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Nvidia Will Fully Transition To Open-Source GPU Kernel Modules With R560 Drivers
by Peter Reutemann 19 Jul '24

19 Jul '24

'Nvidia is ready to fully transition to open-source Linux GPU kernel drivers, starting with the R555 series and planning a complete shift with the R560 series. The open-source kernel modules will only be available for select newer GPUs, while older architectures like Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta must continue using proprietary drivers. TechSpot reports: According to Nvidia, the open-source GPU kernel modules have helped deliver "equivalent or better" application performance compared to its proprietary kernels. The company has also added new features like Heterogeneous Memory Management (HMM) support, confidential computing, and the coherent memory architectures of the Grace platform to its open-source kernels. [...] For compatible GPUs, the default version of the driver installed by all methods is switching from proprietary to open-source. However, users will have the ability to manually select the closed-source modules if they are still available for their platform. Unfortunately, the open-source kernel modules are not available for GPUs from the older Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta architectures, meaning people still running a GTX 980 or GTX 1080 will have to continue using Nvidia's proprietary drivers. For mixed deployments with older and newer GPUs in the same system, Nvidia recommends continuing to use the proprietary driver for full compatibility. "Nvidia has moved most of its proprietary functions into a proprietary, closed-source firmware blob," adds Ars Technica's Kevin Purdy. "The parts of Nvidia's GPUs that interact with the broader Linux system are open, but the user-space drivers and firmware are none of your or the OSS community's business." ' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/24/07/18/2050235 Reminds me a bit of the Brother Linux drivers that I've used in the past: open-source scripts around binary, closed-source blobs... Cheers, Peter

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SUSE Requests openSUSE to Rebrand
by Peter Reutemann 18 Jul '24

18 Jul '24

'Believe it or not, an unexpected conflict has arisen in the openSUSE community with its long-time supporter and namesake, the SUSE company. At the heart of this tension lies a quiet request that has stirred not-so-quiet ripples across the open source landscape: SUSE has formally asked openSUSE to discontinue using its brand name. Richard Brown, a key figure within the openSUSE project, shared insights into the discussions that have unfolded behind closed doors. Despite SUSE’s request’s calm and respectful tone, the implications of not meeting it could be far-reaching, threatening the symbiotic relationship that has benefited both entities over the years. Let’s face it: SUSE has been more than just a namesake for openSUSE; it has actively provided resources and support far beyond what it would ordinarily need for its business operations. This generosity has fostered a thriving openSUSE project that has excelled under SUSE’s goodwill and informal support, including contributions made by SUSE employees on company time. However, the recent request for a branding separation has overshadowed this partnership. If openSUSE does not handle this request with the sensitivity and cooperation it demands, the project risks not just a reduction in support from SUSE but a potential shift in priorities away from it. The “Factory first” policy, a cornerstone of the engineering synergy between SUSE and openSUSE, could also be scrutinized, emphasizing the gravity of the current situation.' -- source: https://linuxiac.com/suse-requests-opensuse-to-rebrand/ Cheers, Peter

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What Is Code?
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 11 Jul '24

11 Jul '24

Apologies if you already know about this essay, but I just discovered it today: <https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-paul-ford-what-is-code/>. It’s long. It’s breezy, entertaining, and manages to convey some actual content. Great for recommending to friends or family members who ask what software development is all about.

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Debian Curl Now Supports HTTP3: What You Need To Know
by Peter Reutemann 09 Jul '24

09 Jul '24

'Good news for Debian users! HTTP3 arrives in Debian Curl. Yes, starting with curl 8.0.0-2, Debian users can now utilize HTTP3. This marks a significant upgrade in the capabilities of curl, enhancing its performance and efficiency in handling web communications. This new feature can be easily tested using the --http3-only flag.' -- source: https://ostechnix.com/debian-curl-supports-http3/ Cheers, Peter

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No more boot loader: Please use the kernel instead
by Peter Reutemann 09 Jul '24

09 Jul '24

'We are working on a new scheme to replace the GRUB bootloader with a fast, secure, Linux-based, user-space solution: nmbl (for no more boot loader). Most people are familiar with GRUB, a powerful, flexible, fully-featured bootloader that is used on multiple architectures (x86_64, aarch64, ppc64le OpenFirmware). Although GRUB is quite versatile and capable, its features create complexity that is difficult to maintain, and that both duplicate and lag behind the Linux kernel while also creating numerous security holes. On the other hand, the Linux kernel, which has a large developer base, benefits from fast feature development, quick responses to vulnerabilities and greater overall scrutiny. We (Red Hat boot loader engineering) will present our solution to this problem, which is to use the Linux kernel as its own bootloader. Loaded by the EFI stub on UEFI, and packed into a unified kernel image (UKI), the kernel, initramfs, and kernel command line, contain everything they need to reach the final boot target. All necessary drivers, filesystem support, and networking are already built in and code duplication is avoided. We will showcase the work done so far, and ask you for your feedback and use cases.' -- source: https://pretalx.com/devconf-cz-2024/talk/W3AVCT/ -- video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywrSDLp926M Cheers, Peter

