Vulkan Display Extensions To Be Used By SteamVR Merged Into Mesa RADV/ANV

Keith Packard's long in development work for improving the Linux display stack infrastructure for better dealing with VR head-mounted displays is about rounded out with the new Vulkan extension support being merged into Mesa. Just over a year ago famed X developer Keith Packard started contract work for Valve to improve the plumbing around the Linux/X.Org support for virtual reality HMDs for better performance and better integration. Within the Linux kernel and the X.Org Server he's worked and landed the DRM leasing support of outputs to let a VR compositor (Steam VR) have direct access to the output, "non-desktop" quirk handling so VR HMDs don't become mapped as part of a standard Linux desktop, and related work.

A Slew Of AMDGPU DC Updates Published, Further Improvements For Raven Ridge

There hasn't been a new AMDGPU DC code drop in a while as AMD developers work to improve their internal processes, but hitting the wire today is a set of 51 new patches for this "display code" stack that work on a variety of improvements.

Sway 1.0 Wayland Compositor Nears With Floating Windows, Tablet Support & More

The release of the Sway 1.0 Wayland compositor is inching closer with the recent third alpha release. Sway for the uninformed is a very promising i3-compatible Wayland compositor. Earlier this month Sway 1.0 Alpha 3 was released to succeed the second alpha release from the month prior. Sway 1.0 is succeeding the Sway 0.15 changes with a great deal of improvements. Most notably with the 1.0 series is now requiring the WLROOTS modular Wayland compositor library.

OpenBSD Disabling SMT / Hyper Threading Due To Security Concerns

Security oriented BSD operating system OpenBSD is making the move to disable Hyper Threading (HT) on Intel CPUs and more broadly moving to disable SMT (Simultanious Multi Threading) on other CPUs too. Disabling of Intel HT and to follow with disabling SMT for other architectures is being done in the name of security. "SMT (Simultanious Multi Threading) implementations typically share TLBs and L1 caches between threads. This can make cache timing attacks a lot easier and we strongly suspect that this will make several spectre-class bugs exploitable. Especially on Intel's SMT implementation which is better known as Hypter-threading. We really should not run different security domains on different processor threads of the same core." OpenBSD could improve their kernel's scheduler to workaround this, but given that is a large feat, at least for now they have decided to disable Hyper Threading by default. Those wishing to toggle the OpenBSD SMT support can use the new hw.smt sysctl setting on OpenBSD/AMD64 and is being extended to cover CPUs from other vendors and architectures.

Linux malware threats - bots, backdoors, trojans and malicious apps [Ed: Ignoring back doors in Windows and other proprietary platforms to instead focus on malicious software one actually needs to install on one's machine or choose a trivial-to-guess password (when there are open ports)]

Does Open Source Boost Security? Hortonworks Says Yes

Organizations are best served security-wise if they favor and adopt open source technology — especially enterprise open source — over proprietary alternatives, according to Hortonworks. However, not everybody agrees that open source software intrinsically is more secure. It’s tough to argue that open source hasn’t brought significant benefits to the IT industry and the tens of thousands of organizations that rely on IT products to automate their operations. Starting with the introduction of Linux in the late 1990s, major swaths of the tech industry have shifted to open source development methodologies. That includes the vast majority of the big data ecosystem, which has been largely bootstrapped by various Apache Software Foundation projects.

Don't Neglect Open Source Security [Ed: Well, if you have chosen proprietary software, then you have already given up on security altogether. With FOSS there's at least control and hope.]

How to build a strong DevSecOps culture: 5 tips [Ed: Red Hat is still promoting dumb buzzwords that help employers overwork their staff]

A Framework to Strengthen Open Source Security and Compliance [Ed: Firms that profit from perceived insecurity of FOSS push so-called 'white papers' into IDG]

Call for Feedback! Draft of Goal-Metrics for Diversity & Inclusion in Open Source (CHAOSS)

In the last few months, Mozilla has invested in collaboration with other open source project leaders and academics who care about improving diversity & inclusion in Open Source through the CHAOSS D&I working group. Contributors so far include: Alexander Serebrenik (Eindhoven University of Technology) , Akshita Gupta (Outreachy), Amy Marrich (OpenStack), Anita Sarma (Oregon State University), Bhagashree Uday (Fedora), Daniel Izquierdo (Bitergia), Emma Irwin (Mozilla), Georg Link (University of Nebraska at Omaha), Gina Helfrich (NumFOCUS), Nicole Huesman (Intel) and Sean Goggins ((University of Missouri).

