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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/

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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/

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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/

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