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FreeBSD Contributor Mocks Gloomy Predictions for the Open Source Movement
by Peter Reutemann 08 Jul '24

08 Jul '24

'In Communications of the ACM,/em>, long-time FreeBSD contributor Poul-Henning Kamp mocks the idea that the free and open-source software has "come apart" and "will end in tears and regret." Economists and others focused on money — like my bank — have had a lot of trouble figuring out the free and open source software (FOSS) phenomenon, and eventually they seem to have reached the conclusion that it just makes no sense. So, they go with the flow. Recently, very serious people in the FOSS movement have started to write long and thoughtful opinion pieces about how it has all come apart and will end in tears and regret. Allow me to disagree... What follows is a humorous history of how the Open Source movement bested a series of ill-conceived marketing failures starting after the "utterly bad" 1980s when IBM had an "unimaginably huge monopoly" — and an era of vendor lock-in from companies trying to be the next IBM: Out of that utter market failure came Minix, (Net/Free/Open)BSD, and Linux, at a median year of approximately 1991. I can absolutely guarantee that if we had been able to buy a reasonably priced and solid Unix for our 32-bit PCs — no strings attached — nobody would be running FreeBSD or Linux today, except possibly as an obscure hobby. Bill Gates would also have had a lot less of our money... The essay moves on to when "that dot-com thing happened, fueled by the availability of FOSS operating systems, which did a much better job than any operating system you could buy — not just for the price, but in absolute terms of performance on any given piece of hardware. Thus, out of utter market failure, the FOSS movement was born." And ultimately, the essay ends with our present day, and the phenomenon of companies that "make a business out of FOSS or derivatives thereof..." The "F" in FOSS was never silent. In retrospect, it seems clear that open source was not so much the goal itself as a means to an end, which is freedom: freedom to fix broken things, freedom from people who thought they could clutch the source code tightly and wield our ignorance of it as a weapon to force us all to pay for and run Windows Vista. But the FOSS movement has won what it wanted, and no matter how much oldsters dream about their glorious days as young revolutionaries, it is not coming back; the frustrations and anger of IT in 2024 are entirely different from those of 1991. One very big difference is that more people have realized that source code is a liability rather than an asset. For some, that realization came creeping along the path from young teenage FOSS activists in the late 1990s to CIOs of BigCorp today. For most of us, I expect, it was the increasingly crushing workload of maintaining legacy code bases...' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/24/07/07/0243241 Cheers, Peter

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“RegreSSHion” vulnerability in OpenSSH gives attackers root on Linux
by Peter Reutemann 03 Jul '24

03 Jul '24

'Researchers have warned of a critical vulnerability affecting the OpenSSH networking utility that can be exploited to give attackers complete control of Linux and Unix servers with no authentication required. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2024-6387, allows unauthenticated remote code execution with root system rights on Linux systems that are based on glibc, an open source implementation of the C standard library. The vulnerability is the result of a code regression introduced in 2020 that reintroduced CVE-2006-5051, a vulnerability that was fixed in 2006. With thousands, if not millions, of vulnerable servers populating the Internet, this latest vulnerability could pose a significant risk. [...] The vulnerability affects the following: - OpenSSH versions earlier than 4.4p1 are vulnerable to this signal handler race condition unless they are patched for CVE-2006-5051 and CVE-2008-4109. - Versions from 4.4p1 up to, but not including, 8.5p1 are not vulnerable due to a transformative patch for CVE-2006-5051, which made a previously unsafe function secure. - The vulnerability resurfaces in versions from 8.5p1 up to, but not including, 9.8p1 due to the accidental removal of a critical component in a function.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/07/regresshion-vulnerability-in-opens… OpenSSH 9.8 was released July 1st: https://www.openssh.com/ Cheers, Peter

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Made Move To Wayland
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 01 Jul '24

01 Jul '24

I’d been running Wayland OK on my laptop for some months now, but I held off putting it on my main machine for one reason: when I logged into a Wayland session, Emacs would not recognize my Compose key (which I have set to Caps Lock). Today I finally figured out I have to install the “emacs-pgtk” package instead of “emacs-gtk”; the former is built with a version of GTK that works with Wayland. And yes, my Compose key works again. Still have to get used to slightly different input behaviour: previously, once I hit Compose, nothing would appear until I finished the whole key sequence. Now it echoes each keystroke immediately as I type it, in place, overwriting the previous echo (starting with an underline for the Compose key itself), then when I have typed the last key, it overwrites the echo area with the final character.

