Untitled Linux Show 173 Transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.
 

00:00 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Hey, this week we're talking gaming, but on the M1 running Linux. Then we talk about Linux apps on Android. We get a quick talk about Thunderbird on Android, then NVIDIA playing nice with Wayland, oh, and the big release of Ubuntu 2410, and lots more. You don't want to miss it, so stay tuned. Podcasts you love.

00:21 - David Ruggles (Co-host)
From people you trust. This is Twit.

00:28 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
This is the Untitled Linux Show, episode 173, recorded Saturday, october the 12th. Nobody gnomes. Hey folks, it is Saturday, it's time to get geeky with Linux, open source, probably some gaming and I don't know who knows what all else. Before the show, we were talking about 3d printing and all sorts of fun stuff. It's the untitled linux show and it is a lot of fun. It is, of course, not just me. We've got rob, we've got david, we've got jeff.

00:55
Ken worked a ridiculous number of hours and is off trying to sleep right now. Best of luck to him for that, and we'll have ken back, I'm sure, in a week or two. Uh, but guys, welcome. Good to be here, happy to be here. Yeah, it is time to talk linux, and, uh, I saw a tweet this uh this week, and it was kind of funny, because somebody says um, something on linux on. You know, mac is now officially running native. It's like you're running that inside of Wine. That's not exactly native anymore. This is sort of the same thing, though, isn't it, rob? There's some interesting things going on in the M1, m2 world with running Linux on Macs.

01:39 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yes. So in my own social media feed I often see an ad for Parallels Desktop on the new M1, m2 Macs and the ad shows a sad person that can't run games on their Mac and then it shows a happy person because now they can run games on their Mac with Parallels. I think the headline is something about now you can run Windows games on on your Mac. And often, often, I go on those comments because I'm a troll like that and I and I put no, I'm good, I just install Linux, I can run games on my Mac, just fine. Well, in all honesty, I don't have Linux running on a Mac yet because I haven't been donated enough money to get a Mac to put Linux on. But although nobody has ever called me out on the comment that I put on there, I forget about the part that the new Macs are ARM and Windows games run great on Linux. Linux on arm is another issue to overcome. But you know we shared rumors recently. I know a couple episodes I want to say it is that it sounded like valve was working on just this problem. So so this week it appears maybe Valve wasn't the only ones working on this. So, although this big solution uses Steam. I'm not seeing any credits mentioned on their involvement on this.

03:23
What I did see is Alyssa Rosenswing. We haven't talked about Asahi for a while, but Alyssa, she's one of the developers of that Mainly. I think she does a lot of the graphics work on the Asahi Linux, which, being the Linux distro made to run on the M1 M2 Max. So anyway, she posted this week that on the Fedora Asahi Remix for the m1 m2 max. So anyway, she posted this week that on the fedora asahi remix for the m1 m2 max, you can now play windows games with linux on steam, you know, but this must be kind of difficult, right? That's at least what all the commenters on the previous story I said all right, you know we talked about it said. It's like yeah, but if you think doing dnf install steam is hard, then yes, I guess it is, but it is really just as easy as it is. It is on any other linux distro. Apparently it works well, maybe, maybe one of the only caveats I saw on there is that you are going to want at least 16 gigabytes of RAM to do it. So the open source Honeycrisp Vulcan driver for Apple Silicon M1 and M2 within Mesa and related work as part of the Asahi Linux project provides a nice Linux gaming experience atop the ARM-based Apple devices At least that's what Ulysses says. And, as the rumor was for Valve testing on ARM, asahi is also using FX, that's F-E-X, as the translation layer from x86-64 to ARM. So the stack goes FEX emulates x86 on ARM, then WINE translates Windows into Linux and then DXVK and VKD3D-Proton translates DirectX to Vulcan.

05:26
So I know, when we shared the Valve story, I thought this was early days and early testing and it would be quite a while before we actually saw some benefits. I know we had some discussion on the show and I think maybe I said this year or next year's, some people said years out, I don't remember. Um, there were people on on the forums that said 10 years maybe, and in my defense was you know, it doesn't matter if it works great today, it's the start. But you know, I think I think we really underestimated the technology, you know, and the person person's comments saying you know it was months away, I think. I think the most optimistic, optimistic person was saying it was months away and I think it was even closer than they thought. So that's, you know, they've got it going on the, the m1s m2s sounds like it works pretty smooth and pretty slick, even with all those layers there. So I I think our arm feature is upon us yeah, that is.

