Monthly Archive:: May 2024
Qualcomm’s Adreno 6xx architecture has been superseded Adreno 7xx, but it’s still used in countless devices, including the current-gen Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3. Here, I’ll be looking at the Adreno 640 GPU in the Snapdragon 855. Zarif98 on Reddit kindly provided a OnePlus 7 Pro, and I’ll be using that to check out Adreno 640. Compared to the older Snapdragon 821’s Adreno 530, Adreno 640 dramatically increases compute throughput while still working within a very constrained power and thermal envelope. Process node improvements help, and TSMC’s 7 nm process should be far better than the 14 nm Samsung node used in the Snapdragon 821. But cell phone SoC constraints meant Qualcomm couldn’t go around copy-pasting basic GPU building blocks and call it a day. ↫ Chips and Cheese Chips and Cheese with another deep dive.
Years of accumulated security debt at Microsoft are seemingly crashing down upon the company in a manner that many critics warned about, but few ever believed would actually come to light. Microsoft is an entrenched enterprise provider, owning nearly one-quarter of the global cloud infrastructure services market and, as of Q1 last year, nearly 20% of the worldwide SaaS application market, according to Synergy Research Group. Though not immune to scandal, in the wake of two major nation-state breaches of its core enterprise platforms, Microsoft is facing one of its most serious reputational crises. ↫ David Jones at Cybersecurity Dive It’s almost like having the entire US government dependent on a single vendor is a bad idea. Just spitballing here.
With 14.9, Vanguard, Riot’s proprietary Anti-Cheat system will be deployed and active in League of Legends. This means that active enforcement of Vanguard will be in effect and working hard to make sure your queues are free from scripters, botters, and cheaters! We recently released a blog detailing the “why” behind bringing Vanguard to League that you can check out here. It’s a bit of a long read, but it does have some pictures. ↫ Lilu Cabreros in the League of Legends patch notes The basic gist is that Vanguard is a closed-source, kernel-level rootkit for Windows that runs at all times, with the supposed goal of detecting and banning cheaters from playing League of Legends. This being a rootkit designed specifically to inject itself into the Windows kernel, it won’t work on Linux, and as such, the entire League on Linux community, which has been playing League for years now and even at times communicated with Riot employees to keep the game running, is now gone. Interestingly enough, Riot is not implementing Vanguard on macOS, which League of Legends also supports – because Apple simply doesn’t allow it. This is probably the most invasive, disturbing form of anticheat we’ve seen so far, especially since it involves such a hugely popular game. It’s doubly spicy because Riot Games is owned by Tencent, a Chinese company, which means a company owned and controlled by the Chinese government now has rootkits installed on the roughly 150 million players’ computers all over the world. While we’re all (rightly, in my opinion) worried about TikTok, China just slipped 150 million rootkits onto computers all over the world. One really has to wonder where these increasingly invasive, anti-privacy and anti-user anticheat measures are going from here. Now that this rootkit can keep tabs on literally every single thing you do on your Windows computer, what’s going to be the next step? Anticheat might have to move towards using webcams to watch you play to prevent you from cheating, because guess what? The next level of cheating is already here, and it doesn’t even involve your computer. Earlier this year, hardware maker MSI showed off a gaming monitor that uses “AI” to see what’s going on on your monitor, and then injects overlays onto your monitor to help you cheat. MSI showed off how the monitor will use the League of Legends minimap to follow enemy champions and other relevant content, and then show warnings on your screen when enemies approach from off-screen. All of this happens entirely on the monitor’s hardware, and never sends any data whatsoever to the computer it’s attached to. It’s cheating that literally cannot be detected by anything running on your computer, rootkit or not. So, the only logical next step as such forms of cheating become more advanced and widespread is to force users to turn on their webcams, and point them at their displays. I fired up League of Legends today on my gaming computer – which runs Linux, of course – and after the League client “installed” the rootkit, it just got stuck in an endless loop of asking me to restart the client. I’ve been playing League of Legends for close to 14 years, and while I know the game – and especially its community – has a deservedly so bad reputation, I’ve always enjoyed the game with friends, and especially with my wife, who’s been playing for years and years as well. Speaking of my wife – even though she runs Windows and could easily install the rootkit if she wanted to, she has some serious doubts about this. When I explained what the Vanguard rootkit can do, her mouse pointer slowly moved away from the “Update” button, saying, “I’m not so sure about this…”
