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Remember when we linked to David Revoy's story about how his drawing pen's buttons stopped working properly due to a Linux kernel update? Well, it turns out that Linux kernel developers took this one up, and a fix is already being tested. This solution is still W.I.P. and I still have some homework to send more data about my tablets after this blog post, but in overall I'm already using a newer kernel (Linux workstation 6.5.10-200.fc38.x86_64) and I don't have the problem with the eraser mode on the top button of my XPPen Artist 24 Pro and XPPen Artist 16 Pro Gen2 styluses. The buttons are also now perfectly customisable via xsetwacom CLI tool. Yay! That's why I wanted to share this blog-post as soon as possible. Be sure to read the whole article for an in-depth explanation of what's being done to fix this.

Microsoft steals access data" - When the well-known German IT portal Heise Online" uses such drastic words in its headline, then something is up. If Microsoft has its way, all Windows users will have to switch to the latest version of Microsoft Outlook. But: Not only can the IMAP and SMTP access data of your e-mail account be transferred to Microsoft, but all e-mails in the INBOX can also be copied to the Microsoft servers, even if you have your mailbox with a completely different provider such as mailbox.org. They're going to use it for AI, I'm assuming. In any event, don't use the new Outlook - it's a web app anyway and there's better clients for Windows. I think. I'm not sure people are still developing e-mail clients for Windows.

Yep you read that right, we've decided to throw the lever and go Wayland by default! The three remaining showstoppers are in the process of being fixed and we expect them to be done soon-certainly before the final release of Plasma 6. So we wanted to make the change early to gather as much feedback as possible. Excellent news. Of course, distributions will still be able to opt for the unmaintained, deprecated X.org if they want to, but most distributions will opt for Wayland, as all the major ones have been doing for a while now.

The year was 1983. Microsoft was slowly becoming a well-known tech company in the PC space. Two years before, in 1981, Its MS-DOS operating system would be installed in the first IBM PC. It launched its first-word processing program, Word, earlier in 1983, along with its first Microsoft Mouse product. It even made Mac and PC hardware expansion cards. However, 40 years ago today, on November 10, 1983 at a press event in New York City, Microsoft first revealed its plans to launch an all-new graphical user interface-based PC operating system. The company called the OS Windows. If you've ever used Windows 1.0 - either because you're old and remember it as new, or in a VM - you'll know just how limited and useless Windows 1.0 really was. Still, it set the stage for one of the most successful tech products of all time, and few products in tech can boast about being on the market for four decades. That being said, I'm not exactly sad Windows seems to be in its twilight years.

Apple has been under pressure in the European Union as the Digital Markets Act antitrust legislation requires the company to allow users to sideload apps outside the App Store to increase competition. 9to5Mac has now found evidence in the iOS 17.2 beta code that the company is indeed moving towards enabling sideloading on iOS devices. The meat of the story here is not that Apple is going to allow sideloading - they were always going to if they want to keep operating in the EU/EEA - but that apparently, they intend to region-lock it to countries in the European Union and European Economic Area. This would mean that consumers in the US would, once again, not be able to benefit from consumer protection laws enacted in the EU.

Will SteamOS ever become generally available straight from Valve, instead of the community builds you can try out right now? We're hoping soon, though, it is very high on our list, and we want to make SteamOS more widely available. We'll probably start with making it more available to other handhelds with a similar gamepad style controller. And then further beyond that, to more arbitrary devices. I think that the biggest thing is just, you know, driver support and making sure that it can work on whatever PC it happens to land on. Because right now, it's very, very tuned for Steam Deck." Valve also just unveiled a new and updated Steam Deck, with an OLED display, more efficient processor, and a few other nips and tucks, including making the devices easier to repair, not harder - made available for the same price as the previous model it replaces.

Some of the x86 microcode loading improvements in Linux 6.7 include not loading microcode on 32-bit before paging has been enabled to avoid a variety of issues, reworked late-loading of CPU microcode, late-loading microcode is now CPU hotplug safe, and the notion of a minimum microcode revision for determining when late microcode loading is deemed safe. Considering how crucial microcode loading is, it makes sense to improve it as much as possible.

It's about a legal battle between Intel and NEC in the 1980s over the microcode of the 8086 processor. But whilst it may be about events a long time ago, the themes are still familiar today. Whilst writing it, I couldn't help but think about the ongoing lawsuit between Qualcomm and Arm. About how the future of both companies, and indeed others, including Intel, may be crucially affected by the results of a ruling on intellectual property protection. The court case we'll discuss today would also have important implications for Intel, the US semiconductor industry, its Japanese competitors and for intellectual property law in general. Lawsuits. Lawsuits never change.