Introducing A-Terrain - a cartography component for A-Frame

Have you ever wanted to make a small web app to share your favorite places with your friends? For example your favorite photographs attached to a hike, or just a view of your favorite peak, or your favorite places downtown, or a suggested itinerary for friends visiting?

Setting up Arcanist for Mozilla development on Windows

Taming Phabricator

So Mozilla is going all-in on Phabricator and Differential as a code review tool. I have mixed feelings on this, not least because it’s support for patch series is more manual than I’d like. But since this is the choice Mozilla has made I might as well start to get used to it. One of the first things you see when you log into Phabricator is a default view full of information.

This Week in Rust 239

This week's crate is SIMDNoise, a crate to use modern CPU vector instructions to generate various types of noise really fast. Thanks to gregwtmtno for the suggestion!

WebRender newsletter #20

Report from the GNOME Software design sprint

A couple of weeks ago representatives from across Canonical met in London to talk about ideas to improve the user experience of GNOME Software. We had people from the store team, snap advocacy, snapd, design and from the desktop team. We were also fortunate enough to be joined by Richard Hughes representing upstream GNOME Software.

Emerging Trends in Financial Services: IoT, AI and Blockchain

The answer has its roots at both an infrastructure level, where legacy technology is being replaced with something more akin to what is seen in challengers banks or in technology leaders from Silicon Valley, and in changing mentalities, where a new mindset can be just as important as the technology that’s adopted. Of course, to say that this is simply a technological problem is naive, often, technology implementation is the easy part, with the larger challenge coming with organisational acceptance of the need to change. Often, the case is that an organisation isn’t culturally ready for change, resulting in projects that fail and negatively impact the ability to evolve with an increasingly tumultuous market that is being impacted by regulatory changes and a technology revolution. Mark Baker, Field Product Manager at Canonical, said: “We tend to find that the technology is the easy part once we’ve got the business aligned around a common goal with common sets of objectives and accepting of the change.” However, once an organisation is culturally aligned around a common goal and is accepting of technological change, then it is possible to work with a technology partner like Canonical in order to deploying the technology simple.

Ubuntu Server development summary – 19 June 2018

The purpose of this communication is to provide a status update and highlights for any interesting subjects from the Ubuntu Server Team.

Simple Dark/Light GTK/Gnome Shell Theme for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver)

There are many dark themes for GTK with a simple and good color scheme. But, I have been looking for a simple dark theme especially for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver). I tried many Dark themes on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) and my mind was set on Qogir Dark theme. The simple design and the comfort of the dark colors scheme is quite amazing and gives a relief looking for the desktop environment. Qogir comes with a Dark and Light Theme for GTK 2.0 / GTK 3.0 and Gnome Shell. The Dark or the Light theme integration with the default installed applications such as Nautilus file manager, LibreOffice and Mozilla Firefox are quite good.

Zenkit: The influence of developer communities in progressing snaps

Last month, Zenkit published their project management tool as a snap. For those not familiar with Zenkit, they introduced themselves in a guest blog at the time the snap was published which can be read here. Since then, we caught up with Philipp Beck, Full Stack Developer at Zenkit, to discover his opinion on snaps and the publishing experience. Philipp was introduced to snaps via a developer friend of his and could immediately appreciate the potential benefits for Zenkit to pursue and the advantages it would offer their users. For the former, Philipp comments: “The biggest draw for us was the ease at which we could reach a diverse range of Linux users, without having to specifically package Zenkit for each distribution. There are obvious benefits here in terms of time saved in updating multiple Linux packages too.”