News/3

• Ongoing (Albeit Secret) Campaign of Patent Extortion Against GNU/Linux Distributions Using Software Patents, Even Expired Ones in Europe
  
  
  GNU/Linux distros attacked by software patents, even in Europe where no such patents are supposed to exist (or have any legal bearing)
  
• Mesa Just Got A Significant Performance Boost For Intel Tiger Lake Chips
  
  
  Intel's Kenneth Graunke has written a few patches for Intel Gen12+ graphics chips that boost graphics performance by one to twelve percent. Don't get too excited, it only applies to Intel Tigerlake and newer and they won't arrive in mainstream GNU/Linux distributions until Mesa 20.3 is released mid-December.
  
• Vulkan Specification Version 1.2.158 Brings Two New Extensions
  
  
  Version 1.2.158 of the Vulkan specification introduces VK_KHR_fragment_shading_rate that lets developers change the rate at which fragments are shaded on a per-region, per-primitive or per-draw basis and VK_KHR_shader_terminate_invocation which, together with the previously introduced VK_EXT_shader_demote_to_helper_invocation extension, lets developers do a much more specific OpKill.
  
• Apple's CUPS Repository Has Died A Quiet Death
  
  
  The Common Unix Printing System (CUPS) is something all the GNU/Linux distributions use to manage printers. It's been maintained by Apple since 2007. The Apple-lead CUPS development efforts appear to have completely died out after lead CUPS developer Michael Sweet left the company. CUPS isn't dead, though, Sweet and others are still working on it in a fork maintained by the OpenPrinting organization.
  
• Linux 5.9.1 And Older Stable Kernel Updates Fixing "Bleeding Tooth" Bluetooth Vulnerability Are Available
  
  
  BleedingTooth is a remote code execution vulnerability affecting all Linux kernels going back to Linux 4.8. It allows an attacker within Bluetooth range to execute code on remote systems if Bluetooth is turned on the remote system and it's set to be discoverable thanks to a combination of security issues in the BlueZ library and heap-based type confusion on the Linux kernels L2CAP code.
  
• SDL2 Gains OS/2 Support
  
  
  The cross-platform zlib-licensed Simple DirectMedia Layer v2 now supports the OS/2 operating system. SDL2 support for OS/2 comes nearly 19 years since IBM released the last OS/2 version in December 2001. There's no OpenGL support and no joystick support in SDL2 on OS/2 but most of SDL2's other features are there.
  
• Ben Cotton: How Fedora Is Run And Why
  
  
  Ben Cotton is the Senior Program Manager at IBM subsidiary Red Hat and "primarily" the Fedora Program Manager. He presented How Fedora Is Run And Why in about 30 minutes at the joint openSUSE/LibreOffice Virtual Conference 2020 this week. He explained that Fedora is "mostly" independent and not completely controlled by Red Hat or its owner IBM.
  
• Linux 5.10 Will Have A Fully Lock-Less Ring Buffer
  
  
  Linus Torvalds has merged a set of printk() patches by John Ogness that make the kernel ring buffer (what you see if you type dmesg) fully lock-less. This is a big improvement that allows messages to be stored and read without the need for temporary per-CPU buffers with no risk of deadlocks.
  
• Richard Brown: Regular Releases are Wrong, Roll for your life
  
  
  openSUSE Chairman Richard Brown made a really compelling argument for why a rolling release model is better than using "stable" packages that have to have fixes back-ported to them in a 35 minute video presentation at the joint openSUSE+LibreOffice Virtual Conference 2020 taking place this week.
  
• XFS Patches For Linux 5.10 Delays The Year 2038 Problem To 2486
  
  
  XFS patches for Linux 5.10 submitted by XFS file system maintainer Darrick J. Wong will delay the year 2038 problem for XFS by an additional 448 years. That should be enough to come up with a real long-term solution. The time-stamp patches were submitted as a part of a larger patch-set with a "large pile of new stuff".
  
• GCC 11 Will Be Set In Stone On November 15th
  
  
  Developer Richard Biener has announced that next major version of the GNU Compiler Collection will enter a feature-freeze on November 15th. There's currently a total of 572 regressions in GCC 11 that need to be fixed before the final version is released April/May 2021.
  