As AMD is now well into their third generation of RDNA architecture GPUs, the sun has been slowly setting on AMD's remaining Graphics Core Next (GCN) designs, better known by the architecture names of Polaris and Vega. In recent weeks the company dropped support for those GPU architectures in their open source Vulkan Linux driver, AMDVLK, and now we have confirmation that the company is slowly winding down support for these architectures in their Windows drivers as well. Under AMD's extended driver support schedule for Polaris and Vega, the drivers for these architectures will no longer be kept at feature parity with the RDNA architectures. And while AMD will continue to support Polaris and Vega for some time to come, that support is being reduced to security updates and functionality updates as available." What's odd is that AMD is still selling these as integrated GPUs to this day, and they, too, are getting this treatment. That's a pretty shitty deal for people buying these products today.

Amazon has been working on a new operating system to replace Android on Fire TVs, smart displays and other connected devices, I have learned from talking to multiple sources with knowledge of these plans, as well as job listings and other materials referencing these efforts. Development of the new operating system, which is internally known as Vega, appears fairly advanced . The system has already been tested on Fire TV streaming adapters, and Amazon has told select partners about its plans to transition to a new application framework in the near future. A source with knowledge of the company's plans suggested that it could start shipping Vega on select Fire TV devices as early as next year. Is it a Linux distribution? Amazon's new operating system is also based on a flavor of Linux, and is using a more web-forward application model. App developers are being told to use React Native as an application framework, which allows them to build native apps with Javascript-powered interfaces. Of course it's a Linux distribution.

Eight gigabytes has been the standard RAM load out on new MacBook Pros for the better part of a decade, and in 2023, Apple execs still believe it's enough for customers. With the launch of Apple's M3 MacBook Pros last month, a base 14-inch $1,599 model with an M3 chip still only gets you 8GB of unified DRAM that's shared between the CPU, GPU, and neural network accelerator. In a show of Apple's typical modesty this week, the tech giant's veep of worldwide product marketing Bob Borchers has argued, in an interview with machine-learning engineer Lin YilYi, that the Arm-compatible, Apple-designed M-series silicon and software stack is so memory efficient that 8GB on a Mac may equal 16GB on a PC - so we therefore ought to be happy with it. Eight gigabyte of RAM in and of itself isn't an issue, on a budget machine. Apple is selling incredibly expensive machines labelled as pro" with a mere 8 GB, and charges 200 for another 8, which is highway robbery, plain and simple. I wonder how many people at Apple - at any level - use Macs with 8 GB of RAM. I have a feeling that number is quite low.

Xiaomi also has bad news for MIUI users who wish to unlock their smartphones, saying they won't get updated to HyperOS. Previous operating systems, such as MIUI 14, still retain the ability to unlock, but users will no longer receive any Xiaomi HyperOS updates if they leave their devices in an unlocked state," the company told us. The Chinese brand clarified in a follow-up email that HyperOS updates won't be available if you've unlocked your phone's bootloader, regardless of whether you're on MIUI 14 or HyperOS. However, the company said you'll receive HyperOS updates if you choose to lock your device again. This applies to all Xiaomi devices outside of China. I rarely say this, but with this new HyperOS" skin being the most blatant iOS ripoff I've ever seen, just get an iPhone if you want that experience that badly.

A few weeks ago, we reported an odd discovery in Microsoft Edge: a poll asking users to explain their decision to download Chrome. A similar thing is now haunting OneDrive users on Windows, demanding to answer why they are closing the app. And demanding is a correct word here because Windows will not let you quit OneDrive without answering first. The beatings will continue until morale improves.

I cannot pinpoint the source of this misconception, it could have been a vendor, or long-lost blog post, or one of the many webinars I attended in my early days as a program lead. Regardless of the source, I operated under the wild misconception that all I needed to do was train my teams to do accessibility. Developers, QAs, designers, all they needed was training! This model does not work. Especially for an organization with multiple products, multiple platforms, and multiple development teams. Accessibility is so much more complicated than can be summarised in a mere training. It requires experts, capable programmers, users who actually require said accessbility, and so much more. It's also an ongoing process - it's not a static train once, use everywhere" kind of deal.

