OSnews

The macOS Big Sur 11.2 kernel (XNU) source has been released here: source, tarball. My previous post on building XNU for macOS 11.0.1 described the method for compiling open source XNU for Intel Macs. This post details how to compile XNU for both Intel and Apple Silicon Macs, and how to boot the custom kernel on both platforms. Note that it is not possible to build or boot a custom XNU on Apple Silicon Macs before macOS 11.2. I doubt many people compile and run their own XNU kernels, but the fact that you can is still cool.

A group of enthusiasts are proposing a new set of graphics instructions designed for 3D graphics and media processing. These new instructions are built on the RISC-V base vector instruction set. They will add support for new data types that are graphics specific as layered extensions in the spirit of the core RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA). Vectors, transcendental math, pixel, and textures and Z/Frame buffer operations are supported. It can be a fused CPU-GPU ISA. The group is calling it the RV64X as instructions will be 64-bit long (32 bits will not be enough to support a robust ISA). There’s a lot of activity around RISC-V, and with it being open and freely usable, a lot of – at first – cheaper, embedded uses will be taken over by RISC-V, hopefully followed by more performant use cases in the near future.

Ubuntu is going to be trying to switch over to using Wayland by default for the current Ubuntu 21.04 cycle to allow sufficient time for widespread testing and evaluation ahead of next year’s Ubuntu 22.04 LTS release. Canonical engineer Sebastien Bacher announced today they will be trying again for Ubuntu 21.04 to enable Wayland by default, four years after they originally tried but reverted back to using GNOME on X.Org for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS and since that point. Ubuntu with GNOME Shell on Wayland has been available as a non-default choice but the hope is now in 2021 they are ready to comfortably switch to Wayland. I try to use Wayland wherever possible, since the performance gains and battery life improvements are just too good to ignore. There’s still two major blockers, though – first, NVIDIA support is problematic, at best, so my main computer will remain on X until NVIDIA gets its act together. Second, my desktop environment of choice, Cinnamon, does not support Wayland and has no support coming in the pipeline, which is really disappointing. GNOME can be made usable with extensive use of extensions, and I’m seriously considering switching to it once the NVIDIA situation is sorted. My laptop already runs GNOME for this very reason.

The Linux 5.10 release included a change that is expected to significantly increase the performance of the ext4 filesystem; it goes by the name “fast commits” and introduces a new, lighter-weight journaling method. Let us look into how the feature works, who can benefit from it, and when its use may be appropriate. Better file system performance is always welcome, especially when it concerns what is probably the most common file system among desktop Linux users.

That Windows Package Manager exists at all is a big step forward, but while the service is in preview it is rather limited. At present you can use it to find and install software but removing it has to be done the old fashioned way. And who wants to do that? Finally, though, that is about to change, according to these tweets from Demitrius Nelon, a member of the Windows Package Manager team. Yes, I know it’s a preview and all that, but a package manager that cannot uninstall packages isn’t really a package manager at all, now is it?

Apple’s second computer — its first to have a case — launched in 1977, and that boxy beige Apple II was soon everywhere: in classrooms, living rooms and offices. At the vanguard of a generation of personal computers to come, it featured a particular and carefully-chosen beige. But what did that look like? Those first machines — the ones that have escaped landfills anyway — have shifted in color over 40 years. The documented public record is sketchy and confused. But I stumbled upon a way to investigate what Apple Beige was like. Fascinating bit of sleuthing, and a fun read to boot. Maybe not the most important aspect of computer history, but every bit of information we can preserve is worth it.

For our benchmark suite, almost all of our benchmarks show an uplift for the new Ryzen 5000 Mobile series, some considerably so: our compile benchmark is +12%, Corona rendering is +18%, Dolphin emulation +17%, NAMD +8%, Blender +6%. To our surprise our SPEC2006 1T benchmark is +32%, accelerated considerably by the 16 MB L3 cache, but also because these CPUs also support a higher instantaneous power turbo modes than the previous generation. This enables some competitive performance numbers against Intel’s Tiger Lake platform in single thread focused tests (AMD wins on multithread quite easily). AnandTech with the only deep dive that really matters.

