Monthly Archive:: September 2017

I ordered a special edition New 3DS XL just for the new Samus Returns. The Metroid series is one of my favourite series in gaming, and many of them are classics all of us have played at some point in our lives. Personally, I greatly prefer the 2D, side-scrolling Metroid games, as the series foray into 3D/FPS - the Prime series - fell a bit flat to me.

With the iPhone X revealed, we really have to start talking about its processor and SoC - the A11 Bionic. It's a six-core chip with two high-power cores, four low-power cores, and this year, for the first time, includes an Apple-designed custom GPU. It also has what Apple calls a Neural Engine, designed to speed up tasks such as face recognition.

Apple already had a sizeable performance lead over competing chips from Qualcomm (what Android phones use) in single-core performance, and the A11 blasts past those in multicore performance, as well. Moreover, the A11 also performs better than quite a number of recent desktop Intel chips from the Core i5 and i7 range, which is a big deal.

For quite a few people it's really hard to grasp just how powerful these chips are - and to a certain extent, it feels like much of that power is wasted in an iPhone, which is mostly doing relatively mundane tasks anyway. Now that Apple is also buildings its own GPUs, it's not a stretch to imagine a number of mobile GPU makers feeling a bit... Uneasy.

At some point, these Apple Ax chips will find their way to something more sizable than phones and tablets.

Aside from new iPhones, theres more Apple news - the company has set release dates for iOS 11 - 19 September - and macOS High Sierra - 25 September. I can't say much about High Sierra - I don't have a Mac - but iOS 11 is an absolute must, especially for iPad users. I've been using it for a long time now on my 2017 iPad Pro 12.9", and I haven't looked back to my laptop since buying it and installing iOS 11 on it.

iOS 11 is a huge leap forward for the iPad, and it'll make your tablet feel like a new, and much more capable device.

9to5Mac is reporting on a leak of the iOS 11 GM release, which details quite a few things about the new iPhone we could only rumour and guess about up until now.

This is a major leak, and confirms several of the final details regarding the iPhone Pro or iPhone X or whatever the more expensive iPhone will be called. The leak confirms the removal of any form of home button - phyisical or virtual - replacing it with a gesture-based UI, as we talked about before. The power switch will also gain some new features, allowing you to set it up to control things like Siri and Apple Pay. iOS 11 also comes with animated animal emojis, which is a sentence that makes me sad. Among many more things I could link to, the leak also reveals how Face ID - the replacement for Touch ID - will work, and how to set it up.

The HomePod leak, the recent Bloomberg story by Mark Gurman, and now this GM leak basically leaves nothing left to the imagination - aside from the name and perhaps pricing. Update: and we have the name too: iPhone X. Apple listened to me (this is a joke).

Names, social security numbers, birthdays, addresses, driver's license numbers, credit card numbers - this is a very big breach.

Interestingly enough, three executives of the credit reporting agency sold their shares in the company days after the breach was discovered.

Remember when Scotty Allen built his own iPhone from parts bought in Shenzhen? This time around, he ups the ante and adds a headphone jack to an iPhone 7. He had to design his own custom circuit board, have it printed, and build it into his iPhone 7. It's an amazing project, and it's an incredibly interesting 30 minute video.

He sent the circuit board he designed and built to Apple, and open sourced all the schematics needed so those with the right tools and expertise can build it at home.

Large technology companies have an immense amount of control over and influence on our society, far more than they - or anyone else, for that matter - care to admit. We're way past the point where governments should step in and start to correct this dangerous situation. It's time for another breakup of the Bell System. It's time we, as society, take a long, hard look at corporations - in tech and elsewhere - and ask ourselves if we really want to be subject to the control of organisations we effectively have no democratic control over.

I'm not a proponent of nationalisation, but I am a proponent of breaking up Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and possibly others (I'm sticking to technology for now) to severely limit their power and influence. The products and services these companies create have become too important and too vital to the functioning of our society, and they should be treated as such.

It wouldn't be the first time we, as society, decide a certain product has become too vital to leave in corporations' unrestricted hands.

Remember, back in December 2016, when there were rumours Oracle was killing Solaris? And how a month later, Solaris effectively switched to maintenance mode, and then to a "continuous deliver model"?

Sun's Solaris is dead.

Bryan Cantrill on this news (this Bryan Cantrill):

We talked about postmarketOS back in late May, and this weekend the project published a summary of all the work they've done over the past 100 days.

That's a lot of work for just 100 days.

It's 2017, and I can post a news item about an alternative operating system shipping on a smartwatch.

Today was a good day.

Not the most substantial Windows update for regular users, but I do like the faster update cycle for Windows. I'm glad the monolithic releases of yore are gone for most users, while enterprise users are still able to opt for the Long Term Servicing Branch for the more monolithic approach.

With version 17.08, the Genode OS project conquers the highly complex topic of hardware-accelerated graphics. In true microkernel fashion, Genode's new Intel-GPU multiplexer provides the bare minimum of functionality to enable (potentially untrusted) components to use the GPU without interfering with each other. Further highlights of the new release are the broadened support for the seL4 microkernel on ARM and 64-bit x86, the ability to boot via UEFI, and Genode's use as Xen DomU domain.

Seven years ago, the Genode developers took their first baby steps with the use of hardware-accelerated graphics. However, their original port of the Intel graphics execution manager along with Mesa/Gallium to the Genode user land never outgrew an experimental stage. One particular limitation was that the GPU could only be used by a single application exclusively. At that time, the secure sharing of GPUs among multiple - and potentially malicious - applications was an afterthought in the predominant driver architectures like Linux' DRI. A port of this driver architecture to Genode would not magically solve that.

In the meanwhile, hardware features like per-process graphics translation tables (PPGTT) and hardware contexts have proliferated and are now present in all modern Intel GPUs. What MMU-based virtual memory is to a CPU, these features are to a GPU. They in principle allow the sandboxed execution of GPU commands under the regime of a potentially very small GPU driver, analogously to how a microkernel facilitates an MMU to sandbox user-level components. However, with about 100K lines of code, Intel's official i915 driver stack as used in the Linux kernel is far from being small and simple. To put the number in perspective, modern microkernels like seL4 or NOVA consist of merely 10K lines of code. Inflating Genode's trusted computing base by on order of magnitude would be a tough decision. There had to be another way. Hence, one year ago, an experiment was started to develop a clean-slate GPU multiplexer as a Genode component. In contrast to the i915 driver stack that needs to accommodate a mind boggling number of legacy hardware that is still in broad use, Genode's custom GPU multiplexer could do a clear cut by only supporting very recent GPUs. The result is quite reassuring. At far less than 10K of code, Genode's new user-land GPU multiplexer is able to accommodate trusted and untrusted OpenGL applications side by side. The current release features the first version of this component along with several examples.

Besides the GPU topic, the new release comes with numerous other improvements. Most noteworthy is the ability to use Genode with the seL4 kernel on the ARM and 64-bit x86 architectures. The upgraded seL4 support also enables SMP on x86, priorities, and Genode's CPU-monitoring facilities. Following up on the big infrastructural changes of the previous releases, the current release comes with gradual refinements of the VFS infrastructure, the timing accuracy, and the package-management tools. The complete picture is presented in the official release documentation.

Apple finally has something to say about net neutrality. In its first comment to the FCC about proposed upcoming rollbacks to net neutrality rules, Apple writes:

The comment's a good - albeit late - start, but it does leave some wiggle room, as it, for instance, doesn't advocate for keeping internet traffic under Title II. Apple is, at the very least, in good company, as a staggering 98.5% of all comments to the FCC were in favour of maintaining the United States' current strong net neutrality rules.