A new update for Ubuntu Touch is here - adding Ubuntu 20.04 LTS support for new devices (the PinePhone, PinePhone Pro, PineTab and PineTab 2), and containing a whole slew of bug fixes and new features. It's awesome to see the UBPorts team delivering a steady stream of updates, keeping the Ubuntu Touch platform alive and kicking.

What's happening here is that Migration Assistant has migrated all my apps, and has automatically launched any of them that are listed in Login Items or are set to automatically launch in the background. They all launch, all at once, and every single one of them then prompts me for permission to do all the things they already had permission to do on my previous Mac. In this screen shot, I've dragged them apart, but in reality most of these windows appeared on top of each other. They float above every other window, and most of them want to open various portions of the Settings app. In the background, a few apps have launched with their own alert prompts, requesting that I perform more tasks in order to get the system ready. You will be protected.

Google is hoping regulators will bail it out of the messaging mess it has created for itself after years of dysfunctional product reboots. The Financial Times reports that Google and a few cell carriers are asking the EU to designate Apple's iMessage as a core" service that would require it to be interoperable under the new Digital Markets Act." The EU's Digital Markets Act targets Big Tech gatekeepers" with various interoperability, fairness, and privacy demands, and while iMessage didn't make the initial cut of services announced in September, Apple's messenger is under a market investigation" to determine if it should qualify. The criteria for gatekeeper services all revolve around business usage. The services the EU wants to include would have more than 45 million monthly active EU users and more than 10,000 yearly active business in the EU, a business turnover of at least 7.5 billion euros, or a market cap of 75 billion euros, with the caveat that these are just guidelines and the EU is open to arguments in both directions. When the initial list was announced back in September, the EU said that iMessage actually met the thresholds for regulation, but it was left off the list while it listens to Apple's arguments that it should not qualify. The sooner the various messaging services are forced to interoperate - preferably via completely open specifications anyone can build for - the better. These services should not be locking users in.

Fedora Workstation now features GNOME 45, which brings better performance and many usability enhancements, including a new workspace switcher and a much-improved image viewer. If you're looking for a different desktop experience, our Budgie Special Interest Group has created Fedora Onyx, a Budgie-based Atomic" desktop in the spirit of Fedora Silverblue. Of course, that's not all - we also have updated desktop flavors featuring KDE Plasma Desktop, Xfce, Cinnamon, and more. As with every Fedora release, it comes with the latest and greatest every one of the Linux desktops has to offer, as well as all the newest versions of the various frameworks and underlying layers, down to the kernel. Fedora KDE is my desktop of choice, so I'm definitely a bit biased, but I can't wait to load up the upgrade and install it.

In addition to Canonical continuing to invest in developing Mir as a platform now built atop Wayland, over the past year Canonical developers have been quietly working on Miriway as a Mir-based Wayland compositor and it's becoming iteratively more useful. I'm not entirely sure what its purpose is.

The ReactOS project has published another newsletter filled with news about their progress, and two things stand out. First, there's now initial support for booting using UEFI. Work has been underway since the beginning of the year to transition FreeLoader, our default bootloader for ReactOS, to support UEFI on x86 and AMD64, as well as ARM32 and ARM64. Hermes has been developing a system for passing the UEFI framebuffer information in a fashion that allows Windows XP to run on UEFI systems, while Justin Miller (TheDarkFire) has been developing the UEFI freeloader build. On top of supporting booting ReactOS, other features are being built such as EFI chainloading and a bootmgfw-compatible build of FreeLoader. These features would add boot management capabilities and allow modern Windows systems to bootstrap our favorite bootloader. Second, and this is a big one: work has been done to add initial support for running Windows applications targeting newer systems than Windows Server 2003. Up until now, ReactOS was limited to running Windows applications targeting NT 5.2 found in Server 2003, but now work is being done to support appications targeting NT 6.0 and newer, as found in Windows Vista and newer. A group made up of Timo Kreuzer, Justin Miller, and other developers and contributors alike are developing the necessary APIs for compatibility with modern programs. While Timo is still working on implementing a dynamic versioning system for DLLs (#3239) that allows exporting of routines to applications depending on their compatibility settings, he has added the option for ReactOS bot builders to compile builds with NT6 exports which makes it possible to experiment with NT6+ application compatibility. There are also various improvements to the shell and debugger, but a new release is still a ways away, so unless you want to dive into unstable builds, there's no way to test any of this just yet. Still, hose are some massive projects being undertaken, and makes ReactOS a bit more prepared for the future.

