Way, way, way back in 2009, we reported on a small hobby operating system called StreamOS – version 0.21-RC1 had just been released that day. StreamOS was a 32-bit operating system written in Object Pascal using the Free Pascal Compiler, running on top of FreeDOS. It turns out that its creator, Oleksandr Natalenko (yes, the same person), recovered the old code, and republished it on Codeberg for posterity.

It’s not a complete history, rather a couple of larger breadcrumbs stuck together with git. I didn’t do source code management much back in the days, and there are still some intermediate dev bits scattered across my backup drive that I cannot even date properly, but three branches I pushed (along with binaries, btw; feel free to fire up that qemu of yours and see how it crashes!) should contain major parts of what was done.

↫ Oleksandr Natalenko

It may not carry the same import as Doom for the SNES, but it’s still great to see such continuity 15 years apart. I hope Natalenko manages to recover the remaining bits and bobs too, because you may never know – someone might be interested in picking up this 15 year old baton.

The complete source code for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) version of Doom has been released on archive.org. Although some of the code was partially released a few years ago, this is the first time the full source code has been made publicly available.

↫ Shaun James at GBAtemp

The code was very close to being lost forever, down to a corrupted disk that had to be fixed. It’s crazy how much valuable, historically relevant code we’re just letting rot away for no reason.

Howard Oakley has written an interesting history of secure enclaves on the Mac, and when he touches upon “exclaves”, a new concept that doesn’t have a proper term yet, he mentions something interesting.

While an enclave is a territory entirely surrounded by the territory of another state, an exclave is an isolated fragment of a state that exists separately from the main part of that state. Although exclave isn’t a term normally used in computing, macOS 14.4 introduced three kernel extensions concerned with exclaves. They seem to have appeared first in iOS 17, where they’re thought to code domains isolated from the kernel that protect key functions in macOS even when the kernel becomes compromised. This in turn suggests that Apple is in the process of refactoring the kernel into a central micro-kernel with protected exclaves. This has yet to be examined in Sequoia.

↫ Howard Oakley

I’m not going to add too much here since I’m not well-versed enough in the world of macOS to add anything meaningful, but I do think it’s an interesting theory worth looking into by people who posses far more knowledge about this topic than I do.

Sometimes you come across a story that’s equally weird and delightful, and this is definitely one of them. Oleksandr Natalenko posted a link on Mastodon to a curious email sent to the Linux Kernel Mailing List, which apparently gets sent to the LKML every single year. The message is very straightforward.

Is it possible to write a kernel module which, when loaded, will blow the PC speaker?

↫ R.F. Burns on the LKML

Since this gets sent every year, it’s most likely some automated thing that’s more of a joke than a real request at this point. However, originally, there was a real historical reason behind the inquiry, as Schlemihl Schalmeier on Mastodon points out. They link to the original rationale behind the request, posted to the LKML after the request was first made, all the way back in 2007.

At the time, the author was helping a small school system manage a number of Linux workstations, and the students there were abusing the sound cards on those workstations for shenanigans. They addressed this by only allowing users with root privileges access to the sound devices. However, kids are smart, and they started abusing the PC speaker instead, and even unloading the PC speaker kernel module didn’t help because the kids found ways to abuse the PC speaker outside of the operating system (the BIOS maybe? I have no idea).

And so, the author notes, the school system wanted them to remove the PC speakers entirely, but this would be a very fiddly and time-consuming effort, since there were a lot of PCs, and of course, this would all have to be done on-site – unlike the earlier solutions which could all be done remotely.

So, the idea was raised about seeing if there was a way to blow the PC speaker by loading a kernel module.  If so, a mass-deployment of a kernel module overnight would take care of the PC speaker problem once and for all.

↫ R.F. Burns on the LKML

So, that’s the original story behind the request. It’s honestly kind of ingenious, and it made me wonder if the author got a useful reply on the LKML, and if such a kernel module was ever created. The original thread didn’t seem particularly conclusive to me, and the later yearly instances of the request don’t seem to yield much either. It seems unlikely to me this is possible at all.

Regardless, this is a very weird bit of Linux kernel lore, and I’d love to know if there’s more going on. Various parts of the original rationale seem dubious to me, such as the handwavy thing about abusing the PC speaker outside of the operating system, and what does “abusing” the PC speaker even mean in the first place?

As Natalenko notes, it seems there’s more to this story, and I’d love to find out what it is.

Brussels is set to charge Apple over allegedly stifling competition on its mobile app store, the first time EU regulators have used new digital rules to target a Big Tech group.

The European Commission has determined that the iPhone maker is not complying with obligations to allow app developers to “steer” users to offers outside its App Store without imposing fees on them, according to three people with close knowledge of its investigation.

↫ Javier Espinoza and Michael Acton

This was always going to happen for as long as Apple’s malicious compliance kept dragging on. The rules in the Digital Markets Act are quite clear and simple, and despite the kind of close cooperation with EU lawmakers no normal EU citizen is ever going to get, Apple has been breaking this law from day one without any intent to comply. European Union regulators have given Apple far, far more leeway and assistance than any regular citizen of small business would get, and that has to stop.

The possible fines under the DMA are massive. If Apple is found guilty, they could be fined for up to 10% of its global revenue, or 20% for repeated violations. This is no laughing matters, and this is not one of those cases where a company like Apple could calculate fines as a mere cost of doing business – this would have a material impact on the company’s numbers, and shareholders are definitely not going to like it if Apple gets fined such percentages.

As these are preliminary findings, Apple could still implement changes, but if past behaviour is any indication, any possibly changes will just be ever more malicious compliance.

Former employee says software giant dismissed his warnings about a critical flaw because it feared losing government business. Russian hackers later used the weakness to breach the National Nuclear Security Administration, among others.

↫ Renee Dudley at ProPublica

In light of Recall, a very dangerous game.

Google’s own Project Zero security research effort, which often finds and publishes vulnerabilities in both other companies’ and its own products, set its sights on Android once more, this time focusing on third-party kernel drivers.

Android’s open-source ecosystem has led to an incredible diversity of manufacturers and vendors developing software that runs on a broad variety of hardware. This hardware requires supporting drivers, meaning that many different codebases carry the potential to compromise a significant segment of Android phones. There are recent public examples of third-party drivers containing serious vulnerabilities that are exploited on Android. While there exists a well-established body of public (and In-the-Wild) security research on Android GPU drivers, other chipset components may not be as frequently audited so this research sought to explore those drivers in greater detail.

↫ Seth Jenkins

They found a whole host of security issues in these third-party kernel drivers in phones both from Google itself as well as from other companies. An interesting point the authors make is that because it’s getting ever harder to find 0-days in core Android, people with nefarious intent are looking at other parts of an Android system now, and these kernel drivers are an inviting avenue for them. They seem to focus mostly on GPU drivers, for now, but it stands to reason they’ll be targeting other drivers, too.

As usual with Android, the discovered exploits were often fixed, but the patches took way, way too long to find their way to end users due to the OEMs lagging behind when it comes to sending those patches to users. The authors propose wider adoption of Android APEX to make it easier to OEMs to deliver kernel patches to users faster.

I always like the Project Zero studies and articles, because they really take no prisoners, and whether they’re investigating someone else like Microsoft or Apple, or their own company Google, they go in hard, do not surgarcoat their findings, and apply the same standards to everyone.

After initially announcing it was going to change its Recall feature and then pulling the preview Windows release containing the feature, Microsoft has now given in almost entirely and is delaying Recall altogether. Instead of shipping it on every new Copilot+ PC, they’re going to release it as an optional feature for Windows Insiders.

Today, we are communicating an additional update on the Recall (preview) feature for Copilot+ PCs. Recall will now shift from a preview experience broadly available for Copilot+ PCs on June 18, 2024, to a preview available first in the Windows Insider Program (WIP) in the coming weeks. Following receiving feedback on Recall from our Windows Insider Community, as we typically do, we plan to make Recall (preview) available for all Copilot+ PCs coming soon.

