• Android 9.0 Pie is set to roll out to Samsung's Galaxy M10, M20, and M30

• LG V40 ThinQ gets Android Pie in the US, only second update from the company

• Google just removed the Huawei P30 Pro & Mate X from Android's website

• Android Q Beta 3 spontaneously rebooting for some people to "test mainline update"

• Android Q is heading to OnePlus 5/5T, OnePlus 7 Pro features heading to 6/6T

• 11 things my Android phone does way better than your iPhone

• Google Pixel 3a XL Review: Full-Featured, Affordable Pure Android

• Gameloft Developing Another LEGO Game For Android

In Ubuntu 19.04, Canonical introduced the ability to download Nvidia's propriety graphics driver during the OS installation process (provided the user has an internet connection). That was a welcome step toward making gaming more accessible for newcomers. With the upcoming Ubuntu 19.10, however, Canonical is following in the footsteps of System76's Pop!_OS and slapping Nvidia's driver (both 390 and 418) right onto the ISO.

Phoronix spotted the update via Ubuntu's Launchpad platform. What this means is that users can have the proprietary Nvidia driver -- a better option for gaming compared to the open source "Nouveau" driver -- ready to go at first boot. They also have the option to install the Nvidia binary at any point in the future without needing to add or activate a repository or download the driver.

Now with MDS / Zombieload being public and seeing a 8~10% performance hit in the affected workloads as a result of the new mitigations to these Microarchitectural Data Sampling vulnerabilities, what's the overall performance look like now if going back to the days of AMD FX Vishera and Intel Sandybridge/Ivybridge processors? If Spectre, Meltdown, L1TF/Foreshadow, and now Zombieload had come to light years ago would it have shaken that pivotal point in the industry? Here are benchmarks looking at the the performance today with and without the mitigations to the known CPU vulnerabilities to date.

As I've already delivered many benchmarks of these mitigations (including MDS/Zombieload) on newer CPUs, for this article we're looking at older AMD FX CPUs with their relevant Spectre mitigations against Intel Sandybridge and Ivybridge with the Spectre/Meltdown/L1TF/MDS mitigations. Tests were done on Ubuntu 19.04 with the Linux 5.0 kernel while toggling the mitigation levels of off (no coverage) / auto (the default / out-of-the-box mitigations used on all major Linux distributions for the default protections) / auto,nosmt (the more restricted level that also disables SMT / Hyper Threading). The AMD CPUs were tested with off/auto as in the "auto,nosmt" mode it doesn't disable any SMT as it doesn't deem it insecure on AMD platforms.

• EPO Strikes Further Diminish Chances of UPC Ever Materialising (in Any Shape or Form)
• EPO Allegedly Becoming Insolvent (Pretext for Cuts), So Staff Gets Punished While Management Takes the Jackpot
• EPO President Still Not Obeying Courts’ Rulings
• António Campinos Has Run Out of Time and EPO Staff is Going on Strike (Skipping Mere Protests)
• Links 24/5/2019: PostgreSQL 12 Beta 1 and Rust 1.35 Released
• Links 23/5/2019: Elisa 0.4.0, OpenSUSE Leap 15.1 Released
• Links 22/5/2019: Mesa 19.0.5, Huawei and GNU/Linux, Curl 7.65.0, End of Antergos, Tails 3.14, ownCloud Server 10.2, Firefox 67.0

• Zombieload, Nextcloud, Peppermint 10, KDE Plasma, IPFire, ArcoLinux, LuneOS | This Week in Linux 67

  On this episode of This Week in Linux, we’ll check out some Distro News from Peppermint OS, ArcoLinux, LuneOS & IPFire. We got a couple apps to talking about like Nextclou0…d and a new Wallpaper tool that has quite a bit of potential. We’ll take a look at what is to come with the next version of KDE Plasma. Intel users have gotten some more bad news regarding a new security vulnerability. Later in the show, we’ll cover some interesting information regarding a couple governments saving money by switching to Linux. Then finally we’ll check out some Linux Gaming News. All that and much more on your Weekly Source for Linux GNews!