Do you ever sit at your 1981 vintage IBM PC and get the urge to pop onto that newfangled WWW' to stay up to date on all the goings-on in the world? Fret not, because Al's Geek Lab has you covered with a new video, which you will unfortunately have to watch on a device that was made at the very least in the late 1990s. What makes this feat possible is a miniscule web browser called MicroWeb, created by jhhoward, that will happily run on an 8088 CPU or compatible, without requiring any fiddling with EMS or similar RAM extensions. Anything is possible, if you just want it hard enough.

Ironclad is a formally verified, hard real-time capable kernel for general-purpose and embedded uses, written in SPARK and Ada. It is comprised of 100% free software, free in the sense that it respects the user's freedom. Version 0.5.0 has been released. This release brings a lot of improvements to mainly the scheduling, time keeping, userland, and networking subsystems. The easiest way to try Ironclad, either virtually or on real hardware, is to use a distribution that uses it - Gloire seems to be the recommended option. Gloire is an OS built with the Ironclad kernel and using GNU tools for the userland, along with some original applications like gwm. This repository holds scripts and tools to build the OS from the ground up. I had never heard of this project before, but it seems incredibly cool.

OmniOS Community Edition r151048 has been released. For those of us that lost track of the Solaris world - OmniOS is a distribution of illumos, which in turn is a fork of the last release of OpenSolaris before Oracle did what Oracle does and screwed everyone over by taking Solaris closed source again. OmniOS focuses on being a server operating system. For this release, the userland is now built with gcc 13, and it contains various improvements for AMD Zen 4 support. The which command has been replaced by an implementation in C rather than csh, dtrace has seen some improvements on machines with a lot of CPUs, and so, so much more.

LXQt, the Lightweight Qt Desktop Environment, version 1.4.0 has been released, and this one marks an important milestone - it's the last release based on Qt5, before the next release moves to Qt6. LXQt 1.4.0 is based on Qt 5.15, the last LTS version of Qt5. If everything goes as planned, this is the last Qt5-based release - we'll do our best to port the next release to Qt6, even if we'll have to delay it. It's loaded with new features, bugfixes, and improvements, and, as always, will find its way to your distribution of choice soon enough.

Cities: Skylines 2 like its predecessor is made in Unity, which means the game can be decompiled and inspected quite easily using any .NET decompiler. I used JetBrains dotPeek which has a decent Visual Studio -like UI with a large variety of search and analysis options. However static analysis doesn't really tell us anything concrete about the rendering performance of the game. To analyze what's going with rendering I used Renderdoc, an open source graphics debugger which has saved my bacon with some of my previous GPU-y personal projects. An incredibly detailed look at just what's going on under the hood to make the new Cities: Skylines 2 behave so poorly.

A wider bipartisan group of U.S. lawmakers is asking the Biden administration about its plans to respond to China's rising use of RISC-V chip design technology after Reuters last month reported on growing concerns about it in both houses of Congress. Now, a broader group of 18 lawmakers that includes five Democrats is asking the Biden administration for how it plans to prevent China from achieving dominance in ... RISC-V technology and leveraging that dominance at the expense of U.S. national and economic security," according to a letter the group sent to Raimondo and seen by Reuters. A rather shortsighted take, and without even looking I wouldn't be surprised if some of these lawmakers have chip factories or whatever in their districts.

WinRAR has a massive security hole that's still being actively exploited, and it's one of many Windows applications that do not auto-update. The developer boasts of more than 500 million WinRAR installations around the world, so it's likely that hundreds of millions of PCs are vulnerable to malicious ZIP files today. How is it that, in 2023, the world's most popular desktop operating system doesn't provide an easy way to update your installed applications? It baffles me that Windows and macOS users still have to manually keep track of and update each and every one of their applications individually, like it's 1997 or something. Stay safe. It's the wild west out there for some of you.

Google engineers on Wednesday posted an initial request for comments" set of patches that re-implement Android's Binder code within the Linux kernel in the Rust programming language rather than C. Binder remains a critical piece of Android's software stack and for increasing the robustness and security, Google is pursuing a rewrite of the C code in Rust. Binder is responsible for inter-process communication (IPC) and other tasks on Android while replacing it with memory-safe Rust code should be a big step-up for system security. Rust is everywhere.

