OpenSUSE: Election Campaign and Leap 15.2 Install Party

• Stasiek Michalski answers Richard Brown's questions as the openSUSE election campaign progresses

  Community members are welcome to ask the candidates questions about their views on the project and to comment on some of the pertinent matters within the community. Richard Brown, former Chairman of openSUSE, put a few questions to Stasiek Michalski about his views on conflict resolution, the board structure and the project's key sponsor SUSE. Stasiek expressed his views as he answered Richard on the project mailing list.

• Leap 15.2 Install party @ GOLEM - A quick report

  Ah, the event was also recorded, but they still have to let me know whether that worked well or not. I decided to do a live install as I think our installer is great, and wanted to show it off a bit. :-) In fact, I’ve heard a few times people saying that installing openSUSE is difficult, and I wanted to give it a shot to busting that myth. I showed how it is possible to install the distro with just a few clicks, which is the opposite of difficult. After that, I went back and explained all the various possible customizations that one can make – but only if she wants to– at each stage. Feedback on this was extremely good, and I think I’m going to reuse this same approach for other similar occasions. While the installer was copying packages, there was the time to talk a bit about the characteristics of Leap such as its goals, release cycle, development process, relationship with SLE, etc. I quickly mentioned the maintenance process, taking advantage of some slides kindly provided by Marina (thanks to you again as well!), and this also was perceived as very interesting. After the system was ready, I had the time to showcase YaST a little, to explain how to add Packman repos for the codecs and to introduce BTRFS snapshots, snapper and demo a reboot into a previous snapshot and the rollback.

Why I switched to Fedora

As stated above Fedora has a software freedom commitment similar in spirit to that of Debian. This means that you should be able to give Fedora to anyone, anywhere without violating intellectual property laws. Any software which is either not licensed in a way that Fedora finds acceptable or that bares US patent encumbrances can be found in the rpmfusion.org repository. After the install your next concern is undoubtedly configuring things and installing new packages. Fedora’s command-line package manager is dnf. It works as you would expect. Note also that since rpm uses file-based dependency tracking instead of package-based dependency tracking, as almost all others do, there are very few traditional metapackages. There are, however, package groups.

Kernel and Graphics: Another Attack on the GPL, Power Management and Thermal Control Microconference, Intel and AMD

• Wrap it before you tap it? No, say Linux developers: 'GPL condom' for Nvidia driver is laughed out of the kernel

  Linux devs have dismissed a proposed patch to the kernel that would only work with a Nvidia driver, motivating a second patch that will prevent disguised use of proprietary code in GPL modules. The Linux Kernel licensing rules make provision for proprietary third-party modules but state that they must be tagged as such. This "cannot be used for modules with source code in the kernel tree. Modules tagged that way are tainting the kernel with the 'P' flag when loaded and the kernel module loader refuses to link such modules against symbols which are exported with EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL()." Facebook developer Jonathan Lemon put forward an RFC (Request for Comments) on a proposal to implement DMA (Direct Memory Access) zero-copy between a network card and a GPU to enhance network performance, while keeping the protocol processing on the CPU. The use case is for "GPUs used for machine learning, which are located near the NICs, and have a high bandwidth PCI connection between the GPU/NIC," states the RFC. The code relies on Nvidia's proprietary driver for Linux, noticed by kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman, who observed: "OK, now you are just trolling us. Nice job, I shouldn't have read the previous patches. Please, go get a lawyer to sign-off on this patch, with their corporate email address on it. That's the only way we could possibly consider something like this."

• Power Management and Thermal Control Microconference Accepted into 2020 Linux Plumbers Conference

  We are pleased to announce that the Power Management and Thermal Control Microconference has been accepted into the 2020 Linux Plumbers Conference! Power management and thermal control is an important area in the Linux ecosystem to help with the global environment. Optimizing the amount of work that is achieved while having long battery life and keeping the box from overheating is critical in today’s world. This meeting will focus on continuing to have Linux be an efficient operating system while still lowering the cost of running a data center. Last year’s meetup at Linux Plumbers resulted in the introduction of thermal pressure support into the CPU scheduler as well as several improvements to the thermal framework, such as a netlink implementation of thermal notification and improvements to CPU cooling. Discussions from last year also helped to improve systems-wide suspend testing tools.

