Dave Airlie: crocus misrendering of the week

The bottom image is crocus vs 965 on top. This only happened on Gen4->5, so Ironlake and GM45 were my test machines. I burned a lot of time trying to work this out. I trimmed the traces down, dumped a stupendous amount of batchbuffers, turned off UBO push constants, dump all the index and vertex buffers, tried some RGBx changes, but nothing was rushing to hit me, except that the vertex shaders produced were different. However they were different for many reasons, due to the optimization pipelines the mesa state tracker runs vs the 965 driver. Inputs and UBO loads were in different places so there was a lot of noise in the shaders. I ported the trace to a piglit GL application so I could easier hack on the shaders and GL, with that I trimmed it down even further (even if I did burn some time on a misplace */+ typo). Using the ported app, I removed all uniform buffer loads and then split the vertex shader in half (it was quite large, but had two chunks). I finally then could spot the difference in the NIR shaders.

X.Org Server Adds "Fake Screen FPS" Option

The X.Org Server has picked up a new "-fakescreenfps" option to help with VNC and other remote display scenarios. Currently when any main hardware screen is powered off, the X.Org Server initializes the fake screen to a one second update interval. The X.Org Server will keep to that one second update interval for fake screens even if VNC or other remote viewing software is running, until the physical display is powered on.

FluBot malware spreads to Australia

The FluBot strain of Android banking malware, which was initially observed in Spain in late 2020 before spreading more widely across Europe over the following months, is now targeting Australian banks. Once installed, FluBot periodically sends a list of apps installed on the device to one of its command-and-control servers. The server responds with a list of apps the malware should overlay. Upon one of these apps being launched, FluBot immediately displays an overlay on top of the legitimate app. The overlays impersonate the legitimate apps and are designed to collect the victim’s online banking credentials, which are sent to the criminals operating FluBot via the command-and-control server.

Bits relating to Alpine security initiatives in July – Ariadne's Space

Another month has passed, and we’ve gotten a lot of work done. No big announcements to make, but lots of incremental progress, bikeshedding and meetings. We have been laying the ground work for several initiatives in Alpine 3.15, as well as working with other groups to find a path forward on vulnerability information sharing.

Linux Plumbers Conference: Android Microconference Accepted into 2021 Linux Plumbers Conference

We are pleased to announce that the Android Microconference has been accepted into the 2021 Linux Plumbers Conference. The past Android microconferences have been centered around the idea that it was primarily a synchronization point between the Android kernel team and the rest of the community to inform them on what they have been doing. With the help of last year’s focus on the Generic Kernel Image[1] (GKI), this year’s Android microconference will instead be an opportunity to foster a higher level of collaboration between the Android and Linux kernel communities. Discussions will be centered on the goal of ensuring that both the Android and Linux development moves in a lockstep fashion going forward.

Vaccines + Masks for Safe In-Person Events – Read About All On-Site Safety Protocols [Ed: Linux Foundation discriminates and is not inclusive. "A vaccine verification app will be used to confirm vaccination status" means that Linux Foundation now mandates surveillance devices with back doors for all attendees. This is antithetical to a lot of Free software; they do not accept paper proof. There are commercial interests in the mix]

The Linux Foundation is ecstatic to return to in-person events next month; we know how important these face-to-face gatherings are to accelerating collaboration and innovation in the open source community. [...] As announced previously, in-person attendees will be required to be fully vaccinated against the COVID-19 virus. A vaccine verification app will be used to confirm vaccination status.

Petter Reinholdtsen: Mechanic's words in five languages, English, Norwegian and Northern Sámi editions