06:38 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
That is, uh, really quite impressive. Um, something related that comes to mind. You know there's a video by Jeff Geerling just recently where he slapped a big full-sized video card onto a Raspberry Pi, the Pi 5 because it's got that exposed PCI Express port on it. You could do some fun things with that. I'll make sure and grab that URL and we'll throw in the show notes. Yeah, it's, it's really coming along to where you can. You can do some pretty interesting things. Um, yeah, it's real fascinating. And the thing that I love most about this is the linux support is better for the max gpu than the max support is. Yep, apple's like no, we can't make OpenGL, whatever 4.3 work on that, it's never going to happen. And yeah, it totally works with the Linux drivers. It's just hilarious to me.

07:38 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Well, we talked about Mac, came out with their we're going to support gaming more and kind of went okay, here's some uh documentation, you guys take care of it. And yeah, they didn't really do much themselves other than say have a good time, you know well, I mean what?

07:55 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
what they did is? They said we're going to support gaming more so long as people use metal, and nobody. And nobody used the Metal Gear API. It's broken. Now it's really different.

08:09 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
That is a big difference between Linux, windows and macOS. Windows makes their thing, apple makes their thing, and then they expect people to use their thing. Linux makes their thing, and since a lot of people aren't their thing, linux makes their thing. And since a lot of people aren't going to make stuff work for them, linux makes things work for them. You don't see Mac making other people's stuff work for them, or even Windows doing that. I mean kind of I guess with WSL and stuff like that, but kind of Kind of, kind of of uh, fun, fun, fun.

08:52 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
All right. Well, let's uh continue on the video card and a gaming train and chat about nvidia, and I guess, specifically, we're talking wayland on nvidia and nvidia onland. I'm not sure which way you would say that, jeff. What's new?

09:07 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Well in Montreal this week at the XORG Developers Conference, also known as XDC 2024, which is taking place right now, and at the conference NVIDIA shared a roadmap outlining their plans for Wayland and encouraged Wayland compositors to target the Vulkan API. Austin Schaefer and James Jones, who are part of the NVIDIA Linux team, presented on some of their recent Wayland driver features, namely explicit sync support, and they also shared slides on the future direction of the NVIDIA Linux driver. Now, the presentation was rather short as it only encompassed four informational slides. I'm not counting the intro and exit slides that are, you know, cover letters and whatnot. So, but you know they had, they had a few slides. The first slide covered recent features and fixes for the year in review and they said explicit sync has finally landed and both gl native and x whalen vulcan are supported. Additionally, they brought up that egl is on x whalen and they mentioned that hdr color accuracy fixes are on the way. So they specifically mentioned they're continuing to work on reported issues and you know so it's, it's good news. They're at least dedicated to squishing bugs and trying to drive things forward. The next slide was a roadmap slide where they went over the upcoming work. They want to ramp up their internal Wayland testing to have a better quality product when it ships. They're looking to support the upstream HDR color pipeline, drm UAPI, and they noted that the upstream proposal has limitations that conflict with NVIDIA hardware. So you know that is a little bit of a problem but it doesn't seem like a complete showstopper. And they did mention the DRM HDR. Vendor properties will be exposed soon. So more to come there. It just might come a little slower than we hope just because of those hardware restrictions. They are also interested in internal display muxing on Wayland. But they know compositors need to support multi-GPU scan out to implement display muxing and additionally they're looking to enable the NVIDIA DRM FDB dev equals one and the mode set equals one kernel module parameters by default. So no more having to go into your boot command and set some of those to make things work right.

11:40
The third slide covered problems encountered or pain points during the development. The third slide covered problems encountered or pain points during the development. One issue was with remote desktop usage. They mentioned that the ease of use is very compositor dependent and the use case they listed was, you know, a fully remote. You know, launch a session on a physical display locally and get remote access. The second major pain point was window management controls, which included things like automated window resizing, minimizing, maximizing, things like that.