Update 2: At a staggering 176% of the original goal within 2 days, I think it's time to end this crazy ride. Rests me to thank all of you - donor or not - for the incredible support and generosity. This will enable me to go far beyond mid-tier" and build something that's going to set me for close to a decade. I'm absolutely stunned. Update: I did not expect this to take off, but within a few hours we've already reached the goal! Thanks, everyone - I'm stunned and at a loss for words, which, I can assure you, is a rather rare occurrence. The goal sits at 110% now, and I'll leave it up for the night so this story doesn't suddenly stop making sense (it's 02:26 where I live). I'll also contact the two largest donors privately and work out the details with them. Since we started our more visible push for donations to ensure we can keep OSNews running as an independent technology news website without having to resort to SEO spam, ad overload, and worse, a number of people have expressed interest in donating to specific goals instead of donating generically. A possible goal for this has recently come up, so I'm stepping out of my comfort zone (this whole thing terrifies me): you can now donate specifically towards a much, much-needed upgrade for my PC - and troll me along the way. Read on! After almost 8 years of loyal service, my PC, with a 7700K and GTX 1070, is starting to show some serious signs of old-age and constant use. This machine is the main computer I have, used for both my work on OSNews as well as gaming, and it's getting long in the tooth. As such, I'm planning a relatively conservative, mid-tier upgrade for the machine, retaining as many parts as possible to keep costs down. I will retain the case, power supply, CPU cooler, and the various SSDs and hard drives. My intention is to purchase the following parts: In Sweden, this would add up to SEK 10900 (incl. all applicable taxes), or 921/$978, so I set the goal at an even 1000. With the state of the world as it is, as well as having a family with two young children, investments like this simply aren't something I can do out of pocket, and that's why people have been suggesting for months to take this step. However, I want to make things a bit more interesting, and provide you lovely nerds with some ways to troll me. As such, I will give the two largest combined donations (as in, you can donate multiple times and it'll count) some extra perks, designed to give you the opportunity to mess with me: Obviously, there are some ground rules here - no pornography, no hateful stuff like racism, no gore, stuff like that. We're all adults here, and I'm pretty sure we all instinctively know what I mean. Other than that - anything goes! Any required stickers I'll buy myself, as long as you can provide me a link. Any donation made through our Ko-Fi will count towards this goal, and you can keep track of the progress there as well. Since I have absolutely no idea how this will go (like I said, I'm terrified), I haven't set a time limit on the goal. So, hop on over to our Ko-Fi page and donate away! In the meantime, I'm going to curl up in a corner because I have no clue how anyone is going to respond to this.

Bruce Lawson writes: This week, I've had the pleasure to read the post-modernist triumph that is CASES DMA.100013 Apple - online intermediation services - app stores, DMA.100025 Apple - operating systems and DMA.100027 Apple - web browsers (PDF), which details some of Apple's attempts to avoid being regulated. I call it a post-modernist triumph" because its prose is almost as incomprehensible as James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, and it is so full of preposterous lies and contradictions that it can only be sanely read as a metatextual joke like the Illuminatus! Trilogy. In order to avoid having Safari being deemed a Core Platform Service (and thus falling under the remit of DMA), Apple argues Look, those Safaris on iOS, iPadOS, MacOS, TvOS, WatchOS are TOTALLY DIFFERENT PRODUCTS and none of them have enough users in the EU for you to even think about regulating us, alright? We're a tiny start-up! Will nobody think of the children?!?". (I paraphrase somewhat). Entirely unsurprisingly, Apple's legal contortions did not work - the EU basically tossed this nonsense out right away, using Apple's own marketing claims about Safari against them.

The Pixel 8 hardware (Tensor G3) supports the ARM Memory Tagging Extension (MTE), and software support is available both in Android userspace and the Linux kernel. This feature is a powerful defense against linear buffer overflows and many types of use-after-free flaws. I'm extremely happy to see this hardware finally available in the real world. You can enable this feature in both Android and the kernel, as the post explains. Sadly, the post does not explain if there's any downsides to enabling this extension, and I'm certainly not the right person to investigate that. Does anyone in our audience know?

I was yet again spectacularly wrong in speculating that we had another eight months to wait before Apple would release the first Macs with M3 chips. Another few days and the first will be upon us, and the fortunate few will start bragging or moaning about their performance. That has suddenly grown more complex: the number of each CPU core type has diversified with the M3 Pro in particular. This article looks at some of the factors involved in comparing CPU performance across Apple's expanded range of M-series chips. As Apple's line-up of processors grows, it's becoming harder to keep track of all the details. This article does a good job of highlighting some of the changes coming inside M3-based Macs.