Almost thirty years ago, some forward looking people interested in metal work and Northern Sámi, decided to create a list of words used in Northern Sámi metal work. After almost ten years this resulted in a dictionary database, published as the book "Mekanihkkársánit : Mekanikerord = Mekaanisen alan sanasto = Mechanic's words" in 1999. The story of this work is available from the pen of Svein Lund, one of the leading actors behind this effort. They even got the dictionary approved by the Sámi Parliament of Norway as the recommended metal work words to use. Fast forward twenty years, I came across this work when I recently became interested in metal work, and started watching educational and funny videos on the topic, like the ones from mrpete222 and This Old Tony. But they all talk English, but I wanted to know what the tools and techniques they used were called in Norwegian. Trying to track down a good dictionary from English to Norwegian, after much searching, I came across the database of words created almost thirty years ago, with translations into English, Norwegian, Northern Sámi, Swedish and Finnish. This gave me a lot of the Norwegian phrases I had been looking for. To make it easier for the next person trying to track down a good Norwegian dictionary for the metal worker, and because I knew the person behind the database from my Skolelinux / Debian Edu days, I decided to ask if the database could be released to the public without any usage limitations, in other words as a Creative Commons licensed data set. And happily, after consulting with the Sámi Parliament of Norway, the database is now available with the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license from my gitlab repository.

Lang team August update

This week the lang team held its August planning meeting. We normally hold these meetings on the first Wednesday of every month. We had a short meeting this month, just planning and scheduling the design meetings for the remainder of the month. After each meeting, we post an update (like this one!) with notes and meeting announcements.

Dirk Eddelbuettel: x13binary 1.1.57-1 on CRAN: New Upstream, New M1 Binary

Christoph and I are please to share that a new release 1.1.57-1 of x13binary, of the X-13ARIMA-SEATS program by the US Census Bureau (with updated upstream release 1.1.57) is now on CRAN. The x13binary package takes the pain out of installing X-13ARIMA-SEATS by making it a fully resolved CRAN dependency. For example, when installing the excellent seasonal package by Christoph, then X-13ARIMA-SEATS will get pulled in via the x13binary package and things just work. Just depend on x13binary and on all major OSs supported by R you should have an X-13ARIMA-SEATS binary installed which will be called seamlessly by the higher-level packages such as seasonal or gunsales. With this the full power of the what is likely the world’s most sophisticated deseasonalization and forecasting package is now at your fingertips and the R prompt, just like any other of the 17960+ CRAN packages. You can read more about this (and the seasonal package) in the Journal of Statistical Software paper by Christoph and myself. This release brings a new upstream release as well as binaries. We continue to support two Linux flavours (theh standard x86_64 as well as armv7l), windows and for a first time two macOS flavour. In addition to the existing Intel binary we now have a native built using the arm64 “M1” chip (with thanks to Kirill for the assist).

[LibreOffice] Tender to implement support for editing and creation of a Dynamic Diagram feature (#202108-02)

The Document Foundation (TDF) is the charitable entity behind the world’s leading free/libre open source (FLOSS) office suite LibreOffice. We are looking for an individual or company to implement support for editing and creation of Dynamic Diagrams. The work has to be developed on LibreOffice master, so that it will be released in the next major version. The task is to solve the following problem: Our existing “SmartArt” import uses the fallback stream in OOX files (and has some issues). It therefore gives us only the draw shapes that are imported, so we lose the original layout. Additionally, in older file versions we don’t have the cached shapes, and therefore can’t render anything. The solution we seek, and as such the scope of this tender, is to have a schema driven diagram layout as a core feature. This should be interoperable with OOX (at least MSO2016) and have suitable extensions for ODF. It should layout interoperability, and allow editing of the underlying data, and selection of a schema.

Cinelerra Enters Sparky Linux

Cinelerra is one of the most advanced, open-source non-linear video editors and compositors for Linux. Turn your Linux box into a complete audio and video production environment.

The Brains Behind the Books – Part VIII: Julia Faltenbacher

My name is Julia, I was born in Bremen. This beautiful old Hanseatic city is situated in the north of Germany, close to the North Sea. When I was six years old, my parents and I moved to Rosenheim in Bavaria, which is on the southern end of Germany. Rosenheim is a rather small city, close to the Alps. I consider this my first “experience abroad”, as Bavarian people are very different to the Northern German people. They have a very strong accent and a special dialect. It took me years to understand the Bavarian dialect, and I still can’t talk like them. And still, I am learning new Bavarian words I have never heard before.

