Redis 7.0 Is Near With "Significant Performance Optimizations" - Phoronix

The first release candidate of Redis 7.0 was made available today. Getting us excited about this updated in-memory key-value database are "significant performance optimizations" among other improvements.

Redis 7.0-rc1 comes with performance optimizations and more but as well a number of changes that break backwards compatibility support for this popular open-source project. The performance work for Redis 7.0 includes "significant" memory savings from various optimizations, lower copy-on-write memory overhead, memory efficiency improvements, improvements to fsync to avoid large writes to disk, improved latency, and more.

The Apache Weekly News Round-up: week ending 28 January 2022

Farewell, January --we're wrapping up the month with another great week. Here are the latest updates on the Apache community's activities...

LibreOffice project and community recap: January 2022

Perl Annual Report - 2021

Thanks to the Team PWC, I completed one more year of weekly challenge. It may not sound a big deal but for me it is. I wouldn't have done without the support of the team. I would like to mention one name, Colin Crain, our in-house, Perl reviewer for the hard work in reviewing Perl solutions every week without fail for so many months now.

Rakudo Weekly News: 2022.05 foo = 42

Ralph Mellor published a Request For Comments allowing for a new syntax to define constants in the Raku Programming Language. And quite some discussion followed, and some clarifications. In any case, it caused the creation of one new module in the ecosystem: immutable.

No, Linus Torvalds is not Bitcoin's legendary creator Satoshi Nakamoto

One of the great tech mysteries is "Who really is Bitcoin's inventor, the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto?" Recently, some people thought Linus Torvalds, the developer behind both the world's most popular operating system, Linux, and its most popular development tool, the Git distributed version control (DVC) system, had also claimed he was the world's most popular cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, inventor: The perplexing Satoshi Nakamoto.

d-ptr pitfalls | [bobulate]

A “smart” pointer manages a chunk of memory it points to. Examples in Qt include QScopedPointer and QSharedPointer. C++ standard examples are std::shared_ptr and std::unique_ptr.

Smart pointers need a particular implementation: the Qt source code implements the Q-flavored ones (in Qt source code, and there’s only one Qt source code), but the standard ones are implemented by multiple standard libraries. There’s GNU libstdc++ and LLVM libcxx, for instance. There are differences in the implementations.

One important difference lies in the implementation of the destructor of a std::unique_ptr. The LLVM implementation replaces an internal pointer by a nullptr and then calls the destructor of the held object, while GNU calls the destructor of the held object and leaves the internal pointer alone (the std::unique_ptr is being destroyed anyway, so why bother updating the pointer-value).

This becomes visible in some situations where a not-completely-destroyed smart pointer is used: with the GNU implementation it may still hold a valid pointer, with LLVM it holds nullptr. Some will crash, some will not – it doesn’t really matter because to get into this situation you need to be in Undefined Behavior territory anyway and you should be glad that your computer doesn’t catch fire, fall over, and then sink into the swamp.

The visible symptom in a backtrace is an unexpectedly nullptr “smart” pointer.

PinePhone community poll results

Throughout January we ran a poll asking people about how they use their PinePhones. Some poll results are quite predictable while others yielded unexpected results. Before we start, let me put on my academic hat for just one minute. This is a small, self-reported and not representative sample. A total of 3079 respondents took part in the poll – which amounts to less than 5% of all PinePhone owners. I’d therefore hesitate to extrapolate any of the results to the entire PinePhone community. I find it more likely that this sample reflects the most active community members and people following our project. It is also worth mentioning that some questions posed in the poll weren’t exactly well phrased, and that the poll itself did not follow any established conventions. But this was never meant to be a comprehensive study – it is instead, at best, a peak at the overarching trends of the most active portion of the community. To this end, when describing the results I’ll use descriptive generalizations, such as ‘more than half’ or ‘the majority’, rather than exact numbers or percentages I feel that this is more in line with the nature of the data and the general spirit of the poll. For what it’s worth, I’ll also share some of my thoughts and insights as we review the results. Exact numbers and percentages are, however, included in the graphs.