12:12
These features are either not very easy or possible to implement and they did suggest potential solutions such as YDO tool or KDO tool, but they've also questioned whether there's actually a need for this in the community. They want to ensure they're focusing on what users actually want and not wasting time on unnecessary features that nobody actually cares about, and to that point, the final slide asked for feedback. They specifically inquired about which missing features would you like to see supported and what issues impact your experience currently on Wayland. They also request people either reach out and provide feedback, either in person at the XDC conference there's four actual people there from NVIDIA or on the NVIDIA forums, so they want to hear what's important, what's most groundbreaking or most impactful, so they can make sure they're working on that.

13:08
First, take a look at the article linked in the show notes. There are more details I didn't go over and there's a link to the slides they presented, along with a PDF linked in there, where they explain why Vulkan is so much better to focus on than OpenGL. They really want to put everything to Vulkan is so much better to focus on than OpenGL. They really want to put everything to Vulkan and I'll be honest, I like where the future of Linux graphics is going. I mean, I think it's really becoming a lot better and really starting to mature.

13:37 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, there's a couple of interesting things in there. I too like that everything is going Vulkan. It seems like it's a much simpler and more powerful way to do things than any of the other options. Yeah, the one thing is Go ahead.

13:53
I was just going to say I find it interesting that NVIDIA is talking about HDR on Wayland. It kind of makes me think that maybe we're getting closer to that being a little more official. You know, right now the only way to get HDR on on wayland is to run kde and that's their frog protocol. We talked about this a little bit in the past. You know that the frog protocols are now sort of becoming the official, unofficial staging thing from wayland. Uh, hopefully we're going to start seeing things. This is another one of those times where valve stepped in and sort of kicked some people on the pants and said let's get this done a little bit better than we're doing it. So hopefully that will. With NVIDIA on board, that'll happen, it'll be a thing, and then maybe even Google Chrome will support it. Like that's the big part that's missing right now to have a good HDR experience.

14:39 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Well, and I think really, if you look at it. So for those who who don't know, vulcan is a much lower level api than open gl. So just totally made up example is kind of open gl says, oh, make a cube this size and put it on the screen, where vulcan you've got to, for example, draw each line. I mean, it's not not actually real, but I mean that's kind of a way you can think about it. But it's also a lot more universal. If you can write something in vulcan, well, windows can handle vulcan, linux can handle vulcan, mac I don't know what they're up to, but you know a lot. A lot of stuff is supporting vulcan and it simplifies things. And then a lot of times developers like it because they can really have a lot of very fine grain control to try to optimize their experience that they're giving to the user. It just is a little harder because you got to know a little more what you're doing.

15:42 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah. So we've got an interesting thought here and this this sort of struck me. It's uh, from one of our discord users search strip. It says I expect a native xbox gaming for linux in the near future to compete with steam and interesting. That's quite the thought. I don't. Um, I it makes a certain amount of sense. Um, what do you think? Are we going to see an Xbox handheld running Linux at some point?

16:10 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I think Microsoft would team up with Steam because they've already got the infrastructure, they get some licensing fees and some advertising money and there's less work they have to do.

16:20 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
It is Microsoft we're talking about, though.

16:22 - David Ruggles (Co-host)
Yeah, and they've got a lot invested in their Xbox branding yeah, but they're already transitioning Xbox away from the console.

16:34 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I don't know if he's talking about having a handheld or another console that's based on Linux. My interpretation at least you can correct me is that he means like, uh, kind of like how you can, how you can, have xbox on your windows desktop. Now you know they have their xbox software. You're not actually playing the console games, but I suspect he means more as in xbox software running on your linux desktop playing their games.

17:06 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, but that then allows you to run it on the Steam Deck as well, and all of those things. Oh, sure. It's just an interesting thought to me that well, maybe Microsoft's going to want to get in on this with the Xbox.

17:19 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
And that's a native. But you can already do Xbox Cloud streaming on Linux desktop or on the Steam Deck. I already tested it. It worked really well on the Steam Deck and it felt native, even though it's actually really going through a web browser.

17:38 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Wow, impressive.

17:40 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Well and I've even talked to some people at work. We've talked about Linux going or Microsoft kind of adopting Linux so they don't have to do so much development. And somebody said well, what about you know all the legacy stuff that they need to run? Well, why wouldn't you have Microsoft branded Linux? I mean, they put their nice shiny template over the top and for the actual windows code they just run it in a container and it's an isolated little thing when actually most of the underlying operating system is based on linux. I mean similar to like what mac did, where it's unix. But they just put a shiny front end over the top and and then microsoft can say we can, we can take all these developers for the kernel and just have them work on cloud and stuff and ai stuff and we let the community handle the operating system.

