Programming: Emacs Org, ISO C++, PyCharm and Recursive Programming

• The world’s most advanced UNICs of Organizers

  I recently began using Emacs Org mode, a tool for keeping notes, maintaining TODO lists, planning projects, and authoring documents with a fast and effective plain-text system. Since I am a cosplayer I was looking for a repacement for Cosplanner, a non-free Android app. When I was still using Android, I once installed Cosplanner and found out that it has many nasty features. So I deleted my copy. Unlike Cosplanner, Orgmode uses a human readable text format that you can read with any text editor. This allows the user to store an Orgmode file in a git repository that can be synced between devices.

• November 2018 ISO C++ meeting trip report (Core Language)

  The ISO C++ standards meeting in November 2018 was held in San Diego, CA. As usual, Red Hat sent three of us to the meeting: me (for the Core Language Working Group), Jonathan Wakely (for the Library Working Group [LEWG]), and Thomas Rodgers (for the Concurrency and Parallelism Study Group [SG1]). I felt the meeting was productive, though some features that had been expected to make it into C++20 are now in question.

• PyCharm 2019.1 EAP 4

  Our fourth Early Access Program (EAP) version for PyCharm 2019.1 is now available on our website.

• Recursive Programming

  Despite often being introduced early-on in most ventures into programming, the concept of recursion can seem strange and potentially off-putting upon first encountering it. It seems almost paradoxical: how can we find a solution to a problem using the solution to the same problem?

Graphics: Mesa/Virgl3D, Nouveaum and Gallium3D

• Virgl Lands A Number Of Performance Optimizations In Mesa 19.1

  For those using the Virgl3D driver stack for having OpenGL acceleration within KVM guest VMs with VirtIO-GPU that is then accelerated by hosts, there are performance optimizations that have just landed in the Mesa 19.1 development code. Virgl has introduced a transfer queue along with being able to de-duplicate intersecting 1D transfers, which results in a texture upload micro-benchmark going from 64.23 mtexel/sec all the way to 367.44 mtexel/sec.

• Panfrost Gallium3D Driver Gets Mali T600/T700 Midgard Update

  The Panfrost Gallium3D driver that was recently merged into Mesa 19.1 will soon have better support for the Mali T600/T700 series graphics. ARM's Mali Midgard T600/T700 generations have always been part of the support target for the Panfrost driver, but the newer T860 is where the developers spend most of their reverse-engineering, open-source driver development resources. With a several hundred line patch, the Panfrost Gallium3D driver is receiving updated support for the older Mali Midgard hardware with tests done on the T760 while not regressing the newer T860 support.

• Nouveau Driver Picks Up SVM Support Via HMM

  The Nouveau kernel driver has queued patches for introducing Shared Virtual Memory (SVM) support for this open-source NVIDIA driver as a step forward to its OpenCL/compute opportunities. The Nouveau DRM driver has support for SVM via the Heterogeneous Memory Management infrastructure that's been part of the mainline kernel for a while. Nouveau patches have been worked on for a while but finally on trajectory for mainline. The NVIDIA proprietary driver has also been working to make use of HMM.

Linux 5.1 Improvements

• Linux 5.1 Kernel Bringing New Option For Drivers To Be Async Probed

  This driver_async_probe option added by Intel Linux developers allows specifying a list of drivers for the given system that can be probed asynchronously. While the Linux kernel has supported asynchronous driver probing during boot time, some drivers still don't behave properly in this context. As a result, using driver_async_probe= is a safe route for specifying drivers that can be probed asynchronously or for easily testing drivers to verify their async behavior.

• Linux 5.1 To Deal With More Quirky Hardware From The Lenovo X1 Tablet To ASUS Transbook

  There's no shortage of quirky HID hardware out there. With the upcoming Linux 5.1 kernel cycle will be more fixes/workarounds for such consumer devices.