Google has announced it's going to drop the Web Environment Integrity proposal - the controversial proposal that set the internet on fire a few months ago. Instead, the company intends to offer a much more limited version of the proposal that only targets Android WebViews embedded in applications, targeting only media streams running inside Android applications. We've heard your feedback, and the Web Environment Integrity proposal is no longer being considered by the Chrome team. In contrast, the Android WebView Media Integrity API is narrowly scoped, and only targets WebViews embedded in apps. It simply extends existing functionality on Android devices that have Google Mobile Services (GMS) and there are no plans to offer it beyond embedded media, such as streaming video and audio, or beyond Android WebViews. I might be ye of little faith, but this feels a lot like a case of proposing something overtly horrible first, to pave the way for something that now seems benign in comparison. On top of that, that scope might be limited now, but does anyone have any faith left that Google won't just... Widen the scope later, once we're all not looking?

Facebook has unveiled the prices it's going to charge European users who want to have an ad-free experience on Facebook and Instagram. People in these countries will be able to subscribe for a fee to use our products without ads. Depending on where you purchase it will cost 9.99/month on the web or 12.99/month on iOS and Android. Regardless of where you purchase, the subscription will apply to all linked Facebook and Instagram accounts in a user's Accounts Center. As is the case for many online subscriptions, the iOS and Android pricing take into account the fees that Apple and Google charge through respective purchasing policies. Until March 1, 2024, the initial subscription covers all linked accounts in a user's Accounts Center. However, beginning March 1, 2024, an additional fee of 6/month on the web and 8/month on iOS and Android will apply for each additional account listed in a user's Account Center. That's a high price to pay to read your racist uncle's rants and see the heavily photoshopped photos of some random influencer peddling vitamin pills.

This week, Mozilla CEO Mitchell Baker rose as a key figure in Google's defense against the Justice Department's monopoly claims. Providing a video deposition for the landmark trial, Baker testified that Mozilla's popular browser Firefox tried to switch from using Google as a default search engine but reverted back after a failed" bet on Yahoo made it clear that Google was Firefox users' preferred search engine. That fits in a long string of similar claims - namely, that defaulting to anything but Google is impossible, because nothing else is even remotely as good as Google Search, because none of the others are the default, meaning they don't get the amount of queries needed to improve search quality, and on the spiral goes. What's spicy here is that this trial could potentially turn out to be Mozilla's downfall, since Google's search deals with, among others, Mozilla, are up for debate. Desktop Linux' Firefox problem could explode sooner than we might think.

In recent years the Itanium support in the Linux kernel has went downhill with not many users left testing new kernels on aging Itanium servers. There also hasn't been any major active contributors to the Itanium code for keeping it maintained and making any serious improvements to the architecture code. On and off for months there's been talk of retiring Itanium from the Linux kernel and now it's finally happened. With Linux 6.6 expected to be this year's Long-Term Support (LTS) kernel version, there was the proposal recently to drop Itanium in Linux 6.7 and indeed it's successfully happened. This is a complete outrage, and a sign Torvalds has completely lost the plot. Itanium is the future, and dropping it from the Linux kernel will be its death knell. I'm going back to DOS.

The European data regulator has agreed to extend a ban imposed by non-EU member Norway on behavioural advertising" on Facebook and Instagram to cover all 30 countries in the European Union and the European Economic Area, it said on Wednesday. Meta runs the risk of getting fined up to 4% of its global turnover, the Norwegian data regulator said. Sure, the European Union isn't perfect - no government is - but the Union's fight against the utter dominance of tech giants, as well as standing up for citizen privacy, is commendable.

There's an alternative universe where we decided to teach the kernel about every piece of hardware it should run on. Fortunately (or, well, unfortunately) we've seen that in the ARM world. Most device-specific simply never reaches mainline, and most users are stuck running ancient kernels as a result. Imagine every x86 device vendor shipping their own kernel optimised for their hardware, and now imagine how well that works out given the quality of their firmware. Does that really seem better to you? It's understandable why ACPI has a poor reputation. But it's also hard to figure out what would work better in the real world. We could have built something similar on top of Open Firmware instead but the distinction wouldn't be terribly meaningful - we'd just have Forth instead of the ACPI bytecode language. Longing for a non-ACPI world without presenting something that's better and actually stands a reasonable chance of adoption doesn't make the world a better place. Matthew Garrett with the usual paragraphs of wisdom.