• Latest 20.41.18123 Intel NEO OpenCL Driver Claims "Production" OpenCL 3.0 Quality On All Intel CPUs Going Back To Broadwell
  
  
  Intel made their Neo Graphics Compute-Runtime OpenCL claim to have OpenCL 3.0 support on all chips going back to Broadwell in the v20.40.18075. The latest v20.41.18123 goes one step further by having that same claim in the release-notes. There's also a new clinfo warning regarding the supposed OpenCL 3.0 support.
  
• Plausible Analytics Switches From MIT To GNU AGPL License Due To Competition
  
  
  Plausible Analytics is a free software web analytics platform designed to run in a Docker container and a corporation based in Estonia, Europe. They discovered that developing web analytics software and giving it away for free results in competing corporations building services around said software in direct competition to your own services.
  
• Mesa 20.1.10 Is Released With A Handful Of Bug-Fixes
  
  
  Mesa 20.1.10 is a small bug-fix release for GNU/Linux distributions that have not yet upgraded to Mesa 20.2.0. There's not much to see, there's seven for the Intel graphics drivers and two on the AMD side.
  
• Distri: researching fast Linux package management
  
  
  Michael Stapelberg was a Debian developer for 7 years before he abandoned in favor of Arch Linux it due to "antique tooling and slow changes". Arch's Pacman package manager isn't fast enough for him so he decided to develop Distri, a blazing fast package manager. He presented it at the Arch Conf 2020. The video presentation is 20 minutes with an additional 30 minutes of Q&A.
  
• Martin Dougiamas: Why Openness in Education is essential
  
  
  You probably never heard of Moodle - unless you are a student. Moodle is the worlds most widely used educational platform and it's free software available under the GNU GPL version 3. Martin Dougiamas, who originally wrote Moodle, held a talk explaining what Moodle is, what features it has, what's planned for the future and what proprietary software it competes with at the NextCloud 2020 conference that took place October 2nd to 3rd, 2020. The video is 36 minutes long and worth a watch if you want some insights into modern education systems.
  
• Why Schools Should Exclusively Use Free Software
  
  
  Educational activities, including schools of all levels from kindergarten to university, have a moral duty to teach only free software.
  
• GamerOS: An Arch Linux based gaming OS
  
  
  Video: Alesh Slovak missed Vavle's SteamOS so he created a new GNU/Linux operating system called GamerOS based on Arch Linux and some of the components from SteamOS. The idea is to have a OS that boots directly into Steam's Big Picture mode so you can sit on the couch and use a PC with a game-pad the same way you would use a gaming console. Alesh Slovak presented his new OS at the Arch Conf 2020 last weekend. His video presentation is about 45 minutes with Q&A.
  
• Kdenlive 20.08.2 Is Released With 17 Bug-Fixes And GPU Accelerated Video Rendering
  
  
  The free multi-platform video editor Kdenlive got automatic scene splitting and hardware accelerated video rendering on the GPU in this release even though it it was released as just a minor version bump. There's also 17 bugs that have been fixed since 20.08.1 was released. GPU video rendering is twice as slow as CPU rendering, so it is, for now, a utterly useless new feature.
  
• Zvezdin Besarabov: How to organise your digital life in a privacy-preserving, machine-agnostic, and practical manner
  
  
  Zvezdin Besarabov held a talk at the Arch Conf 2020 last weekend where he shared what software he ended up using on his personal devices with after trying to find free software with a perfect balance between usability and privacy. He covers the GNU/Linux and the Android alternatives to less privacy-respecting commercial software for e-mail, calendar, contacts, task management, office applications, password management and cloud storage.
  
• Linux 5.9 Is Released With New Drivers, Improved AMD GPU Support, And Support The x86-64 FSGSBASE CPU Instructions
  
  
  It was a bumpy release-cycle for Linux 5.9 with one release candidate refusing to show anything graphical on Intel GPUs. The final 5.9 release doesn't have that problem. It has have quite a lot of new features such as support for upcoming AMD graphics cards, support for the FSGSBASE x86-64 instructions, a Corsair RGB hub and a lot more.
  