18:30 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Or you know, we keep a quarter of the developers around for that right, they could just make their version of wine or or help contribute to wine, and then, once they got their legacy covered, they can move to the future and just be linux.

18:47 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
But yeah I mean it wouldn't be unprecedented for microsoft to use an existing open source software stack for part of their kernel. I mean that's where the windows nt uh network driver came from pretty much got lifted from one of the bsds, right that's, that's a real thing, that's not just a conspiracy theory. I think at this point that was actually confirmed at some point. I think yeah fact, check me on that guys, let me know. I think that's accurate.

19:15 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I I'm, I'm 99 sure you're correct in that they kind of got caught with their pants down. But then then I think it was like well, but now we don't use it. It's it got rewritten or something, and yeah, uh, that sounds right.

19:30 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
That's. That's been a while ago it's all linux underneath that's why they won't open source it. Oh, it's a unique system, I know this yeah.

19:42 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
But I mean, if you, if you think about it, it's actually a good, money-saving business plan to redirect your resources to higher value IP, because at this point Windows is pretty saturated. They're not going to grow their market share. They've already lost in the server and the big industrial sectors. It's like, okay, we're just changing the colors and redesigning a few things. What if we didn't have to do all that? We had it underneath and for legacy we have a little container and then we don't even have to worry about security as much because it's contained in that.

20:17 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
That container, whatever you know, like a docker or whatever, whatever the cool kids containerize these days yeah, uh, we are getting comments saying that the uh, this is what I just saw you searching on the internet. Apparently the deck alpha guys developed a lot of windows nt and they did borrow a lot from unix at the time. So fun, uh, fun stuff. Some interesting history there.

20:43 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Let's go j ahead. We're either one that said the nt kernel was actually could be unix if they actually would have.

20:50 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
It's like missing one feature, two features that, yeah, so officially branded as unix it is, I, I think, the only thing and this has been a long time ago, somebody said this, but I think it's fairly accurate um, windows nt is unix compatible, except for the way the fork system call works, but other than that, which is why you can take a, a piece of unix code. You can take, you know, c or c plus plus code written for linux and you can cross compile it on windows using, you know, something like sigwin, and it just works. You get an actual windows binary. It's Windows using something like SigWin and it just works. You get an actual Windows binary. It's because there are a lot of those pieces that are compatible, that are there. So, yeah, some interesting shared history there.

21:36
But this is not the Untitled Windows show, this is the Untitled Linux show. What are we doing talking so much about Windows here? Let's talk about Linux. Let's talk about Enterprise Linux and David's going to take it away and tell us about rocky linux and, uh, apparently, the cost of a support contract.

21:51 - David Ruggles (Co-host)
Yes, yes, so um, I've got a link to an article from the register about ciq, um and they have unveiled a version of rocky lin backed by service-level objectives indemnities for enterprises requiring more than the support of an enthusiastic community behind an operating system they also have. So their service-level objectives are around remediation of CVEs and security updates. Level objectives are around remediation of cves and security updates. The legal indemnification protects against potential infringement claims related to open software and the distribution of supply chain validation for packages.

22:36
But the interesting thing I find about this article is the fact that it is 2525,000 a year and Rocky is one of the competitors to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. So I was like dang, that's a lot of change. How does that compare to RHEL? So I actually have a second link there to Red Hat's the closest thing I could find to this Not just physical metal, bare metal machines, but like virtual machine servers before it would make sense to take this over just going with RHEL directly. Some of the other points that they make which I think are interesting is they're saying it as a positive. They mentioned that Open ELA. When I say they CIQ, and their press release mentions Open ELA, ciq, oracle and SUSE joining forces to ensure a stable and resilient future for indicate just continued fracturing in the enterprise Linux ecosystem since Red Hat, you know, did what they did with CentOS and everything. So hey, support is out there if you're willing to pay for it. It's not cheap, but there are a lot of options.

24:21 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, now it is important to note that with Rocky and CIQ, this is not a per-machine license, this is not a per-core, this is a flat rate.