↫ Pavan Davuluri on the Windows blog

It’s incredible just how much Microsoft has bungled the launch of this feature, as it’s now almost overshadowing everything else that comes with these new ARM laptops. They rushed to shove machine learning into a major feature, and didn’t stop to think about the consequences.

Typical Silicon Valley behaviour.

Speaking of PCs that don’t use x86 chips, Canonical and DeepComputing today announced a new RISC-V laptop running Ubuntu, available for pre-order in a few days. It’s the successor to the DC-ROMA, which shipped last year.

Adding to a long list of firsts, the new DC-ROMA laptop II is the first to feature SpacemiT’s SoC K1 – with its 8-cores RISC-V CPU running at up to 2.0GHz with 16GB of memory. This significantly doubled its overall performance and energy efficiency over the previous generation’s 4-cores SoC running at 1.5GHz. Moreover, SpacemiT’s SoC K1 is also the world’s first SoC to support RISC-V high performance computing RVA 22 Profile RVV 1.0 with 256 bit width, and to have powerful AI capabilities with its customised matrix operation instruction based on IME Group design principle! 

This second-generation DC-ROMA RISC-V laptop also features an all-metal casing making it more durable, as well as improving heat dissipation and more on its premium class look and feel compared to previous generation.

↫ Canonical’s blog

The DC-ROMA II is clearly aimed at developers, as it has what is essentially a GeekPort on the side of the laptop, to aid in porting and debugging software. Aside from that and the RISC-V processor, it’s a rather mid-range kind of device, and no pricing has been published yet so I’m not sure if this is something I could afford for an OSNews review. Once the preorders go live in a few days, we’ll know more.

If you’d like to see this RISC-V laptop make an appearance on OSNews, let me know, and I’ll see what I can do.

In the last 8 months Qualcomm has made a lot of interesting claims for their high-performance Windows-on-Arm SoC – many of which will be put to the test in the coming weeks. But beyond all the performance claims and bluster amidst what is shaping up to be a highly competitive environment for PC CPUs, there’s an even more fundamental question about the Snapdragon X that we’ve been dying to get to: how does it work?

Ahead of next week’s launch, then, we’re finally getting the answer to that, as today Qualcomm is releasing their long-awaited architectural disclosure on the Snapdragon X SoC. This includes not only their new, custom Arm v8 “Oryon” CPU core, but also technical disclosures on their Adreno GPU, and the Hexagon NPU that backs their heavily-promoted AI capabilities. The company has made it clear in the past that the Snapdragon X is a serious, top-priority effort for the company – that they’re not just slapping together a Windows SoC from their existing IP blocks and calling it a day – so there’s a great deal of novel technology within the SoC.

↫ Ryan Smith at AnandTech

I cannot wait until AnandTech can move beyond diving into information provided by Qualcomm, and can start doing their own incredibly in-depth benchmarks and research. Assuming the effort succeeds, the Snapdragon X line will most likely form the backbone of ARM PCs for years – if not decades – to come, meaning that when you and I go shopping for a new laptop, this chip will be the one heavily promoted by stores and outlets.

How closely independent benchmarks line up with Qualcomm’s eight months of promises and cherry-picked benchmarks will also tell us a lot about how trustworthy the company will be about the performance of its chips going forward. In smartphones – where we mostly see Qualcomm today – performance simply doesn’t matter as much, but when you’re dealing with laptops, and in the future possibly even desktops, performance suddenly matters a lot more, and Qualcomm’s claims will be facing a level of scrutiny and detail I don’t think they’ve ever really had to deal with before.

PC enthusiasts don’t mess around.

If the Linux support turns out to be as solid as Qualcomm claims, and if the performance figures they’ve been putting out are verified by quality independent reviewers like the people at AnandTech, I honestly don’t think my next laptop will be using x86. I just hope weird companies like Chuwi will release a version of their MiniBook X with one a Qualcomm chip, because I’ll be damned if I go back to anything larger than 10″.

Two days ago, I broke the news that Mozilla removed several Firefox extensions from the add-on store in Russia, after pressure from Russian censors. Mozilla provided me with an official statement, which seemed to highlight that the decision was not final, and it seems I was right – today, probably helped by the outcry our story caused, Mozilla has announced it’s reversing the decision. In a statement sent to me via email, an unnamed Mozilla spokesperson says:

In alignment with our commitment to an open and accessible internet, Mozilla will reinstate previously restricted listings in Russia. Our initial decision to temporarily restrict these listings was made while we considered the regulatory environment in Russia and the potential risk to our community and staff.

As outlined in our Manifesto, Mozilla’s core principles emphasise the importance of an internet that is a global public resource, open and accessible to all. Users should be free to customise and enhance their online experience through add-ons without undue restrictions.

By reinstating these add-ons, we reaffirm our dedication to:

– Openness: Promoting a free and open internet where users can shape their online experience.
– Accessibility: Ensuring that the internet remains a public resource accessible to everyone, regardless of geographical location.

We remain committed to supporting our users in Russia and worldwide and will continue to advocate for an open and accessible internet for all.

↫ Mozilla spokesperson via email

I’m glad Mozilla reversed its decision, because giving in to a dictatorship never ends well – it starts with a few extensions today, but ends up with the kind of promotional tours for China that Tim Cook goes on regularly. Firefox is a browser that lives or dies by its community, and if that community is unhappy with the course of Mozilla or the decisions it makes, especially ones that touch on core values and human rights, it’s not going to end well for them.

That being said, this does make me wonder what would’ve happened if the forum thread that started all this died in obscurity and never made its way to the media. Would Mozilla have made the same reversal?

Surprisingly quietly, in the middle of Apple’s WWDC, Google’s ChromeOS team has made a rather massive announcement that seems to be staying a bit under the radar. Google is announcing today that it is replacing many of ChromeOS’ current relatively standard Linux-based subsystems with the comparable subsystems from Android.

To continue rolling out new Google AI features to users at a faster and even larger scale, we’ll be embracing portions of the Android stack, like the Android Linux kernel and Android frameworks, as part of the foundation of ChromeOS. We already have a strong history of collaboration, with Android apps available on ChromeOS and the start of unifying our Bluetooth stacks as of ChromeOS 122.

↫ Prajakta Gudadhe and Alexander Kuscher on the Chromium blog

The benefits to Google here are obvious: instead of developing and maintaining two variants of the Linux kernel and various related subsystems, they now only have to focus on one, saving money and time. It will also make it easier for both platforms to benefit from new features and bugfixes, which should benefit users of both platforms quite a bit.

As mentioned in the snippet, the first major subsystem in ChromeOS to be replaced by its Android counterpart is Bluetooth. ChromeOS was using the BlueZ Bluetooth stack, the same one used by most (all?) Linux distributions today, which was initially developed by Qualcomm, but has now switched over to using Fluoride, the one from Android.

According to Google, Fluoride has a number of benefits over BlueZ. It runs almost entirely in userspace, as opposed to BlueZ, where more than 50% of the code resides in the kernel. In addition, Fluoride is written in Rust, and Google claims it has a simpler architecture, making it easier to perform testing. Google also highlights that Fluoride has a far larger userbase – i.e., all Android users – which also presents a number of benefits.

Google performed internal tests to measure the improvements as a result from switching ChromeOS from BlueZ to Fluoride, and the test results speak for themselves – pairing is faster, pairing fails less often, and reconnecting an already paired device fails less often. With Bluetooth being a rather problematic technology to use, any improvements to the user experience are welcome.

At the end of Google’s detailed blog post about the switch to Fluoride, the company notes that it intends for the project as whole – which is called Project Floss – to be a standalone open source project, capable of running on any Linux distribution.