• Ubuntu Podcast: S12E07 – R-Type

  This week we’ve been installing Lineage on a OnePlus One and not migrating Mastodon accounts to ubuntu.social. We round up the Ubuntu community news from Kubuntu, Ubuntu MATE, Peppermint OS and we discuss some tech news.

  It’s Season 12 Episode 07 of the Ubuntu Podcast! Alan Pope, Mark Johnson and Martin Wimpress are connected and speaking to your brain.

• OpenGL 4.6 / SPIR-V Support Might Be Inching Closer For Mesa Drivers

  We're quickly approaching the two year anniversary of the OpenGL 4.6 release and it's looking like the Intel/RadeonSI drivers might be inching towards the finish line for that latest major revision of the graphics API. 

  As we've covered many times, the Mesa drivers have been held up on OpenGL 4.6 support due to their SPIR-V ingestion support mandated by this July 2017 version of the OpenGL specification. While there are the Intel and Radeon RADV Vulkan drivers already with the SPIR-V support that is central to Vulkan, it's taken a long time re-fitting the OpenGL drivers for the likes of ARB_gl_spriv. Then again, there aren't many (actually, any?) major OpenGL games requiring version 4.6 of the specification even with its interoperability benefits thanks to SPIR-V.

• Left Is A Minimalist, Distraction-Free Text Editor For Writers

  Left is a free and open source distraction-free text editor for Linux, Windows and Mac.

  The main goal of Left is to get you to focus on writing. It comes with writing essentials like autocomplete, synonym suggestions and writing statistics, but it doesn't support text formatting, and doesn't have all the bells and whistles found in applications like LibreOffice Writer or Microsoft Office Word.

  This minimalist text editor may not be particularly exciting, and it's not for everyone, but if you're working on a long writing project, a clean interface that allows you to focus exclusively on your work may be for you.

• Samba 4.10.4 Released With 40 Bug fixes

  The Samba Team announced the availability of Samba 4.10.4.

  This is the latest stable release of the Samba 4.10 release series.

  Also, they released a patch against Samba 4.10.3.

  This release comes with close to 40 bug fixes.

• 8 Best latex editors for Linux, Windows or MacOS

  LaTeX project is a programming language with which scientific and mathematical texts can be created. The full form of LaTeX here is Lamport TeX. In simple words, it is a document preparation system for high-quality typesetting but for special purposes where you need scientific and mathematical texts like scientific formulas for some academic books or PDF… Using packages or libraries, you can extend the scope of functions to create graphics and formulas.

  Now, what exactly is the LaTex editor? In simple words, the editor that supports LaTeX programming to create documents is called LaTeX editors. Thus, it is not like our normal word editor where we get formatted text in WYSIWYG (“what you see is what you get”) such as OpenOffice, LibreOffice or Microsoft Office. LaTeX is totally opposite uses a command line interface to format text for books or documents need an extensive text system that is intended for books, scientific papers and articles. Particularly in the mathematical-technical area, the system offers itself because of the formulas contained.

  You can simply install LaTeX on your system and then text can be entered in a simple editor and saved in a source text file, similar to a script. This text is supplemented by LaTeX commands, which, for example, identify chapters, sections, headings, and quotes. In addition, a LaTeX document can be spread over several files, so that each chapter is a separate file. However, there are a good number of best LaTeX backed editors are available for online to download with both open sources as well as a free license for Windows, Linux and MacOS. Thus, here we are with some best open source or free LaTeX editors but before installing them remember they are not simple text editors and to operate them, first, you must get familiar with the LaTeX commands…

• PyRadio – curses based internet radio player

  On my roadmap is to review all actively maintained internet radio players. To date, I’ve covered odio, Shortwave, and Radiotray-NG. While there’s lots to admire in these projects, I feel that an internet radio player meeting all my requirements is still out there waiting to be discovered.

  For this review, I’ll run through PyRadio. Unlike the other radio players I’ve covered, PyRadio is curses based software.

