seL4 micro-kernel working towards a general-purpose, multi-server OS

In addition to the establishing of the seL4 Foundation and adding the open-source RISC-V architecture as one of their primary architectures, the seL4 micro-kernel has been seeing a lot of work and also research into future work. Among the ambitious research goals is to create a “truly secure, general-purpose OS”. This multi-server OS would be secure, support a range of use-cases and security policies, and perform comparable to monolithic systems. Be sure to flip through the slides of the presentation in question for more information.

It’s 2021 and the Linux kernel’s floppy driver is still seeing the occasional patch

The Linux kernel’s floppy driver dates back to the original days of the kernel back in 1991 and is still being maintained thirty years later with the occasional fix. Somewhat surprisingly, a patch was sent in to the Linux kernel’s block subsystem ahead of the Linux 5.12 merge window around the floppy code. Floppies are awesome and I’m sure there’s tons of older machines out there – especially in corporate settings – that are still rocking a floppy drive for backwards compatibility reasons. Might as well keep the code up to snuff.

Mandatory Windows 10 update will kill off the old Microsoft Edge

The legacy version of the Microsoft Edge, which is set to be discontinued in March, will be removed from Windows 10 with the release of Patch Tuesday updates in April. As we reported recently, Windows 10 currently comes with three different web browsers – Legacy Edge (hidden), Chromium Edge (default), and Internet Explorer (enabled). In an attempt to reduce clutter and improve security, Microsoft is removing the older browsers from the OS. I mean, on the one hand it seems like this is a reasonably move – there’s a new version of Edge, so an update will remove the old one. On the other hand, though, these are really two entirely different applications that happen to share a name, and it seems grotesque and user-hostile to just remove an entire application without even giving users the option to keep it. Sure, this concerns an outdated browser nobody uses, and that makes it easy to handwave this away, but what if this happens to an application you actually like and use?

Google explores alternative to Apple’s new anti-tracking feature

Google is exploring an alternative to Apple Inc.’s new anti-tracking feature, the latest sign that the internet industry is slowly embracing user privacy, according to people with knowledge of the matter. Internally, the search giant is discussing how it can limit data collection and cross-app tracking on the Android operating system in a way that is less stringent than Apple’s solution, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing private plans. Of course it’s going to be less stringent than Apple’s solution. Can’t limited ad tracking too much if ad tracking is how you make money.

Containerize all the things with Ubuntu Core 20

The key difference between regular Ubuntu and Ubuntu Core is the underlying architecture of the system. Traditional Linux distributions rely mostly on traditional package systems—deb, in Ubuntu’s case—while Ubuntu Core relies almost entirely on Canonical’s relatively new snap package format. Ubuntu Core also gets a full 10 years of support from Canonical rather than the five years traditional Ubuntu LTS releases get. But it’s a bit more difficult to get started with, since you need an Ubuntu SSO account to even log in to a new Ubuntu Core installation in the first place. Ars takes a look at this rather unusual Ubuntu variant.

“Think twice before abandoning Xorg. Wayland breaks everything!”

Here we go. Wayland is not ready as a 1:1 compatible Xorg replacement just yet, and maybe never will. Hence, if you are interested in existing applications to “just work” without the need for adjustments, then you may be better of not using Wayland at this point. Wayland solves no issues I have but breaks almost everything I need. And usually it stays broken, because the Wayland folks only seem to care about Gnome, and alienating everyone else in the process. DO NOT INSTALL WAYLAND! Let Wayland not destroy everything and then have other people fix the damage it caused. Or force more Red Hat/Gnome components (glib, Portals, Pipewire) on everyone! I’ll save you a read and summarise the ‘article’ so you can do something more productive, like I don’t know, cleaning your floors with a toothpick or something: “my tools and components written specifically for X and its APIs do not work under Wayland, therefore Wayland is garbage and shit”. Wayland is not X.org. Let me repeat that. Wayland is not X.org. If you need the functionality that X.org delivers, then you shouldn’t be using Wayland. This is like buying a Mac and complaining your Windows applications don’t work.

Bedrock Linux: a meta Linux distribution

Bedrock Linux is a meta Linux distribution which allows users to mix-and-match components from other, typically incompatible distributions. Bedrock integrates these components into one largely cohesive system. You think you’ve seen everything the Linux world has to offer and nothing can you surprise you anymore, and then you run into something like this. I wonder how well this works if a Bedrock Linux installation holds up over time.

Huawei’s HarmonyOS: “fake it till you make it” meets OS development

Remember HarmonyOS, the operating system Huawei claimed it had written from the ground-up? Yeah it’s just Android 10. After getting access to HarmonyOS through a grossly invasive sign-up process, firing up the SDK and emulator, and poring over the developer documents, I can’t come to any other conclusion: HarmonyOS is essentially an Android fork. The way that Huawei describes the OS to the press and in developer documents doesn’t seem to have much to do with what the company is actually shipping. The developer documents appear almost purposefully written to confuse the reader; any bit of actual shipping code to which you hold up a magnifying glass looks like Android with no major changes. The phrase “fake it till you make it” is often given as motivational advice, but I’ve never seen it applied to OS development before. If you’ve ever seen a modern Huawei Android phone, HarmonyOS is largely the same thing… with a few strings changed. So while there’s not much new to see, we can at least dissect HarmonyOS and debunk some of Huawei’s claims about its “brand-new” operating system. So nothing new under the sun here.

The start of a crazy journey: the SunFire V245

The first step in my crazy experiment to see if you can turn a Sun SPARC server into a workstation has been completed. Thanks to an incredibly generous donation by Jon Rushton, a reader from the UK, I’m now in possession of a SunFire V245 server (I did pay for shipping, of course). The machine has some serious specifications: Two UltraSPARC IIIi 1.5Ghz processors 8 GB of DDR1 RAM Two SAS hard drives (73GB and 140GB) Sun Raptor GFX graphics card (to be replaced by a Sun Quadro FX 3450) The machine has plenty of room for expansion, as well as the usual server features like dual power supplies, lots and lots of fans that no doubt will be incredibly loud, hot-swappable drive bays, remote management ports, and so on. Since I’m still waiting on a few more accessories I needed to purchase in order to setup and use the server – a USB serial console cable and the aforementioned more powerful GPU – I can’t turn it on and use it quite yet. While we wait on those accessories to be delivered, I figured I might as well post a story in the meantime with a bunch of photos of the server. I have a lot of learning to do here, since the server world is not a place I have ever really visited. I’m going to make stumbles along the way, but the end goal is for this server to be a usable workstation – most likely running either Linux or BSD. I can’t wait to get started.

Building XNU for macOS 11.2 (Intel and Apple Silicon)

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.

RV64X: a free, open source GPU for RISC-V

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 21.04 will try to use Wayland by default

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.

Fast commits for ext4

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.

Windows Package Manager getting an uninstall option very soon

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?

What color was “Apple Beige”?

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.

AMD Ryzen 9 5980HS Cezanne review: Ryzen 5000 Mobile tested

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.

Limine and TomatBoot

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: a hobby operating system

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.

Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment

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 cuts Chromium off from sync features and Google APIs

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”.