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From Jupyter To JupyterLab
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 28 Jun '24

28 Jun '24

I’ve been using Jupyter <https://jupyter.org/> as a convenient basis for “scratchpad” programming (not just in Python, but also some other languages) for a while now. I had heard about this next-generation “JupyterLab” thing they were working on, but always held off trying it out. Then I did my usual monthly upgrade of Debian Unstable on my main machine a few days ago, and this time my Jupyter installation broke. So I updated my wrapper scripts for building Jupyter from source, to check out more recent versions of all the necessary components. Got the build done, started it up, and ... it seems my Jupyter has turned into JupyterLab. Yup, it has a new interface now. The file-manager display no longer seems to open things with a single click; that now only selects items, and you then have to perform an action (like open a notebook) from a right-click menu. And there is no “open in new tab/window” menu item; creating a new tab always happens when opening a notebook, while opening a subfolder always replaces the current tab contents. I used to be able to middle-click on a folder to open it in a new tab, but that option is now gone. There is an option in the right-click menu to “Copy Shareable Link”. When you do this on a notebook or folder and paste the result into the address bar, it opens the item in what I can only call “lab” mode. The window now has three panes, with the middle one an editor-type display, for viewing/editing notebook contents and other document content. The left-hand pane can show various things, selected by clicking one of the icons in its leftmost margin: it can show folder contents, or the table of contents of the current notebook, or a summary of open notebooks, running processes etc. And in the right-hand pane, there are various kinds of “tools” (for debugging, inspection etc) that only seem to appear when viewing notebook content. Ah, discovered how to control the visibility of this “tool” pane: it has two icons for selecting the two different categories of this it can display. But if you click the icon for the section that is already showing, the whole pane shrinks down to a narrow strip just showing the icons. Click again to expand the pane, of course. Further ah, same thing happens with the left-hand pane: click the icon for the section that’s already showing, and that pane too shrinks down. Hiding both the left- and right-hand panes brings you almost back to the old-style minimal-frills notebook/document display, except it only takes a click to bring one of those extras back. The middle pane has its own tab system, to let you have multiple documents open at once. You can drag its internal tabs around to tile them vertically or horizontally. And you can just drag a document to here from the folder display on the left to open it. Click on the document tab header, and that item opens in a separate browser window/tab. If nothing is open here it defaults to showing a “Launcher” tab, with icons for creating notebooks, opening terminal sessions, and creating other document types. The “lab” mode is activated by having an extra “/lab” part in the URL; if you remove this, it reverts to the old-style view of a single folder or notebook. Another thing that has changed is the way notebooks are saved. Previously, there was a menu option to “save and checkpoint” (with no option to do a manual save without checkpointing). And I found that if you tried to close the view of a modified notebook, it would ask to confirm you wanted to close the tab/window, but regardless of which you selected, the notebook would still be saved back to the file. Now that confirm-close trick no longer does saving; you have to explicitly select Save from the File menu, or hit CTRL/S. Checkpointing might still happen automatically as part of autosaving; I can’t find a menu option for explicitly creating a checkpoint, only for restoring from one. So anyway, a lot of intriguing new stuff in there to discover. If you like experimenting with code (as I do), Jupyter can be a great way to do it.

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Superfile: A Modern Terminal File Manager for Linux and macOS
by Peter Reutemann 20 Jun '24

20 Jun '24

'Superfile is a modern terminal file manager that recently caught my attention; it’s not only easy to use but is very user-friendly compared to its alternatives, such as Ranger, MC, or nnn. It allows you to create files and directories, view (process, metadata, clipboard), provide a navigation pane, create multiple panels to work in two separate directories, support plugins, offer a variety of themes, and much more. The project is new, so there have been active updates every week, allowing you to see new features quickly. I’ve also been using it for a few days, and honestly, one key factor in using DE in Linux for me was its easy-to-use file manager, but with Superfile, there’s no need for that now.' -- source: https://linuxtldr.com/installing-superfile/ I've used mc in the past, being familiar with norton commander, but I might give Superfile a go in the future. Cheers, Peter

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