• Insync 3 Beta Available With OneDrive Syncing Support On Linux [Ed: Give all your files to Microsoft (which bribes officials to dump GNU/Linux, puts back doors in everything arrests whistleblowers etc.)]

• GNOME 3.34's Mutter Gets Important Fix To Avoid Stuttering / Frame Skips

  In addition to GNOME's Mutter compositor / window manager seeing an important fix recently lowering the output lag under X11 so it matches GNOME's Wayland performance, another important Mutter fix also landed.

  The Mutter/Clutter change to avoid skipping over the next frame to render has landed. This is yet another big deal contribution by Canonical's Daniel van Vugt as part of their GNOME desktop enhancements.

• Firefox brings you smooth video playback with the world’s fastest AV1 decoder

  Tuesday’s release of Firefox 67 brought a number of performance enhancing features that make this our fastest browser ever. Among these is the high performance, royalty free AV1 video decoder dav1d, now enabled by default on all desktop platforms (Windows, OSX and Linux) for both 32-bit and 64-bit systems.

  With files more than 30% smaller than today’s most popular web codec VP9 [1], and nearly 50% smaller than its widely deployed predecessor H.264 [2], AV1 allows high-quality video experiences with a lot less network usage, and has the potential to transform how and where we watch video on the Internet. However, because AV1 is brand new and more sophisticated, some experts had predicted that market adoption would wait until 2020 when high-performance hardware decoders are expected. Dav1d in the browser upends these predictions.

• GNU Binutils Begins Landing eBPF Support

  The GNU Binutils is finally getting wired up around the Extended BPF (eBPF) as the modern, in-kernel virtual machine that stretches the Berkeley Packet Filter beyond the networking subsystem. 

  Compiling for eBPF has most commonly been done by the LLVM eBPF back-end to allow compiling C into the eBPF bytecode but it looks like the GNU toolchain developers are looking to increase their support around the increasingly common eBPF use-cases for this in-kernel VM.

• Draco Desktop

  There is a new desktop available for Sparkers: Draco

• Archiving 26 500 community Q&As from Ask Fedora

  Ask Fedora is the Fedora Linux community’s questions-and-answers portal, and it recently transitioned from a forum software called Askbot to Discourse. Changing the underlying forum software doesn’t have to be destructive but Ask Fedora decided to go with a nuke-and-pave migration strategy: They decided to start from scratch instead of copying user accounts and the user-contributed content to the new software.

  The first time I learned of the migration was a few days after it had happen. I’d run into an issue with my Fedora installation and went online looking for solutions. Every useful search result was from the old Ask Fedora site and every link returned an HTTP 404 Not Found error message as those answers hadn’t been migrated to the new Ask Fedora website.

• Attention epel6 and epel7 ppc64 users

  If you are a epel6 or epel7 user on the ppc64 platform, I have some sad news for you. If you aren’t feel free to read on for a tale of eol architectures.

  ppc64 (the big endian version of power) was shipped with RHEL6 and RHEL7 and Fedora until Fedora 28. It’s been replaced by the ppc64le (little endian) version in Fedora and RHEL8.

• Optional dependencies don’t work

  In the i3 projects, we have always tried hard to avoid optional dependencies. There are a number of reasons behind it, and as I have recently encountered some of the downsides of optional dependencies firsthand, I summarized my thoughts in this article.

  [...]

  Software is usually not built by end users, but by packagers, at least when we are talking about Open Source.

  Hence, end users don’t see the knob for the optional dependency, they are just presented with the fait accompli: their version of the software behaves differently than other versions of the same software.

  Depending on the kind of software, this situation can be made obvious to the user: for example, if the optional dependency is needed to print documents, the program can produce an appropriate error message when the user tries to print a document.

  Sometimes, this isn’t possible: when i3 introduced an optional dependency on cairo and pangocairo, the behavior itself (rendering window titles) worked in all configurations, but non-ASCII characters might break depending on whether i3 was compiled with cairo.

