How do we understand value when we talk about sustainability? What does investing in open source mean? The meaning is different for many people because of an implicit understanding of what open source means.

This post is a reflection on the past year in my work with the UNICEF Venture Fund. We integrated new open source tools to capture metrics and data about open source repositories connected to UNICEF portfolio companies and created a shortlist of key metrics that map to business sustainability metrics. Now, we are better positioned to look back on past, current, and upcoming portfolio companies and mentor support programs.

The cyberdeck trend has evolved to a relatively straightforward formula: take a desktop computer and strip it to its barest essentials of screen , PCB, and input device, before clothing it in a suitably post-apocalyptic or industrial exterior. Sometimes these can result in a stylish prop straight from a movie set, and happily for [Patrick De Angelis] his Raspberry Pi based cyberdeck (Italian, Google Translate link) fits this description, taking the well-worn path of putting a Raspberry Pi and screen into a ruggedised flight case. Its very unremarkability is the key to its success, using a carefully-selected wired keyboard and trackpad combo neatly dodges the usual slightly messy arrangements of microcontroller boards.

• Intel To Ring In 2022 With New, Faster AV1 Encoder Release - Phoronix

  Intel in cooperation with the Alliance for Open Media continues developing SVT-AV1 as the flagship CPU-based AV1 video encoder. With the next SVT-AV1 update there are performance optimizations as well as several new preset levels allowing for even greater performance. Here are some early benchmarks of that updated SVT-AV1.

• Open Source Trends for 2022 and Beyond

  “There's nothing magical about open-source methodology and security,” Vaughan-Nichols notes. “Linus's law is that given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow. But, if not enough developers are looking, security vulnerabilities will still go unnoticed.” And, according to what he is calling Schneier's law, "Security is a process, not a product,” and “constant vigilance is needed to secure all software.”

• LibreOffice Working On A New Cairo Graphics Back-End - Phoronix

  Merged yesterday into the LibreOffice code-base was introducing yet another graphics drawing back-end for this open-source office suite.

  SvpGraphicsBackend is this new VCL (Visual Class Library) back-end for LibreOffice. SvpGraphicsBackend is being used as a new back-end around Cairo. There is already SvpSalGraphics for LibreOffice that uses Cairo for drawing while SvpGraphicsBackend is being worked into the new implementation alongside the various other VCL graphics/drawing back-ends for the cross-platform office suite.

  Tomaž Vajngerl of Collabora has been working on this new Cairo back-end that was merged on Thursday. So far there have been a few more follow-up commits beginning to move more functionality into SvpGraphicsBackend.

• Will Anyone Actually Show Up at CES on Wednesday?

  A given at the first of each year is CES. Formally called the Consumer Electronic Show, the event practically takes over Las Vegas for a few days every January, and every company that even dabbles in electronics is on hand to show off their latest offerings.

  How big is it? In 2019, more than 182,000 people attended and more than 4,400 vendors exhibited their wares. How important is being there to vendors? In 2020, Apple made its first appearance at the event in 27 years, if that tells you anything.

  In 2021, when there was no in-person event due to COVID, organizers pulled out all the stops to create an engaging virtual event, featuring a live digital performance by Billie Eilish as a lead-in to a discussion session on digital performances in whic Ryan Seacrest spoke with Billie Eilish and Dua Lipa.

• CES Rolls the Dice and Gambles on Becoming a Superspreader Event

• openSUSE Tumbleweed – Review of the week 2021/52 – Dominique a.k.a. DimStar (Dim*)

  Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

  The last week of the year, and the last day of the year, are coming to an end. Tumbleweed had a small dip, as the last two snapshots that moved to openQA had to be stopped from being published. Nevertheless, we still managed to publish 6 snapshots before heading out to the new-year celebrations (1223…1228).

• Intel Alder Lake's Thread Director Support Coming to Linux | Tom's Hardware

  Intel has published a new patch series for its Linux drivers that promise to improve the performance of its hybrid Alder Lake processors by optimizing usage of (P)erformance and (E)fficiency cores.

  When Intel released its 12th Generation Core 'Alder Lake' processors earlier this year, it quickly turned out that the new CPUs perform better under Windows rather than under Linux. Unlike Windows 11, Linux does not have proper support for Intel's Thread Director technology based on the Enhanced Hardware Feedback Interface (HFI), which enables the OS to utilize high-performance Golden Cove and energy-efficient Gracemont cores properly.

  At present, the Linux kernel decides when to use P or E cores using the ITMT/Turbo Boost Max 3.0 driver that relies on the information exposed by the firmware, reports Phoronix. Essentially, this means that under Linux, the OS in many cases prefers the fastest cores (i.e., Golden Coves at high clocks) and underutilizes energy-efficient cores.

• ThinkPad ACPI Driver Picking Up New Features With Linux 5.17 - Phoronix

  For those running Linux on Lenovo ThinkPad laptops, the upcoming Linux 5.17 cycle is set to bring a few improvements to the "thinkpad_acpi" driver.

  Thanks to developers Ognjen Galic and Thomas Weißschuh, the ThinkPad ACPI driver is adding support for inhibit charge behavior if wanting to temporarily disable charging support for ThinkPads allowing this behavior through the system's embedded controller (EC).

  Similarly, there is also now force discharge support if wanting to force the battery to change and again contingent upon EC support from the ThinkPad.

• Mesa's Radeon Vulkan Driver Lands Experimental Mesh Shaders - Phoronix

  Thanks to Valve engineer Timur Kristóf and other open-source developers involved, Mesa's Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" is ending 2021 on a high note: mesh shaders was just merged!

  As noted back in October, RADV has been working on mesh shaders at least in experimental form and making use of NVIDIA's NV_mesh_shader extension.

  Mesh shaders provide a compute-like shader stage to replace the conventional vertex/geometry pipeline. This work though is expected to remain "experimental" until there is a proper Vulkan cross-vendor extension around mesh shaders as NV_mesh_shader is known to perform poorly on AMD hardware for which the extension was not designed.

  Mesh shaders support requires Radeon RX 6000 "RDNA2" GPUs and newer for support. This experimental mesh shaders support will be part of Mesa 22.0 that will debut as stable by March. This may prove beneficial for VKD3D-Proton in mapping Direct3D 12 mesh shaders atop Vulkan but, again, the performance isn't expected to be optimal.