↫ Russ Lindsay, Abhishek Pandit-Subedi, Alain Michaud, and Loic Wei Yu Neng on the chromeOS dev website

We aspire to position Project Floss as a standalone open source project that can reach beyond the walls of Google’s own operating system in a way where we can maximize the overall value and agility of the larger Bluetooth ecosystem. We also intend to support the Linux community as a whole with the goal that Floss can easily run on most Linux distributions.

If Fluoride can indeed deliver tangible, measurable benefits in Bluetooth performance on Linux desktops, I have no doubt quite a few distributions will be more than willing to switch over. Bluetooth is used a lot, and if Fedora, Ubuntu, Arch, and so on, can improve the Bluetooth experience by switching over, I’m pretty sure they will, or at least consider doing so.

The new Windows on ARM Copilot+ PC thing, running on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite and Pro chips, isn’t even out the door yet, and we’re already dealing with legal proceedings.

But the main conversation among conference attendees was over how a contract dispute between Arm Holdings and Qualcomm, which work together to make the chips powering these new laptops, could abruptly halt the shipment of new PCs that industry leaders expect will make Microsoft and its partners billions of dollars.

↫ Max A. Cherney at Reuters

The basic gist of the story is as follows. Qualcomm acquired a company named Nuvia, founded by former Apple processor engineers, in order to gain new technology to build its Snapdragon X Elite and Pro chips. Nuvia was planning on developing ARM chips for servers, but after the acquisition, Qualcomm changed their plans and repurposed their technology for use in laptops – the new X chips. ARM claims that Nuvia was only granted a license for server use, and not laptop use. Qualcomm, meanwhile, argued that it has a broad license to use ARM for pretty much anything, and as such, that any possible restrictions Nuvia had are irrelevant.

While this all sounds like very rich corporations having a silly legal slapfight, it could have real consequences. If the legal case goes very, very wrong for Qualcomm, it could halt the sale of devices powered by the Snapdragon X chips well before they’re even shipping. I doubt it’ll get that far – it rarely does, and there’s some big names and big reputations at play here – but it does highlight the absurdity of how the ARM ecosystem works.

Speaking of the ARM ecosystem, Qualcomm isn’t the only ARM chip makers dying to break into the PC market. Qualcomm currently has a weird exclusivity agreement with Microsoft where it’s the only ARM chip supplier for PCs, but that agreement is running out soon. Another player that’s ready to storm this market once that happens is MediaTek, who is also developing a chip geared towards Microsoft’s Copilot+ specifications, with a release target of 2025. Let’s hope MediaTek will be as forthcoming with Linux support as Qualcomm surprisingly has been, but I have my sincerest doubt.

The extensible scheduler “sched_ext” code has proven quite versatile for opening up better Linux gaming performance, more quickly prototyping new scheduler changes, Ubuntu/Canonical has been evaluating it for pursuing a more micro-kernel like design, and many other interesting approaches with it. Yet it’s remained out of tree but that is now changing with the upcoming Linux 6.11 cycle.

Linus Torvalds as the benevolent dictator for life “BDFL” of the Linux kernel announced he intends to merge the sched_ext patches for Linux 6.11 even though there has been some objections by other kernel developers. Torvalds feels the sched_ext code is ready enough and provides real value to the mainline Linux kernel. It’s not worth dragging out sched_ext continuing to be out-of-tree.

↫ Michael Larabel at Phoronix

I haven’t felt the need to mess around with the Linux scheduler in a long, long time – I have some vague memories of perhaps well over a decade ago where opting for a different scheduler could lead to better desktop-focused performance characteristics, but the details in my brain are so fuzzy that it may just be a fabricated or confabulated memory.

This is an attempt to turn OpenBSD into a Whonix or Tails alternative, although if you really need that level of privacy, use a system from this list and not the present guide. It is easy to spot OpenBSD using network fingerprinting, this can not be defeated, you can not hide the fact you use OpenBSD to network operators.

I did this guide as a challenge for fun, but I also know some users have a use for this level of privacy.

↫ Solène Rapenne

Written by OpenBSD developer Solène Rapenne, so you’re probably not going to find a guide written by anyone more knowledgeable.

Microsoft recently announced some big changes to the Recall feature in Windows, and now it’s pulled the Release Preview version which contained Recall entirely.

It’s likely not a coincidence that Microsoft also quietly pulled the build of the Windows 11 24H2 update that it had been testing in its Release Preview channel for Windows Insiders. It’s not unheard of for Microsoft to stop distributing a beta build of Windows after releasing it, but the Release Preview channel is typically the last stop for a Windows update before a wider release.

↫ Andrew Cunningham at Ars Technica

The company doesn’t actually mention why the release was pulled, but the reason is pretty obvious if you connect the dots. I’m at least glad Microsoft is taking the complaints seriously, and while I don’t personally think Recall is a good idea, if a user gives their consent and uses it knowingly and willingly, I don’t see any problems with it.

A few days ago, I was pointed to a post on the Mozilla forums, in which developers of Firefox extensions designed to circumvent Russian censorship were surprised to find that their extensions were suddenly no longer available within Russia. The extension developers and other users in the thread were obviously not amused, and since they had received no warning or any other form of communication from Mozilla, they were left in the dark as to what was going on.

I did a journalism and contacted Mozilla directly, and inquired about the situation. Within less than 24 hours Mozilla got back to me with an official statement, attributed to an unnamed Mozilla spokesperson:

Following recent regulatory changes in Russia, we received persistent requests from Roskomnadzor demanding that five add-ons be removed from the Mozilla add-on store. After careful consideration, we’ve temporarily restricted their availability within Russia. Recognizing the implications of these actions, we are closely evaluating our next steps while keeping in mind our local community.

↫ Mozilla spokesperson via email

I and most people I talked to already suspected this was the case, and considering Russia is a totalitarian dictatorship, it’s not particularly surprising it would go after browser extensions that allow people to circumvent state censorship. Other totalitarian dictatorships like China employ similar, often far more sophisticated methods of state control and censorship, too, so it’s right in line with expectations.

I would say that I’m surprised Mozilla gave in, but at the same time, it’s highly likely resisting would lead to massive fines and possible arrests of any Mozilla employees or contributors living in Russia, if any such people exist, and I can understand a non-profit like Mozilla not having the means to effectively stand up against the Russian government. That being said, Mozilla’s official statement seems to imply they’re still in the middle of their full decision-making process regarding this issue, so other options may still be on the table, and I think it’s prudent to give Mozilla some more time to deal with this situation.

Regardless, this decision is affecting real people inside Russia, and I’m sure if you’re using tools like these inside a totalitarian dictatorship, you’re probably not too fond of said dictatorship. Losing access to these Firefox extensions through the official add-store will be a blow to their human rights, so let’s hope the source code and ‘sideloaded’ versions of these extensions remain available for them to use instead.

Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference keynote has come to a close — and the company had a whole lot to share. We got our first look at the AI features coming to Apple’s devices and some major updates across the company’s operating systems.

If you missed out on watching the keynote live, we’ve gathered all the biggest announcements that you can check out below.

↫ Emma Roth at The Verge

Most of the stuff Apple announced aren’t particularly interesting – a lot of catch-up stuff that has become emblematic of companies like Google, Apple, and Microsoft when it comes to their operating systems. The one thing that did stand out is Apple’s approach to offloading machine learning requests to the cloud when they are too difficult to handle on device. They’ve developed a new way of doing this, using servers with Apple’s own M chips, which is pretty cool and harkens back the days of the Xserve.

In short, these server are using the same kind of techniques to encrypt and secure data on iPhones, but now to encrypt and secure the data coming in for offloaded machine learning requests.

