Programming: Picolibc, NGT, Tryton, OCaml, GNOME and KDE

• Picolibc Updates (October 2019)

  Tiny stdio in picolibc uses a global variable, __iob, to hold pointers to FILE structs for stdin, stdout, and stderr. For this to point at actual usable functions, applications normally need to create and initialize this themselves. If all you want to do is make sure the tool chain can compile and link a simple program (as is often required for build configuration tools like autotools), then having a simple 'hello world' program actually build successfully can be really useful. I added the 'dummyiob.c' module to picolibc which has an iob variable initialized with suitable functions. If your application doesn't define it's own iob, you'll get this one instead.

• NGT: A library for high-speed approximate nearest neighbor search

  Different search methods are used for different data types. For example, full-text search is for text data, content-based image retrieval is for images, and relational databases are for data relationships. Deep learning models can easily generate vectors from various kinds of data so that the vector space has embedded relationships among source data. This means that if two source data are similar, the two vectors from the data will be located near each other in the vector space. Therefore, all you have to do is search the vectors instead of the source data. Moreover, the vectors not only represent the text and image characteristics of the source data, but they also represent products, human beings, organizations, and so forth. Therefore, you can search for similar documents and images as well as products with similar attributes, human beings with similar skills, clothing with similar features, and so on. For example, Yahoo! Japan provides a similarity-based fashion-item search using NGT.

• Tryton Spanish Days 2019: In Alicante on the 27th & 28th of November

  The Tryton Foundation is happy to announce the venue and date of the next Tryton Spanish Days.

• 6 Excellent Free Books to Learn OCaml

  Caml is a general-purpose, powerful, high-level programming language with a large emphasis on speed and efficiency. A dialect of the ML programming language, it supports functional, imperative, and object-oriented programming styles. Caml has been developed and distributed by INRIA, a French research institute, since 1985. The OCaml system is the main implementation of the Caml language. It has a very strong type-checking system, offers a powerful module system, automatic memory management, first-class functions, and adds a full-fledged object-oriented layer. OCaml includes a native-code compiler supporting numerous architectures, for high performance; a bytecode compiler, for increased portability; and an interactive loop, for experimentation and rapid development. OCaml’s integrated object system allows object-oriented programming without sacrificing the benefits of functional programming, parametric polymorphism, and type inference. The language is mature, producing efficient code and comes with a large set of general purpose as well as domain-specific libraries. OCaml is often used for teaching programming, and by large corporations. OCaml benefits from a whole range of new tools and libraries, including OPAM (package manager), optimizing compilers, and development tools such as TypeRex and Merlin. OCaml was written in 1996 by Xavier Leroy, Jérôme Vouillon, Damien Doligez, and Didier Rémy at INRIA in France.

• Build win32/win64 nightlies using Gitlab CI

  A week ago after getting Dia nightlies published on GNOME’s new Flatpak nightlies infrastructure I was discussing with Zander Brown, the new maintainer of Dia, of the possibility to publish Windows nightlies through Gitlab the same way we do with Flatpak bundles. A few minutes later I was already trying to cargo-cult what Gedit had to build Windows bundles. It took me a bit of time to figure out how things work, especially that I wanted to make it easier for you to set up a win32/win64 build for your project without much work and as we already use a CI template for Flatpak builds, I ended up doing something pretty similar, but a bit more complex under the hood.

• Additions and Corrections

  FreeBSD official ports has KDE Frameworks 5.63, Plasma 5.17 and Applications 19.08.2 so it’s right up-to-date with the main KDE releases and it makes a great development platform.

Graphics: Mesa 19.1.8, dGPU and Intel

• Mesa 19.1.8

  Mesa 19.1.8 is now available.
  
  NOTE: It is anticipated that 19.1.8 will be the final release in the
  19.1 series. Users of 19.1 are encouraged to migrate to the 19.2 series
  in order to obtain future fixes.
  
  Apologies for the big delay in this release; there were several regressions that we
  were investigating, which prevented the pre-release to be on time.
  