As I was browsing back and forth around the website for skiftOS yesterday, I came across two more interesting related projects – two bootloaders with very specific goals. First, Limine: Limine is an advanced x86/x86_64 BIOS Bootloader that supports modern PC features such as Long Mode, 5-level paging, multi-core startup, and more thanks to the stivale and stivale2 boot protocols. Second, since Limine does not support EUFI, they mention TomatBoot, which uses the same boot protocols but in an EUFI environment: TomatBoot is a simple kernel loader for 64bit UEFI based systems. The gold of this bootloader is to serve as an example of how to create UEFI applications, we use the edk2 headers/libraries without the edk2 buildsystem for simplicity.

skiftOS is a hobby operating system built for learning and for fun targeting the x86 platform. It features a kernel named hjert, a graphical user interface with a compositing window manager, and familiar UNIX utilities. This looks remarkably advanced for a “hobby operating system”, and can be run in both Qemu and VirtualBox. This one is definitely worth a virtual boot. The code is licensed under the MIT license and available on GitHub.

The rise of OSX (remember, when it came along Apple had a single-digit slice of the computer market) meant that people eventually got used to the idea of a life with no desktop personalization. Nowadays most people don’t even change their wallpapers anymore. In the old days of Windows 3.1, it was common to walk into an office and see each person’s desktop colors, fonts and wallpapers tuned to their personalities, just like their physical desk, with one’s family portrait or plants. It’s a big loss. Android and Linux desktops still offer massive amounts of personalisation options – thank god – but the the other major platforms have all individuality stamped out of them. It’s boring.

Google has announced that it is cutting off access to the Sync and “other Google Exclusive” APIs from all builds except Google Chrome. This will make the Fedora Chromium build significantly less functional (along with every other distro packaged Chromium). It is noteworthy that Google gave the builders of distribution Chromium packages these access rights back in 2013 via API keys, specifically so that we could have open source builds of Chromium with (near) feature parity to Chrome. And now they’re taking it away. The reasoning given for this change? Google does not want users to be able to “access their personal Chrome Sync data (such as bookmarks) … with a non-Google, Chromium-based browser.” They’re not closing a security hole, they’re just requiring that everyone use Chrome. Or to put it bluntly, they do not want you to access their Google API functionality without using proprietary software (Google Chrome). There is no good reason for Google to do this, other than to force people to use Chrome. This is what we in the business call a “dick move”.

Win32 APIs provide powerful functionality that let you get the most out of Windows in your applications. While these APIs are readily accessible to C and C++ developers, other languages like C# and Rust require wrappers or bindings in order to access these APIs. In C#, this is commonly known as platform invoking or P/Invoke. Historically this has required developers to handcraft the wrappers or bindings, which is error prone and doesn’t scale to broad API coverage. In recent years, given the strong demand for calling Win32 APIs from various languages, several community projects have spawned to provide more strongly typed and idiomatic representations of these wrappers and bindings to provide an improved developer experience and spare developers the overhead of creating them themselves. Some notable projects include PInvoke for .NET and winapi-rs for Rust. The main challenge with these projects is they are manually maintained, which makes broad and sustained API coverage difficult and costly, and their work doesn’t really benefit other languages. As owners of the Windows SDK, we wanted to see where we could provide unique value here, take some of the burden off of the community, and make achieving broad and sustainable API coverage across languages a reality. The result of this is our win32metadata project and corresponding Win32 language projections now in preview on GitHub! I’m not a developer, but I think this means that Microsoft is trying to make it easier to tap into the Win32 API with languages other than C and C++. This seems like a smart move considering how popular some of these more modern and/or recent languages have become. It also highlights that despite repeated attempts to kill Win32, Microsoft seems to have accepted that it simply isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

It also made Apple silicon rather distinct from all other 64-bit ARM hardware in terms of both CPU core and peripherals. Our Corellium virtualization platform has been providing security researchers with unparalleled insight into how operating systems and programs work on Apple ARM processors. But in the process of developing our virtualization system, we also gain knowledge about the hardware we are modeling, and this knowledge can be best refined by testing it against real hardware – which we have only been able to do with the emergence of checkm8, an exploit that let us load programs onto Apple smartphones. This led directly to the Sandcastle project, where we built a kernel port to the A10 processor in early 2020. So when Apple decided to allow installing custom kernels on the Macs with M1 processor, we were very happy to try building another Linux port to further our understanding of the hardware platform. As we were creating a model of the processor for our security research product, we were working on the Linux port in parallel. Excellent work by Corellium, and this materialised a lot faster than I anticipated. This makes M1-equipped Macs potentially more useful than if they could only run macOS, but of course, as with all these closed platforms and Linux support, the devil is in the details – bringing up a Linux kernel is only the first step – a big and crucial one, but only the first.

