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Android Leftovers

Submitted by Rianne Schestowitz on Monday 6th of August 2018 03:58:42 PM Filed under

Android

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More in Tux Machines

Canonical makes Kubernetes moves

When last I spoke to Mark Shuttleworth, Canonical's founder, in Berlin, he told me that -- when it comes to Kubernetes -- enterprise "Kubernetes runs on Ubuntu." Kubernetes, the most popular cloud container orchestration program, "makes life easier for people who want portability across public clouds. With multiple Kubernetes clusters you have one common way to run workloads on Linux over both private and public clouds."

Devices: Raspberry Pi, Winmate (With Intel ME Back Doors), and Purism

Raspberry Pi projects for IT professionals

The single-board design is affordable and has been used to promote computer science in schools. Despite this and a strong consumer base, the applications for Raspberry Pi have become more advanced over the years beyond just education and is being used in industry too.

There are various ways the Raspberry Pi can be embedded to create huge value in the enterprise world. Such projects developed using Raspberry Pi may transform traditional businesses.

Here are some ways to use Raspberry Pi effectively in your business.
Apollo Lake mini-PC offers WiFi and a USB Type-C port with DP

Winmate’s rugged, Linux-friendly “EAC Mini EACIL22S” mini-PC runs on an Intel Apollo Lake processor and offers 64GB eMMC, WiFi, a DisplayPort-ready USB Type-C port, and dual GbE and USB 2.0 ports, Winmate has begun adding some Linux-supported systems to its largely Windows-driven embedded lineup, including the recent FM10A VMC touch-panel computer for forklifts. Now, it has launched a rugged, Apollo Lake based mini-PC with Ubuntu 16.04, Linux 4.1.5, or Win 10 IoT Enterprise. The 115 x 90 x 31mm, 0.8 Kilogram EAC Mini EACIL22S follows a similar, but NXP i.MX6 based, EAC Mini EACFA20 system that runs Android 6.0.
Break Free from Privacy Prison with Purism

As 2018 comes to a close, people around the world have to face the stark truth of surveillance capitalism. Nearly all consumer products — speakers, phones, cars, and perhaps even mattresses — are recording devices, storing metrics on our movements and behavior. The New York Times just published a detailed report on location tracking in leaky Android and iOS apps. That’s just a fact of life when people use smartphones, right? Wrong. In 2019, Purism’s Librem 5 smartphone will be proof that no one has to live with spies in their pockets. If anything has changed since Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal, it’s that more and more people are jumping ship from the Frightful Five: Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft. At Purism, we offer an alternative to the polluted software ecosystems of these tech giants. Our code is Free and Open-Source Software (FOSS), the industry standard in security because it can be verified by experts and amateurs alike. The software on our Librem laptops and our upcoming phone stands on a strong, foundational chain of trust that is matched by hardware features such as kill switches. These switches give people the added assurance that their devices won’t record or “phone home” to advertisers, spies, and cyber criminals. Turn off WiFi, microphone, and webcam on the Librem 5 and they’re off, no question about it.

Graphics: V3D, AMD/Vega, Flicker-Free Boot

V3D Compute, VC4 display, PM

For V3D last week, I resurrected my old GLES 3.1 series with SSBO and shader imgae support, rebuilt it for V3D 4.1 (shader images no longer need manual tiling), and wrote indirect draw support and started on compute shaders. As of this weekend, dEQP-GLES31 is passing 1387/1567 of tests with “compute” in the name on the simulator. I have a fix needed for barrier(), then it’s time to build the kernel interface. In the process, I ended up fixing several job flushing bugs, plugging memory leaks, improving our shader disassembly debug dumps, and reducing memory consumption and CPU overhead.
AMD Outs New Vega 10 & 20 IDs With Linux Driver Patch

AMD may have accidentally revealed some new products containing its Radeon RX Vega 10 and Radeon RX Vega 20 graphics technologies. The company patched its RadeonSI Mesa and AMDKFD/AMDGPU kernel drivers with new PCI IDs; no other changes were made with the patch. Phoronix reported that the patch added six new IDs released to Vega 10: 0x6869, 0x686A, 0x686B, 0x686D, 0x686E, and 0x686F. These are new IDs that were previously only referenced in an update to macOS Mojave and GPUOpen's lists of GFX9 parts. That could mean AMD plans to introduce new Vega 10 products sooner than later, but the company might also be internally testing new products that are a ways from release.
AMD Files Trademark For Vega II

