Category: open-source

coreutils 9.5

March 29th, 2024

“cp, mv, install, cat, and split commands can now read/write a minimum of 256KiB at a time. Previously there was a 128KiB minimum while this has been doubled in order to enhance the throughput of Coreutils on modern systems. The throughput with Coreutils 9.5 thanks to this change increases by 10~20% when reading cached files on modern systems. The benefit comes from reducing system call overhead. This default I/O size update was last adjusted a decade ago.”

This change was introduced in this commit:

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnu/2024-03/msg00006.html
Valuable news from vermaden

March 4th, 2024

1)FreeBSD Puts An End To 32 Bit CPU Support (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98Y5D_Az2AY)

2) FreeBSD 13.3-RC1 Improves WiFi Stability and Takes Care of Some Kernel Panics

3) FreeBSD Journal – 2024/01-02 – 10 Years in Publication.

4) NetBSD 10.0 RC5 Available

Valuable News – 2024/03/04
HDMI forum rejects AMD’s suggestion for an open-source driver

March 2nd, 2024

https://www.phoronix.com/news/HDMI-2.1-OSS-Rejected
Chimera – a distro with an alternative userland

February 17th, 2024

“Chimera comes with a novel userland setup based on FreeBSD core tools (replacing coreutils and related projects like findutils, diffutils, sed or grep; read our FAQ for details about why).

The FreeBSD tools were chosen for their high quality code and solid feature set. However, Chimera does not aim to replicate the FreeBSD experience on Linux in general, instead having its own choices and workflows.

The LLVM/Clang suite provides the system toolchain (clang, lld) as well as runtime parts (compiler-rt, libunwind, libc++). The C library is provided by musl, patched to use LLVM’s (also used e.g. in Android and Fuchsia) Scudo allocator for performance as well as security.

This means Chimera is not a GNU/Linux system, as it utilizes neither GNU utilities, nor GNU libc, nor GNU toolchain. However, the project is not anti-GNU/GPL, and its userland choice is primarily technical. Users are generally free to use whichever software they like.”
Thunderbird implements Rust code

February 14th, 2024

Major advantage the memory safety that Rust offers.

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Thunderbird-Rust-2024

Migrated to Alacritty from Konsole

January 1st, 2024

Alacritty is a terminal emulator written in Rust.

After using it for a couple hours it is definitely faster and more responsive than Konsole!

Currently using Nord theme.

My toml configuration file looks like this:

> cat ~/.config/alacritty/alacritty.toml
#theme = "Nord"

[shell]
program = "/bin/zsh"

[window]
dimensions = {columns = 80, lines = 15}

[font]
size = 18.0

[font.bold]
family = "monospace"
style = "Bold"

[font.bold_italic]
family = "monospace"
style = "Bold Italic"

[font.italic]
family = "monospace"
style = "Italic"

[font.normal]
family = "monospace"
style = "Regular"

[colors.bright]
black = "#4C566A"
blue = "#81A1C1"
cyan = "#8FBCBB"
green = "#A3BE8C"
magenta = "#B48EAD"
red = "#BF616A"
white = "#ECEFF4"
yellow = "#EBCB8B"

[colors.normal]
black = "#3B4252"
blue = "#81A1C1"
cyan = "#88C0D0"
green = "#A3BE8C"
magenta = "#B48EAD"
red = "#BF616A"
white = "#E5E9F0"
yellow = "#EBCB8B"

[colors.primary]
background = "#2E3440"
foreground = "#D8DEE9"

[cursor]
style = "Beam"

[env]
LANG = "en_US.UTF-8"
LC_CTYPE = "en_US.UTF-8"
TERM = "alacritty"

LLVM changes it’s versioning system

December 24th, 2023

Rather than starting with 18.0 stable, the first version will be 18.1, following the gcc version handling.

https://www.phoronix.com/news/LLVM-N-1-Stable-Versioning

https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/commit/4532617ae420056bf32f6403dde07fb99d276a49
December 15th, 2023
Xorg’s security is like a Swiss cheese

October 26th, 2023

So after this 1988 vulnerability and multiple privilege escalation problems, the list of security advisories continues with more issues of X.Org X server prior to 21.1.9 and Xwayland prior to 23.2.2

https://lists.x.org/archives/xorg-announce/2023-October/003430.html

https://www.phoronix.com/news/X.Org-Halloween-Bugs-2023
Brave installs VPN without permission… Oh, the irony

October 21st, 2023

Brave, a browser focused on privacy installed a VPN service in Windows clients without even asking to do so. This behavior dates back to 2022 but is limited to the Windows version.

It’s possible to remove these services manually or another is to uninstall Brave and reinstall it without admin rights so that the program can’t install additional services.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/20/23925192/brave-browser-vpn-windows-11

https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/33592
My first Git commit

October 7th, 2023
Richard Stallman reveals he has cancer

October 4th, 2023

“Fortunately it is slow-growing and manageable follicular lymphona, so he will probably live many more years nonetheless. But he now has to be even more careful not to catch Covid-19.”

https://stallman.org/
Xorg vulnerability dating back to 1988

October 4th, 2023

https://lists.x.org/archives/xorg/2023-October/061506.html

https://www.phoronix.com/news/XOrg-Vulnerabilities-Since-1988
Best online resources for understanding UNIX/Linux and filesystems in general

August 28th, 2023
1. Arch Linux Wiki (https://wiki.archlinux.org/)
2. Arch Linux man pages (https://man.archlinux.org/)
3. FreeBSD Handbook (https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/)
4. FreeBSD man pages https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi
5. https://vermaden.wordpress.com/
6. https://klarasystems.com/articles/
7. https://openzfs.github.io/openzfs-docs/
8. https://btrfs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
These are only the resources that come to mind in a couple of seconds. Will update them later 🙂
Version numbering system change of LibreOffice

August 25th, 2023

Devs will leave semantic versioning behind and will adopt a year.month system

At least not like Firefox’s development system 🙂

https://www.phoronix.com/news/LibreOffice-24.2-Up-Next