  Subject: [ANNOUNCE] mesa 19.1.8
  To: mesa-announce at lists.freedesktop.org
  Cc: mesa-dev at lists.freedesktop.org
  
  Adam Jackson (1):
        docs: Update bug report URLs for the gitlab migration
  
  Alan Coopersmith (5):
        c99_compat.h: Don't try to use 'restrict' in C++ code
        util: Make Solaris implemention of p_atomic_add work with gcc
        util: Workaround lack of flock on Solaris
        meson: recognize "sunos" as the system name for Solaris
        intel/common: include unistd.h for ioctl() prototype on Solaris
  
  Andreas Gottschling (1):
        drisw: Fix shared memory leak on drawable resize
  
  Andres Gomez (3):
        docs: Add the maximum implemented Vulkan API version in 19.1 rel notes
        docs/features: Update VK_KHR_display_swapchain status
        egl: Remove the 565 pbuffer-only EGL config under X11.
  
  Andrii Simiklit (1):
        glsl: disallow incompatible matrices multiplication
  
  Arcady Goldmints-Orlov (1):
        anv: fix descriptor limits on gen8
  
  Bas Nieuwenhuizen (2):
        tu: Set up glsl types.
        radv: Add workaround for hang in The Surge 2.
  
  Danylo Piliaiev (1):
        st/nine: Ignore D3DSIO_RET if it is the last instruction in a shader
  
  Dylan Baker (5):
        meson: fix logic for generating .pc files with old glvnd
        meson: Try finding libxvmcw via pkg-config before using find_library
        meson: Link xvmc with libxv
        meson: gallium media state trackers require libdrm with x11
        meson: Only error building gallium video without libdrm when the platform is drm
  
  Eric Engestrom (4):
        gl: drop incorrect pkg-config file for glvnd
        meson: re-add incorrect pkg-config files with GLVND for backward compatibility
        util/anon_file: add missing #include
        util/anon_file: const string param
  
  Erik Faye-Lund (1):
        glsl: correct bitcast-helpers
  
  Greg V (1):
        util: add anon_file.h for all memfd/temp file usage
  
  Haihao Xiang (1):
        i965: support AYUV/XYUV for external import only
  
  Hal Gentz (1):
        gallium/osmesa: Fix the inability to set no context as current.
  
  Jason Ekstrand (2):
        nir/repair_ssa: Replace the unreachable check with the phi builder
        intel/fs: Fix fs_inst::flags_read for ANY/ALL predicates
  
  Juan A. Suarez Romero (12):
        docs: add sha256 checksums for 19.1.7
        cherry-ignore: add explicit 19.2 only nominations
        cherry-ignore: add explicit 19.3 only nominations
        Revert "Revert "intel/fs: Move the scalar-region conversion to the generator.""
        cherry-ignore: Revert "gallium: remove PIPE_CAP_TEXTURE_SHADOW_MAP"
        bin/get-pick-list.sh: sha1 commits can be smaller than 8 chars
        cherry-ignore: nir/opt_large_constants: Handle store writemasks
        cherry-ignore: util: added missing headers in anon-file
        cherry-ignore: radv: Fix condition for skipping the continue CS.
        cherry-ignore: Revert "radv: disable viewport clamping even if FS doesn't write Z"
        Update version to 19.1.8
        docs: add release notes for 19.1.8
  
  Ken Mays (1):
        haiku: fix Mesa build
  
  Kenneth Graunke (4):
        iris: Initialize ice->state.prim_mode to an invalid value
        intel: Increase Gen11 compute shader scratch IDs to 64.
        iris: Disable CCS_E for 32-bit floating point textures.
        iris: Fix iris_rebind_buffer() for VBOs with non-zero offsets.
  