The release of Apple Silicon-based Macs at the end of last year generated a flurry of news coverage and some surprises at the machine’s performance. This post details some background information on the experience of porting Firefox to run natively on these CPUs. We’ll start with some background on the Mac transition and give an overview of Firefox internals that needed to know about the new architecture, before moving on to the concept of Universal Binaries. We’ll then explain how DRM/EME works on the new platform, talk about our experience with macOS Big Sur, and discuss various updater problems we had to deal with. We’ll conclude with the release and an overview of various other improvements that are in the pipeline. These kinds of articles are very valuable, since Apple isn’t always forthcoming with documentation of specifications, and the new M1-based Macs are no exception. Big, massive projects like Firefox sharing their experiences can be quite useful to other developers.

It was weird to own a Zune in 2005. It is even weirder to own a Zune in 2021 — let alone 16 of them. And yet, 27-year-old Conner Woods proudly shows off his lineup on a kitchen table. They come in all different colors, shapes, and sizes, and each can be identified by that telltale black plastic D-pad just below the screen. He owns the entire scope of the brief Zune lineup — from the svelte Zune 4 to the chunky Zune HD — and among the microscopic community of people who still adore Microsoft’s much-derided MP3 player, no collection of dead tech could possibly be more enviable. But today, almost a decade after Microsoft terminated the brand, there is a small bastion of diehards who are still loving and listening to their Zunes. If you talk to them, they’ll tell you that these MP3 players are the best pieces of hardware to ever run a Windows operating system. Preserving the Zune legacy has just become another part of the hobby. I’ve never once seen a Zune in real life.

Apple is back under the spotlight over labor conditions in its supply chain following an explosive report from The Information on Thursday that revealed new details about the company’s reluctance to cut ties with suppliers who violate its ethics policies. According to the report, Apple learned in 2013 that Suyin Electronics, a China-based company that (at the time) made parts for its MacBooks, was employing underage workers, and despite telling Suyin to address the issue or risk losing business, Apple discovered additional workers as young as 14 years old during an audit just three months later. But rather than immediately cutting ties with Suyin for violating its supply chain ethics policies — which prohibit child labor and which Apple claims are the “highest standards” — Apple continued to rely on the company for more than three years, according to The Information. Any company – and their executives – knowingly and willingly using child labour, slave labour, or forced labour anywhere in the world should be tried as if they are committing these heinous acts in their home countries. The body of evidence that Apple is fully aware of its extensive use of child labour and forced labour in e.g. China’s Uighur concentration camps is extensive, and the fact Tim Cook can get away with this without ever having to face the consequences is disgusting. Tim Cook’s fellow Americans get life sentences for less. Of course, Apple is far from the only company guilty of this – just look at Nestle or Nike, for instance – but being the largest company in the world with the biggest, most arrogant mouth about how “ethical” they are should be the first to end up in court.

This quarter had quite a lot of work done, including but certainly not limited to, in areas relating to everything from multiple architectures such as x86, aarch64, riscv, and ppc64 for both base and ports, over kernel changes such as vectored aio, routing lookups and multipathing, an alternative random(4) implementation, zstd integration for kernel dumps, log compression, zfs and preparations for pkg(8), along with wifi changes, changes to the toolchain like the new elfctl utility, and all the way to big changes like the git migration and moving the documentation from DocBook to Hugo/AsciiDoctor, as well as many other things too numerous to mention in an introduction. The best way to keep up with FreeBSD development from an outsider’s perspective. FreeBSD is on my radar for the UltraSPARC server-as-a-workstation project – a reader has donated a SunFire V245 that’s currently in shipping to me – so I’m trying to be a bit more in tune than I usually am with the world of FreeBSD.

On modern Unix-like systems such as FreeBSD, “swapping” refers to the activity of paging out the contents of memory to a disk and then paging it back in on demand. The page-out activity occurs in response to a lack of free memory in the system: the kernel tries to identify pages of memory that probably will not be accessed in the near future, and copies their contents to a disk for safekeeping until they are needed again. When an application attempts to access memory that has been swapped out, it blocks while the kernel fetches that saved memory from the swap disk, and then resumes execution as if nothing had happened. In 2021, cheap SSDs have become commonplace and have performance characteristics much better suited to swapping, so it seems worthwhile to revisit how swapping works in FreeBSD, and try to provide some insight into frequently raised issues. Some light reading for the weekend.

