Latest Firefox on OpenPOWER/POWER and Arctic Fox 27.11.0

• Firefox 82 on POWER goes PGO

  You'll have noticed this post is rather tardy, since Firefox 82 has been out for the better part of a week, but I wanted to really drill down on a couple variables in our Firefox build configuration for OpenPOWER and also see if it was time to blow away a few persistent assumptions. But let's not bury the lede here: after several days of screaming, ranting and scaring the cat with various failures, this blog post is finally being typed in a fully profile-guided and link-time optimized Firefox 82 tuned for POWER9 little-endian. Although it multiplies compile time by nearly a factor of 3 and the build process intermittently can consume a terrifying amount of memory, the PGO-LTO build is roughly 25% faster than the LTO-only build, which was already 4% faster than the "baseline" -O3 -mcpu=power9 build. That's worth an 84-minute coffee break! (-j24 on a dual-8 Talos II [64 threads], 64GB RAM.) The problem with PGO and gcc (at least gcc 10, anyway) is that all the .gcda files end up in the same directory as the built objects in an instrumented build. The build system, which is now heavily clang-centric (despite the docs, gcc is clearly Tier 2, since this and other things don't work), does not know how to handle or transfer the resulting profile data and bombs after running the test load. We don't build with clang because in previous attempts it never managed to fully build the browser on ppc64le and I'm sceptical of its code quality on this platform anyway, but since I wanted to verify against a presumably working configuration I did try a clang build first to see if anything had changed.

• Arctic Fox 27.11.0 release

  This 2020 with COVID, quarantines and lockdown was and is a strange year, but it allowed me to take care of Arctic Fox quite a bit. A lot of work is going on in my Arctic Fox fork, which Matt dutifully imports. Thousands of commits flew in into this new release, tackling JavaScript upgrades, build fixes, further metro removal, JIT optimizations. SO much was imported from Firefox that this is really exciting!

today's howtos

• How do I Install an Entire Ubuntu on a USB Flash Drive? – Linux Hint

  Among all the Linux distros out there, Ubuntu is one of the most well-known and popular ones. Maintained by Canonical, Ubuntu is a Debian-based distro with tons of additional features. It’s a distro that can meet the needs of all sorts of workloads, be it casual or professional. Linux is an operating system that can run on almost any hardware. Thanks to its lower hardware resource requirement (depends on the distro, but on average, still lower), you can run it on even the most potato computer you can find in your attic. In this guide, let me demonstrate to you just that. Of course, it’s not something crazy, but really fun. Check out how to install an entire Ubuntu system on a USB flash drive.

• What is MongoDB? How Does MongoDB Work?

  MongoDB is an open-source, modern, general-purpose, document-based distributed database management system developed, distributed, and supported by MongoDB Inc.

• OpenStack Cluster Installer: the Debian way to deploy OpenStack

• How to speed up Blender rendering – Linux Hint

  Blender, which was first launched in 1995 by Ton Roosendaal, a developer from the Netherlands, is a powerful 3D creation tool used to create 3D graphics, interactive 3D apps, video games, virtual reality videos, and animations. It has been available as an open-source software since 2002, and it runs on popular operating systems like macOS, Linux, and Windows. Blender has many features, and it can be used for 3D modeling, texturing, shading, rigging, particle simulation, sculpting, motion graphics, and compositing. Blender is easy to learn, and it has the support of a huge community. Blender is a very robust application, and its modeling, sculpting, and viewport navigation functions are smooth. However, for scenes with many 3D assets, glossy shaders, high-definition textures, particles, and volumetric lights, a significant amount of time is required for rendering. However, the time required for rendering can be reduced by employing the proper renderer settings. In this article, we will discuss methods for reducing the rendering time in Blender, and the effects of these methods on the final result. Rendering a scene in Blender is different than rendering an image in a photo editor or a video from a video editor. There are many factors to consider before rendering in Blender to avoid wasting time. For example, Blender (version 2.8) comes with two rendering engines: Eevee and Cycles. Eevee is much faster than Cycles, and it has lower time and resource requirements; however, while Eevee is a real-time viewport port renderer, Cycles is a ray-tracing rendering engine that achieves better results. A rendering engine can be selected based on personal preference, but professional designers tend to prefer Cycles due to its accuracy and realism, despite its higher time requirements.

• How to Use the SAR Command in Linux: A Full Tutorial for Beginners – Linux Hint

  If you are a system administrator, then you probably perform many tasks related to monitoring, logging, and auditing. For such tasks to be completed successfully, all system activities must be recorded. Luckily, the Linux operating system provides the system activity reporter (SAR) command. The SAR command, which is used to track the activities performed in a computer system, is very useful to understand because it can facilitate various tasks related to system administration. This tutorial provides an in-depth look into Linux’s SAR command for beginners, beginning with the installation process. Please note that, for this tutorial, we use Linux Mint 20.

• How to Copy a Folder in Linux? – Linux Hint

  The files and folders are commonly used in any operating system. At times, your folder contains some crucial data, and you prefer to keep several backup copies. The first solution that comes to our mind is to copy that folder somewhere else. Therefore, in this article, our target is to figure out all the methods of copying a folder in Linux, i.e., both the CLI-based methods and the GUI-based methods. Note: For explaining the different methods of copying a folder in Linux, we have made use of Linux Mint 20.

• Configure Ansible and Run ad-hoc Commands

  In the first part of the Ansible series, you got acquainted with Ansible and learned to install it. In this tutorial, you will learn how to manage static inventory in Ansible. You will also understand various Ansible configuration settings. Furthermore, you will explore few Ansible modules and you will get to run Ansible Ad-Hoc commands.

Fedora 34 Looking To Add An AArch64 KDE Plasma Desktop Spin

Given the AArch64 laptops coming to market and continuing popularity around ARM64 SBCs for Linux desktop use-cases, Fedora's KDE special interest group is proposing Fedora KDE Plasma edition also be spun for the 64-bit ARM architecture. While there is the Fedora KDE Plasma spin for x86_64, it currently isn't produced for AArch64. The desktop-minded spins to date for Fedora AArch64 have been Fedora Workstation with GNOME Shell and then Fedora Xfce for a lighter spin. There is also the minimal and server images, but the proposal laid out this week is for delivering Fedora KDE on AArch64 in 2021.