Linus shares his thoughts on Rust in the kernel, Nvidia enables GPU passthrough on Linux, PipeWire support is headed to OBS, and a handy GUI for devices with coreboot firmware.
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Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
05:42 Rust in the kernel
08:07 GeForce GPU Passthrough
12:12 PipeWire in OBS
14:12 Coreboot GUI
17:42 Pinephone Limited edition
21:17 Retro Google News
24:27 eBPFSnitch
31:47 NVME Pi
34:42 Floppy Pi
37:07 Emails
On Rusty Kernels
- Both Linus and GKH agree on the main obstacles to getting the Rusty boat to integrate with the great big C.
- The actual bridge between the two and drivers.
- Call me old fashioned but I think drivers should be pretty low level, no?
- If the point of driver support is just to get the Rusty bits to talk to the hardware, that’s fine.
- But I can also see people trying to build drivers in Rust.
- And if you have the driver between the abstraction layer and the rest of the kernel, what’s that going to do for latency?
- I guess that’s part of the issue, huh?!
- Having memory managed drivers is a great idea and can increase the speed of the OS tremendously.
- Take Redox OS for instance, which is a Unix-like Operating System written in Rust that runs great on older machines.
- Rust is the new hotness and for good reasons.
- I’ve enjoyed playing around with it but…
- It’s still a moving target at this point so it’s nice to know it’s not being ruled out but tapping the brakes until things settle down makes sense.
Nvidia passthrough
https://nvidia.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/5173
- Difficulty: You’re going to need two cards.
- This will work for one VM unless you have Quads or Titans.
- All GeForce/TITAN GPUs supported in the R465 driver will work.
- Good for developers wanting to test code.
- This is nice for bare metal gaming in a Windows virtual machine.
- But I find that VMware actually does a nice job of this utilizing just one GPU.
- That’s different.
- What’s next?! Open sourcing their RTX implementation in Quake 2? Oh wait…
OBS pipewire
https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/commit/c2f8b2058b77fad3bc09492207c74665d7f8b63d
- Mix this with the new Wayland bits and you’re cooking with evil gas.
- Not supported in Ubuntu 18 / 20.
- Oh! Martin Gräßlin, is still around.
- I used to kinda silently follow everything he put out about KDE and Linux on Google+
- Good to see he’s still around.
Coreboot GUI
https://github.com/JaGoLi/corevantage
- It has only been tested to work with the ThinkPad X200 running the latest version of libreboot
- One of many advantages that the open source coreboot bios has over proprietary bios is that you can make your own software to access it :-D
- A few motherboard manufacturers are starting to offer OS-level tools to access the UEFI settings.
- Unfortunately that’s only for windows now.
- Though, keeping your typical Windows user out of the BIOS is probably not the worse idea.
Pinephone limited
- You can now pre-order the PinePhone Beta Limited Edition Linux-powered smartphone for $149.99.
- And as we have talked about before, Manjaro Linux with KDE Plasma Mobile is now the default OS installed on the PinePhone.
- But you still can buy the “Convergence Package” like the previous alpha community editions that includes the USB-C dock for $199.99.
- I was willing to drop £250 on the Pinebook Pro and, as much as I’m looking for a new phone, that’s a little too much.
Retro Google news
- Is your daily driver a calculator?
- All the google news in retro txt goodness.
- This is a link to Google news in basic text only HTML, for those of us who own vintage computers or are low powered.
- It was tested on Netscape 1.1 through 4, but will work nicely in lynx, eLinks or w3m ;-)
- My 68k Mac SE behind me, my Atari ST and Amiga thank you!
- Whatever happened to the spanish aggregator?
- That’s very nice for the truly slow processors of old.
- And the simple rendering will make CLI browsers viable for at least the basic reading.
Ebpfsnitch (rtheren)
https://github.com/harporoeder/ebpfsnitch
- Does anyone ship a distro with a firewall enabled?
- I mean, outside of RH / CentOS.
- Schröedinger’s OpenSnitch fork.
- By all means kick the tires and let us know how it goes, just don’t try it on your company servers.
- Like iptables and firewalld but for container apps.
Slice of Pi
NVME Pi
https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2021/raspberry-pi-can-boot-nvme-ssds-now
- You can launch Chrome a bit faster.
- This is more for size / capacity.
- Much like the Pinebook Pro, it doesn’t make much of a difference when it comes to responsiveness on accounts of how slow the CPU is.
- It’s a full second faster from the PCIe NVMe than the USB NVMe adapter.
Floppy Pi
https://www.smbaker.com/raspberry-pi-floppy-controller-board
- The Pi already was the ultimate hipster computer.
- This… this was just a matter of time.
- It’s for the “purists” that refuse those abominations with USB connectors.
- Because this is the only true way to turn your RasPi into a 486 or an Apple II ;-D
- If you’re not running your retro BBS off a floppy it’s not really retro.
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