Herein, we lay out our plans for evolving Genode. Progress in addition to this planning will very much depend on the degree of community support the project will receive. The Challenges page collects some of our ideas to advance Genode in various further directions. The road map is not fixed. If there is commercial interest of pushing the Genode technology to a certain direction, we are willing to revisit our plans. This is a very detailed roadmap, but as clearly mentioned in the opening paragraphs, this is not set in stone, and things may change. Most of the planned focus seems to be on vastly improving support for ARM, for instance by working on bringing Genode to the PinePhone. They also want to streamline and improve the process for porting Linux device drivers to Genode, which should help in increasing hardware support.

The WhatsApp messaging service announced on Friday that it would delay changes to new business features after people around the world criticized the new policy. The Facebook-owned company said it is “going to do a lot more to clear up misinformation around how privacy and security works on WhatsApp.” Privacy rights activists heavily criticized the WhatsApp changes, saying it was the latest step showing Facebook’s poor handling of user data. The real issue was a far larger than expected exodus of users to services like Signal and Telegram. I doubt Facebook will actually make any meaningful changes – instead, we’ll see a different tone or wording.

After years of waiting, it looks like Microsoft now has a true answer to Chrome OS. A new and near-final version of Windows 10X has leaked, and it offers a first look at the changes Microsoft has made to the upcoming operating system to get it ready for laptops. Windows 10X first started off life as a variant of Windows 10 designed for dual-screen devices. It was supposed to launch alongside Microsoft’s Surface Neo, a tablet-like device with two separate nine-inch displays that fold out to a full 13-inch workspace. Microsoft revealed last year that Windows 10X is now being reworked for “single-screen” devices like laptops, and Surface Neo has been delayed. While the company has spent years differentiating Windows 10X for foldable and dual-screen hardware, it now looks and feels more like Chrome OS than ever before. This is literally Chrome OS. It looks, feels, and tastes like Chrome OS – and of course, that’s the point. It also points to what we can expect from regular Windows over the coming years.

I spent the first week of 2021 learning an OS called Plan 9 from Bell Labs. This is a fringe operating system, long abandoned by its original authors. It’s also responsible for a great deal of inspiration elsewhere. If you’ve used the Go language, /proc, UTF-8 or Docker, you’ve used Plan 9-designed features. This issue dives into operating system internals and some moderately hard computer science topics. Sounds like an excellent article for us!

Among the many highlights for Wine 6.0 are core modules now being implemented in Portable Executable (PE) format, the initial (experimental) Vulkan back-end for WineD3D as an alternative to OpenGL, DirectShow and Media Foundation support, and a redesign of their text console implementation. Wine is such an integral part of my computing life now, due to Proton and Valve.

Theseus is a new OS written from scratch in Rust to experiment with novel OS structure, better state management, and how to shift OS responsibilities like resource management into the compiler. We are continually working to improve the OS, including its fault recovery abilities for higher system availability without redundancy, as well as easier and more arbitrary live evolution and runtime flexbility. Though still an incomplete prototype, we envision that Theseus will be useful for high-end embedded systems or edge datacenter environments. See our published papers for more information about Theseus’s design principles and implementation philosophy, as well as our goal to avoid the phenomenon of state spill or mitigate its effects as much as possible. Also, see Theseus’s documentation for more. Definitely an experimental operating system, and it joins the many other Rust-based operating systems projects out there.

Intel CEO Bob Swan is stepping down from the position on February 15th, the company has announced. He will be replaced by VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger. Swan was named Intel’s permanent CEO two years ago in January 2019. He initially took on the role on an interim basis in June 2018 following the resignation of Intel’s previous CEO Brian Krzanich. They need a Lisa Su.

In a world where our routers look more and more like upside-down spiders than things you would like to have in your living room, there are only a handful of routers that may be considered “famous.” Steve Jobs’ efforts to sell AirPort—most famously by using a hula hoop during a product demo—definitely deserve notice in this category, and the mesh routers made by the Amazon-owned Eero probably fit in this category as well. But a certain Linksys router, despite being nearly 20 years old at this point, takes the cake—and it’s all because of a feature that initially went undocumented that proved extremely popular with a specific user base. Today’s Tedium talks about the blue-and-black icon of wireless access, the Linksys WRT54G. This is the wireless router that showed the world what a wireless router could do. I’ve often pondered tinkering with this, but I’m terrible with anything related to networking – it seems like it’s a weird world of technology that exists on its own separate plane, disconnected from everything else. Networking is obtuse, and as long as our home network is functioning, I’m not touching it.