The root of trust for Private Cloud Compute is our compute node: custom-built server hardware that brings the power and security of Apple silicon to the data center, with the same hardware security technologies used in iPhone, including the Secure Enclave and Secure Boot. We paired this hardware with a new operating system: a hardened subset of the foundations of iOS and macOS tailored to support Large Language Model (LLM) inference workloads while presenting an extremely narrow attack surface. This allows us to take advantage of iOS security technologies such as Code Signing and sandboxing.

↫ Apple’s security research blog

Apple also provided some insight into where its training data is coming from, and it claims it’s only using licensed data and “publicly available data collected by our web-crawler”. The words “licensed” and “publicly available” are doing a lot of heavy lifting here, and I’m not entirely sure what definitions of those terms Apple is using. There are enough people out there who feel every piece of data – whether under copyright, available under an open source license, or whatever – is fair, legal game for ML training, so who knows what Apple is using based on these statements alone.

From Apple’s presentations yesterday, as well as any later statements, it’s also not clear when machine learning requests get offloaded in the first place. Apple states they try to run as much as possible on-device, and will offload when needed, but the conditions under which such offloading happens are nebulous and unclear, making it hard for users to know what’s going to happen when they use Apple’s new machine learning features.

I’ve long been waiting for a powerful ARM laptop that can run Linux comfortably, and it seems that with Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon X Elite SoC, that’s finally going to happen. We talked earlier about how for once, Qualcomm is taking Linux support for their new laptop-focused processors very seriously, and that promise and associated effort is paying dividend. Tuxedo, a popular Linux OEM from Germany, has announced it’s working on a laptop with the Snapdragon X Elite chip, and they showed off a working prototype at Computex in Taiwan.

We have been working with a first prototype for some time, which will soon be replaced by a second one. The development is still in the alpha stage, as some drivers are still missing, which will hopefully be available with the next two kernel versions.

It is quite conceivable that an ARM notebook from TUXEDO will be under your Christmas tree in 2024. However, there are still too many pieces of the hardware, software and delivery capability puzzle missing to even begin to set a release date. TUXEDO for ARM will come, but we don’t yet know exactly when.

↫ Tuxedo’s website

Their timeline of more Qualcomm drivers making it into the next two kernel versions lines up with Qualcomm’s own timeline, so it seems we’re mostly just waiting for them to finish their Linux drivers and add them to the kernel. This is quite exciting, and a much better option for Linux users than buying a Windows version of an X Elite or Pro laptop and hoping for the best.

NetBSD 10 was released recently, so a lot of people are experimenting with it and writing down their thoughts. I’ve got two of those for you today, to help you in case you, too, want to install NetBSD 10 and play around with, or just use, it.

First, what if you want to install NetBSD 10 on a UEFI system, but with full disk encryption in case your device gets stolen? It turns out there are countless guides for installing with full-disk encryption on MBR-based systems, but once you use UEFI – as you should be – things get a lot more complicated. The NetBSD installer is apparently rather basic, and a better solution is to drop to a shell and install NetBSD that way instead, and even then, full disk encryption with UEFI is actually not possible, as it seems the root file system – where the operating system itself resides – cannot be encrypted.

The restriction is in the root file-system. It needs to be in plain-text and in a regular partition. It seems to me that rootfs in CGD or LVM is not well supported.

↫ vsis.online

This seems like something the NetBSD team may need to take a look at, since full disk encryption should be an easy option to choose, even, or especially in 2024, on UEFI systems. Such encryption is easily achieved on Linux or Windows systems, and it seems odd to me that NetBSD is lagging behind a bit here. In the meantime, the linked guide will be a good jumping-off point for those of you interested in going a similar route.

The second article I want to highlight concerns NetBSD 10 on the Pinebook Pro, the inexpensive ARM laptop that normally ships with Linux. It turns out there’s a NetBSD 10 image for this device, so installation is quite a bit more straightforward than the more exotic setup I mentioned earlier. It seems most of the hardware works quite well out of the box, with the inly exception being the on-board Wi-Fi, which the author addressed with a USB W-Fi dongle.

Other than that, NetBSD is running well on the Pinebook Pro for the author, which is great to read since that makes this cheap device a great starting point for people interested in running NetBSD.

Last night, I ran through the ZFSBootMenu documentation guide for Void and followed it both on a VM and then on an external SATA HDD plugged through a USB case, taking some notes and getting a general idea of the process.

The Void installer does not support ZFS out of the box, so the Void Handbook itself recommends the ZFSBootMenu documentation before its own (a manual chroot installation) when it comes to doing a ZFS-on-root install. This guide from ZFSBootMenu is what we’ll be following throughout this post.

↫ Juno Takano

There’s a ton of good stuff in this lengthy, detailed, and helpful blog post. First, it covers Void Linux, which is one of the best signifiers of good taste, classy style, and generally being a good person. Void is not necessarily underappreciated – it gets a lot of mentions in the right places – but I do feel there are a lot more people for whom Void Linux would be a perfect fit but who don’t yet know about it. So, time for a very short introduction.

Void Linux is distribution with its own unique and very user-friendly package manager that’s an absolute joy to use. Unlike many other custom, more obscure package formats, the Void repositories are vast, generally some of the most up-to-date, and you’ll be hard-pressed to be asking for some piece of software that isn’t packaged. Void eschews systemd in favour of runit, and while I personally have no issues with systemd, diversity is always welcome and runit is, in line with everything else Void, easy to grasp and use. Lastly, while Void also comes in a GNU libc flavour, it feels like the “real” Void Linux is the one using musl.

Second is a tool I had never heard of: ZFSBootMenu. The name is rather self-explanatory, but in slightly more detail: it’s a self-contained small Linux-based bootloader that detects any Linux kernels and initramfs images on ZFS file systems, which can then be launched using kexec. It makes running Linux on ZFS quite a bit easier, especially for systems that don’t over ZFS as an option during installation, like, in this case, Void Linux.

And that’s what the linked post is actually about: setting up a root-on-ZFS Void EFI installation. It’s a great companion article for anyone trying something similar.

Now that we have the MenuetOS 64 disk image file (M6414490.IMG), it is time to analyze! We will analyze the image file both statically and dynamically. Static analysis is reading and analyzing code without running it, whereas dynamic analysis is running the code and watching how it changes registers and memory during execution. Each analysis mode compliments the other; there are some things that can only be discerned through code execution, like register values or stack layout at a specific point in time during execution. Static analysis is useful for “filling in the blanks” when executing code to understand what the code should do next (or just did). Since MenuetOS 64 is written in Intel x64 assembly, our static analysis will consist of memory mapped disassembly in Ghidra. After reading this post, readers should understand how to launch a MenuetOS 64 virtual machine using QEMU as well as how to attach a debugger (gdb) to QEMU in order to debug while code is executing. Also, readers should understand how MenuetOS 64 begins the boot process as control of execution is passed to MenuetOS 64 code from the virtualization firmware.

↫ Nicholas Starke

This is an old post – from late 2022 – but a great read nonetheless, and considering MenuetOS doesn’t change very much from year to year, it’s still mostly relevant.

The very short version: Unix PIDs do start at 0! PID 0 just isn’t shown to userspace through traditional APIs. PID 0 starts the kernel, then retires to a quiet life of helping a bit with process scheduling and power management. Also the entire web is mostly wrong about PID 0, because of one sentence on Wikipedia from 16 years ago.

There’s a slightly longer short version right at the end, or you can stick with me for the extremely long middle bit!

But surely you could just google what PID 0 is, right? Why am I even publishing this?

↫ David Anderson

What a great read. Just great.

Adobe Creative Cloud users opened their apps yesterday to find that they were forced to agree to new terms, which included some frightening-sounding language. It seemed to suggest Adobe was claiming rights over their work.

Worse, there was no way to continue using the apps, to request support to clarify the terms, or even uninstall the apps, without agreeing to the terms.

