Linux Archive
The Linux 6.6 modules infrastructure is changing to better protect against the illicit behavior of NVIDIA’s proprietary kernel driver. Luis Chamberlain sent out the modules changes today for the Linux 6.6 merge window. Most notable with the modules update is a change that better builds up the defenses against NVIDIA’s proprietary kernel driver from using GPL-only symbols. Or in other words, bits that only true open-source drivers should be utilizing and not proprietary kernel drivers like NVIDIA’s default Linux driver in respecting the original kernel code author’s intent. Here’s a wild idea, NVIDIA: just release your driver code as open source.
“But does it run Linux?” can now be finally and affirmatively answered for the Commodore C64! There is a catch (rather: a couple) of course: It runs extremely slowly and it needs a RAM Expansion Unit (REU), as there is no chance to fit it all into just 64KiB. It even emulates virtual memory with an MMU. Insanity. A real C64 would take about a week (!) to boot Linux.
ZFSBootMenu is a bootloader that provides a powerful and flexible discovery, manipulation and booting of Linux on ZFS. Originally inspired by the FreeBSD bootloader, ZFSBootMenu leverages the features of modern OpenZFS to allow users to choose among multiple “boot environments” (which may represent different versions of a Linux distribution, earlier snapshots of a common root, or entirely different distributions), manipulate snapshots in a pre-boot environment and, for the adventurous user, even bootstrap a system installation via zfs recv. In essence, ZFSBootMenu is a small, self-contained Linux system that knows how to find other Linux kernels and initramfs images within ZFS filesystems. When a suitable kernel and initramfs are identified (either through an automatic process or direct user selection), ZFSBootMenu launches that kernel using the kexec command. Interesting bootloader, for sure, but I am curious to know how many people use ZFS on Linux. Are there any distributions that use ZFS by default?
CIQ, Oracle and SUSE today announced their intent to form the Open Enterprise Linux Association (OpenELA), a collaborative trade association to encourage the development of distributions compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) by providing open and free Enterprise Linux (EL) source code. The formation of OpenELA arises from Red Hat’s recent changes to RHEL source code availability. In response, CIQ, Oracle and SUSE are collaborating to deliver source code, tools and systems through OpenELA for the community. Good initiative, except for the involvement of Oracle. I understand why they are part of this endeavour, but I see Oracle as entirely antithetical to open source and everything it stands for, so seeing them weasel their way into this debate pretending to be a good guy feels unpleasant.
Have you ever wanted to do more with your phone, like setting up a Webserver or a Node.js server and running a web app directly on your phone? Or doing some coding on the go? Yes, I have too. With Termux, you can run a full Linux Desktop on your Android device, and here’s how. Even without resorting to a full X desktop, Termux is oretty great. I’m not really a terminal user, so for me it’s just for the novelty of it all, but it certainly seems to work very well on my Galaxy S21.
Alpine Linux remains one of the most popular lightweight Linux distributions built atop musl libc and Busybox. Alpine Linux has found significant use within containers and the embedded space while now sadly the most prolific maintainer of packages for the Linux distribution has decided to step down from her roles. Alice “psykose” who is easily responsible for the highest number of commits per author over the past year has decided to step down from maintaining her packages. This could be a massive hit to Alpine Linux. This distribution is definitely quite popular in its niche, and it always has way better package support than you’d expect from a small distribution like this. I wish Alice all the best, though, and hope for the project itself that the workload can be spread out among other maintainers.
We talked about Chimera Linux before – it’s a unique coupling of the Linux kernel with a FreeBSD userland, musl, the package manager from Alpine Linux, and dinit. The project recently entered the alpha stage, and while not ready for everyday use, Wesley Moore still decided to try and give it a go. So far my experience has actually been better than I expected. Since I installed it I have not rebooted back into Arch. This isn’t the first time I’ve run a desktop musl system and I was prepared to encounter incompatible software more often than I did. Flatpak really helps fill the gaps there. As the alpha announcement suggested, I have run into the odd bug here and there but for the most part the system is remarkably polished and stable. I plan to keep using it as the primary OS on my laptop, including its Framework 13 AMD replacement that should arrive Q4 2023. That’s good news. Chimera is one of the more interesting operating system projects out there, and it’s headed by the same person who used to run the Void Linux for POWER hardware project, so there’s some real pedigree here.