  For users, it is frustrating to only discover in conversation that a program has a feature that the user is interested in, but it’s not available on their computer. For support, this situation can be hard to detect, and even harder to resolve to the user’s satisfaction.

• Is bare Kubernetes still too messy for enterprises?

  Kubernetes is touted as a computing cure-all, fixing up multicloud networking to data mobility. The open-source platform for orchestrating containers (a virtualized method for running distributed applications) may or may not be the panacea it’s hyped up to be. What is certain is that user-ready Kubernetes isn’t as easy as it sounds, so customers should shop carefully for a provider.

  Enterprise users of Kubernetes and containers may not guess just how many moving parts are under the covers. There are a ton of tiny pieces that have to line up just so in order for them to work, according to Mark Shuttleworth (pictured), founder and chief executive officer of Canonical Ltd. He likens these technologies to carefully constructed “fictions.”

• Data as a microservice: Distributed data-focused integration

  Microservices is the architecture design favored in new software projects; however, getting the most from this type of approach requires overcoming several previous requirements. As the evolution from a monolithic to a distributed system takes place not only in the application space but also at the data store, managing your data becomes one of the hardest challenges. This article examines some of the considerations for implementing data as a service.

• Container Adoption Shoots Up Among Enterprises In 2019: Survey

  Majority of IT professionals now run container technologies, with 90 percent of those running in production and 7 in 10 running at least 40 percent of their application portfolio in containers — an impressive increase from two years ago, when just 67 percent of teams were running container technologies in production. According to the joint 2019 Annual Container Adoption Survey released by Portworx and Aqua Security, enterprises have started making bigger investments in containers.

  In 2019, nearly one in five organizations is found to be spending over $1 million annually on containers (17%) as compared to just four percent in 2016.

• SUSE Rolls Out Enterprise Storage 6

  SUSE has announced the latest version of its software-defined storage solution powered by Ceph technology. With SUSE Enterprise Storage 6, IT organizations can adapt to changing business demands. They may also reduce IT operational expense with new features focused on containerized and cloud workload support, improved integration with public cloud, and enhanced data protection capabilities, SUSE said.

• Red Hat completes open sourcing of 3scale code

  At Red Hat we have always been proud of our open source heritage and commitment. We are delighted that more of the industry now shares our viewpoint, and more companies are looking to promote their open source bona fides of late.

  Open source software energizes developers and teams of committed developers working in parallel can outproduce the large development hierarchies of the last generation. We believe working upstream with open source communities is an important innovation strategy.

  Occasionally, however, innovation does originate in traditional commercial organizations under a proprietary development model. Three years ago, Red Hat discovered just such a company that was doing exciting things in the API economy.

• Enbies and women in FOSS Wikipedia edit-a-thon

  To be brief, I’ll be hosting a Wikipedia edit-a-thon on enbies and women in free and open source software, on June 2nd, from 16:00 – 19:00 EDT. I’d love remote participants, but if you’re in the Boston area you are more than welcome over to my place for pancakes and collaboration times.

• LibreOffice Conference 2020, it could be in your city

  LibreOffice Conference 2020 will be an event to remember, for a couple of reasons: it will be the 10th of a series of successful conferences, and it will celebrate the 10th anniversary of the LibreOffice project and the 20th of the FOSS office suite. In 2020, The Document Foundation will be on stage at many FOSS events around the world, and the LibreOffice Conference will be the most important of the year. Organizing this conference is a unique opportunity for FOSS communities, because the event will make the history of free open source software.

• DataStax and the Modern Commercial Open Source Business

  One month ago, Google announced a set of partnerships with seven commercial open source providers. Among those announced was DataStax, which held its annual conference this year and, for the first time, an analyst day. While DataStax and the open source project it is based on, Cassandra, are differentiated on a technical basis, the company also represents an interesting contrast with its peers directionally both among the newly minted Google partners and more broadly.