IBM is hiring 1,000 Customer Success Managers to accelerate Red Hat and IBM Hybrid Cloud Adoption | WRAL TechWire

IBM to set up software lab in Kochi - Times of India

2021 Most Influential Executive Arvind Krishna: ‘I Bleed Blue’

IBM CEO Arvind Krishna has been named the No. 1 Most Influential Executive on CRN’s 2021 Top 100 Executives list.

Special thanks to Nest Platinum Sponsor Amazon AWS [Ed: With sponsors such as this, no wonder Fedora has in effect been outsourced]

It takes a lot of work to put on our annual contributor conference. Special thanks this year to Amazon AWS for their platinum sponsorship! We really appreciate their generosity, as well as the support and resources for Fedora Cloud, Fedora CoreOS, and more.

An open source desk to showcase your projects, complete with swappable panels | Arduino Blog

Almost every maker has run into the problem of not being able to find a convenient display or power source for their project prototype, and thus leading to minor delays and some frustration. However, YouTuber Another Maker has come up with an open source desk concept that makes finding these things simple. The system he built uses a large grid of swappable panels that can simply slide into place within a wooden frame. Behind these are a few devices for both power and connectivity, such as power strips, an Ethernet switch (with PoE capabilities), and an HDMI switch for changing between a Raspberry Pi and a PC.

Tiger Lake-H modules include Nano-ITX-sized COM-HPC Client B model

Congatec announced “Conga-HPC/cTLH” (COM-HPC Client B) and “Conga-TS570” (Basic Type 6) modules with up to octa-core Tiger Lake-H CPUs. The Conga-HPC/cTLH offers up to 128GB DDR4, optional NVMe, 20x PCIe Gen4, 2x 2.5GbE, 2x USB 4.0, and 8K support.

Intel Core i5-1135G7 Tiger Lake mini PC with 12GB RAM sells for $700 and up

Minisforum TL50 is a mini PC based on Intel Core i5-1135G7 Tiger Lake quad-core/octa-thread processor that ships with 12GB RAM, and optional 256GB and 512GB SSD preloaded with Windows 10 Pro. The mini PC also features two 2.5 Gbps Gigabit Ethernet ports, two 2.5-inch SATA drives, one M.2 slot for NVMe SSD, and supports 8K and 4K monitor setups through HDMI, DisplayPort, and USB-C video outputs. It was announced a few months ago, but it’s now available for sale for $699.99 and more on Banggood depending on storage options.

Intel Proposes Linux Kernel Driver Allow/Deny Filtering

As part of their work around Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) support for Linux, Intel engineers are proposing a driver filter option for Linux to be able to set allow or deny lists of driver(s) that can or cannot be loaded by the booted kernel. In order to reduce the attack surface within guest virtual machines while still wanting to be able to use the same kernel build between a host and guest, Intel engineers are looking to add this driver filter support to the kernel. When booting the guest, via the kernel command-line they can just specify the specific drivers to allow to be loaded by the kernel or alternatively setting a list of specific drivers that shouldn't be allowed to be loaded by the system.

Oracle Working On BPF CO-RE Support For GCC To Easily Run BPF Programs On Any Kernel

Running eBPF kernel programs continues to be increasing popular and used for a variety of use-cases in production environments but one of the challenges is around needing to compile the (e)BPF programs for a given kernel while BPF CO-RE has been working to change that. The LLVM Clang compiler already supports the ability for BPF "Compile Once, Run Everywhere" while now Oracle engineers are working to bring the same level of support to GCC.

AMD PTDMA Driver Revised Ahead Of Its Possible Inclusion For Linux 5.15 - Phoronix

One of the AMD patch series that has been in the works for more than one year is the PTDMA driver providing pass-through DMA engine support on Linux. The driver is now up to its eleventh revision but the mainlining might happen soon. The AMD PTDMA Linux driver effort dates back to September 2019 for enabling their PTDMA controller in performing high bandwidth memory-to-memory and I/O copy operations. Modern AMD CPUs support multiple PTDMA controllers, the PTDMA driver hooks into the kernel's direct memory access (DMA) subsystem and is intended to be used with AMD Non-Transparent Bridge (NTB) devices but not for general purpose peripheral DMA.