In case you missed it, Red Hat announced they will no longer be providing the means for downstream clones to continue to be 1:1 binary copies of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Very quickly, both Jack and I shared some initial thoughts, but we intentionally took our time deciding the next right step for AlmaLinux OS. After much discussion, the AlmaLinux OS Foundation board today has decided to drop the aim to be 1:1 with RHEL. AlmaLinux OS will instead aim to be Application Binary Interface (ABI) compatible. For a typical user, this will mean very little change in your use of AlmaLinux. Red Hat-compatible applications will still be able to run on AlmaLinux OS, and your installs of AlmaLinux will continue to receive timely security updates. The most remarkable potential impact of the change is that we will no longer be held to the line of “bug-for-bug compatibility” with Red Hat, and that means that we can now accept bug fixes outside of Red Hat’s release cycle. While that means some AlmaLinux OS users may encounter bugs that are not in Red Hat, we may also accept patches for bugs that have not yet been accepted upstream, or shipped downstream. I wonder just how much consumers care about the strict 1:1 with RHEL. With this change to AlmaLinux, we’re about to find out.
It’s been all over the news, so I can’t get around posting about it here: the year of the Linux desktop is finally here. According to the – admittedly, troublesome – figures from StatCounter, the market share of Linux on the desktop has reached 7.23%. Other publications do not count Chrome OS installations as part of the Linux share, but I think that’s nonsense – they’re both clearly Linux desktop operating systems, and should be added up. In the end, it doesn’t really matter, and I’ve mostly stopped reporting on market share figures ages ago, as all they do is invite pointless flamewars and vitriol. Linux on the desktop is doing just fine, and received a major boost thanks to Valve’s Proton. We all have our desktop platform of choice, and each of those choices is valid. Still, more than 7% on the desktop and like 90%+ on mobile is not bad for a project developed by a community.
As expected Linux 6.4 is out today as stable as an on-time release following a relatively quiet cycle the past two months. While the RC period of Linux 6.4 was relatively quiet and uneventful, that’s not to say there isn’t anything good with Linux 6.4… But in fact there’s a lot from beginning to upstream various Apple M2 support code in different drivers, AMD Guided Autonomous Mode added to their P-State driver, and a lot of other new hardware work. It’ll find its way to your distribution, or you can install or compile it yourself.
Linux on the PS3 has a pretty interesting history. If you’re familiar with the History of the PS3 you probably know that when it was first released in 2006 Sony shipped it with support to run other operating systems through a feature called OtherOS. OtherOS allowed people to install operating systems like Linux or FreeBSD on a second partition on the PS3 hard drive. In 2010 Sony removed OtherOS support in firmware 3.21 because of “security concerns” AKA some people were starting to use it to look a bit too close into the PS3 internals and figure out how to pirate games. With custom firmware it’s possible to use OtherOS on modern firmwares so that’s what we’ll be doing here. This is the continuation of part 1 about the Xbox 360.
Back in March I came home for spring break and quickly found myself motivated to do something dumb with Linux but there was an issue, all of my stuff was back in my dorm. The only thing I really had was a hard modded Xbox 360, an old monitor, and an even older keyboard. I knew what I had to do. Of course.
For years, the traditional Linux operating system has been a top pick for its flexibility and ability to be customized. But as great as it is, there are use cases in which stricter security rules and higher reliability standards are needed. That’s where immutable Linux operating systems come in – offering a more secure and reliable option, especially in settings where security is paramount. In this post, we’ll be addressing some common questions to help you understand the principles behind immutable operating systems. We’ll also be exploring the various solutions available and the challenges faced in this field. So, get ready to dive in! I’m quite interested in this concept, as I feel it might be something the desktop Linux world is slowly moving towards. There’s considerable advantages, but also the risk of making the whole system far less flexible than desktop Linux is today.
The merge request for landing the first of “many” parts of the Wayland driver for Wine was opened this morning. This is part of the effort of allowing Windows games/applications running under Wine to operate natively on Wayland rather than having to go through XWayland. Excellent work.
A keyboard, mouse, a NIC, VGA output, 16MB of RAM and a whole gig (you wish) of read-only optical drive space with a 200MHz Hitachi SuperH SH-4 CPU faulting its paltry 8K of I-cache and 16K of D-cache non-stop. Now freshly refurbished, its cooling fan runs louder than my Power Mac Quad G5 at idle and the drive makes more disk seeking noise than when I can’t find a lost floppy. And since the buzzword with Linux distros today is immutability, what could be more immutable than an ephemeral, desperately undersized RAM disk overlaid on a live CD? i want a DreamCast.
