● 06.26.23
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● Links 26/06/2023: Linux (Kernel) 6.4 and Antitrust Catchup
Posted in News Roundup at 12:58 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
GNU/Linux
Audiocasts/Shows
Kernel Space
- Highlights of Linux kernel 6.4 include Intel LAM (Liniar Address Masking) support, user trace events, the ability for the machine keyring used for Machine Owner Keys (MOK) to store only CA-enforced keys, LoongArch support for the nolibc library, support for zoned block devices for the F2FS file system, as well as support for the Svnapot extension and hibernation support for the RISC-V architecture.
- The io_uring subsystem was improved to be able to perform multiple direct-I/O writes at the same time to a file (currently only supported on EXT4 and XFS filesystems), the SCTP (Stream Control Transmission Protocol) protocol gained support for the Fair and Weighted Fair Queuing (WFQ) schedulers, and a new netlink-based API was implemented to call out the user space for helper functions.
- Headline features in this release include: generic iterators for BPF, the removal of the SELinux runtime disable knob, the removal of the SLOB memory allocator, linear address masking support on Intel CPUs, process-level samepage merging control, support for user trace events, more infrastructure for writing kernel modules in Rust, per-VMA locks, and much more. See the LWN merge-window summaries (part 1, part 2), and the (in-progress) KernelNewbies 6.4 page for the details.
Applications
Instructionals/Technical
- Need to clone your Linux hard disk drive or partition? Use one of these drive cloning tools to clone your Linux disk.
- Want to keep your Raspberry Pi up-to-date? Here’s how to upgrade Raspbian to Raspberry Pi OS.
Desktop Environments/WMs
GNOME Desktop/GTK
- The visual appearance of your desktop plays a significant role in your overall Linux experience. GTK themes offer a simple yet powerful way to customize the look of your desktop environment. Applying a GTK theme lets you change the colours, window decorations, and overall style to match your preferences.
- Apart from KDE Plasma, and LXQt, the majority of the popular desktop environments are based on GTK. Hence it’s important to find out which are the best GTK themes available today.
- Let’s dive into the top 15 GTK themes that have gained popularity in 2023.
Distributions and Operating Systems
- I started using Linux back in the mid-1990s, with RedHat Linux. In 2003 it morphed into a commercial product called RedHat Enterprise Linux. A fork of the last free version of RedHat Linux was used to launch Fedora Linux.
- Nowadays, Fedora is well-known as a rock-solid distribution. But twenty years ago, I found it a little picky about the hardware it liked to run on. To some extent, that was par for the course, regardless of your distribution. It was just life on Linux. Resolving issues was part of that whole scene. But it did grow tiresome.
- I started hearing good things about a new and, almost, hardware-agnostic distribution called Ubuntu. It had big backing behind it, too, so it wasn’t going to go away anytime soon. The philanthropic sentiments behind the distribution appealed to me, too. I decided to give it a go.
- I think it was Ubuntu 5.04, the Hoary Hedgehog. I used Ubuntu as my daily driver until Autumn 2019, when I moved to Manjaro. I’ve already written about the thought processes behind that move.
- Two years after moving to Manjaro, I migrated to EndeavourOS. Here’s why.
Reviews
- I made a few other observations about Plasma 6 while I was exploring its new features. One was the desktop does not appear to have changed in terms of performance and resource consumption. Plasma 6 used about 900MB of RAM on KaOS, which is about the same amount Plasma 5 uses on the same distribution running the same services. This makes Plasma a little heavier than average (when compared against other desktops), but still lighter than GNOME on most distributions.
- In terms of responsiveness, Plasma is still in the middle of the pack. It performs well, but isn’t as snappy as lighter desktops such as LXQt.
- A concern I had was the System Settings panel crashed frequently. About half of the time, when I opened a specific configuration page, System Settings would crash. This was also a problem with later versions of the Plasma 5.x series and it has become worse in the preview of Plasma 6.
- On the whole, Plasma 6 looks like it will be a minor evolution forward. There are some nice little touches, some more predictable and consistent defaults, and some streamlining of the experience. Nothing big or surprising, just nice little improvements and a few visual tweaks that I think most people will enjoy.
New Releases
- This is just ment to be a incremental update to Liya 7.0, but cannot be installed via liya-update, because this version had lot of backend changes, mostly related to cinnamon, 7.0 Users have two choices, either do a clean install (recommended) or stay on cinnamon 5.6.8(not recommended), so the choice rests on the user.
- From now onwards, there will be no specific release cycle for Liya, new versions will be released when the Creator feels its the correct time to do so.
- On June 20th 2023, the Emmabuntüs Collective is happy to announce the release of the Emmabuntüs Debian Edition 5 RC 1 update (32 and 64 bits), based on the Debian 12.0 stable Bookworm distribution and supporting both Xfce and LXQt desktop environments.
- This distribution was originally designed to facilitate the reconditioning of computers donated to humanitarian organizations, starting with the Emmaüs communities (which is where the distribution’s name obviously comes from), to promote the discovery of GNU/Linux by beginners, as well as to extend the lifespan of computer hardware, in order to reduce the waste induced by the over-consumption of raw materials.
- In preparation for the Jul 1 2023 release goal, team Peppermint is happy to release our signature styled PeppermintOS Xfce desktop for further testing by a wider audience, as a Release Candidate.
- We’re very excited to announce the major release 8.0 of Proxmox Virtual Environment! It’s based on the great Debian 12 “Bookworm” but using a newer Linux kernel 6.2, QEMU 8.0.2, LXC 5.0.2, and OpenZFS 2.1.12.
