Android Leftovers

• How to block spam calls on your Android smartphone

• Android tips and tricks: How to empty Trash on Android smartphone to make it run stunningly fast | How-to

• Visible adds eSIM support on Pixel and Samsung phones - 9to5Google

• Some of the best Android 13 features to expect when you update

• Pebble founder: it’s your ‘last chance’ to make a small Android phone happen - The Verge

LWN.net Weekly Edition for May 12, 2022

• Dealing with negative dentries: how the kernel can manage the cache of file-name lookup failures better.
• Recent RCU changes: a quick overview of read-copy-update (RCU) followed by descriptions of some of the bigger changes that have gone into it over the last few years.
• How to cope with hardware-poisoned page-cache pages: What should the kernel do when memory errors corrupt a page in the page cache?
• Page pinning and filesystems: this year's discussion on how to solve the problems with get_user_pages().
• Ways to reclaim unused page-table pages: a lot of the memory used to hold page tables is not needed in that role and could be put to better uses.
• The ongoing search for mmap_lock scalability: the 2022 version of the perennial page-fault scalability topic, perhaps with some solutions on the horizon this time.
• Improving memory-management documentation: how to capture some of the "tribal knowledge" behind memory management and make it available to more developers.
• The state of memory-management development: : Andrew Morton describes some changes to how memory-management patches are handled.
• Seeking an API for protection keys supervisor: protection keys can help to harden the kernel, but the best way of managing them is still unclear.
• Better tools for out-of-memory debugging: understanding out-of-memory problems is not easy; what can be done to improve the situation?
• Changing filesystem resize patterns: filesystems that are created small, but continually resized to be much larger, are causing some headaches.

today's leftovers

• Distro Delights, New Release Mania, Forking KDE, Windows in a Bottle

  If you are looking for a really cool Linux computing platform with lots of extras and a twist on traditional desktop design, check out Modicia OS Ultimate. Italy-based Modicia Web Design and Development Company recently released its latest upgrade — Modicia O.S. 22. You probably won’t stumble on this gem in hiding if you distro hop or browse through traditional outlets for Linux operating systems; but it is definitely a discovery worth finding. It is one of the easiest Linux offerings I have used. Modicia Ultimate installs without hassles and has no learning curve to get started. It is a great platform for personal and small business use as well. Get it here. The popular CentOS alternative, AlmaLinux, is now available on Oracle Cloud. AlmaLinux OS Foundation on May 5 announced its availability on the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure marketplace, continuing AlmaLinux’s penetration into the cloud.

• The Linux Foundation and Fintech Open Source Foundation Announce the Schedule for Open Source in Finance Forum London 2022, July 13

• OSI to the European Commission: make space for patent-free standards too

  One of the biggest hidden challenges facing the software and technology world is the evolving conflict between old electronics vendors and the new software-defined universe. It’s arising because of patents embedded within international standards. We think it needs fixing because it especially affects Open Source. It may come as a surprise to find that some supposedly “open“ standards – including those ratified by standards development organizations (SDOs) like ISO, CEN and ETSI – can’t be implemented without going cap-in-hand to the world’s largest companies to buy a license. This is because both the SDOs and regulators allow so-called SEPs – “standard-essential patents” – to be tolerated due to the legacy approach of standards in hardware contexts.