Mozilla: Rust, Socorro, and 'Healthier' Internet (Openwashing)

• Another Rust-y OS: Theseus joins Redox in pursuit of safer, more resilient systems

  Rust, a modern system programming language focused on performance, safety and concurrency, seems an ideal choice for creating a new operating system, and several such projects already exist. Now there is a new one, Theseus, described by creator Kevin Boos as "an Experiment in Operating System Structure and State Management." The key thinking behind Theseus is to avoid what Boos and three other contributors from Rice and Yale universities call "state spill".

• This Week In Rust: This Week in Rust 373

• Socorro Engineering: Half in Review 2020 h2 and 2020 retrospective

  2020h1 was rough. 2020h2 was also rough: more layoffs, 2 re-orgs, Covid-19. I (and Socorro and Tecken) got re-orged into the Data Org. Data Org manages the Telemetry ingestion pipeline as well as all the things related to it. There's a lot of overlap between Socorro and Telemetry and being in the Data Org might help reduce that overlap and ease maintenance. [...] 2020 sucked. At the end, I was feeling completely demoralized and deflated.

• Reimagine Open: Building a Healthier Internet

  Does the “openness” that made the [Internet] so successful also inevitably lead to harms online? Is an open [Internet] inherently a haven for illegal speech, for eroding privacy and security, or for inequitable access? Is “open” still a useful concept as we chart a future path for the [Internet]?

  A new paper from Mozilla seeks to answer these questions. Reimagine Open: Building Better Internet Experiences explores the evolution of the open [Internet] and the challenges it faces today. The report catalogs findings from a year-long project of outreach led by Mozilla’s Chairwoman and CEO, Mitchell Baker. Its conclusion: We need not break faith with the values embedded in the open [Internet]. But we do need to return to the original conceptions of openness, now eroded online. And we do need to reimagine the open [Internet], to address today’s need for accountability and online health.

Kernel: Linux 5.11, TuxMake, Linux 5.12, and NVIDIA "Nouveau" Driver

• 5.11 Merge window, part 2

  Linus Torvalds released the 5.11-rc1 prepatch and closed the 5.11 merge window on December 27. By that time, 12,498 non-merge changesets had been pulled into the mainline; nearly 2,500 of those wandered in after the first merge-window summary was written. Activity slowed down in the second week, as expected, but there were still a number of interesting features that found their way into the mainline.

• Portable and reproducible kernel builds with TuxMake

  TuxMake is an open-source project from Linaro that began in May 2020 and is designed to make building Linux kernels easier. It provides a command-line interface and a Python library, along with a full set of curated portable build environments distributed as container images. With TuxMake, a developer can build any supported combination of target architecture, toolchain, kernel configuration, and make targets. Building a Linux kernel is not difficult. Follow the documentation, install the dependencies, and run a couple of make commands. However, if a developer wants to build for multiple architectures, with multiple toolchains, things get complicated quickly. Most developers and maintainers have a set of custom scripts that they have written and maintained to perform their required set of builds. TuxMake provides a common layer of abstraction to reduce the need for every developer to write their own build scripts. TuxMake publishes containers for various toolchain/architecture combinations. These containers eliminate the need for individual developers to source and install multiple toolchains and toolchain versions on their systems. It also makes builds reproducible and portable because now the environment in which a kernel is built is versioned and shareable across the internet and on mailing lists. TuxMake has two goals. First, remove the friction that may cause developers, especially new developers, to skip build testing for uncommon toolchain/architecture combinations. Second, to make it easier for builds and build problems to be described and reproduced.

• Linux 5.12 To Allow Disabling Intel Graphics Security Mitigations - Phoronix

  The Linux 5.12 kernel will allow optional, run-time disabling of Intel graphics driver security mitigations, which so far is just in regards to last year's iGPU Leak vulnerability. This i915.mitigations= module parameter control is being added as part of finally fixing the Haswell GT1 graphics support that was fallout from this mitigaion. The drm-intel-gt-next pull request to DRM-Next for Linux 5.12 was sent in. Most notable is that fixing of the Haswell GT1 support that came from the clear residual security mitigations. Since that iGPU Leak mitigation for Gen7/Gen7.5 graphics was merged last year, Haswell GT1 graphics have resulted in hangs at boot. That's finally fixed up. Besides being in Linux 5.12, it should also get back-ported to recent stable kernel series as well.

• Open-Source "Nouveau" Driver Now Supports NVIDIA Ampere - But Without 3D Acceleration - Phoronix

  Patches were sent out today that provide the open-source Linux kernel "Nouveau" driver with support for NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 series "Ampere" graphics cards. But at the moment there is no 3D acceleration and the developers are blocked still by signed firmware requirements, so it's basically just a matter of having kernel mode-setting display support. Red Hat's Ben Skeggs sent out the pull request today that provides kernel mode-setting support for the RTX 30 "Ampere" graphics cards with the long-standing open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" driver

Daniel Stenberg: Food on the table while giving away code

I founded the curl project early 1998 but had already then been working on the code since November 1996. The source code was always open, free and available to the world. The term “open source” actually wasn’t even coined until early 1998, just weeks before curl was born. In the beginning of course, the first few years or so, this project wasn’t seen or discovered by many and just grew slowly and silently in a dusty corner of the Internet. Already when I shipped the first versions I wanted the code to be open and freely available. For years I had seen the cool free software put out the in the world by others and I wanted to my work to help build this communal treasure trove. Also: GStreamer 1.18.3 stable bug fix release

What my Linux adventure is teaching me about our possible future

I am a Linux ambassador of sorts. I’ve been using the Linux computer operating system since 2013. I can still remember the light feeling I had the day I broke free of the Microsoft Windows operating system. No more constant worries about viruses hijacking or corrupting my computer. No more outlays to pay for each upgrade. No more worries that the next upgrade will be really lousy and buggy and remain so for months or even years. And, above all, no more freezes in the middle of my work and work lost as a result. Now eight years into my Linux adventure I am wildly satisfied with that choice. That remains the case even though my most recent upgrade did not go as planned and got stretched out over several days. But this latest upgrade has made me think hard about why I stick with Linux and what the Linux way of doing things can tell us about a possible, better future. I think some of the principles and structures I’m seeing are found in practically every pursuit, agriculture, education, the arts, politics, and commerce. If you are growing some of your own food, you are practicing these principles and creating similar structures. If you are teaching outside existing educational systems, you are likely doing the same. If you are writing, painting, singing, dancing or somehow expressing yourself artistically, you are probably already moving toward the world that the Linux community is pioneering in its own corner. If you created a business not only to have a livelihood, but because you want to change the world, you are almost certainly on the same path. Let me explain a little about Linux, and then try to relate that to the broader world. First, I tell people who decide to try Linux that they are not merely loading a piece of software on their computer; they are joining a community. This is a very important distinction. Also: Behind the Scenes of System76: Customer Happiness Team