↫ Ben Lovejoy at 9To5Mac

Of course users were going to revolt. Even without the scary-sounding language, locking people out of their applications unless they agree to new terms is a terrible dark pattern, and something a lot of enterprise customers certainly aren’t going to be particularly happy about. I’ve never worked an office job, so how does stuff like this normally go? I’m assuming employees aren’t allowed to just accept new licensing terms from Adobe or whatever on their office computers?

In response to the backlash, Adobe came out and said in a statement that it does not intend to claim ownership over anyone’s work, and that it’s not going to train its ML models on customers’ work either. The company states that to train its Firefly ML model, it only uses content it has properly licensed for it, as well as public domain content. Assuming Adobe is telling the truth, it seems the company at least understands the concept of consent, which is good news, and a breath of fresh air compared to crooks like OpenAI or GitHub. Content used for training ML models should be properly licensed for it, and consent should be properly obtained from rightsholders, and taking Adobe at their word, it seems that’s exactly what they’re doing.

Regardless, the backlash illustrates once again just how – rightfully – weary people are of machine learning, and how their works might be illegally appropriated to train such models.

We haven’t been hearing much out of the Fuchsia team anymore after said team was hit hard by the Google layoffs, but we’ve got some news so my fancy Fuchsia database category doesn’t go entirely to waste. As Phoronix highlights, Fuchsia support is being upstreamed to Mesa 3D, indicating that no, Fuchsia is not entirely dead.

This adds fairly standard support for Fuchsia in src/util. It’s being used in downstream forks of Lavapipe and it’s useful for gfxstream-vk. The idea is to incrementally merge these obvious changes to help reduce the patch load until someone has time to upstream the full driver.

↫ Gurchetan Singh

As you can tell from the language here, we’re dealing with the first experimental steps, and a lot more work is required before full Fuchsia support can be added to Mesa 3D, as further evidenced by the various friendly conversations attached to the merge request. After some small changes to the code here and there, the code was merged a few days later, so it seems the process can continue.

It used to be quite easy to predict where Fuchsia was going, since pretty much every indication was that Google had grand ideas for the project, and consequently, the Fuchsia team was large, staffed with well-known names, and the kind of progress we saw all pointed towards a role for Fuchsia on smartphones, tablets, laptops, desktops, and perhaps even beyond. There was a real sense that Google intended to almost silently replace the Linux base with Fuchsia in Android, and all the technologies to do so were either in place or actively being worked on.

Then came Google’s massive layoffs, though, and the Fuchsia team was hit proportionally harder than other teams, and now, it’s not so clear anymore what the future has in store for this custom operating system. Several Fuchsia-related efforts were wound down, from no longer porting Chrome to Fuchsia to killing Fuchsia smart speaker efforts. This was one of the few truly interesting projects inside Google, and it presented a real chance that we might see a new major operating system enter the market, for the first time in decades.

Alas, Google gonna Google.

The US Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission reportedly plan investigations into whether Nvidia, Microsoft, and OpenAI are snuffing out competition in artificial intelligence technology.

The agencies struck a deal on how to divide up the investigations, The New York Times reported yesterday. Under this deal, the Justice Department will take the lead role in investigating Nvidia’s behavior while the FTC will take the lead in investigating Microsoft and OpenAI.

↫ Jon Brodkin at Ars Technica

Even if there’s no findings of wrongdoing, these kinds of investigations are incredibly important, if only to let the megaocorporations know we’ve got our eyes on them. Artificial intelligence is a whole new world of potential monopolistic and other forms of abuse, and I’d like the various competition authorities to be on top of it right from the beginning for once, so we don’t end up with a fait accompli like we have in so many other parts of the technology sector.

It turns out that the storm of criticism Microsoft’s recently unveiled Recall feature has actually pushed Microsoft to change its mind and make some very significant changes to the feature. Today, after over a week of sustained criticism and worries, Redmond announced it’s going to implement Recall very differently.

First and foremost, instead of Recall being enabled by default and only configurable after installation and the out-of-box experience, it will not be disabled by default, and the user will be prompted during the OOBE if they want to enable the feature or not. This in and of itself should alleviate quite a few worries, since having this on by default without most users really realising it was a recipe for disaster and privacy issues.

Second, Recall will not be taking advantage of Windows Hello, and using Window Hello will be a requirement before you can use Recall. On op of that, Recall will use Windows Hello presence detection, so that it will only show any collected and saved data if you’re the one sitting behind the computer. It’s wild to me that they didn’t think of this one sooner, but alas – I have a feeling a lot of this “AI” stuff has been implemented in a bit of a hurry.

Last but definitely not least, the Recall database, where information extracted from the screenshots is stored as well as the search index will now be properly encrypted. They will only be decrypted once the user in question is authenticated. Here, too, one really has to wonder why it wasn’t implemented this way from the very beginning, and the fact that it wasn’t makes me think we’ll be finding more questionable security and implementation details as the feature becomes widely available in a few weeks.

I bought a Topton GM1 Industrial Mini PC for my HomeLab. It is aimed at running Slackware Linux but I wanted to have a quick look at how well BSD OSes support it out-of-the-box.

↫ Joel Carnat

That’s really all there’s to this story. I just really, really love tiny industrial and office computers and thin clients, and every time I see another one for sale I really have to stop myself from buying one I have absolutely no use for. There’s just something about how these little guys are built that speaks to me – they’re different than regular PCs, but only marginally so, making them fun to play around with, getting drivers for everything, seeing if Linux and BSD have any issues with it, and so on.

They’re also often fanless, which is a major boon. The Dell thin client I wrote about last week has been run through a gauntlet of operating systems to see just how capable it is, and I’m surprise by just how much you can do even with a pedestrian Pentium Silver. For now it’s running Fedora GNOME to get an idea how the most default of default Linux environments performs and feels – so I can include it in future articles about it – but I think I’m going to set it up as a retrogaming console using Batocera.

Industrial, office, and thin client computers are just fun to play around with, and they’re incredibly cheap when buying used. If things like a Raspberry Pi are hard to get, backordered, or overpriced due to demand outstripping supply, it’s definitely a good idea to see if you can find some cast-off thin client or whatever for your project instead.

Before PC users can enjoy everything Windows 11 has on tap, they must first enter an e-mail address that’s linked to a Microsoft account. If you don’t have one, you’ll be asked to create one before you can start setting it up.

A frequently used trick to circumvent this block is a small but ingenious step. By entering a random e-mail address and password, which doesn’t exist and causes the link to fail, you end up directly with the creation of a local account and can thus avoid creating an official account with Microsoft.

↫ Laura Pippig at PCWorld

Microsoft has now “fixed” this trick, and it’s no longer possible to use it. The other popular method of circumventing the Microsoft account requirement, by opening the command prompt during installation and running OOBE\BYPASSNRO, still works, but one has to wonder how long it’s going to take before Microsoft plugs that method, too. It seems the company is hell-bent on getting every consumer onto the Microsoft Account train, come hell or high water, so I wouldn’t be surprised seeing local accounts eventually being positioned as a “pro” or even “enterprise” feature that will simply no longer be available on consumer PCs.

I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with offering an online account option, but the keyword here is option. You should always be able to set up any computer to run with a regular old local account, even if only because internet access isn’t always a given in many places around the world. Add the obvious privacy concerns to that – an issue amplified by Recall – and I doubt users’ desire to run a local account and jump through hoops to do so will fade any time soon.

As some of you will know, I recently started working on OSNews as my full-time job, and that means I sometimes need to be annoying and remind you all that I need your help in keeping the website going. Ad income has been going down the drain for years and years now, so your support is crucial in keeping OSNews online. We’ve been providing you with the latest technology news for over 25 years now, and I’d really like to keep things going for another 25 years. So, how can you help?