This project allows old x86 computers using a classic BIOS to boot from modern NVMe storage attached via PCI(e). It's a heavily modified version of iPXE (which usually allows for booting from the network), but instead of the network, this code uses a port of the SeaBIOS NVMe implementation to talk to a local NVMe drive. What a useful idea.

In short, after a Linux kernel update (6.5.8-200.fc.x86_64 on Fedora KDE), I can't use the top button of my pen on my tablet. This is really affecting my digital painting workflow! Right-clicking on the pen is an essential part of my workflow. Right-click on a layer in Krita to get the menu, right-click while using the Transform tool to get the transformation options, right-click on the canvas to get the pop-up palette! ...And I'm not even talking about how difficult it is to handle files and the D.E. without right-clicking. And if that makes you smile, imagine someone hardcoding the behaviour of your main device like the right-click on your mouse or touchpad (or anything else you have been using for more than 20 years) to something completely useless, and pushing it through kernel updates. And the icing on the cake, they left you with no user tool to change it back. I now have that same feeling or rage mixed with hopelessness that you feel when dealing with pointless government bureaucracy.

During his testimony, Pichai revealed a tidbit on how Google operates that gives a better look behind the curtain and could help explain users' frustration with Android phones not seeing security updates. According to Pichai, Google financially incentivizes OEMs to update their phones. Companies that keep phones current with the latest security patches see a higher revenue share from Google services than those that don't. In other words, the amount of money an OEM makes from you using Google products on its device is correlated to how often it keeps that device up to date with security patches. This means Google intentionally strongarms OEMs to be better about updating phones, which is something we didn't know before. We knew that Google mandates two years of updates for any Android phone and strongly encourages more extended support than that, but we didn't realize there were financial incentives involved. I'm honestly not entirely sure if this wasn't known before, but this is an interesting approach for Google to take. If it's not financially interesting for OEMs to update their Android devices, why not give them a bigger slice of the Google revenue pie to incentivise them? I'd prefer proper update windows be legally mandated - I wouldn't be surprised if the EU is working on that somewhere - but in the meantime, I'll take this rare case of Google's interests lining up with consumers' interests.

Tom's Hardware reports: MyDrivers has published a review of Loongson's 3A6000 quad-core CPU, confirming that the chip's IPC improvements are real. Benchmarks reveal that the 3A6000 enjoys an impressive 60% performance uplift in single-core performance and an even more impressive 2x performance multiplier in multi-core performance over its 3A5000 predecessor. With these improvements, the 3A6000 features performance comparable to a Core i3-10100F, with the IPC performance of a Zen 3 chip. Of course, both Intel's Comet Lake 10th Gen architecture and AMD's Zen 3 architecture are now coming up on three years old. They're nowhere near the top of our list of the best CPUs for gaming or other purposes. But it still represents a step in the right direction. Chinese chipmakers are improving quite fast, but unless they can somehow get access to the latest machinery from the Dutch company ASML, which makes virtually all of the machines capable of producing the chips with the smallest nanometers and is the linchpin in the entire semiconductor industry, they won't be able to overtake or even match what TSMC and Intel are doing. That being said, I love weird processors, and I'd love to get my hands on one of these to play around with.

I've recently been working on putting together a CI system for postmarketOS that will allow us to do proper automated integration testing. That is to say - when someone opens a merge request that modifies our initramfs (for example), we should be able to click a button and some minutes later know that this change doesn't break any of our important usecases. QEMU absolutely can (and will) get us most of the way there, but at some point we need to just run the same software that we're running on end user devices. Furthermore, QEMU can't tell us anything about changes in the kernel that might affect our devices, and manually testing during kernel upgrades, frankly, sucks. So we need a fancy board farm, this is one of those things where folks with the right technical background could build something over the course of a week. But for someone like me it's full of trial and error and hidden complexity... It's easy enough to do this with one device - just hack something together, but to be successful we need something reliable and adaptable, that we can adjust to fit our needs in the future, and the wide range of devices we support. Now this is an article you won't come across very often, as the number of people setting up something like this who can actually talk openly about it - someone doing this for a closed company probably can't - is probably quite small. A great read.