- Mit Univention Corporate Server 5.0-4 steht das vierte Point-Release für Univention Corporate Server (UCS) 5.0 zur Verfügung. Es umfasst Funktionserweiterungen und Verbesserungen, neue Eigenschaften sowie diverse Detailverbesserungen und Fehlerkorrekturen. Ebenso sind alle seit Version 5.0-3 erschienenen Erratas in den Installationsmedien enthalten.
Canonical/Ubuntu Family
- Ubuntu ranks as arguably the most popular Linux-based operating system. It’s undoubtedly one of the best-known. However, Ubuntu varies quite a bit. Ubuntu has two distinct flavors: a stable release and long-term support (LTS) iteration.
- Further, Ubuntu splits into Ubuntu Cloud, Ubuntu Core, Ubuntu Desktop, and Ubuntu Server. Here, you’ll learn all about the differences between Ubuntu Server and Ubuntu Desktop.
Open Hardware/Modding
Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
Free, Libre, and Open Source Software
FSFE
Programming/Development
- Calling teams “Scrum Teams” implies that effectiveness is defined by Scrum. Spotify shifted to “Squad”, at least partly, as a way to be clearer that teams should not limit themselves to Scrum patterns and practices. Outside of Spotify itself, I’m wary of suggesting “Squad” as an alternative to “Scrum Team”, mainly because of a general tendency to blindly copy Spotify. “Crew” is an alternative from the Cynefin community but it’s fairly niche.
- Take any ID or value in your system. How many computers does it touch? How much time does it spend in HTTP packets? How big and how long does it spend in RAM? How many times is it copied in CPU cache? How is it moved or copied on the program stack? How is it represented in the GPU?
- When designing systems, it’s easy to get caught up in the minutia of each decision that has to be made along the way. Technical systems may raise concerns about choosing the appropriate logging framework or determining the most effective concurrency model. Human systems may instead be concerned with how many meetings to hold, with whom, and how often.
- While individual decisions may be important to the outcome of the project, the ability to adapt and change those decisions in the future is likely to be significantly more critical. Despite careful thought and planning, achieving 100% certainty in the correctness of every decision is highly unlikely. Even if this level of certainty were possible, the Pareto principle suggests that 80% of the overall outcome will be driven by only 20% of these decisions; therefore, investing excessive time to ensure the absolute correctness of every decision would necessarily result in a considerable amount of wasted resources.
- This post may seem a bit harsh, but I’m tired of SQL shaming that has somehow become a thing in the industry. I have a right to disagree, don’t I?
- Every year or so, a new general-purpose database engine comes out. And that’s great! It can bring new valuable approaches, architectures, and tools (plus, building database engines is fun).
- Often this new database engine comes with a new query language. And that’s probably good, too. Or maybe it’s not.
- The only difference is the spelling of the name of the thing we’re calling (which is a function template in C++ and a macro in Rust) – otherwise, identical.
- Nevertheless, there is a surprisingly vast gulf of difference between the two languages in how they handle formatting, at basically every level beneath the user-facing syntax. I thought the differences were pretty interesting and worth going over.
- Earlier this year, Wanhong Huang, Tomoharu Ugawa, and myself published some new experiments on interpreter performance. We experimented with a Genetic Algorithm to squeeze a little more performance out of bytecode interpreters. Since I spent much of my research time looking for ways to improve interpreter performance, I was quite intrigued by the basic question behind Wanhong’s experiments: which is the best order of bytecode handlers in the interpreter loop?
Perl / Raku
Python
- This article describes some principles I’ve found useful for designing good Python library APIs, including structure, naming, error handling, type annotations, and more. It’s a written version of a talk I gave in June 2023 at the Christchurch Python meetup.
- It’s been nine whole years since PEP 484 landed and brought us types from on high. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move1. Since then, people on the internet have been clamoring to find out: does this mean we can now compile Python to native code for more speed? It’s a totally reasonable question. It was one of my first questions when I first started working on Python compilers. So can we do it?
- No. But also, kind of, yes. I’ll explain. I’ll explain in the context of “ahead-of-time” compiling within or adjacent to CPython, the predominant implementation of the Python language. Just-in-time (JIT) compilers are a different beast, and are described more below. None of the information in this post is novel; I hope only to clarify a bunch of existing academic and industry knowledge.
- The core thesis is: types are very broad hints and they are sometimes lies.
- Instead of having to limit sanity checks to the boundaries of the program, we could re-use those as function contracts using the assert keyword. Indeed, setting PYTHONOPTIMIZE removes all assert, making the check useful in dev, and free in production.
- Unfortunately, the community doesn’t know about the feature, and use assert for things that should never be removed, so using the flag would likely introduce bugs into your program.
Leftovers
Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)
- A leaked internal poll has revealed a significant drop in confidence among Microsoft employees towards the company’s leadership. The poll results, which Business Insider shared, indicate a growing dissatisfaction among the workforce.
- A now-former LinkedIn employee, who was among the 716 people handed pink slips by the job-search platform in May, has remarked that until his own layoff, he thought of layoffs as a ‘thing that one sees only in movies.’
Security
Defence/Aggression
Environment
Wildlife/Nature
Finance
AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda
Censorship/Free Speech
Civil Rights/Policing
Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
Streaming and Digital Restrictions (DRM)
Monopolies
- Microsoft is currently the second largest cloud provider in terms of market share, while Google trails behind as a distant third
- In a complaint filed with the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) this week, Google accused Microsoft of using its dominant position to trap customers into contracts within its Azure cloud server…
Patents
Trademarks
Copyrights
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