  Of the seven commercial open source partners Google announced, for example, DataStax is one of two along with InfluxData that has not introduced a non-open source, hybrid license as a means of protecting itself from competition from the cloud providers. This is not, notably, because the company doesn’t seem them as a threat; asked about who the competition was in the analyst sessions, the CEO of DataStax candidly acknowledged that the company’s primary competitive focus was not on premise competition such as Oracle, but cloud-based managed services offerings.

• IGEL Developing Linux Distro For Windows Virtual Desktop Users [Ed: IGEL used to support #GNU/Linux and now it's just helping Microsoft enslave GNU/Linux insider Windows with NSA back doors.]

Linux Mint no longer may be an ideal choice for above-par performance out of the box, but it still can serve diehard users well with the right amount of post-installation tinkering.

The Linux Mint distro clearly is the gold standard for measuring Cinnamon desktop integration. Linux Mint's developers turned the GNOME desktop alternative into one of the best Linux desktop choices. Linux Mint Cinnamon, however, may have lost some of its fresh minty flavor.

The gold standard for version 19.1 Tessa seems to be a bit tarnished when compared to some other distros offering a Cinnamon environment. Given that the current Linux Mint version was released at the end of last December, it may be a bit odd for me to focus on a review some five months later.

Linux Mint is my primary driver, though, so at long last I am getting around to sharing my lukewarm experiences. I have run Linux Mint Cinnamon on three primary work and testing computers since parting company with Ubuntu Linux Unity and several other Ubuntu flavors many years ago. I have recommended Linux Mint enthusiastically to associates and readers in my personal and professional roles.

• Modern business logic tooling workshop, lab 4: Create a process

• Dual booting Windows and Linux using UEFI

• How to change the login picture in Ubuntu 19.04

• How to archive a page or an entire website in the Internet Archive

• tr command in Linux Explained With Examples

• Linux Commands

• How to integrate aws CloudWatch monitoring service with SNS service

• find directory with most inodes/files

• Knot DNS: One Tame and Sane Authoritative DNS Server

• Linux VPN plugin failed error - What now?

• EuroPython 2019: Financial Aid Program starts today

• Cardlings looks to be an interesting turn-based strategy with an usual gameplay style

  Cardlings caught my attention recently, a unique turn-based strategy game from Clockwork Chilli that's confirmed to be releasing for Linux on June 5th.

  What's interesting about it, is the way the turns work. While one player is doing combat and movement, the other player has the chance to get building and gathering resources. To make it even more unique, only the player doing movement and combat can end the turn and then it's reversed. So this means the player doing the moment, will want to end the turn quickly so the other player doesn't get tons of resources and buildings set up. The developer said this "results in very intense, fast-paced games that still preserve all the depth of more traditional turn-based strategy titles".

• Incredibly weird comedy point and click adventure 'Clam Man' is out

  Clam Man from Team Clam is a new comedy adventure game, it just recently released with Linux support. It's a point and click adventure, although it has a focus on the story rather than pushing you through puzzles.

• Comedy adventure Nelly Cootalot: Spoonbeaks Ahoy! HD is now out with Linux support

  Originally released in 2007, Nelly Cootalot: Spoonbeaks Ahoy! HD revamps the experience to make it less painful to play on modern systems with full Linux support.

• Unique gravity-defying metroidvania 'Dandara' finally sees an update to the Linux version

  Dandara, a very unique take on the action metroidvania genre took me by surprise with the fun gameplay last month and now the Linux version is actually up to date.

  The main problem, as noted in the previous article, was that the Linux version of Dandara hadn't seen any updates since release. The developer, Long Hat House, actually emailed in last night to note that the whole game has been updated and they've managed to now get the Linux version on equal footing too.

• Steam Play updated again to 4.2-5 to include newer DXVK, networking and controller fixes

  Valve have pushed out the latest smaller update to Steam Play, this time including an updated DXVK and a bunch of fixes for various games.

• The Linux demo for 'Eagle Island', a very slick action-adventure rogue-lite is out and it's extremely impressive

  Ever since I first heard of Eagle Island I was basically in love, with super slick pixel-art and an owl you throw as your weapon? Sign me up.

