier-1" support in Android, putting RISC-V on equal footing with Arm. Qualcomm has announced the first mass-market RISC-V Android chip, a still-untitled Snapdragon Wear chip for smartwatches. Now Google has announced a timeline for developer tools via the Google Open Source Blog. The last post is titled "Android and RISC-V: What you need to know to be ready." Getting the Android OS and app ecosystem to support a new architecture is going to take an incredible amount of work from Google and developers, and these tools are laying the foundation for that work. First up, Google already has the "Cuttlefish" virtual device emulator running, including a gif of it booting up. This isn't the official "Android Emulator" -- which is targeted at app developers doing app development -- Cuttlefish is a hardware emulator for Android OS development. It's the same idea as the Android Emulator but for the bottom half of the tech stack -- the kernel, framework, and hardware bits. Cuttlefish lets Google and other Android OS contributors work on a RISC-V Android build without messing with an individual RISC-V device. Google says it's working well enough now that you can download and emulate a RISC-V device today, though the company warns that nothing is optimized yet. The next step is getting the Android Emulator (for app developers) up and running, and Google says: "By 2024, the plan is to have emulators available publicly, with a full feature set to test applications for various device form factors!" The nice thing about Android is that most app code is written with no architecture in mind -- it's all just Java/Kotlin. So once the Android RunTime starts spitting out RISC-V code, a lot of app code should Just Work. That means most of the porting work will need to go into things written in the NDK, the native developer kit, like libraries and games. The emulator will still be great for testing, though.' -- source: https://developers.slashdot.org/story/23/10/31/2059206 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Bcachefs Merged Into the Linux 6.7 Kernel
by Peter Reutemann 01 Nov '23

01 Nov '23

'The new open-source, copy-on-write file system known as Bcachefs has been successfully merged into the Linux 6.7 kernel. "Given the past struggles to get Bcachefs mainlined, I certainly didn't expect to see Linus Torvalds act so soon on merging it," writes Phoronix's Michael Larabel. "But after it spent all of the 6.6 cycle within Linux-Next, overnight Linus Torvalds did in fact land this new file-system developed by Kent Overstreet." >From a Slashdot story published on Friday August 21, 2015: Bcachefs is a new open-source file-system derived from the bcache Linux kernel block layer cache. Bcachefs was announced by Kent Overstreet, the lead Bcache author. Bcachefs hopes to provide performance like XFS/EXT4 while having features similar to Btrfs and ZFS. The bachefs on-disk format hasn't yet been finalized and the code isn't yet ready for the Linux kernel. That said, initial performance results are okay and "It probably won't eat your data -- but no promises." Features so far for Bcachefs are support for multiple devices, built-in caching/tiering, CRC32C checksumming, and Zlib transparent compression. Support for snapshots is to be worked on.' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/23/10/31/215248 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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