You can become an OSNews Patreon, which will remove ads from OSNews, and give you a little bit of flair on every comment you post to show off that you support us. We offer three pricing tiers with an increasing level of prominence for your flair, with the highest tier giving you the option of choosing your own flair to really show off to your fellow readers and commenters that you are just a little bit more equal than everyone else.

You can also make individual donations through Ko-Fi. Since I really need to replace the monitor of my OSNews workstation – after eight years of loyal use, the cheap monitor is started to show ghosting and flickering, and I feel like it could give out at any moment – I’ve set a goal on Ko-Fi for this very purpose. I don’t expect this goal to be met any time soon, but it’s a nice target to aim for and look forward to. I intend to replace the old 4K display with the cheapest 4K/144Hz panel I can find here in Sweden, but since that will most likely be unrealistic price-wise, the goal is rooted more in aspiration than reality.

There are other ways to support us too – you can make a donation through Liberapay, or go to our merch store and buy T-shirts, mugs, and other cool items.

The ultimate goal that I’m working towards is to eventually be able to offer ad-free by default, fully supported by you, our generous readers. This is a long-term goal and not something we’ll achieve overnight, but I want to maintain OSNews’ independence at all costs. Virtually every other technology news site you visit is part of a major media empire, such as The Verge or Ars Technica, with huge amounts of staff and massive funds backing them – and all the questionable relationships between writers and the technology companies that entails. Add to it the rise of artificial intelligence and the negative consequences that’s going to have, and the need for independent, reader-funded technology websites is greater than ever.

That being said, we will not be gating content behind paywalls, so even if you cannot or are unwilling to support us, you will still get all the same content as everyone else. As such, supporting OSNews financially is entirely optional, and will not degrade your experience in any way. Still, OSNews’ continued existence is entirely dependent on me being able to generate enough income through it, so while you do not have to support us, it’s definitely needed.

I’ve barely scratched the surface, but there’s enough here for me to seriously consider a switch to it as my primary Linux distro for testing and servers. I love that htop(1) and lsof(1) only shows a small list of recognisable processes, that it uses OpenRC, that package management seems straight forward, and that it’s so simple to configure. I’ve wondered what a modern, functional “Occam’s Linux” would look like. This is it.

↫ Ruben Schade

Alpine is very popular among people inclined towards BSD, but who still want to run Linux as well – and it’s easy to see why when you try it out or read about it. This article is a good jumping-off point for those of you curious about Alpine.

You know what could really use a dose of “AI”? Your BIOS.

aiBIOS leverages an LLM to integrate AI capabilities into Insyde Software’s flagship firmware solution, InsydeH2O® UEFI BIOS. It provides the ability to interpret the PC user’s request, analyze their specific hardware, and parse through the LLM’s extensive knowledge base of BIOS and computer terminology to make the appropriate changes to the BIOS Setup. This breakthrough technology helps address a major hurdle for PC users that require or desire changes to their BIOS Setup for their personal computers but do not fully understand the meaning of the settings available to them.

↫ Insyde press release

Google told users to put glue on pizzas and eat rocks, so I’m sure the combined efforts of a BIOS maker will surely not pose any problems when automatically changing BIOS settings based on the requests of users who do not really understand what they’re doing. This surely is a recipe for success, and I can’t wait to tell my BIOS to enable XMP, only for it to disable hyperthreading, change the boot order to only allow booting from the non-existent floppy drive, and to force the use of the integrated GPU when I’m actually using a dedicated one.

This is going to be just fine.

Starlark is a small programming language, designed as a simple dialect of Python and intended primarily for embedded use in applications. Some people might say it’s a bit like Lua with Python syntax, but I think there are many interesting bits to discuss. The language is now open-source and used in many other applications and companies. As I led the design and implementation of Starlark, I’d like to write a bit more about it.

↫ Laurent Le Brun

I’m sure there’s a few among you will like this.

The short version is this: In its current form, Recall takes screenshots and uses OCR to grab the information on your screen; it then writes the contents of windows plus records of different user interactions in a locally stored SQLite database to track your activity. Data is stored on a per-app basis, presumably to make it easier for Microsoft’s app-exclusion feature to work. Beaumont says “several days” of data amounted to a database around 90KB in size. In our usage, screenshots taken by Recall on a PC with a 2560×1440 screen come in at 500KB or 600KB apiece (Recall saves screenshots at your PC’s native resolution, minus the taskbar area).

Recall works locally thanks to Azure AI code that runs on your device, and it works without Internet connectivity and without a Microsoft account. Data is encrypted at rest, sort of, at least insofar as your entire drive is generally encrypted when your PC is either signed into a Microsoft account or has Bitlocker turned on. But in its current form, Beaumont says Recall has “gaps you can drive a plane through” that make it trivially easy to grab and scan through a user’s Recall database if you either (1) have local access to the machine and can log into any account (not just the account of the user whose database you’re trying to see), or (2) are using a PC infected with some kind of info-stealer virus that can quickly transfer the SQLite database to another system.

↫ Andrew Cunningham at Ars Technica

It really does seem Recall is kind of a mess in the security department, and it has a certain rushed quality about it. All the screenshots are saved in an AppData folder, and data pulled from those screenshots is stored in a local SQLite database that happens to be entirely unencrypted. TotalRecall, a tool developed by Alexander Hagenah, will neatly pull the data from Recall for you without any hassle or issues.

This truly is a security nightmare. Aside from all the obvious issues this presents, such as making it even easier for law enforcement to gain access to pretty much everything you do online, something especially troubling for minorities or in countries with less-than-stellar police departments, Recall also presents a whole host of other problems. Imagine being in an abusive relationship, and the abusive partner demanding Recall be left on at all times to exert even more control. Imagine an unscrupulous employee abusing Recall to steal sensitive information from a company for a competitor. Imagine living in some backwards part of a country with controlling religious parents, and you happen to be gay. The problems here are endless.

The fact you can turn Recall off doesn’t mean much, since in the above examples, turning it off is not an option since there are controlling people involved who will demand you keep it on. Browser history and other forms of history in your computer exist as well, of course, but they’re not always as easy to parse, they’re easier to manipulate, sanitise, and temporarily hide. Recall just combines all of this and puts a neat little bow on it, ready to be abused by anyone with bad intentions.

Recall is ill-conceived, badly implemented, and a solution looking for a problem, that in an of itself creates tons of other problems. I hope Microsoft reconsiders, but in a world where “AI” makes investors go nuts, I doubt we’ll see a sudden sense of clarity coming out of Redmond.

OpenAI’s efforts to produce less factually false output from its ChatGPT chatbot are not enough to ensure full compliance with European Union data rules, a task force at the EU’s privacy watchdog said.

“Although the measures taken in order to comply with the transparency principle are beneficial to avoid misinterpretation of the output of ChatGPT, they are not sufficient to comply with the data accuracy principle,” the task force said in a report released on its website on Friday.

↫ Tassilo Hummel at Reuters

I’m glad at least some authorities are taking the wildly inaccurate nonsense outputs of many “AI” tools seriously. I’m not entirely sure when a tool like ChatGPT can be considered “accurate”, but whatever it is now, is not it.

GNU Nano, by far my favourite text editor when using the command line, released version 8.0 recently – and by recently I mean a month ago – and in it, there’s a pretty interesting additional feature that should make using Nano a little bit more straightforward for those not used to its key combinations.

Command-line option –modernbindings (-/) makes ^Q quit, ^X cut, ^C copy, ^V paste, ^Z undo, ^Y redo, ^O open a file, ^W write a file, ^R replace, ^G find again, ^D find again backwards, ^A set the mark, ^T jump to a line, ^P show the position, and ^E execute.

