Kernel (Linux): Windows Assimilation, Wake-on-LAN, AMD and Intel

• Tuxera First to Bring Network Bandwidth-Saving SMB Compression Feature to Linux Environments

• Tuxera First to Bring Network Bandwidth-Saving SMB Compression Feature to Linux Environments

  Tuxera, a world-leader in quality-assured storage management and networking software, announced that the company's SMB server implementation, Fusion File Share by Tuxera, now offers transparent compression to platforms outside of Microsoft Windows. Compression is being rapidly and widely adopted in the storage industry as a feature in memory hardware, file system implementations, and also networking protocols such as Microsoft's server messaging block technology (SMB). The ability to compress files inline during transfer can significantly reduce bandwidth and transfer time. Microsoft released the transparent compression feature to their SMB protocol specification in early 2019. However, Tuxera is the first to implement SMB compression outside of Microsoft Windows, bringing this highly in-demand feature to Linux environments in enterprises around the world.

• Wake-on-LAN

  With Wake-on-LAN (WoL) it can be slightly easier to manage machines in-house. You can fire up the workstation and start the day’s compile jobs (to catch up with overnight work by the KDE community, say) while drinking an espresso downstairs and doomscrolling. [...] If all the administrative bits are in place, then the simple way to wake up a machine is wake <hostname>. This requires root, since it sends specially-crafted (broadcast) Ethernet packets, which isn’t something that regular users can do.

• AMD+SUSE Tackling Frequency Invariance For AMD EPYC 7002 CPUs - Phoronix

  Thanks to work by AMD and SUSE engineers, the Linux kernel could soon be seeing frequency invariance support for EPYC 7002 "Rome" processors for yielding greater performance and power efficiency. Over the past year we have seen a lot of Linux kernel work for dealing with frequency invariance but to now that on the x86 side has been focused on Intel Xeon processors. Now through the cooperation of AMD with patches led by SUSE, frequency invariance is being worked on for the EPYC 7002 "Rome" processors.

• Intel Begins Landing Their Open-Source Vulkan Driver Ray-Tracing Support

  This week marked the release of Vulkan 1.2.162 with the ray-tracing extensions now finalized. As such Intel's stellar open-source team has begun landing their work around Vulkan ray-tracing ahead of the Xe HPG hardware availability that will support this functionality. Back in October I wrote about Intel preparing their open-source driver support for Vulkan ray-tracing ahead of Xe HPG and now with the updated Vulkan spec out there they are able to push more of their work.

today's leftovers

• Friends of GNOME Update – November 2020 – Getting to know GNOME

  The Seattle GNU/Linux Conference took place online this year and we were there. Executive Director Neil McGovern gave a presentation titled “Patently Obvious” about our legal case with a patent assertion entity and how the settlement impacts all of FOSS. Strategic Initiatives Manager M. de Blanc gave a surprise talk that had nothing to do with GNOME, but discussed the Foundation nonetheless. We also had talks at Linux Application Summit and GNOME.Asia, which you can read more about below.

 

• Support UserFreedom by purchasing gifts from the GNU Press Shop

  To celebrate this year's thirty-fifth anniversary of the FSF, we designed and issued an extremely cool undersea-themed 35th Anniversary T-shirt. The initial run sold out faster than a weekend scuba diving trip, but we've reprinted them in a new color scheme worthy of Neptune himself -- lots of these are in stock and ready to send to you. But that's not all! So excited are we on the occasion of FSF's coral anniversary that we also made new socks. Warm your toes with the brand new FSF thirty-fifth anniversary socks -- crew-length socks whose coral, black, and blue color scheme will match your FSF 35th Anniversary Poster. Orders for these limited edition socks will be accepted on a "pre-order" basis until December 9th -- we'll collect customer orders, then print the socks, which I'll then ship to you. Be sure to order socks within the above time frame if you want them, because we won't have a lot of surplus after the orders are filled. [...] Finally, a note about shipping. The current pandemic places a lot of obstacles to buying and selling merchandise at FSF, so your order may be shipped less punctually than before -- but it absolutely will be shipped. This time of year, many customers place orders hoping to have them in hand by December 25. If this is you, and you are in the United States, please place your order before December 4, in order to provide us with the necessary lead time to make sure that your gifts are shipped on time. In any circumstance, it's advisable to place any order as soon as you can; I will endeavor to ship it as promptly as circumstances permit. As always, don't hesitate to email sales@fsf.org with any questions or concerns about shipping, inventory, payment, suggestions for future items for sale, or anything else -- this email address is the first thing I check every work day, especially at this time of year.