24:32 - David Ruggles (Co-host)
Yes, which is why around 100 machines or so, yeah, and it's definitely cheaper. So if you're huge, this is a heck of a lot cheaper.

24:43 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Which actually kind of makes sense, because you probably don't need this unless you're that big right. This isn't necessarily even specifically about support, so much as it is the indemnification and all that stuff like this. This is sort of rocky, saying we take the, the legal burden, instead of you having to take it. Um, there's some. There's some interesting things sort of legally wrapped up in that.

25:07 - David Ruggles (Co-host)
Yeah, and it's definitely on the legal side, because this $25,000 price tag does not include support.

25:15 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
It is just $25,000 support contract asterisk Does not actually include support.

25:24 - David Ruggles (Co-host)
Support is available separately, which also, you know, is press release. Speak for add additional cost.

25:31 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Oh, of course. So what kind of legal stuff? I mean what?

25:39 - David Ruggles (Co-host)
It's the situation you get into where somebody like Oracle comes out and says hey, that's my code that you're running on that server. Here's a bill for every instance of every core you're running. And you can say no, I got this from CIQ. You go talk to them.

25:58 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, that is the sort of thing it is. It sounds like there's some other things baked into that, like CVE stuff.

26:06 - David Ruggles (Co-host)
They're going to do better support for it. They're guaranteeing a responsiveness and remediation for CVEs and getting security updates out and things like that.

26:16 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
So this is for a big business, this is for enterprise actually it is specifically for enterprise and this is for an enterprise that does not want to use software that is free. We're not talking about the open source sort of freedom, not freedom sort of free, but beer sort of free. You've got some enterprises that that's just not okay. They've got to have a contract. They've got to have a contract that they enter into to be able to run something, and so this is what that is for.

26:42 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I'm just surprised support's not there too. But uh, you know, jeff. Jeff made a good point in the discord. For anybody who wants me to get the support contract contract, it will be 5 000 coffees per year per year. Per year so 500 a month will get me well more than enough 500 a month will get me well more than enough.

27:09 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, yeah, just just to put the uh kind of the exclamation mark on this. If you look at that and go 25 000, it's that month. It's not for you. If that, if that cost surprises you, it's not for you, it's not for me enterprise.

27:21 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Depending on the size, some of that would be lost in the noise. Oh, absolutely, amount of their. Their power bill doesn't even begin. 25 000 wouldn't even begin to cover just their power bill per month.

27:33 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah yeah, yeah, oh. Can you imagine running a data center? How much their power bill like the my power bill at my house with my three computers that run all the time is ridiculous. Oh, I don't want to even think about a full-on data center.

27:46 - David Ruggles (Co-host)
It's got to be well, I I think if you're just want a quick, uh, matter of scale. Um, microsoft has entered into a 20-year contract that's been up a nuclear reactor for their data center that's awesome, there we go, yes I realize that that's a segue into microsoft yet again, so you can go research that on your own time.

28:10 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
But yeah, it's funny, david, don't go rob on us yes, that's right.

28:16 - David Ruggles (Co-host)
I'm not replacing rob today. I'm replacing ken.

28:18 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I'm sorry, yeah yeah, um, just you know, if you, if you're at all curious. Now it doesn't directly apply because they get industrial rates, but you're probably looking at 10 to 50 plus megawatts of power in a data center.

28:35 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I mean just just gigawatts, is that?

28:39 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
point five.

28:41 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
So not enough to run the DeLorean.

28:43 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Not enough. Not enough, but I mean, if you want to just know the scale of you know and there's bigger and smaller, but I mean that gives you at least a power of 10 type thing, that the kind of power you're looking at and not counting what you have to cool and all the other support stuff to go with it.

29:08 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
That's strictly for the, for the machines. Yeah, yeah, all right, rob, let's talk about android. Android is linux. Android is about to become a little bit more linux, isn't it? In some ways, I I think I might be excited about this. I've you know, I've run termux for the longest time and, uh, sounds like android is getting in on that game. Well, we'll see how you feel when I'm done.