  The demo just recently went live on Steam, including for Linux and after giving it a go I've come away from it extremely impressed. It works beautifully and it looks gorgeous, probably one of the best demos I've played for some time. I even joked about the demo splash-screen missing a Linux icon with the developer on Twitter, which they took it rather well as they just haven't yet found a good one to use.

• Very cool deck-building roguelike Dicey Dungeons alpha ending soon, last chance for early price + updated

  Dicey Dungeons might just be one of my favourite indie games this year, a unique blend of an usual roguelike with an ability system powered by cards and dice rolls.

• A look at what's on sale ahead of the weekend once again, come find your next game

  The weekend is almost upon us and you're in the market for a fresh new game, I've got you covered with what deals are going currently.

• Cardlings looks to be an interesting turn-based strategy with an unusual gameplay style

  Cardlings caught my attention recently, a unique turn-based strategy game from Clockwork Chilli that's confirmed to be releasing for Linux on June 5th.

  What's interesting about it, is the way the turns work. While one player is doing combat and movement, the other player has the chance to get building and gathering resources. To make it even more unique, only the player doing movement and combat can end the turn and then it's reversed. So this means the player doing the moment, will want to end the turn quickly so the other player doesn't get tons of resources and buildings set up. The developer said this "results in very intense, fast-paced games that still preserve all the depth of more traditional turn-based strategy titles".

• Security updates for Thursday

• ZombieLoad Mitigation Costs For Intel Haswell Xeon, Plus Overall Mitigation Impact

  With tests over the past week following the disclosure of the Microarchitectural Data Sampling (MDS) vulnerabilities also known as "Zombieload", we've looked at the MDS mitigation costs (and now the overall Spectre/Meltdown/L1TF/MDS impact) for desktop CPUs, servers, and some laptop hardware. I've also begun doing some tests on older hardware, such as some Phoronix readers curious how well aging Intel Haswell CPUs are affected.

• How to enhance FTP server security [Ed: It just needs to be abandoned]

• Hack.lu 2019 Call for Papers, Presentations and Workshops

  The purpose of the hack.lu convention is to give an open and free playground where people can discuss the implication of new technologies in society. hack.lu is a balanced mix convention where technical and non-technical people can meet each others and share freely all kind of information. The convention will be held in the Grand-Duchy of Luxembourg in October (22-24.10.2019). The most significant new discoveries about computer network attacks and defenses, commercial security solutions, and pragmatic real world security experience will be presented in a three days series of informative tutorials. We would like to announce the opportunity to submit papers, and/or lightning talk proposals for selection by the hack.lu technical review committee. This year we will be doing workshops on the first day PM and talks of 1 hour or 30 minutes in the main track for the three days.

• Hacking SETI

• Legal Threats Make Powerful Phishing Lures

  On or around May 12, at least two antivirus firms began detecting booby-trapped Microsoft Word files that were sent along with some various of the following message: [...]

• US officials say foreign election [cracking] is inevitable

  "Systems that are connected to the Internet, if they're targeted by a determined adversary with enough time and resources, they will be breached," Hickey said. "So, we need to be focusing on resilience."

• Why a Windows flaw patched nine days ago is still spooking the Internet

  The vulnerability resides in Microsoft’s proprietary Remote Desktop Protocol, which provides a graphical interface for connecting to another computer over the Internet. Exploiting the vulnerability—which is present in older versions of Windows but not the much better secured Windows 8 and 10—requires only that an attacker send specific packets to a vulnerable RDP-enabled computer. In a testament to the severity, Microsoft took the highly unusual step of issuing patches for Windows 2003, XP, and Vista, which haven’t been supported in four, five, and seven years, respectively.

• Serial publisher of Windows 0-days drops exploits for 2 more unfixed flaws

  In Tuesday’s disclosure, SandboxEscaper wrote that the Task Scheduler vulnerability works by exploiting a flaw in the way the Task Scheduler processes changes to discretionary access control list permissions for an individual file. An advisory published Wednesday by US Cert confirmed that the exploit worked against both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows 10.