• Intel Tiger Lake OpenCL Support On Linux Now Considered Production Ready

  With all the recent work on Intel's open-source compute stack around the vector back-end and GPU code generation with their ISPC compiler there was another significant milestone achieved that went unnoticed until spotting the change a few days ago.  The open-source Intel Compute Runtime in the past two weeks now has "production" ready OpenCL support for the forthcoming Gen12 Tiger Lake graphics. That's good news with Tiger Lake laptops expected to market soon. 

• RADV ACO Back-End Begins Tackling Navi 2 / GFX10.3 Support

  With the "Sienna Cichlid" and "Navy Flounder" open-source driver support as what appear to be the first "Navi 2" GPUs and the first of the "GFX10.3" generation on the graphics engine side there is the initial kernel support with Linux 5.9 and the initial Mesa support for 20.2. That Mesa support has been focused on RadeonSI as the official OpenGL driver as well as Mesa's RADV driver as the Radeon Vulkan driver in-tree but not officially supported by AMD. That RADV support is currently un-tested. Both drivers currently depend upon the "AMDGPU" back-end found in the forthcoming LLVM 11.0 with its initial GFX10.3 support. But now on the RADV driver side there is preliminary GFX10.3 bits landing for the popular "ACO" back-end.  ACO is the back-end worked on by Valve and other stakeholders like open-source graphics driver engineers from Google and Red Hat. But as ACO isn't officially supported by AMD, there hasn't been any patches from them in wiring up the Navi 2 / GFX10.3 support for this AMDGPU LLVM alternative. Rhys Perry as part of Valve's Linux driver efforts though has worked out what should be the initial changes needed for this yet-to-be-released hardware with ACO. 

Security: Back Doors, EFF, Trump/Microsoft Blackmail and 1Password on GNU/Linux

• Bill Barr Applauds FOSTA Sponsor's Clone Of Senate's Encryption-Breaking 'Lawful Access' Bill

  I guess those "rule of law" folks don't care if a law is any good or will do what it intends to do without causing significant collateral damage. All they care about is that it's a law and, as a law, everyone should just subject themselves to it with a minimum of complaining.

• Supporting Digital Freedom at the (Virtual) Summer Security Conferences

  During a typical year, EFF staff members would be headed to Las Vegas to present our latest work to the world and ensure legal support for computer security researchers at the long-running hacker events BSidesLV, Black Hat, and DEF CON. These summer security conferences are a natural opportunity for the curious and the professional to geek out on tech. Hackers, tinkerers, and reverse engineers were among the first to embrace the excitement and potential of their own imaginations in digital space. They have been a core part of EFF and the online freedom community since the beginning, and we relish thanking them face to face.

  But this year, as we each grapple with a sobering pandemic, these conferences have had to undergo big changes and are all happening in virtual space. DEF CON is even free to attend. This pandemic, as well as far-reaching protests, have forced us to rethink much of our daily lives—and these questions can feel overwhelming.

• TikTok Ban: A Seed of Genuine Security Concern Wrapped in a Thick Layer of Censorship

  It is ironic that, while purporting to protect America from China’s authoritarian government, President Trump is threatening to ban the TikTok app. Censorship of both speech and social media applications, after all, is one of the hallmarks of the Chinese Internet strategy.  While there is significant cause for concern with TikTok’s security, privacy, and its relationship with the Chinese government, we should resist a governmental power to ban a popular means of communication and expression.  

  As is too often the case with government pronouncements, the Trump administration has proposed a ban without specifying what the ban would actually be or what authority allows for it. Rather, the President has said broadly, “we’re banning them from the United States,” or most recently, “it's going to be out of business in the United States.” This could mean a ban on using the app, or perhaps a ban on distributing TikTok in app stores, or maybe something else. Any way you slice it, an effective ban of the scope suggested cannot be squared with the Constitution. 

• ‘1Password’ App Coming To Linux, Initial Release Available For Download

  The user-friendly and cross-platform password manager app, 1Password, is finally coming for all Linux platforms with full-feature and native support. Currently, a development preview for Linux has been unveiled. This is the initial release for testing and validation purposes only. Hence, you should not use its Linux development preview for production or business environments. As planned, an official release with long-term support will be announced later this year after including new updates, features, and changes over the next few months. However, if you want a stable version of 1Password for Linux, you can use 1Password X in your browser. 1Password is available for all devices, browsers, and operating systems such as Windows, macOS, iOS, Android, Chrome OS, Google Chrome, Brave, Edge, and Firefox. And now it is also going to be available for Linux desktop as well.