Kernel: Millennium Prize, Compute Express Link 2.0, HP Platform Profile Support

• Millennium prize problems but for Linux

  There is a longstanding tradition in mathematics to create a list of hard unsolved problems to drive people to work on solving them. Examples include Hilbert's problems and the Millennium Prize problems. Wouldn't it be nice if we had the same for Linux? A bunch of hard problems with sexy names that would drive development forward? Sadly there is no easy source for tens of millions of euros in prize money, not to mention it would be very hard to distribute as this work would, by necessity, be spread over a large group of people. Thus it seems is unlikely for this to work in practice, but that does not prevent us from stealing a different trick from mathematicians' toolbox and ponder how it would work in theory. In this case the list of problems will probably never exist, but let's assume that it does. What would it contain if it did exist? Here's one example I came up with. it is left as an exercise to the reader to work out what prompted me to write this post. [...] A knee-jerk reaction many people have is something along the lines of "you can solve this by limiting the number of linker processes by doing X". That is not the answer. It solves the symptoms but not the underlying cause, which is that bad input causes the scheduler to do the wrong thing. There are many other ways of triggering the same issue, for example by copying large files around. A proper solution would fix all of those in one go.

• Compute Express Link 2.0 Support Sent In For Linux 5.12, Enabling CXL 2.0 Memory Devices - Phoronix

  Immediately following the publishing of the Linux enablement patches for CXL 2.0 and that continued in the months since over several rounds of patches. That initial CXL 2.0 code is now slated for mainlining with the Linux 5.12 kernel. The initial Compute Express Link 2.0 focus for the Linux kernel has been on supporting Type-3 Memory Devices. The CXL 2.0 type-3 memory device support being fleshed out first is for serving as a memory expander for RAM or persistent memory and can optionally be interleaved with other CXL devices. For the lack of any CXL 2.0 hardware yet even within the confines of Intel, Widawsky worked out this initial enablement code thanks to writing up support around the specification within QEMU for emulation.

• Linux 5.13 Should See HP Platform Profile Support - Phoronix

  Linux 5.12 is bringing the initial infrastructure around ACPI Platform Profile support and with this kernel it's implemented for newer Lenovo ThinkPad and IdeaPad laptops. The support allow for altering the system's power/performance characteristics depending upon your desire for a speedy, quiet, or cool experience. With Linux 5.13 it looks like HP laptops with this capability will begin to see working Platform Profile support too. Lenovo is the initial Linux user/supporter of this Platform Profile support while Dell has also expressed interest in supporting it on Linux for letting users manipulate their desire desired balance of performance vs. cool/quiet operation. There has been an HP patch implementing the support and it's looking like that is now ready to be queued into the x86 platform driver tree once the current Linux 5.12 merge window is over, which would mark it as material for 5.13.

Open Source Community Critical Of Chessbase, Fat Fritz 2

The development teams behind the two most successful and influential open-source chess programs, Stockfish and Leela Chess Zero, have issued statements denouncing the commercial program Fat Fritz 2 and the company Chessbase that is selling the program for 99,90 euros. The statements (Stockfish blog, lichess announcement) assert that the engine in Fat Fritz 2 is Stockfish with minimal changes, that Fat Fritz 2 has violated the GNU General Public License under which Stockfish is released, and that Chessbase's marketing has made false claims about Fat Fritz 2's playing strength.

Videos/Audiocasts/Shows: Password Managers, Rust, and Laptops as Servers

• Password Managers: A Tool Everybody Deserves - YouTube

  Lastpass was in the news recently and it made me realize how few people use a password manager, regardless of whether you prefer an offline or online solution not using a password manager leads to bad habits and much weaker passwords.

• FLOSS Weekly 618: Rust - Steve Klabnik & Rust

  Steve Klabnik joins Doc Searls and Shawn Powers to talk about Rust. Rust, which was started at Mozilla, has grown to become one of the world's most relied-upon and fastest growing programming languages. Klabnik literally wrote the book on Rust. In the show, he visits how it differs from C++ and other alternatives, some of the many ways it is used, the large and familiar names (e.g. DropBox) that depend on it, the community culture around it, how open source and free software work are changing as we move toward a post-COVID world.

• How to Homelab - Laptops as Servers?!

  In the latest episode of "How to Homelab", we take a look at the concept of using laptops as servers, and I give you my thoughts. It might just be a crazy enough idea to work!

Mozilla Leftovers

• Firefox 86 brings multiple Picture-in-Picture, “Total Cookie Protection”

  In December 2019, Firefox introduced Picture-in-Picture mode—an additional overlay control on in-browser embedded videos that allows the user to detach the video from the browser. Once detached, the video has no window dressing whatsoever—no title bar, min/max/close, etc. PiP mode allows users who tile their windows—automatically or manually—to watch said video while consuming a bare minimum of screen real estate. Firefox 86 introduces the concept of multiple simultaneous Picture-in-Picture instances. Prior to build 86, hitting the PiP control on a second video would simply reattach the first video to its parent tab and detach the second. Now, you can have as many floating, detached video windows as you'd like—potentially turning any monitor into something reminiscent of a security DVR display. The key thing to realize about multi-PiP is that the parent tabs must remain open—if you navigate away from the parent tab of an existing PiP window, the PiP window itself closes as well. Once I realized this, I had no difficulty surrounding my Firefox 86 window with five detached, simultaneously playing video windows.

• This Week in Glean: Boring Monitoring [Ed: Mozilla insists that it is not surveillance when they call it "data science" and "big data"]

  Every Monday the Glean has its weekly Glean SDK meeting. This meeting is used for 2 main parts: First discussing the features and bugs the team is currently investigating or that were requested by outside stakeholders. And second bug triage & monitoring of data that Glean reports in the wild. [...] It probably can! But it requires more work than throwing together a dashboard with graphs. It’s also not as easy to define thresholds on these changes and when to report them. There’s work underway that hopefully enables us to more quickly build up these dashboards for any product using the Glean SDK, which we can then also extend to do more reporting automated. The final goal should be that the product teams themselves are responsible for monitoring their data.

• William Lachance: Community @ Mozilla: People First, Open Source Second [Ed: Is this why Mozilla pays its CEO over 3 million dollars per year (quadruple the older sum) while sacking even its own people and spying on Firefox users (people)?]

  It seems ridiculously naive in retrospect, but I can remember thinking at the time that the right amount of “open source” would solve all the problems. What can I say? It was the era of the Arab Spring, WikiLeaks had not yet become a scandal, Google still felt like something of a benevolent upstart, even Facebook’s mission of “making the world more connected” sounded great to me at the time. If we could just push more things out in the open, then the right solutions would become apparent and fixing the structural problems society was facing would become easy! What a difference a decade makes. The events of the last few years have demonstrated (conclusively, in my view) that open systems aren’t necessarily a protector against abuse by governments, technology monopolies and ill-intentioned groups of individuals alike. Amazon, Google and Facebook are (still) some of the top contributors to key pieces of open source infrastructure but it’s now beyond any doubt that they’re also responsible for amplifying a very large share of the problems global society is experiencing.