  Lionel Landwerlin (5):
        anv: gem-stubs: return a valid fd got anv_gem_userptr()
        intel: use proper label for Comet Lake skus
        mesa: don't forget to clear _Layer field on texture unit
        intel: fix subslice computation from topology data
        intel/isl: Set null surface format to R32_UINT
  
  Marek Olšák (1):
        gallium/vl: don't set PIPE_HANDLE_USAGE_EXPLICIT_FLUSH
  
  Matt Turner (1):
        util: Drop preprocessor guards for glibc-2.12
  
  Michel Dänzer (1):
        radeonsi: fix VAAPI segfault due to various bugs
  
  Michel Zou (2):
        scons: add py3 support
        scons: For MinGW use -posix flag.
  
  Paulo Zanoni (1):
        intel/fs: fix SHADER_OPCODE_CLUSTER_BROADCAST for SIMD32
  
  Prodea Alexandru-Liviu (1):
        scons/MSYS2-MinGW-W64: Fix build options defaults
  
  Rhys Perry (2):
        radv: always emit a position export in gs copy shaders
        nir/opt_remove_phis: handle phis with no sources
  
  Samuel Iglesias Gonsálvez (1):
        intel/nir: do not apply the fsin and fcos trig workarounds for consts
  
  Stephen Barber (1):
        nouveau: add idep_nir_headers as dep for libnouveau
  
  Tapani Pälli (3):
        iris: close screen fd on iris_destroy_screen
        egl: check for NULL value like eglGetSyncAttribKHR does
        util: fix os_create_anonymous_file on android
  
  pal1000 (2):
        scons/windows: Support build with LLVM 9.
        scons: Fix MSYS2 Mingw-w64 build.
  
  git tag: mesa-19.1.8
  

• Mesa 19.1.8 Released To End Out The Series

  More than one month has passed since Mesa 19.1.7 compared to the usual bi-weekly release cadence, but on Monday following the closure of remaining blocker bugs, Mesa 19.1.8 was released that also ends out this release series. Mesa 19.1.8 is the last planned release in the 19.1 Q2 series with users now being encouraged to upgrade at least to the stable Mesa 19.2 while Mesa 19.3 should be out around early December.

• Linux 5.5 To Restore Power-Savings For Hybrid Laptops When Not Using The dGPU

  On recent kernels when using a laptop with hybrid graphics but not running with the discrete GPU graphics enabled, a regression meant the dGPU never got powered off... Fortunately, for Linux 5.5 -- and potentially to be back-ported after that -- is a change to restore that power-savings. A change enabling NVIDIA HDA controller support inadvertently left dGPUs powered up when not in use, i.e. where the dGPU is not bound to a driver. When the NVIDIA discrete graphics aren't bound to a driver, the power saving path wasn't being hit where the platform power management could disable power to the GPU.

• Intel Lands More Graphics Code For Linux 5.5 - Jasper, More Intel Xe Multi-GPU Prepping

  Intel's open-source developers kicked off a new week by sending in their latest vetted changes to DRM-Next ahead of next month's Linux 5.5 kernel cycle. They already have sent in a lot of new graphics driver code for Linux 5.5 particularly around Tiger Lake while this week's pull request contains more new hardware enablement. They also anticipate sending in another pull request next week to DRM-Next with any other lingering feature work they are hoping to get into Linux 5.5.

• Intel's Graphics Compiler For Their NEO Compute Stack Now Supports Jasper Lake

  The team maintaining the LLVM-based Intel Graphics Compiler as part of their "NEO" OpenCL/Compute Stack have rolled out v1.0.2714 that includes initial support for Jasper Lake among other improvements. Just in the past week we've begun seeing Linux graphics driver patches around "Jasper Lake" and that initial kernel-side support coming for Linux 5.5. Jasper Lake is the rumored 10nm successor to Gemini Lake for low-power SoCs but not to be confused with Elkhart Lake that is Tremont+Gen11 also for ultra-low-power environments based upon the limited information thus far.