Lennart Poettering has been working on a new systemd feature called systemd-storagetm that is inspired by the Apple macOS Target Disk Mode" feature. This is similar to Apple's Target Disk Mode as a boot option on Macs that allows other systems to then easily access it as an external device. The systemd intent with this Storage Target Mode is to make it easier to debug a broken system with very few dependencies while being able to access the raw block device of the broken system via the network. This may also make it easier to migrate from one system to the next. By having access to the raw block device via NVMe-TCP, it can be easy to use the dd" command or similar for copying the drive. Target Disk Mode has long been one of those amazing Mac features that should've come to PCs decades ago, so I'm incredibly glad Poettering is working on it. This will make it so much easier to troubleshoot, get files off a broken system, and so on, without having to move hard drives around or boot into live CDs.

In a world where constant change is the norm, finished software provides a breath of fresh air. It's a reminder that reliability, consistency, and user satisfaction can coexist in the realm of software development. So the next time you find yourself yearning for the latest update, remember that sometimes, the best software is the one that doesn't change at all. While this is a nice sentiment, the reality is that software has become so complex, competition to cutthroat, and operating systems so changeful, that finishing" software just doesn't seem like a realistic and attainable goal anymore. The example used in the article, WordStar 4.0 for DOS, can only be finished" because DOS doesn't change anymore.

Support for RISC-V in Android is taking another step forward. The latest update that we have is that now not only are we accepting patches, but we have begun to mature support for RISC-V in Android. RISC-V is a modular ISA, meaning that there are a large number of optional extensions. We have also determined an initial set that we feel is critical to ensure that any CPU running RISC-V will have all of the features we expect to achieve high performance. This set includes the rva22 profile as well as the vector and vector crypto extensions. Excellent news.

The initial support was posted on October 25th 2023 on the Linux kernel mailing lists for review by the Linux developers community. With the set of patches released by Linaro engineers, it is also possible to boot an AOSP image with Graphics Software Rendering using Google's SwiftShader. Since 2014, Linaro Engineers have been working closely with Qualcomm Engineers to enable Snapdragon platforms to work with Mainline Linux. Running a recent upstream Linux kernel immediately after the announcement of a new SoC is a significant achievement, and is a testimony to the close working partnership between Qualcomm and Linaro. Interestingly enough, during the recent announcement of the PC-focused X Elite SoC, Qualcomm also highlighted that Linux will be fully supported by the platform, and to underline that point, the company showed off X Elite laptops running both Windows and Linux. While it'll take more to convince me that Qualcomm now actually cares about properly supporting its SoCs and the open source community, they're at least positive signs.

MicroTCP is a TCP/IP network stack I started building as a learning exercise while attending the Computer Networking course at the Universita degli Studi di Napoli Federico II. It's just a hobby project and is intended to just be a minimal, yet complete, implementation. At this moment MicroTCP implements ARP (RFC 826, complete), IPv4 (no fragmentation), ICMP (minimum necessary to reply to pings) and TCP (complete but not stress-tested). Note that complete" should not be intended as fully compliant" but just as a measure of progress on all of the major features. For instance, it's complete enough to handle HTTP traffic on a local network. People like this usually end up writing a simple operating system, so it's interesting to see a TCP/IP stack instead. While clearly a hobby project, small, portable TCP/IP stacks can potentially be useful for very specific use cases, like bringing connectivity to ancient operating systems or other small hobby projects.

About a year or so ago, the Asahi Linux people told me I was being paranoid about Apple's macOS or firmware updates bricking or otherwise negatively affecting Asahi Linux installs, and that you shouldn't rely on Linux on Apple M devices for anything serious. They told me Apple explicitly supports alternate operating systems on ARM Macs and that Apple can be fully trusted and relied upon. ...so anyway bugs in Sonoma are making Macs with Asahi installed unbootable. macOS Sonoma and macOS Ventura 13.6 were released with multiple serious bugs in their upgrade and boot process. Combined, these bugs can create conditions where a machine always boots to a black screen, no matter what power button press combination is used. This leaves users stuck, and the only solution is to use DFU recovery. Apple obviously doesn't care about anyone running anything but macOS on M Macs, and unsurprisingly nobody at Apple even thought to test for this so of course this happened. I'd say I told you so" but I'm tired of warning people about Apple's behaviour because apparently people just love endlessly banging their bloodied head against a wall.

We've already covered the end of life of Windows CE, but Ars has a short but interesting look back at the history of this undeservedly unloved operating system. It was a proto-netbook, it was a palmtop, it was a PDA, it was Windows Phone 7 but not Windows Phone 8, and then it was an embedded ghost. It parents never seemed to know what to do with it after it grew up, beyond offer it up for anybody to shape in their own image. And then, earlier this month, with little notice, Windows CE was no more, at least as a supported operating system. I will never forget Windows CE.