The new BeagleV is a little different. It’s a small single-board PC with a RISC-V processor and support for several different GNU/Linux distributions as well as freeRTOS. With prices ranging from $120 to $150, the BeagleV is pricier than a Raspberry Pi computer, but it’s one of the most affordable and versatile options to feature a RISC-V processor. The makers of the BeagleV plan to begin shipping the first boards in April and you can sign up to apply for a chance to buy one of the first at the BeagleV website. It’s a good sign that RISC-V hardware is getting more accessible – a truly open source ISA is something we need to compete with the proprietary mess that is ARM.

A number of patches worked on for Haiku OS back for Mesa 20.x were freshened up and with some extra tweaking and code cleaning those patches have now been merged for Mesa 21.0. This includes factoring out a lot of the OpenGL legacy dispatch code and a lot of cleanups around the Softpipe driver handling. With Mesa 21.0-devel as of today, it’s at least enough where Mesa Git can now be built on Haiku OS and yield working OpenGL rendering with the LLVMpipe software. Neat, and a testament to Haiku being in a far better state than many people seem to think.

For decades, my perception of USB was that of a technology both simple and reliable. You plug it and it works. The two first iterations freed PCs from a badly fragmented connector world made of RJ-45 (Ethernet), DA-15 (Joystick), DE-9 (Serial), DIN (PS/2), and DB-25 (Parallel). When USB-3.0 came out, USB-IF had the good idea to color code its ports. All you had to do was to “check for blue” in the chain to get your 5 Gbit/s. Even better, around the same time were introduced type-C connectors. Not only the world was a faster place, now we could plug things with one try instead of three. Up to that point in time, it was a good tech stack. Yet in 2013 things started to become confusing. USB and ThunderBolt have become incredibly complex, and it feels like a lot of this could’ve been avoided with a more sensible naming scheme and clearer, stricter specifications and labeling for cables.

How do you send a password over the internet? You acquire a SSL certificate and let TLS do the job of securely transporting the password from client to server. Of course it’s not as cut-and-dry as I’m making it out to be, but the gist of it holds true and stood the test of time. This hasn’t always been this way though, and one incredibly popular storefront on the world wide web prefers to add a little extra to this day. I’ll be discussing Steam’s unique method of logging in their users, and go down a deep rabbit hole of fascinating implementation details. Not exactly my cup of tea, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned over the years here at OSNews, it’s that the most obscure stuff can generate a lot of interest. So, here you go.

When Apple unveiled major privacy upgrades at the WWDC 2020 for its iOS14, a battle royale broke out between the tech giant and Facebook. The social media giant claimed user data was critical to its ability to serve relevant ads and that Apple’s policies would stymie small business. As the world now grapples with Facebook’s privacy changes that require users to compulsorily share their Whatsapp data with the social media platform, Apple’s privacy labels update all but confirms what we always knew. That, data collected by Whatsapp and Facebook Messenger is far in excess of what its competitors do. Apple’s privacy labels are a great idea, and despite Google being a data-hungry company, I wouldn’t be surprised if they make their way to Android soon, too. I love how they make the contrast between various applications to incredible stark and clear. Good move by Apple.

NVIDIA’s Wayland support is finally coming together albeit long overdue with DMA-BUF passing support and now patches pending against XWayland for supporting OpenGL and Vulkan hardware acceleration with their proprietary driver. Pending patches to the X.Org Server’s XWayland code paired with a yet-to-be-released proprietary driver update finally allow for hardware accelerated rendering with XWayland. NVIDIA is really holding Wayland back, so it’s good to see progress on this front.

WhatsApp, the Facebook-owned messenger that claims to have privacy coded into its DNA, is giving its 2 billion plus users an ultimatum: agree to share their personal data with the social network or delete their accounts. The requirement is being delivered through an in-app alert directing users to agree to sweeping changes in the WhatsApp terms of service. Those who don’t accept the revamped privacy policy by February 8 will no longer be able to use the app. I pretty much have no choice but to accept. Everybody uses WhatsApp – it’s so entrenched in dutch society the app itself has become a verb. Opting out means making it a lot more difficult to talk with my friends, which is already difficult enough considering I live in Sweden now. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: crucial communication protocols – of which WhatsApp is one in many countries – must be open and free to be implemented by anyone. It’s pure insanity to me that important lines of communication are left to faceless corporations on the other side of the world.