• Chris Down, Facebook: Linux memory management at scale
  
  
  Facebook-employed Linux kernel engineer Chris Down held a 40 minute talk about memory management at the Arch Conf 2020 today. It was filled with useful insights, tips and strategies for Linux memory management using modern kernel frame-works like cgroups and tools like the oomd userspace Out-Of-Memory killer. The memory management strategies that vastly improved Facebook's servers may benefit your servers or perhaps just your desktop or laptop.
  
• AMD Hopes To Get Sensor Fusion Hub Driver For AMD Laptop Gyroscopes And Other Sensors Into Linux 5.10
  
  
  AMD's Sandeep Singh has submitted yet another revision of AMD's Linux HID driver for the Sensor Fusion Hub hardware in all AMD laptops based on Ryzen processors. That makes it eight in total. This could be the lucky revision that makes it into the Linux kernel when the Linux 5.10 merge window opens up on Monday.
  
• Arch Linux: Past, Present and Future
  
  
  Allan McRae gave a very detailed overview of the 18 years of Arch Linux and Levente Polyak gave insights into the current state of Arch and it's potential future in a joint presentation at Arch Conf 2020 on October 10th, 2020. It's a great watch if you want to learn the history of Arch and know what changes it may potentially have in the future.
  
• How Arch Linux Manage Their Servers: "Infrastructure at Arch: Making servers go brrrrr"
  
  
  Sven-Hendrik Haaase gave an enlightening talk about the servers and the infrastructure used by Arch Linux to serve packages, The Arch Linux Wiki and the rest of the services the Arch Linux team provides at the Arch Linux Conf 2020 on Saturday October 10th, 2020. The video is about 30 minutes + 15 minutes of Q&A.
  
• Intel's latest NEO OpenCL Driver Claims Support For OpenCL 3.0 On All Intel Chips Going Back To Broadwell
  
  
  Intel's latest NEO OpenCL driver, now going by the name Compute-Runtime since it has gained support for more than just OpenCL compute, claims to have OpenCL 3.0 support on all Intel chips going back to Broadwell. It doesn't actually support OpenCL 3.0 on anything other than Intel's latest Tiger Lake chips, but it does claim to.
  
• LibreOffice 7.0.2 Is Released With 131 Bug-Fixes
  
  
  The latest minor LibreOffice-release has a really long list of 131 bug-fixes. Many of them are related to third party files that can be opened in LibreOffice such as .docx, .xlxs and .pptx. 18 bug-fixes are related to various crashes and the rest of the bug-fixes seem to be all over the place.
  
• Watch Arch Conf 2020 Live October 10th to 11th, 2020
  
  
  The annual Arch Linux conference take place virtually this weekend. You can tune in via live streams provided by either C3VOC (Chaos Computer Club) or Amazon Twitch and enjoy talks such as "Making servers go brrrrr", "Rolling your own security team for fun and no profit at all" and "Arch Linux: Past, Present and Future". The conference starts at 10.00 UTC (12.00 CET, 03:00 PDT).
  
• Wine 5.19 Is Released With 27 Bug-Fixes
  
  
  The latest Wine Is Not An Emulator Windows API re-implementation has game-specific fixes for a long list of games including Beach Life, The Sims Complete Collection, Risk II, Earth 2150, Need for Russia, World of Warcraft, Avencast: Rise of the Mage, Mahjong Titans, Resident Evil HD and Fallout New Vegas. The vast majority of the new code in this release was written by the Codeweavers corporation.
  
• First UbuntuDDE Remix 20.10 Groovy Beta Is Released
  
  
  UbuntuDDE Remix 20.10 Groovy Beta is a GNU/Linux distribution based on the Ubuntu 20.10 Groovy Gorilla beta released last week. It features the latest version of the very user-friendly yet powerful Deepin Desktop Environment instead of the laughable and utterly useless tablet/smart-TV desktop environment Ubuntu's regular release ships with. This beta-release is primarily for testers. We tested it and we liked it.
  

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