[...] The current case demonstrates that even tech giants like Huawei face similar dependencies and vendor lock-in effects as any individual users if they rely on proprietary software.

The following lessons can be drawn from this case: [...]

• Installing Ubuntu 18.04 using both full-disk encryption and RAID1

• Install and Configure FreeRADIUS & daloRADIUS on Debian 9 with MySQL

• Transpose, pivot and bin with GNU Datamash 1.4

• Testing Video4Linux2 drivers like a boss

• EE and Vodafone drop Huawei phones from 5G roll out over Android uncertainty

• Huawei’s Honor 20 Pro launch interrupted due to Android certification issues

• Huawei Is Releasing Own Operating System This Year Amid Android Pullout

• Tor Browser for Android 8.5 offers mobile users privacy boost

• Anonymise Your Android Browsing With Tor's New App

• Asus Zenfone 4 Max and Zenfone 4 Selfie get a taste of Android 9 Pie through beta builds

• OnePlus 3, OnePlus 3T receive Android 9 Pie update with April security patch

• Galaxy M10, M20, and M30 to get Android Pie update starting June 3

• Top 10 Best Android Apps - SMS - May 2019

• Five of the best Android travel apps for BlackBerry fans!

• Recap: Here's what's new with OneNote for Android

• 'PUBG Mobile' 0.13.0 Beta Is Now Available on Android with a New Mode

• Console quality game controllers for your Android phone are just $26 on Amazon

• Chipmaker Qualcomm Gives Android Developers a '5G Wake-Up Call'

• Google Duo Introduces Group Video Call Support on Android and iOS

• Android Users Being Spammed Using Fake Missed Call Alerts

• Android’s rich notifications are making their way to the ChromeOS browser

• Android Auto 4.3 preps upcoming ‘Boardwalk’ redesign [APK Insight]

In today's connected embedded device market, driven by the Internet of things (IoT), a large share of devices in development are based on Linux of one form or another. The prevalence of low-cost boards with ready-made Linux distributions is a key driver in this. Acquiring hardware, building your custom code, connecting the devices to other hardware peripherals and the internet as well as device management using commercial cloud providers has never been easier. A developer or development team can quickly prototype a new application and get the devices in the hands of potential users. This is a good thing and results in many interesting new applications, as well as many questionable ones.

When planning a system design for beyond the prototyping phase, things get a little more complex. In this post, we want to consider mechanisms for developing and maintaining your base operating system (OS) image. There are many tools to help with this but we won't be discussing individual tools; of interest here is the underlying model for maintaining and enhancing this image and how it will make your life better or worse.

• AMD GCN GPU Target Continuing To Improve For The GCC 10 Compiler

  With the recent release of the GCC 9 stable compiler there is the initial "AMD GCN" GPU target/back-end merged. However, for this GNU Compiler Collection release the AMD GCN target isn't all that useful but continued work on it gives us hope of seeing it in good shape for next year's GCC 10 release.

  With the GCC 9.1 release, the AMD GCN back-end can only handle running basic single-threaded programs... Not exactly useful for graphics cards. The GCC 9 code supports targeting the Fiji and Vega 10 GCN instruction set architecture.

• IBM Begins Plumbing "Future" Processor Into GCC Compiler - POWER10?

  IBM engineers have landed initial support for "-mcpu=future" into the GCC compiler... As they say in the commit message, "a future architecture level, as yet unnamed."

  This IBM "future" processor is being added to the POWER architecture code succeeding POWER9. More than likely, its the early enablement work for POWER10.

• Little Trouble in Big Data – Part 1

  A few months ago, we received a phone call from a bioinformatics group at a European university. The problem they were having appeared very simple. They wanted to know how to usemmap() to be able to load a large data set into RAM at once. OK I thought, no problem, I can handle that one. Turns out this has grown into a complex and interesting exercise in profiling and threading.