29:31 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
So I mean, even for those who don't use Chrome OS, it was still beneficial for Linux users. When Chrome OS began supporting running Linux apps, it meant there's more reason to develop for Linux users. When Chrome OS began supporting running Linux apps, you know, meant there's more reason to develop for Linux. But you know, and also I mean that's pretty amazing, isn't it? Just just stop and think about that Chrome OS. It runs on Linux and they were able to support running Linux apps. That's a pretty awesome, I think. But the the popularity of Chrome OS that alone gave Linux app developers more reason to develop for Linux, as it helped the Linux desktop market to something like triple in size. I want to say so. Now Google is planning to do it again. They are going to bring Linux apps to another OS of theirs that is based on Linux and can't run Linux apps today. So obviously I am talking about Android that Jonathan mentioned at the top of the show.

30:42
Engineers at Google began work on a new terminal app for Android a couple of weeks ago as part of the Android virtualization framework and contains a web view that connects to a Linux virtual machine via local IP, and this would allow you to run Linux commands from the Android host. It actually sounds a lot like uh termux to me so far. Uh, so a patch. This week to the android source code or the open source android that is added a new developer option called linux terminal on and it's under settings, system developer options. So right now it sounds like installing Debian still appears to Debian or some other distro, I guess a bit of a manual process.

31:32
From what I read. They plan to improve that and although much of this is early days and much of this can already be done with thermux, you know, like I said, this sounds very similar. If google gets serious about this and builds the support right into the system to be more, to be more than it is today, you know, maybe we could see some tighter integration. You know, just Just getting a little effects on here, you know, and we'll be playing Windows desktop games on our Android phones before you know it.

32:19 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
So one of the things that's different between this and Termux is this is actually running like a full on virtual machine, whereas Termux is just a. It's basically containerization, right. So every everything that runs on android is is very heavily sandboxed, but it does not run in individual virtual machines, whereas they're talking about making this an actual vm, um, which is, which is pretty fascinating. Uh, and apparently this is coming for android tablets. From one thing, the article mentioned that it has been tested there with the Pixel tablet, so maybe Google is thinking about wouldn't it be nice if we had a desktop mode for these Android tablets? And they're going to use Debian to make it happen. I don't know, maybe. And they're going to use Debian to make it happen. I don't know, maybe.

33:09 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
It sounds like it's a little bit further off than, say, running Windows games on an M1, M2 Mac. But, like I said, I think it's early days and just seeing a start in this direction could be a potentially good future, as long as they don't throw it against the wall and decide to abandon it. But they seem to keep a lot of things with Android and Chrome OS, I guess, kind of.

33:39 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah. So a couple more thoughts about this. First off, the timing suggests that it could show up in Android 16. Now it may be hidden. You may have to go and tap the kernel version five times and then turn developer mode on and then be able to turn this on.

33:54
Um, but the the guy is reading the tea leaves. It seems like android 16 is where this would land. Uh, and then one of the other interesting things that that comes to my mind is they're putting it in aosp, the android open source project, and that means that it's going to be there by default in a whole bunch of different devices. So this could, this could become quite ubiquitous, like it could just be in all the devices by default, which is really pretty interesting. I think that's uh, I think that's pretty neat that it's going to be there.

34:25
And then you know, you kind of hope at least my thought, my hope with this is do they then make? Do they make it accessible to apps? So you could, you could even imagine so, like when you, when you set up wsl, uh on windows, you go to the microsoft store and you download a linux distro through the store and it does it. Well, that then makes me think well, is there a possible future where you go to the google play store and you download a linux distro for your phone? Uh, it's definitely not impossible. I could definitely see that being a thing. Uh, that's a pretty cool idea. So I I do find this exciting. I think it's really cool. We shall see we can.

35:06 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah right there alongside all their third-party stores are going to have to allow now. Yeah yeah, see this week in Google for that story.

35:21 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Just so long as we make Apple provide for third-party stores as well, I will be okay with it.

35:28 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I have opinions on that one, but anyway I'm just gonna say that is super disappointing that they ruled one way with apple and then the other way with google the one that's actually a problem. They ignored the fact that with, with, with, uh, with google, I mean, you can already sideload and all that stuff there's. You can sideload a story. Yeah, can already sideload and all that stuff.

