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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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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/

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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/

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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.

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