Android Leftovers

• Airplane Mode may finally stop shutting down Bluetooth audio, starting with Android 11 R

• Android’s ‘Focus Mode’ exits beta, adds new scheduling features

• Google Photos update is exactly what Android and iPhone users wanted for Christmas

• Nokia launches a 55-inch 4K Android TV with JBL sound in India

• Google Translate: How to translate text in photos on Android

• YouTube Music rolls out gapless playback for albums on Android and web

• Best office suite for Android in 2020

• The best smartwatches, fitness trackers, and wearables for Android (Winter 2019)

• Samsung Galaxy Note10 receives yet another Android 10 beta with more bug fixes

• Android 10 for Nokia 7.1 coming next week, 5 more Nokias are getting it in January

• You can finally customize your app layout in Android Auto

• Terrific News for Android OS Users – 80% Android apps encrypting traffic by default

Replacing Orange Livebox router by a Linux box

A few months ago, I moved back to France and I settled for Orange as an ISP with a bundle combining Internet and mobile subscription. In Switzerland, I was using my own router instead of the box provided by Swisscom. While there is an abundant documentation to replace the box provided by Orange, the instructions around a plain Linux box are kludgy. I am exposing here my own variation. I am only interested in getting IPv4/IPv6 access: no VoIP, no TV. Orange is using GPON for its FTTH deployment. Therefore, an ONT is needed to encapsulate and decapsulate Ethernet frames into GPON frames. Two form-factors are available. It can be small Huawei HG8010H box also acting as a media converter to Ethernet 1000BASE-T...

RadeonSI NIR Benchmarks Show Great Progress With Mesa 20.0

With AMD last week having enabled OpenGL 4.6 for their RadeonSI OpenGL Linux driver when enabling the NIR intermediate representation support, you may be wondering how using NIR is stacking up these days compared to the default TGSI route. Here are some benchmarks on Polaris, Vega, and Navi for comparing this driver option that ultimately allows OpenGL 4.6 to be flipped on. NIR is the modern intermediate representation used by a majority of Mesa drivers now in some capacity as an alternative to the likes of TGSI as what had been the default IR for Gallium3D drivers. With RadeonSI they have been transitioning to NIR since that has been the growing trend of these open-source drivers for sharing IR optimizations and the like. As well, NIR is being wired up in order to re-use some code-paths used currently by the "RADV" Radeon Vulkan driver to share some of the SPIR-V work that was needed in order for RadeonSI to have OpenGL 4.6 support. Like on the Intel side when they crossed the OpenGL 4.6 milestone recently, the big blocker to GL 4.6 on these drivers was handling SPIR-V ingestion with GL_ARB_gl_spirv / GL_ARB_spirv_extensions.