35:49 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
There is absolutely no way you can sideload a third-party store really trivially on Android, yeah, anyway. Anyway, speaking of Android, this would be a great place to talk about Thunderbird on Android. So I am now running Thunderbird on Android, which means I am running two copies of K9 Mail on Android. We talked about this a long time ago. This has been in development for a long time, so the folks at Mozilla decided that they wanted an official Thunderbird Mail client for Android and, rather than build their own from scratch, they found K9, which was an open source email client, and they came to an agreement with the author of k9, the people that owned it, and k9, they said, was going to become thunderbird. Uh, that's actually a thing now, and there is a thunderbird for android beta that you can go out and get a hold of, and, uh, you know, it's not bad. Like it works pretty well. It works about like k9 did, with a little bit of a different theme to it.

36:54
Um, my, my one annoyance that it only will show nine new emails at a time in your notifications is still there, and so that's sort of an interesting experience, you know. So you swipe down, you got your notifications, you have nine new emails okay, well, I don't care about this one. Swipe this one to the notifications. You have nine new emails. Okay, well, I don't care about this one. Swipe this one to the side. Pop, you have nine new emails. Swipe, pop, swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe. You have nine new emails. K9 and Thunderbird both do it, so hopefully they'll fix that eventually, because it's annoying. But other than that, it's really it's a pretty good experience and, yeah, I am running it and I like it.

37:32 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I thought it was just all the spam you were getting every time you deleted one and a new one came in. I get quite a bit of spam too.

37:39 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
So the email address that I check with Thunderbird is my developer address and so that's where I have GitHub assigned to and there for a while I was getting notifications on like every issue and pull requests on a couple of repositories. So I would just, oh my god, I would get up in the morning and have 100 emails. It's like, oh, something had to change. But anyway, that idea of I have nine new emails forever so sorry, so, so, so, so, so, so you still have nine new emails ah, got to be a pain. So that's why I care about that particular little bug. It really annoyed me.

38:17 - David Ruggles (Co-host)
I'm digging around in GitHub and K9 is Thunderbird now.

38:21 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yes, yes, they took the K9 project and they adopted it and put the Thunderbird name on it.

38:26 - David Ruggles (Co-host)
So why are you running two K9s? I mean, why are you running Thunderbird canine and original canine?

38:31 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Because I had everything set up with original canine and I got the notification that Thunderbird beta was out, so I did the install and set it up, and so now they're both on there, because it's a beta. I just haven't gone and uninstalled the original one yet.

38:45 - David Ruggles (Co-host)
The interesting thing is that they changed the GitHub URLs but not the code yet, so you go to Thunderbird.

38:59 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Android and the readme says canine mail. It takes time. It takes time to get all that done.

39:04 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Rebrand is a pain. Just one quick said.

39:11 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Just one quick said Did you see the? Okay, so there is the phonetic alphabet, right? Alpha, beta, charlie, delta, echo, right? Yes, amazon rebranded the Amazon Echo to the Amazon. What are they? Dot or whatever, something like that. They rebranded it and now if you ask your Amazon device to use that phonetic alphabet to spell something out, use that phonetic alphabet to spell something out. Whenever it goes to say an e instead of an echo. It now uses the new brand name of the amazon device because they literally just used, said and replaced every time that echo was in there. So it's delta, dot pretty much. Yes, I don't think it's. I don't think it's actually dot. That's not what they called it, but yeah, that's it was.

40:14
It was hilarious you're saying you think this is still the case um, I imagine they fixed it now that it's been, it's been announced, but it's got to be one on youtube or something. It's. Yeah, it's got to be out there somewhere. I, I saw it. I saw it in a tweet, but you know it, it's. It's very apropos to this conversation. Uh, all right, jeff, you're on, you're on a bunch of 24 10. You did it, you made the leap well, kind of kubuntu.

40:41 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Well, okay, katie, yeah, so it's kind of a dual story. I I kind of start out with what's going on and then I transition kind of into my experience here. So you know, we had a very large release this week. On thursday, october 10th, ubuntu 24.10 was released, which also includes the other flavors with different desktops. Now this isa short-term release and only gets nine months of updates before you need to upgrade to 2504, which will be coming out in April of this next year. So this is not going to stick around for a lot, so they can play a little fast and loose with this one.

41:18
The installer is going to look very familiar to those who installed on 24.04, as there weren't really any changes. So while they've talked about moving the user account setup until after the system install and there's some other stuff they talk about, but none of that happened in 2410, so it's going to look just the exact same. When you first boot up, you'll run into on proper Ubuntu GNOME install setup, which is where the first time configuration is done, and this is for things like selecting the language, how you want to connect to the internet, picking a time zone. You know other things like that.