Turning those percentages into whole numbers isn’t a matter of simple division, unfortunately, because we don’t know the denominator. Microsoft has told us for years that the Windows user base is 1.5 billion, but I argued a year ago that the number of Windows PCs is probably much lower than that, even with a pandemic-induced resurgence in PC sales. Even allowing for that uncertainty, it’s clear that at least 100 million PCs are still running Windows 7, and that number could be significantly higher. It makes sense. Windows 7 is still a perfectly capable operating system, and I can understand how especially for average, normal users, there’s little in Windows 10 that’s worth going through the hassle of an upgrade for. Security issues aside, Windows 7 still looks modern, too. Why should a regular user upgrade?

Microsoft is building a universal Outlook client for Windows and Mac that will also replace the default Mail & Calendar apps on Windows 10 when ready. This new client is codenamed Monarch and is based on the already available Outlook Web app available in a browser today. Project Monarch is the end-goal for Microsoft’s “One Outlook” vision, which aims to build a single Outlook client that works across PC, Mac, and the Web. Right now, Microsoft has a number of different Outlook clients for desktop, including Outlook Web, Outlook (Win32) for Windows, Outlook for Mac, and Mail & Calendar on Windows 10. The mail client in Windows will carry the well-known Outlook brand and will be a web app. You know, just in case you wanted to know how much faith Microsoft has in its own native application platforms. If not even Microsoft itself cares enough to write native Windows applications, then who does? The Windows application ecosystem is a complete and utter mess.

A group of Google workers have announced plans to unionize with the Communications Workers of America (CWA). The Alphabet Workers Union will be open to all employees and contractors at Google’s parent company. Its goal will be to tackle ongoing issues like pay disparity, retaliation, and controversial government contracts. “This union builds upon years of courageous organizing by Google workers,” said Nicki Anselmo, a Google program manager. “From fighting the ‘real names’ policy, to opposing Project Maven, to protesting the egregious, multi-million dollar payouts that have been given to executives who’ve committed sexual harassment, we’ve seen first-hand that Alphabet responds when we act collectively.” Good. There’s a lot of worker exploitation and other unfair labour practices in the technology sector – and in the US in general – and unions are a proven and effective way to combat this.

KDE developer Nate Graham has penned a post detailing some of the things the KDE project is working on that should come to full fruition next year. There’s quite a few things here, but the biggest one is probably KDE’s maturing support for Wayland. I’ll be honest: before 2020 the Plasma Wayland session felt like a mess to me. Nothing worked properly. But all of this changed in 2020: suddenly things started working properly. I expect the trend of serious, concentrated Wayland work to continue in 2021, and finally make Plasma Wayland session usable for an increasing number of people’s production workflows. That’s good news, and I hope the move to Wayland fixes my biggest issue with Linux on laptops: playing video is a massive assault on your battery and fans.

In a major push to give Europe pride of place in the global semiconductor design and fabrication ecosystem, 17 EU member states this week signed a joint declaration to commit to work together in developing next generation, trusted low-power embedded processors and advanced process technologies down to 2nm. It will allocate up to €145bn funding for this European initiative over the next 2-3 years. Recognizing the foundational nature of embedded processors, security and leading-edge semiconductor technologies in everything from cars, medical equipment, mobile phones and networks to environmental monitoring, and smart devices and services, the European Commission said this is the reason it is crucial for key industries to be able to compete globally and have the capacity to design and produce the most powerful processors. It’s kind of odd that Europe does not command a more prominent position in the semiconductor industry, since the one company that enables the constant progress in this sector isn’t American, Chinese, or Japanese – but Dutch. ASML is by far the world’s largest developer and producer of photolithography systems, which are the machines companies like Intel and TSMC use to fabricate integrated circuits. Their machine are some of the most advanced machines in the world, and all the advanced, high-end chips from Intel, Apple, AMD, and so on, are built using machines from ASML. It seems odd, then, that Europe’s own semiconductor industry lags behind that of the rest of the world. This investment seems to aim to correct that, and that’s a good thing for all of us, no matter if you’re European, American, or from anywhere else – this can only increase competition.

Despite all the turbulence, it has been quite a productive year for ReactOS. Many bugs and instabilities were resolved, many more have been introduced. This year we hired two kernel developers full-time, this happened for the first time in the project’s history. The post highlights some of the changes which may be interesting to the community. This post is a good overview of the progress the ReactOS project has made this past year. One of the major achievements this year is that ReactOS can now use Windows’ own NTFS driver, which is pretty amazing.