Anyone who has spent any time recently using non-GNOME GTK desktop environments, like Cinnamon, MATE, or Xfce, has had to deal with the unfortunate reality of a lot of GTK applications becoming GNOME applications instead, using GNOME’s own libadwaita. These applications are hard to theme, and do not integrate at all with the proper GTK applications non-GNOME desktop environments ship with. With how popular GNOME is, this has meant that the number of non-GNOME GTK applications has been dwindling. Linux Mint, the popular Linux distribution that also develops the Cinnamon desktop environment, has long made a bundle of GTK applications called XApps – basically forks of various core GNOME 3.x applications to ensure they would have access to non-GNOME GTK applications. With GNOME effectively forking GTK into its own, unique, GNOME-specific style (like libaidwaita), other GTK environments have suffered, and XApps were intended to close that gap. That hasn’t really happened though, as XApps remained mostly a Mint-only thing, managed by Mint, as part of the Mint/Cinnamon GitHub projects. Other distributions and GTK desktop environments, such as Xfce, MATE, Budgie, and so on, didn’t really pick them up. The Linux Mint project intends to change that, and will ‘spin off’ the XApps into its own, dedicated, independent project to facilitate cross-distribution and cross-DE collaboration, decision-making and development, all in an effort to ensure the long-term viability of non-GNOME GTK desktop environments. They also intend to fork a lot more of the GNOME 3 applications, for the same reason I mentioned earlier: GNOME applications are no longer GTK applications, but GNOME applications – they look and feel horribly out of place in environments that don’t use the GNOME-specific libadwaita. As such, Celluloid, GNOME Calculator, Simple Scan, Baobab, System Monitor, GNOME Calendar, File Roller, and Zenity were recently downgraded in Linux Mint to their last GTK 3 versions, and will most likely be forked in the near future. In addition, the Adwaita theme, the default GNOME/GTK theme, will be removed from the list of available themes in Cinnamon 6.2. Adwaita, too, has become increasingly GNOME-only, and thus, increasingly broken on non-GNOME desktop environments. Flat-our removing Adwaita altogether is not possible, since it’s a GTK dependency, but hiding it from the theme selector is not an issue, of course. As project lead Clément Lefèbvre writes: libAdwaita is for GNOME and GNOME only. We can’t blame GNOME for this, they’ve been very clear about it from the start. It was made specifically for GNOME to have more freedom and build its own ecosystem without impacting GTK. We want to send a strong signal upstream and towards other projects. We cannot and will not support applications which do not support our users and environments. We can’t promote applications to our users which don’t support our users. The software manager will be vigilant towards that going forward and list compatible software by default. ↫ Clément Lefèbvre All of this is great news to hear. I’ve been making extensive use of Xfce on OpenBSD lately, and on the Fedora Xfce spin in the weeks before that, and the situation has become almost comical. If you install any GNOME application on Xfce, theming just breaks down completely, as most themes are either not made to support the massive headerbars GNOME uses, or they do support it but still look horribly out of place compared to the more sane titlebar plus menubar plus toolbar layout of traditional desktop environments like Xfce. I’ve long been saying that the non-GNOME GTK desktop environments need to work together to formulate an answer to the onslaught of libadwaita and the GNOME-ification of GTK, because each of them risks becoming entirely tied to whatever GNOME and libadwaita decides to do, for better or worse. It seems the Linux Mint team has finally realised this as well, and I really hope – and strongly suggest – Xfce, MATE, and others join them as well. If they don’t, there won’t be an Xfce in a few years. What’s the point in developing Xfce if you’re at the mercy of whatever choices GNOME makes?
Another month, another detailed report about the progress made in Redox, the Rust-based operating system. A major improvements this month is support for USB HID, allowing USB keyboards and mice to work on Redox, but the project does note USB hubs are still problematic and might not work properly. Thanks to these USB improvements, Redox’ desktop environment Orbital now also ran on ARM64 in Qemu for the first time, which is a great step towards running it on real ARM64 hardware. A massive documentation pass has also taken place, fixing various errors and improving and simplifying the writing. More programs have been ported, of course, and various lower-level improvements and fixes, along with a number of other fixes and changes across the operating system.