It looks like AMD could be announcing Vega II as new 7nm Vega GPUs soon complementing the recently announced Vega 20 Radeon Instinct MI50 / MI60 accelerators.
Arch Linux Users With Intel Graphics Can Begin Enjoying A Flicker-Free Boot

It looks like the recent efforts led by Red Hat / Fedora on providing a flicker-free Linux boot experience and thanks to their upstream-focused approach is starting to pay off for the other desktop Linux distributions... A flicker-free boot experience can now be achieved on Arch Linux with the latest packages, assuming you don't have any quirky hardware. A Phoronix reader reported in earlier today that Arch Linux as of the 4.19.8-arch1-1-ARCH kernel is working out well for the seamless/flicker-free boot experience. The caveat though -- like with Fedora -- is that it only works with Intel graphics hardware/driver for now and does require setting the "i915.fastboot=1" kernel module parameter.

today's howtos

Latest News

Red Hat Openwashing Leadership, Promoting VirtIO-FS and Explaining HID

5 things you won't learn from The Open Organization Leaders Manual

Today the open organization community—a global group of writers, consultants, theorists, managers, and other organizational leaders dedicated to helping others understand how open principles can transform organizational culture and design—unveiled the second edition of The Open Organization Leaders Manual. Billed as "a handbook for building innovative and engaged teams," the book is available now as a Creative Commons-licensed eBook and a paperback.
Companies behind on digital transformation get ahead with open leaders

One source of that disruption is digitization. Digitization is reshaping the way we lead, manage, and work. Even in the scope of the last decade, we've seen rapid adjustments to how we live, connect, and receive services. While we've been discussing ad nauseum how (or whether) we should be redefining organizational cultures and business models, the clock has been ticking, and the pace of digitization has not been slowing. In his book The Digital Matrix: New Rules for Business Transformation Through Technology, author Venkat Venkatraman argues that, by 2025, differences between digital and non-digital functions, processes, and business models will no longer exist.
VirtIO-FS: A Proposed Better Approach For Sharing Folders/Files With Guest VMs

Red Hat developers have proposed a new VirtIO-FS component to provide better support for shared folders/files between the host and guest virtual machines. VirtIO-FS was developed out of the need to share folders/files with guest VMs in a fast, consistent, and secure manner. They designed VirtIO-FS for Kata containers but coud be used with other VMs too. The closest existing project to fulfilling their needs was Virtio-9p, but there were performance issues and other factors leading them to designing this new solution.
Peter Hutterer: Understanding HID report descriptors

This time we're digging into HID - Human Interface Devices and more specifically the protocol your mouse, touchpad, joystick, keyboard, etc. use to talk to your computer. Remember the good old days where you had to install a custom driver for every input device? Remember when PS/2 (the protocol) had to be extended to accommodate for mouse wheels, and then again for five button mice. And you had to select the right protocol to make it work. Yeah, me neither, I tend to suppress those memories because the world is awful enough as it is. As users we generally like devices to work out of the box. Hardware manufacturers generally like to add bits and bobs because otherwise who would buy that new device when last year's device looks identical. This difference in needs can only be solved by one superhero: Committee-man, with the superpower to survive endless meetings and get RFCs approved. Many many moons ago, when USB itself was in its infancy, Committee man and his sidekick Caffeine boy got the USB consortium agree on a standard for input devices that is so self-descriptive that operating systems (Win95!) can write one driver that can handle this year's device, and next year's, and so on. No need to install extra drivers, your device will just work out of the box. And so HID was born. This may only an approximate summary of history. Originally HID was designed to work over USB. But just like Shrek the technology world is obsessed with layers so these days HID works over different transport layers. HID over USB is what your mouse uses, HID over i2c may be what your touchpad uses. HID works over Bluetooth and it's celebrity-diet version BLE. Somewhere, someone out there is very slowly moving a mouse pointer by sending HID over carrier pigeons just to prove a point. Because there's always that one guy. HID is incredibly simple in that the static description of the device can just be bytes burnt into the ROM like the Australian sun into unprepared English backpackers. And the event frames are often an identical series of bytes where every bit is filled in by the firmware according to the axis/buttons/etc.