↫ GNU Nano’s news page

Basically, this option makes Nano’s key bindings a bit more in line with what you might expect as someone coming from a graphical environment. Of course, Nano’s keybindings are listed at the bottom of its user interface, but it’s still nice to have the option of making them more in line with the wider computing world.

Instead of using the command-line option, you can also change the name of Nano’s executable, or a symlink to it, to start with “e”.

Remember when I said the honeymoon with AMD’s consumer-friendly chipset and socket support policy would eventually end? Well, while this is not exactly that, it will make a lot of people very unhappy.

While AMD, as does any other company, was boastful about its product touting the 16% IPC boost on Zen 5 and the big AI performance leap delivering up to 50 TOPS on the NPU side, an interesting drawback of the Ryzen AI 300 series that has managed to avoid getting media attention is the lack of support for Windows 10.

While this was just an unconfirmed rumour last month even though it was suggested by a supposed Lenovo China manager, we have now got confirmation from AMD itself that the report, that Strix point and newer CPUs and APUs will not support Windows 10 is true.

↫ Sayan Sen at NeoWin

Official support for Windows 10 is ending next year, so there is some reason to AMD’s madness, but at the same time, almost 70% of Windows users are currently using Windows 10, and leaving those users behind might not be the best idea AMD ever had. There is an argument to be made that at least a reasonable number of these people are still using Windows 10 not out of their own volition, but because of Microsoft’s strict hardware requirements, and as such, anyone buying a new AMD machine will just opt for the latest version of Windows out of habit, but I still think there’s a sizable contingent of people who actively choose Windows 10 over 11 for a whole host of reasons.

On a strongly related note, despite 2025 marking the end of regular support for Windows 10, Microsoft yesterday announced it’s expanding the the number of Insider channels for new Windows 10 features from one to two, adding a Beta tier below the existing Release Preview tier. Microsoft, too, will have to come to terms with the fact that with 70% of Windows users using Windows 10, they might not even be able to drop support for the operating system as early as next year. While this 70% number will surely slowly decrease over the next 12 months, with many people simply being unable to upgrade due to hardware limitations, I have a suspicion we might see an extension on that 2025 date.

A new point release in the FreeBSD 14 series – the first one, in fact, not counting 14.0. FreeBSD 14.1 adds SIMD implementations of string and memory operations on amd64 in the C library to improve performance, improvements to the sound system, such as device hotplug support, and the latest versions of OpenZFS, clang/llvm, and OpenSSH. FreeBSD 14.0 users can just upgrade to FreeBSD 14.1, or you can do a fresh install, of course.

Hot on the heels of AMD, here’s Intel’s next-generation processor, this time for the laptop market.

Overall, Lunar Lake represents their second generation of disaggregated SoC architecture for the mobile market, replacing the Meteor Lake architecture in the lower-end space. At this time, Intel has disclosed that it uses a 4P+4E (8 core) design, with hyper-threading/SMT disabled, so the total thread count supported by the processor is simply the number of CPU cores, e.g., 4P+4E/8T.

↫ Gavin Bonshor at AnandTech

The most significant change in Lunar Lake, however, has nothing to do with IPC improvements, core counts, or power usage. No, the massive sea change here is that Lunar Lake will do away with separate memory sticks, instead opting for on-die memory at a maximum of 32GB LPDDR5X. This is very similar to how Apple packages its memory on the M dies, and yes, this also means that as far as thin Intel laptops go, you’ll no longer be able to upgrade your memory after purchase. You choose your desired amount of memory at purchase, and that’s what you’ll be stuck with.

Buyer beware, I suppose. We can only hope Intel isn’t going to default to 8GB.

About a week ago, there has been a little addition to the 3dbrew wiki page about 3DS cartridges (carts) that outlines the technical details of how the 3DS cartridge controller and a 3DS cartridge talk to each other. I would like to take this opportunity to also include the 3DS itself in the conversation to illuminate which part of which device performs which step. I will then proceed to outline where I think the corresponding design decisions originate. Finally, I will conclude with some concrete ideas for improvement.

↫ Forbidden Tempura

Everything you ever wanted to know about 3DS cartridges and how they interact with the 3DS.

We’ve got some possibly sad, possibly great news. Today, Andreas Kling, the amazing developer who started SerenityOS as a way to regain a sense or normalcy after completing his drug rehab program, has announced he’s stepping down as the ‘big dictator for life’ of the SerenityOS project, handing leadership over the maintainer group. The other half of the coin, however, is that Kling will officially fork Ladybird, the cross-platform web browser that originated as part of SerenityOS, turning it into a proper, separate project.

Personally, for the past two years, I’ve been almost entirely focused on Ladybird, a new web browser that started as a simple HTML viewer for SerenityOS. When Ladybird became a cross-platform project in 2022, I switched all my attention to the Linux version, as testing on Linux was much easier and didn’t require booting into SerenityOS.

Time flew by, and now I can’t remember the last time I worked on something in SerenityOS that wasn’t related to Ladybird.

↫ Andreas Kling

If you know a little bit about Kling’s career, it’s not entirely surprising that his heart lies with working on a browser engine. He originally worked at Nokia, and then at Apple in San Francisco on WebKit, and there’s most likely some code that he’s written in the browser you’re using right now (except, perhaps, for us Firefox users). As such, it makes sense that once Ladybird grew into something more than just a simple HTML viewer, he’d be focusing on it a lot.

As part of the fork, Ladybird will focus entirely on Linux and macOS, and drop SerenityOS as a target. This may seem weird at first, but this is an entirely amicable and planned step, as this allows Ladybird to adopt, use, and integrate third party code, something SerenityOS does not allow. In addition, many of these open source projects Ladybird couldn’t really use anyway because they simply didn’t exist for SerenityOS in the first place. This decision creates a lot of breathing room and flexibility for both projects.

Ladybird was getting a lot of attention from outside of SerenityOS circles, from large donations to code contributions. I’m not entirely surprised by this step, and I really hope it’s going to be the beginning of something great. We really need new and competitive browser engines to push the web forward, and alongside Servo, it now seems Ladybird has also picked up the baton.

What this will mean for SerenityOS remains to be seen. As Kling said, he hasn’t really been involved with SerenityOS outside of Ladybird work for two years now, so it seems the rest of the contributors were already doing a lot of the heavy lifting. I hope this doesn’t mean the project will peter out, since it has a certain flair few other operating systems have.

Another month, another Redox progress report. The Rust-based operating system, headed by system76 engineer Jeremy Soller, has made a big move by replacing Redox’ Orbital file manager, text editor and terminal by their COSMIC counterparts, COSMIC Files, COSMIC Editor and COSMIC Terminal, in the default Redox installation. COSMIC is the Rust-based desktop environment system76 is currently developing for their Linux distribution, Pop!_OS.

You really have to start wondering what the long-term goals for Redox really are here. I’m not saying they’re intending to replace Linux with it – that’d be suicide – but the steady progress towards a general purpose operating system is undeniable.

There’s no denying that not everyone is happy with the state of the GTK world, and I, too, have argued that GNOME’s massive presence and seeming unwillingness to cooperate with or even consider the existence of other GTK-based desktop environments is doing real, measurable harm to the likes of Xfce, Cinnamon, and others. A major root cause is a feeling that GTK is nothing but a vessel for GNOME, and that the project doesn’t really seem to care much about anyone else.

GNOME Foundation member and all-round very kind person Hari Rana, also known as TheEvilSkeleton, penned a blog post highlighting the other side of the story. In essence, what it comes down to, according to Rana, is that it’s better for everyone if GNOME-specific widgets are moved out of GTK, and into something else – first libhandy, and now its succesor libadwaita, splitting the toolkit (GTK) from the design language (libadwaita). This allows GNOME developers to focus on, well, GNOME, and frees up time for GTK developers to focus on generic widgets that aren’t specific to GNOME.