Leftovers: GNOME Lawsuit, Clear Linux, Freespire, OmniOS, Mozilla and Proprietary Traps

• GNOME sends message to 'patent trolls' and files defence against lawsuit

  The GNOME Foundation has filed a defence against the patent lawsuit it received a month ago, saying it wants to "send a message to all software patent trolls out there". The alleged "patent troll" in question, Rothschild Patent Imaging (RPI), sued the GNOME Foundation in September, making claims that the Linux desktop provider had infringed a patent related to the wireless distribution of images. In its original legal complaint, RPI said GNOME's Shotwell program infringed upon its patent as the platform wirelessly shared photos to social media, imported camera photos onto Shotwell, and filtered various photographic images by topics such as events or groups. In response to the patent lawsuit, the Linux desktop provider has filed three legal defences -- a motion to dismiss the case outright, an answer to the claim, and a counterclaim.

• Clear Linux Working On A New Software Store, User Bundles Arriving Before End Of Year

  Intel developers are still working on some interesting improvements to Clear Linux itself this quarter on top of keeping up to date with the latest upstream software it packages. For those users of this Intel-optimized rolling-release Linux distribution, Q4'2019 is set to bring more improvements to its installer, Python 2 should finally be cleared out, the user bundles / third-party support looks like it will be ready, and they are even working on a new alternative to GNOME Software that will be focused on their bundles packaging architecture.

• Freespire 5.0 Run Through

  In this video, we are looking at Freespire 5.0.

• OmniOS Community Edition r151030y, r151028ay, r151022dw

  OmniOS Community Edition weekly releases for w/c 21st of October 2019 are now available.

• OmniOS r151030y Brings Microcode Updates For Intel, Zen Topology Updates For AMD

  OmniOS Community Edition remains one of the few successful Illumos/Solaris operating systems outside Oracle. OmniOS CE r151030y was released today along with other older build updates to address the recent sudo vulnerability. Besides correcting the recent sudo security vulnerability, OmniOS r151030y has updated its bundled Intel CPU microcode bundle against a newer Intel snapshot, there are improvements to AMD processor topology detection, improved compatibility with Linux's getsockopt() within LX Zones, and other fixes.

• Quickly Alter Typography with Firefox Font Editor

  Fonts and typography are at the heart of design on the web. We now have powerful tools to inspect, understand, and design our typography in the browser. For instance, have you ever landed on a web page and wondered what fonts are being used? Then, have you asked yourself where those fonts come from or why a particular font isn’t loading? The font editor in Firefox provides answers and insights. You gain the ability to make font changes directly, with a live preview. As for me, I use the editor for understanding variable fonts, how they work, and the options they expose.

• Nate Weiner, formerly CEO of Pocket, to take expanded role at Mozilla focused on New Markets

  Nate Weiner, founder and CEO of Pocket, has been promoted to SVP of a new product organization, New Markets, at Mozilla. The New Markets organization will be working to expand and scale Mozilla’s product portfolio alongside the Firefox and Emerging Technologies teams. The Pocket and Emerging Markets teams will live within the New Markets organization.

• Avast's internal network was [cracked] via a compromised VPN profile

  "The user, whose credentials were apparently compromised and associated with the IP, did not have domain admin privileges. However, through a successful privilege escalation, the actor managed to obtain domain admin privileges."

• Can the Internet of Things Prevent Colony Collapse?

  Nordic software consultant Tieto Oyj has placed sensors in two beehives in Sweden, connecting some 80,000 bees in each to the Internet. The hives send data to the off-site servers where it can be remotely accessed in real time, and soon artificial intelligence algorithms will be used to analyze the information.

• Apple plans its own Mac processors, report claims

  Apple’s top brass is well aware that dependency for key components on third-party suppliers is a big risk. This is why it likes to have at least two suppliers for most of its components across its chain.

  It is also why the company invests deeply in proprietary technologies.

• Apple's ARM-based Macs are probably arriving next year

  A shift to custom-based ARM chips, while bad news for Intel, would be hardly surprising. It would see Apple more closely merging its hardware efforts, and would also mean the firm no longer have to deal with issues such as Intel's ongoing processor shortages, which could see new MacBooks make it to market more quickly.

• Apple’s Smart Glasses Could Make 2020 the Year of AR

  Apple plans other revamps for later next year, too: a Watch with sleep-tracking features and Macs that might run on custom processors, which would likely have greater efficiency and lower battery drain.