  The background is that they are performing Markov-Chain Monte Carlo simulations by sampling at random from data sets containing SNP (pronounced “snips”) genetic markers for a selection of people. It boils down to a large 2D matrix of floats where each column corresponds to an SNP and each row to a person. They provided some small and medium sized data sets for me to test with, but their full data set consists of 500,000 people with 38 million SNP genetic markers!

• Why precompiled headers do (not) improve C++ compile times

  Would you like your C++ code to compile twice as fast (or more)?

  Yeah, so would I. Who wouldn't. C++ is notorious for taking its sweet time to get compiled. I never really cared about PCHs when I worked on KDE, I think I might have tried them once for something and it didn't seem to do a thing. In 2012, while working on LibreOffice, I noticed its build system used to have PCH support, but it had been nuked, with the usual poor OOo/LO style of a commit message stating the obvious (what) without bothering to state the useful (why). For whatever reason, that caught my attention, reportedly PCHs saved a lot of build time with MSVC, so I tried it and it did. And me having brought the PCH support back from the graveyard means that e.g. the Calc module does not take 5:30m to build on a (very) powerful machine, but only 1:45m. That's only one third of the time.

  In line with my previous experience, on Linux that did nothing. I made the build system support also PCH with GCC and Clang, because it was there and it was simple to support it too, but there was no point. I don't think anybody has ever used that for real.

  Then, about a year ago, I happened to be working on a relatively small C++ project that used some kind of an obscure build system called Premake I had never heard of before. While fixing something in it I noticed it also had PCH support, so guess what, I of course enabled it for the project. It again made the project build faster on Windows. And, on Linux, it did too. Color me surprised.

• KDAB at CppCon 2019

  CppCon is the annual, week-long face-to-face gathering for the entire C++ community – the biggest C++ event in the world. This year, for the first time, CppCon takes place in the stunning Gaylord Rockies Hotel and Convention Center in Aurora, Colorado, very near Denver International Airport.

• Clear Linux Discovers Another AVX2/AVX512 Fix/Optimization To Yield Better Performance

  For those running a system with AVX-512 support, Clear Linux builds as of this week should be yielding even better performance on top of their existing AVX2 and AVX-512 optimizations.

  The Intel developers working on Clear Linux uncovered an issue how the new GCC 9 compiler has been building the important libm math library poorly in AVX2/AVX-512 mode. This poor code compilation yielded slowdowns in various math functions since the switch to the GCC 9 compiler.

• Building Machine Learning Data Pipeline using Apache Spark

• It is easier to gather package meta-data from PyPI package ecosystem, once know the right way

• Python 2.7 vs Python 3.4 ─ What should Python Beginners choose?

• Be Quick or Eat Potatoes: A Newbie’s Guide to PyCon

• Remote Development with Wing Pro

  In this issue of Wing Tips we take a quick look at Wing Pro's remote development capabilities.

• Data School: Data science best practices with pandas (video tutorial)

• PHP extensions status with upcoming PHP 7.4

The PostgreSQL Global Development Group announces that the first beta release of PostgreSQL 12 is now available for download. This release contains previews of all features that will be available in the final release of PostgreSQL 12, though some details of the release could change before then.

In the spirit of the open source PostgreSQL community, we strongly encourage you to test the new features of PostgreSQL 12 in your database systems to help us eliminate any bugs or other issues that may exist. While we do not advise you to run PostgreSQL 12 Beta 1 in your production environments, we encourage you to find ways to run your typical application workloads against this beta release.

Also: PostgreSQL 12 Beta Released With Performance Improvements

The feature-packed and long-desired ZFS On Linux 0.8 release has finally taken place! ZoL 0.8 is out there!

ZFS On Linux 0.8 has debuted today as the newest feature release for this ZFS file-system port for Linux systems. ZFS On Linux 0.8 supports up through the latest Linux 5.1 stable series while still working going back to the Linux 2.6.32 kernel days, but the SIMD support isn't available on stock 5.0+ kernels leading to big performance penalties.