Thanks to the removal of GNOME widgets from GTK 4, GTK developers can continue to work on general-purpose widgets, without being influenced or restricted in any way by the GNOME HIG. Developers of cross-platform GTK 3 apps that rely exclusively on general-purpose widgets can be more confident that GTK 4 won’t remove these widgets, and hopefully enjoy the benefits that GTK 4 offers.

↫ Hari Rana

From a GNOME standpoint, this makes perfect sense, and I can obviously see the benefits for them. However, what this entire post seems to ignore is that the main effect of the split between GTK 4 and libadwaita is that various GTK applications, now targeting libadwaita because of GNOME’s immense popularity, simply no longer integrate very well with other desktops, like Xfce or Cinnamon. GNOME is, of course, under no obligation to remedy this situation, but at the very least they could acknowledge this is a very real problem that their fellow developers working on Xfce, Cinnamon, MATE, and others, have to deal with.

It works the other way around too. Developers targeting the Linux desktop, where GNOME is more or less the default, have to choose between making a GTK application that integrates well with GNOME by opting for libadwaita and leaving non-GNOME users with a crappy experience, or opting for ‘pure’ GTK 4 and leaving GNOME users with a worse experience. Neither option is good for the Linux desktop as a whole.

The very real ripple effects of GNOME’s choices regarding GTK and libadwaita are seemingly being stubbornly ignored, neglected, and often not even acknowledged at all, and it’s no surprise this creates an immense amount of friction in the wider desktop Linux community. It just feels smug and careless, and of course that’s going to rub people the wrong way- regardless of the purity of your intentions.

In regards to performance, AMD is touting an average (geomean) IPC increase in desktop workloads for Zen 5 of 16%. And with the new desktop Ryzen chips’ turbo clockspeeds remaining largely identical to their Ryzen 7000 predecessors, this should translate into similar performance expectations for the new chips.

The AMD Ryzen 9000 series will also launch on the AM5 socket, which debuted with AMD’s Ryzen 7000 series and marks AMD’s commitment to socket/platform longevity. Along with the Ryzen 9000 series will come a pair of new high-performance chipsets: the X870E (Extreme) and the regular X870 chipsets. The fundamental features that vendors will integrate into their specific motherboards remain tight-lipped. Still, we do know that USB 4.0 ports are standard on the X870E/X870 boards, along with PCIe 5.0 for both PCIe graphics and NVMe storage, with higher AMD EXPO memory profile support expected than previous generations.

↫ Gavin Bonshor at AnandTech

I absolutely love that AMD maintains compatibility with its chipset and socket generations as well as it does. I’m currently running a Ryzen 9 7900X, and I see no reason to upgrade any time soon, but it’s good to know I’ll at least have otions once the time comes. Compare this to Intel, which broke compatibility pretty much intentionally almost every generation for years now, and this is a huge win for consumers.

Of course, as AMD regains more and more of its foothold across the market, it will eventually also resort to the kind of tactics Intel has been using while it pretty much had the market to itself. It’s only a matter of time before we’ll see the first new Ryzen generation that mysteriously requires a new socket or chipset out of the blue.

Tock is an embedded operating system designed for running multiple concurrent, mutually distrustful applications on Cortex-M and RISC-V based embedded platforms. Tock’s design centers around protection, both from potentially malicious applications and from device drivers. Tock uses two mechanisms to protect different components of the operating system. First, the kernel and device drivers are written in Rust, a systems programming language that provides compile-time memory safety and type safety. Tock uses Rust to protect the kernel (e.g. the scheduler and hardware abstraction layer) from platform specific device drivers as well as isolate device drivers from each other. Second, Tock uses memory protection units to isolate applications from each other and the kernel.

↫ Tock GitHub page

We’ve never featured Tock on OSNews before, as far as I can tell, which seems odd considering it’s been around for a while. The most recent release stems from January 2023, so a short while ago, but that’s not too surprising considering the target audience of this embedded operating system. It’s licensed under either Apache or MIT.

The act of discarding a message that does not exist must therefore do one of two things. It may cause the message contents to also cease to exist. Alternately, it might not affect the existence but only the accessibility of message contents. Perhaps they continue to exist, but discarding the message (which already did not exist) causes the copy operation to cease being invokable on the message contents (even though they do continue to exist). The story of existence has many mysteries.

↫ Mark J. Nelson

The one question that can really break my brain in a way that is feels like it’s physically hurting – which it can’t, because, fun fact, there’s no pain receptors in the brain – is the question what exists outside of the universe? Any answer you can come up with just leads to more questions which just lead to more questions, in an infinite loop of possible answers and questions that the human mind is not equipped to grasp.

Anyway, it turns out using Outook can lead to the same existential crises.

If, for some reason, you’re still using Chrome or one of the browsers that put a little hat on Chrome and call it a different browser, the time you’re going to want to consider switching to the only real alternative – Firefox – is getting closer and closer. Yesterday, Google has announced that the end of Manifest V2 is now truly here.

Starting on June 3 on the Chrome Beta, Dev and Canary channels, if users still have Manifest V2 extensions installed, some will start to see a warning banner when visiting their extension management page – chrome://extensions – informing them that some (Manifest V2) extensions they have installed will soon no longer be supported. At the same time, extensions with the Featured badge that are still using Manifest V2 will lose their badge.

This will be followed gradually in the coming months by the disabling of those extensions. Users will be directed to the Chrome Web Store, where they will be recommended Manifest V3 alternatives for their disabled extension. For a short time after the extensions are disabled, users will still be able to turn their Manifest V2 extensions back on, but over time, this toggle will go away as well.

↫ David Li on the Chromium blog

In case you’ve been asleep at the wheel – and if you’re still using Chrome, you most likely are – Manifest V3 will heavily limit what content blockers can do, making them less effective at things like blocking ads. In a move that surprises absolutely nobody, it’s not entirely coincidental that Manifest V3 is being pushed hard by Google, the world’s largest online advertising company. While Google claims all the major content blockers have Manifest V3 versions available, the company fails to mention that they carry monikers such as “uBlock Origin Lite”, to indicate they are, well, shittier at their job than their Manifest V2 counterparts.

I can’t make this any more clear: switch to Firefox. Now. While Firefox and Mozilla sure aren’t perfect, they have absolutely zero plans to phase out Manifest V2, and the proper, full versions of content blockers will continue to work. As the recent leaks have made very clear, Chrome is even more of a vehicle for user tracking and ad targeting than we already knew, and with the deprecation of Manifest V2 from Chrome, Google is limiting yet another avenue for blocking ads.

OSNews has ads, and they are beyond my control, since our ads are managed by OSNews’ owner, and not by me. My position has always been clear: your computer, your rules. Nobody has any right to display ads on your computer, using your bandwidth, using your processor cycles, using your pixels. Sure, it’d be great if we could earn some income through ads, but we’d greatly prefer you become a Patreon (which removes ads) or make an individual donation to support OSNews and keep us alive that way instead.

Wayland 1.23.0 has been released. This new release includes the usual bugfixes and protocol clarifications, a number of new features few of us will really understand because we lack the expertise, and most importantly of all: OpenBSD support.

That’s it. That’s the news.

Real-time Ubuntu 24.04 LTS integrates the PREEMPT_RT patch on AMD64 and ARM64. As the de-facto Linux real-time implementation, PREEMPT_RT increases predictability by modifying the existing kernel code. With time-bound responses for mission-critical latency requirements, Real-time Ubuntu 24.04 LTS provides deterministic processing to the most demanding workloads across industries, from manufacturing and automotive to the critical infrastructure of telco operators.

↫ Edoardo Barbieri at the Ubuntu blog

If you need it, you need it, but it’s exclusive to Ubuntu Pro. Luckily Pro is free for personal use, so if you really need Ubuntu but with a real-time kernel – based on Linux 6.8 – there’s nothing stopping you.