BeagleV RISC-V SBC reborn as VisionFive V1

StarFive revealed details about a “VisionFive V1” SBC (formerly BeagleV) that runs Linux on a StarFive JH7100 SoC with dual 1.5GHz SiFive U74 cores and a 1-TOPS NPU based on RV64GC RISC-V. The Pico-ITX SBC has up to 8GB RAM and 40-pin GPIO. In January, BeagleBoard.org and Seeed launched an early access release of a BeagleV SBC (later referred to as the BeagleV – StarLight) that runs Linux on a RISC-V architecture StarFive JH7100 SoC with dual Cortex-A55 like SiFive U74 cores. BeagleBoard.org withdrew from the project over the summer, and StarFive is now prepping an updated version called the VisionFive V1.

today's leftovers

• Distro Rating Wallpapers = Distro Review | Sudo 25k Special - Invidious

  I recently heard about Ubuntu Unity and I was curious how usable Unity 7 would be like in 2021, if it's exciting I might make a followup video about my thoughts.

• Linux overview | deepin 20.3 - Invidious

  In this video, I am going to show an overview of deepin 20.3 and some of the applications pre-installed.

• Craft Parts – Reusable code, Snapcraft style | Ubuntu

  Throughout the ages, humans have always used simpler tools and materials to create more complex ones. Wood and stone for smelting bronze and iron; iron to create steel; vacuum tubes to create logical gates; logical gates to create advanced arithmetic engines, and so on. Modern software is no different. With Snapcraft in particular, the snap building process comprises a number of steps. Source artifacts are collected, there’s compilation and assembly of binary products, and then, these are packaged into a single final archive. This process is very similar to how various other Canonical solutions work, and applicable to many different use cases outside of the snap world. To that end, the Snapcraft team has created a portable, reusable mechanism called Craft Parts.

• Mozilla Performance Blog: Performance Sheriff Newsletter (October 2021)

  In October there were 303 alerts generated, resulting in 45 regression bugs being filed on average 5.2 days after the regressing change landed. Welcome to the October 2021 edition of the performance sheriffing newsletter. Here you’ll find the usual summary of our sheriffing efficiency metrics. If you’re interested (and if you have access) you can view the full dashboard.

• Fedora Community Blog: Friday’s Fedora Facts: 2021-47

  Here’s your weekly Fedora report. Read what happened this week and what’s coming up. Your contributions are welcome (see the end of the post)! Fedora Linux 33 will reach end of life on Tuesday 30 November. The F35 retrospective survey is open through 4 December.

• 4 unexpected ways to use Ansible | Enable Sysadmin

  Ansible is well-known for automating traditional IT tasks, like server administration, networking, application deployments, and more. But Ansible can do a whole lot more. In Jeff Geerling's AnsibleFest 2021 presentation, Automating the uncommon—Ansible automates everything, he shared some of the creative ways he uses Ansible.

• #20 Colorful Characters · This Week in GNOME

  Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from November 19 to November 26.

• Intel Compute-Runtime Updated With DG2/Alchemist Support - Phoronix

  Intel's open-source engineers today released the Compute-Runtime 21.47.21710 as their latest update to this open-source compute stack for Linux systems enabling their graphics processors to enjoy performant OpenCL and oneAPI Level Zero support. Notable with today's Compute Runtime update is that v21.47.21710 is the first having DG2 "Alchemist" graphics card support in place. This goes along with other DG2/Alchemist enablement going on in the Linux kernel and Mesa, etc. When pairing the latest kernel now with Intel Compute-Runtime should yield preliminary support for OpenCL and oneAPI L0 on Alchemist but expect more refinements and optimizations to come over the months ahead.

• Several Older NVIDIA Tegra Powered Tablets To Be Supported By Linux 5.17 - Phoronix

  For those that happen to have older ASUS Transformer tablets powered by a NVIDIA Tegra SoC, the Linux 5.17 kernel cycle early next year is enabling a number of them to work off the mainline kernel. A batch of patches were sent out this week intended for the Linux 5.17 cycle for improving the older NVIDIA Tegra support with the mainline kernel.

Programming Leftovers

• LLVM Prepares New ThreadSanitizer Runtime That Is Faster, Lower Memory Use - Phoronix

  LLVM developers have been working recently to land their new ThreadSanitizer run-time. The TSan as a reminder is the compiler instrumentation with associated run-time library for being able to detect data races. ThreadSanitizer is successful at detecting data race conditions even within large and complex code-bases. But unfortunately it's quite burdensome to enable with performance slowing down in the range of 5~15x while the run-time memory overhead can be in the range of 5~10x.