Lilbits: NYT buys Wordle, AYA NEO Next crowdfunding preview, Linux Smartphone news, and Samsung Galaxy S22 series leaks

In other recent news, developers have been making a lot of progress in creating software for the new PinePhone Pro Linux-friendly smartphone with a Rockchip RK3399 processor, although there’s still a lot of work to do. Meanwhile PinePhone maker Pine64 has released the results of a recent poll that gives us an idea of which mobile Linux distributions and users interfaces are most popular… at least among the most engaged PinePhone users. And the New York Times has acquired popular word game Wordle with a promise that it won’t get put behind a paywall… yet.

[...]

Now that developers and early adopters have received some of the first PinePhone Pro smartphones, some folks have been running into charging issues when trying to use a “dumb” USB charger rather than a smarter USB-C charger or when the battery is completely drained. Megi, who has put an impressive amount of work into maintaining a Linux kernel that enables support for PinePhone and PinePhone Pro hardware, explains the issue in-depth and notes that some mobile Linux distributions for the PinePhone Pro have already merged Megi’s work-in-progress USB Type-C support into their kernel trees… but they may not always have the latest updates.

megi's PinePhone Development Log

Gentoo on a PinePhone Pro

With the release of the PinePhone Pro it is time for an other blog, I've been using the PinePhone Pro since the Developer Editions came out. And I have been working very hard on getting Gentoo to support the PinePhone Pro.

Demo of postmarketOS running on the PinePhone Pro [Martijn Braam / YouTube]

Building a Retro Linux Gaming Computer - Part 10: For I Have Sinned | GamingOnLinux

It was another shovelware collection that first introduced me to XEvil, in this case 300 Arcade Games by Cosmi Corporation made in 2000 for Microsoft Windows. This X11 classic was ported to DirectX by Micheal Judge, with the original game being first released by Steve Hardt in 1994 as a way to teach himself C++ as a sophomore. XEvil would grow in popularity from there, even being the star of organized tournaments similar to those done for Doom and Quake at the time.

The version included on 100 Great Linux Games is actually the forked 1.5.5 Mutant Strain with inferior sprite work, worse controls, and choppier performance than the final stable 2.02 release. A controversial opinion in some quarters as the comments section of The Linux Game Tome illustrates, with people bemoaning the loss of the green chopper boys and black aliens, with some even pining for a return to the original black and white graphics.

That final version of XEvil has near feature parity between the Linux and Windows releases, with one glaring omission. The interfaces are a little different but accomplish the same thing, with the Linux version having more graphics options but the Windows version supporting full screen. On Linux smooth scrolling is disabled by default and needs to be toggled due to the performance penalty, but it gave me no problems running on my Pentium III 500 Katmai.

Portal 2 gets an upgrade ready for the Steam Deck | GamingOnLinux

Ready for some more testing? Valve has put up a brand new update for Portal 2 as they ready up for the Steam Deck. As one of their most popular titles, it's no surprise to see upgrades coming in.

This tool will make playing Epic Games on Steam Deck much easier | TechRadar

We’re less than one month away from the launch of the Steam Deck, and it looks like players might now find it easier to take more than just their Steam library out on the go.

The main selling point of the handheld PC is its portability - at the expense of performance (compared to a powerful gaming PC), players can enjoy their Steam library no matter where they are. However, PC game libraries aren’t confined to just one platform; what if you want to play all those free Epic Games Store games you’ve collected?

This is where Heroic comes in. It’s an open-source, Linux-compatible game launcher that can boot up Epic Games Store titles. Because the Steam Deck is a Linux-based PC (albeit in a handheld form), Heroic’s Linux compatibility means it should be fairly easy to install on the system.

This means that you won’t need to muck around with trying to install a new operating system on your Steam Deck to run your Epic Games library - and (as noted by Forbes) the new 2.1.0. Heroic update (nicknamed “Rayleigh”) has added several Steam Deck-friendly features.

First up is the newly added support for gamepads. While it’s unlikely the Steam Deck's controllers will be compatible right away, we suspect it won’t take long to make them work in Heroic now that the UI is already compatible with Xbox and PlayStation controllers.