• The Talospace Project: Firefox 83 on POWER

  LTO-PGO is still working great in Firefox 83, which expands in-browser PDF support, adds additional features to Picture-in-Picture (which is still one of my favourite tools in Firefox) and some miscellany developer changes. The exact same process, configs and patches to build a fully link-time and profile-guided optimized build work that was used in Firefox 82.

• Presenting Cockpit Wicked | YaST

  If you are into systems management, you most likely have heard about Cockpit at some point. In a nutshell, it offers a good looking web-based interface to perform system tasks like inspecting the logs, applying system updates, configuring the network, managing services, and so on. If you want to give it a try, you can install Cockpit in openSUSE Tumbleweed just by typing zypper in cockpit. [...] Cockpit already features a nice module to configure the network so you might be wondering why not extending the original instead of creating a new one. The module shipped with Cockpit is specific to NetworkManager and adapting it to a different backend can be hard. In our case, we are trying to build something that could be adapted in the future to support more backends, but we are not sure how realistic this idea is.

Programming/Development Leftovers

• PHP 8.0 Ready To Ship With Many New Features, Even Better Performance - Phoronix

  PHP 8.0 is scheduled for release tomorrow on the US Thanksgiving day. PHP 8.0 brings with it many new language features on top of the opt-in JIT compiler support. Here is a look at some of the PHP 8.0 changes along with a quick look at the near final performance of PHP 8.0 on an AMD EPYC Linux server. PHP 8.0 is a very worthy successor to last year's PHP 7.4. Besides the JIT compiler there is a ton of work incorporated into this big version bump. Among the PHP 8.0 highlights are: - PHP8 introduces the much anticipated Just In Time (JIT) compiler for further enhancing the speed of PHP scripts. More details on PHP's JIT compiler via this Wiki page.

• Going from Android LinearLayout to CSS flexbox

  Are you an Android developer looking to learn web development? I find it easier to learn a new technology stack by comparing it to a stack I’m already familiar with. Android developers can layout views using the simple yet flexible LinearLayout class. The web platform has similar tools to layout elements using CSS, and some concepts are shared. Here’s some tips to learn web development using your Android knowledge.

• Software Diagrams Aren’t Always Correct and That’s OK

  Concretely, software is just bits in electronic storage that control and/or are manipulated by processors. Abstractions are the building blocks that enable humans to design and build complex software systems out of bits. Abstractions are products of out minds—they allow us to assign meaning to clusters (some large, some small) of bits. They allow us to build software systems without thinking about billions of bits or how processors work. We manifest some useful and generally simple abstractions (instructions, statements, functions, classes, modules, etc.) as “code” using other abstractions we call “languages.” Languages give us a common vocabulary for us to communicate about those abstract building blocks and to produce the corresponding bits. There are many useful tools that can and should be created to help us understand the code-level operation of a system. But most systems we build today are too complex to be fully understood at the level of code. In designing them we must use higher-level abstractions to conceptualize, compose, and organize code. Abstract machines, frameworks, patterns, roles, stereotypes, heuristics, constraints, etc. are examples of such higher-level abstractions. The languages we commonly use provide few, if any, mechanisms for directly identifying such higher-level abstractions. These abstractions may manifest as naming or other coding conventions but recognizing them as such depends upon a pre-existing shared understanding between the writer and readers of the code.

• How to Convert Integer into String in Python | Linuxize

  Python has several built-in data types. Sometimes, when writing Python code, you might need to convert one data type to another. For example, concatenate a string and integer, first, you’ll need to convert the integer into a string.

• How To Install PyCharm on Debian 10

  In this tutorial, we will show you how to install PyCharm on Debian 10. For those of you who didn’t know, PyCharm is an intelligent and fully-featured IDE for Python developed by JetBrains. It also provides support for Javascript, Typescript, and CSS, etc. You can also extend PyCharm features by using plugins. By using PyCharm plugins you can also get support for frameworks like Django, Flask. We can also use PyCharm for other programming languages like HTML, SQL, Javascript, CSS, and more. This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step by step installation of PyCharm on a Debian 10 (Buster).

• This Week in Rust 366