• xcrun: error: invalid active developer path - buildVirtual

• Why PHP Is Getting a Foundation and Why That Matters - FOSS Force

  The PHP Foundation is an effort by 10 key PHP vendors to assure adequate funding to keep the popular scripting language viable.

• Qt 5.12.12 Released

  We have released Qt 5.12.12 today. This is the last release from Qt 5.12 LTS series and the standard support of Qt 5.12 LTS ends in December 2021. Qt 5.12.12 contains ~ 30 bug fixes compared to the Qt 5.12.11. Please check details about the release from Qt 5.12.12 Release Note. Note that Qt 5.12 LTS standard support ends in December 2021. It has been quite a long journey with it; big thanks to everyone involved!

• LWJGL - The Lightweight Java Game Library Version 3.3 Released

  The part to note in this definition is that LWJGL provides access to native APIs through Java. That it is a wrapper over the APIs doesn't mean that you should not be familiar with the semantics of the underlying API. Hence to get the most out of LWJGL a good understanding of the native APIs is essential too. At this point it is important to disambiguate between a library and a framework. LWJGL is a library and as such is low level; it is not a gamedev framework like libgdx (which itself uses LWJGL under the covers!) or a gamedev engine like GoDot which provide higher level of abstractions. For this reason, it is not recommended for novice programmers to start out writing games with it. And, of course, it is debatable whether Java is a good language for gamedev over the classic value of C++. Some advantages of using Java are its support of multiple operating systems and, of course, the easy learning curve in comparison to C++. Minuses could be garbage collection, performance and a smaller dev community. In any case, it depends on the use case; as they say, choose the best tool for the job at hand.

• Bitrot resistance of next-generation image formats

  What happens when a single bit gets corrupted in an image file you cherish? The results can range from absolutely nothing to an imperceptible visual change to a complete loss of the image. The hero image below is somewhere in the middle of the scale; where the top half of the image is perfect, and the lower half is reduced to meaningless digital noise. Whether due to mechanical failure or transmission interference like cosmic radiation: bitrot happens. A rotted bit, or flipped bit, is when one bit of RAM or persistent storage unintentionally flips its state between zero and one. You can only do so much to protect your system from random failure. Multiple backups and data verification is the only proven strategy to protect against it. Traditional JPEG images (referred to as JPEG troughing the article as opposed to JXL), especially with progressive encoding, handle bitrot remarkably well. You might see a single pixel shift its color almost imperceptibly, or one of the encoding layers may shift slightly. The effects are so well understood that you can even find free software that can automatically recover corrupted JPEG photos. However, the next-generation image formats pack data much more densely than in the legacy image formats. There’s isn’t just less redundancy, but every single bit means more to the complete image. This means the effects of bitrot produce a much greater loss of visual fidelity and decodes to more abstract results. The newer encoding techniques include predictive models that can get thrown off completely by a single bit out of place. The digital hellfire in the lower half of the above hero image is a perfect example of this.

• OpenFaaS: How to Add Python Requirements and Dependencies - Anto ./ Online

  This guide will show you how to add requirements and dependencies for a Python project using OpenFaaS. Python dependencies are software components that your project needs for it to work. You can manually use PyPI (the Python Package Index) to provide packages that you need, but OpenFaaS can automate this for you.

• Perl Weekly Challenge 140: Add Binary

• My Favorite Warnings: experimental | Tom Wyant [blogs.perl.org]

  Perl has had experimental features ever since I started using it at about version 5.6. These were things that were considered useful, but about which there was doubt -- about their final form, whether a satisfactory implementation existed, or whatever. Until Perl 5.18, experimental features were simply documented as experimental. At that point, an experimental warning category was added, with sub-categories experimental::lexical_subs, experimental::lexical_topic, experimental::regex_sets, and experimental::smartmatch. Most of the features covered by the original Perl 5.18 warning categories were actually introduced in Perl 5.10 as back-ports from Raku (or Perl 6, as it was then called), and not documented as experimental. My impression was that the relevant experimental:: warnings were introduced becaue the corresponding features were recognized as being more experimental than originally believed. Programmers already familiar with a feature might not notice an extra sentence in the documentation, but they will surely notice if their code starts spitting out experimental warnings.