There’s a new Haiku activity report, and there’s been a lot of activity over the past two months. My pick this time is progress on the ARM port. tqh and kallisti5 are working on the ARM port. The bootloader is now running mostly fine in UEFI mode but there is some work to be done to set up the MMU before handing control over to the kernel. There are problems related to the “hardfloat” and “softfloat” ABIs on ARM, however. Until now we had worked with the “hardfloat” ABI for Haiku, assuming floating point hardware was available (as is the case on any modern CPU we could reasonably target). However, the EFI firmware does not properly handle these registers, and this seems to result in some confusion when passing data to and from the firmware. We may need to build the bootloader in soft-float mode (not using the hardware floating point processing), but that in turn creates some difficulties with properly configuring gcc. On 64bit ARM, the floating point support is not optional, so it may be easier to move forward with the 64bit port first. The ARM port is important for the future, since desktop and laptop ARM hardware may become far more available than it is today.

Corellium, a mobile device company that supports iOS, this week won a significant victory in its legal battle against Apple. Apple last year sued Corellium for copyright infringement because the Corellium software is designed to replicate iOS to allow security researchers to locate bugs and security flaws. According to The Washington Post, a Florida judge threw out Apple’s claims that Corellium had violated copyright law with its software. The judge said that Corellium successfully demonstrated that it operates under fair use terms. A very unlikely victory, considering the massive financial means difference between these two companies. A good one, though – this was just the world’s largest corporation being annoyed a small upstart made their products look bad by giving security researchers the tools they need to find bugs and security flaws in iOS. Being annoyed your forced Uighur-labour brand might get tarnished should not be grounds for a legal case.

Hyperion Entertainment is proud to announce the immediate release of update 2 for AmigaOS 4.1 Final Edition. Update 2 is by far the largest update ever released for AmigaOS and includes more than 200 updated components with hundreds of bug fixes, improvements and new features and six completely new OS components. The update is the combined effort of four years of AmigaOS development and will bring AmigaOS4.1 Final Edition to a completely new level of stability and usability. This seems like a very large bug-fix and stability release, but since AmigaOS 4 is so hard to find proper hardware for, it’s difficult to keep up with the state of the platform. ACube did announce a new batch of Sam460cr boards that can run Amiga OS 4, but I doubt it will be many, and the pricing is, as with everything Amiga OS 4, not exactly cheap. I understand ACube is a small manufacturer, and I’m not at all saying they have much of a choice, but almost €500 to be able to run Amiga OS 4 is a lot to ask of newcomers.

Here’s a port for the Nintendo 64. At least two people have done such a port before, but didn’t submit. This is not based on either. RFC because I’m not sure if it’s useful to have this merged. Old, niche, and limited platform. “But why”, I hear from the back. Having Linux available makes it easier to port emulators and fb or console games. Yep. Linux on the Nintendo 64.

The internal design of the Game Boy Advance is quite impressive for a portable console that runs on two AA batteries. This console will carry on using Nintendo’s signature GPU. Additionally, it will introduce a relatively new CPU from a UK company that will surge in popularity in years to come. The Game Boy Advance has some of the best Castlevania titles after Symphony of the Night, and I’ve always been amazed that the developers managed to squeeze those impressive games out of this tiny device.

Fujifilm has announced that it has set a new world record by creating a magnetic storage tape that can store a staggering 580 terabytes of data. The breakthrough, developed jointly with IBM Research, uses a new magnetic particle called Strontium Ferrite (SrFe), commonly used as a raw material for making motor magnets. Fujifilm has been investigating Strontium Ferrite as a possible successor to Barium Ferrite (BaFe), which is the leading material today. Tape is still, by far, the most efficient and cheapest way to store loads of data that doesn’t need to be accessed regularly. I find tape-based storage mediums fascinating, and this is right up my alley.

A number of new projects have been introduced during this release cycle, and many improvements have been landed. Very many bugs have been squashed. This list is an extreme over-simplification of the thousands of commits done since the last release. Hopefully, releases will happen more often so this is not always the case. • rmm, a complete rewrite of the kernel memory manager. This has eliminated kernel memory leaks, which became quite an issue with the previous memory manager. Additionally, multi-core support is far more stable.• Much of the work of RSoC, sponsored by donations to Redox OS, has been integrated into this new release. This includes work on ptrace, strace, gdb, disk partitioning, logging, io_uring, and more.• relibc has seen a large amount of work, culminating in improvements for anything that depends on it (i.e. everything in userspace). Redox is a UNIX-like operating system written in Rust, running on a microkernel.