It’s been many years since Intel Itanium processors made a convincing story and faced a slow demise over the past decade. While the last of the Itanium 9700 “Kittson” processors shipped in 2021, just two years later now the Linux kernel is already looking at possibly seeing its IA-64 support removed over having no maintainers or apparent users. I have a morbid curiosity when it comes to Itanium, and I’ve been on the lookout for an Itanium workstation for two decades now. This is the first time where one of these “Linux to deprecate some old unused architecture” posts might actually affect me at some point, and I’m outraged. Outraged, I tell you!
Our mobile Internet Service Provider (ISP) has a bundle where they provide a 4G modem for internet access, and a separate TV set-top box that can be used to watch their TV content or to watch streaming services. This device was sent to us as part of the bundle, but at Zeus, we don’t really have a use for it: we don’t really watch television in our space. What we do have a need for, however, are low-power computers that can run Linux. In this blog post, we will hack this set-top box to run Linux instead of Android TV. Just some good ol’ fashioned hackery for the weekend. You’ll need a soldering iron.
Vanilla OS has released its first version. Vanilla OS is an immutable desktop Linux distribution that brings some interesting new technologies to the table, such as the Apx package manager. By default, Apx provides a container based on your Linux distribution (Ubuntu 22.10 for Vanilla OS 22.10) and wraps all commands from the distribution’s package manager (apt for Ubuntu). Nevertheless, you can install packages from other package distributions. For example, using the --aur flag, a new container based on Arch Linux will be created. Here, apx will manage the packages from the AUR (Pacman and yay), tightly integrating them with the host system. Using the --dnf flag with apx will create a new container based on Fedora Linux. Here, apx will manage packages from Fedora’s DNF repository, tightly integrating them with the host system. Another tentpole technology is ABRoot, which brings atomicity to this distribution. Atomicity is the ability to perform a specific operation in a way where if it fails, nothing will be changed and if it succeeds, the changes will be applied in their entirety. ABRoot achieves this by transacting between 2 root file systems: A and B. Let’s make an example. Let’s say you want to install a new package. ABRoot will check which partition is the present root partition (i.e A), then it will mount an overlay on top of it and perform the transaction. If the transaction succeeds, the overlay will be merged with the future root partition (i.e B). On your next boot, the system will automatically switch to the new root partition (B). In case of failure, the overlay will be discarded and the system will boot normally, without any changes to either partition. Vanilla OS looks incredibly interesting, and I’m definitely keeping an eye on it.
A rant about “year of Linux on the desktop” from a tired old man. I’ve been part of the Linux community since before Linux was called Linux. Over the years there’s been many people telling me directly that Linux is silly or wrong or imperfect, or that free and open source software is foolish or pointless. A lot more people have, of course, pontificated along those lines in public, and not directed it at me. I’m not claiming to be targeted at that, but I’ve been around and active for long enough that things accumulate. It’s the end of a long year for me, and I though I’d let off some steam myself. Hence this rant. Over time, the goal posts of success keep being moved by the naysayers. I’m too tired to dig up all important milestones and dates, or references, but here’s highlights of the timeline as I have experienced it (years may be a little off). The most popular operating system in the world by a huge margin, and yet, it still gets ridiculed by users of platforms that still have to manually install drivers and update applications by hand while getting spied on left, right, and centre. Strange times we live in.
This week I received a new 12th Gen Intel laptop from Framework. And like with any new piece of hardware I get these days, my first instinct was to put NixOS on it. But I wasn’t just content with firing up the NixOS installer and getting to work. Oh no no no. You see, I knew there was a better way. I didn’t now exactly what that better way looked like just yet, but I could feel in my bones that it existed. So I did what I usually do when I suspect there’s a better way of doing something in Nix land and pinged Mic92. What you’ll read in the rest of this post is the result of our conversations. NixOS seems incredibly cool, but at the same time, it also seems obtuse and complex, and like any Linux system, it has its share of problems, too. I’m just not entirely sure if it’s of any value to most regular desktop Linux users, or if it is almost exclusively aimed at developers. Since NixOS seems to be popping up in comments all over the web, I’m trying to keep an eye on it and understand what, exactly, it offers over competing products.