A brand new version of Icaros Desktop is finally ready for everyone. What you have under your eyes is the result of a very long work of analysis and revision, which covers different aspects of the distribution, in its native soul and in the hosted one. We wondered what users would love and how we could make Icaros Desktop more useful and, thanks to the work of third-party application programmers, today we can offer you an operating environment that’s more useful and more beautiful than ever. The novelties to talk about are many: from the Leu spreadsheet to the SilkRAW image reader, from the incredible RNOPublisher DTP to new games, but, above all, the hosted version of Icaros Desktop is the one which has taken a decisive step forward, both for Linux and Windows. The news are so many that, this time, we will list them in different sections. Icaros Desktop is effectively an AROS distribution, and AROS is the Amiga Research Operating System, an open source reimplementation of the Amiga operating system, version 3.x.

So over 40 years ago, if Microsoft and IBM had partnered just a little bit sooner, if they’d been able to predict how popular the platform would become, if they could have harnessed more of its power, and if Microsoft had been able to build more synergy between their flagship BASIC product and the underlying “Quick and Dirty” operating system, how dramatic could the impact have been? It’s impossible to know with any certainty. However, what’s not impossible is creating that product today, and to see for ourselves what the IBM PC was really capable of from “Day One.” And that was the inspiration for BASIC-DOS, a product (well, just a proof-of-concept at this point) that combines the power of BASIC with a multitasking DOS. A fascinating bit of alternative history, and one that goes beyond mere words – BASIC-DOS is in development as a retro-programming project, and is intended to be released next year. You can get a preview of what’s to come, and follow development on the blog.

4.16 was a special cycle in many respects (not only pandemic-wise, but also). One of the corner-stones of the non-code changes concerns our migration to GitLab, which is a change in development workflow and a huge step forward in terms of becoming more contributor-friendly and welcoming. In parts, the humungous changelog of Xfce 4.16 can be attributed to new contributors proposing merge requests (288 merge requests were merged or closed against our core components alone!). We also created a reference Docker container (xfce/xfce-build) and added CI pipelines to all components to ensure we don´t break the build. This is one hell of a big release, and contains everything from an entirely new icon theme to the end of Gtk2 support. The visual tour gives a good overview of that’s new.

I don’t do this very often, but I’m turning to you, lovely reader, with a rather strange, obscure, and possibly entirely stupid question. As part of the first major OSNews Patreon project, I’m looking to buy and write several articles about one of the last proper UNIX workstations, and two companies immediately come to mind – SGI and Sun. Since I’m already halfway familiar with Sun’s hardware, and since their machines are more readily available, I’ve opted to look for a proper Sun SPARC workstation. The last true Sun UNIX workstation was the Sun Ultra 45, available with either one or two UltraSPARC IIIi processors. While these 15 year old machines are certainly readily available on eBay, they also happen to command what I think are crazy prices – the dual processor model, which is really the one you should want, goes for about €1200, which is far too pricey for what you get, and that’s excluding shipping, which often adds another several hundred dollars (and possible import taxes, to boot). However, do you know what type of SPARC machines are not crazy expensive, and far newer, faster, and more modern to boot? That’s right – decommissioned Oracle and Fujitsu SPARC servers. There’s tons of videos and articles out there about people buying decommissioned dual or more Xeon servers, slapping a modern graphics card in them, and use them as impractical, slow, and loud workstations or gaming machines. Basically, I want to do the same – buy something like a Sparc T4-1 server, slap some compatible GPU in it somewhere, and use it as a more impractical, slower, and louder workstation. For science. My question is simple. Is it possible to do this, and if so, how on earth would I find out which GPU is even compatible with Solaris or Linux on SPARC? There seems to be very little information available about this use case (I wonder why) and I’m at a loss as to how to figure something like this out. And yes, I know this is stupid. I know this makes no sense. I know no sane person would do this. I know the world will lose nothing if I do not do this. However, if nobody wants to make proper non-x86 UNIX workstations anymore and eBay sellers want to charge a ridiculous premium for 15 year old junkers, why don’t we just build our own non-x86 UNIX workstation? The Wrights brothers didn’t listen to all the haters, and considering this project would make about as much noise as a passenger jet, why should I? And wouldn’t you want to be part of this crazy journey? I mean, do you know anyone else crazy enough to even entertain a ridiculous, impractical, and stupid idea such as this? I thought so.