41:52
Gnome 47 is the version included in this release. I won't go into the full details because you know we've covered GNOME 47 on the show before, but some of the highlights are support for accent colors natively excuse me improved UI and low resolution displaysolution displays, hardware-encoded screen recorder, better GTK rendering on older hardware and persistent remote login sessions. Either take a look at the link in the show notes or hit one of our older shows where we covered GNOME 47 for more under-the-hood details on GNOME. I didn't want to get too sidetracked on gnome because because nobody cares about gnome.

42:33 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah.

42:34 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, cause, how long is gnome going to be around? But we'll get to that later.

42:38 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Nope, nobody gnomes the desktops I've seen, you know. Okay, before I get too sidetracked, a new version comes with a new kernel, which is 6.11, which is the latest released kernel at this time. Now, we previously covered also how Canonical's really trying to keep the kernel fresher in its releases. So I won't go into all the details because we've covered it before. But you know, as always, new kernels bring a lot of security fixes, new hardware support, expanded support for ARM and RISC-V chipsets RISC-V whichever way it is and, as a cherry on top, it also provides a good speed boost to the EXT4 file system. Now I'm going to veer off the article slightly and mention that I installed Kubuntu 24.10 this week, which is the KDE version of the Ubuntu release. Something that jumped out at me was when I started installing packages and I noticed that apt had changed. Now in the article they mentioned that Ubuntu comes with apt 3.0, which is the command line package, installer, deinstaller, whatnot. Now I don't know if Ubuntu does come with 3.0 or not, but Kubuntu has 2.9.8, which is the development version that has all the upgrades in the interface. So basically it's like 3.0, maybe just a few little tweaks behind, but you're basically there and I got to say I love the change.

44:07
Rather than a large wall of text, you know, like when, say, when you're going to install something, it breaks out the information into nice formatting. It started when I tried to install the NVIDIA drivers. It begins with a list of packages packages that are installed and no longer required. Then it's spaced out and says installing, and lists the program or programs if there's more than one. Next, it lists the dependencies that it will install for those programs and it clearly lists them out in a nice format and there are different colors in here too, so it catches the eye a lot better. And below that are suggested packages to go with it. But it won't install them, but it lists them so that if you see something that catches your eye, you can can install it. And finally, and and finally, a summary of what it's doing before it goes into the actual install messaging that we're all used to. So once, once you say yes, do this, you get the all the normal wall of text, the you know getting getting the code and preparing and unpacking and installing, just like the old apt. But all the beforehand stuff is much better now.

45:20
I did need to install the nvidia drivers, as long-time listeners know I have a green card so I I'm not running any AMD. And you know when I was first booting I had terrible experience with the new view drivers. You know the desktop would freeze every so often. You'd have to wait three to five seconds and it would take off again. But I just put in the 560 drivers, rebooted and it's beautiful's beautiful.

45:48
Uh, there are issues. Yes, there are some. Like on steam, some of the dropdown menus will garble for half a second before fixing themselves. Uh, in LibreOffice, when I was writing the show notes, you know I'd I'd right click, say, to spell correct a word, and the menu would show up a few inches to the right of where I was actually click, click, clicking. Sometimes it was off the actual uh screen of the writer program, for example. I mean it was. It was still on the desktop so I could easily just scroll over and select the menu item. But it was just a little glitch like that. But you know, other than paper cuts like these which which is what Nate Graham in his blog talks about, paper cuts, where these are the kind of things it doesn't stop you from using the desktop. It's just like oh, that's not quite right, and that's what they were. I haven't run into anything that stopped me from continuing to use the system. Nothing was groundbreaking that really stopped anything I had to do.

46:50
Everything seems to work, work just fine, and they just released plasma 6.2, so I'm expecting it won't take too long before it hits 24, 10, um, and I'll I'll uh let everybody know as soon as there's a method for easily installing that without actually grabbing tar files and recompiling, or you know something, something easier for the for, for people that aren't coders and for those who didn't realize why this is a big deal on kubuntu, kde is defaulting to wayland, wayland on all gpus now.

47:25
So 6.1, you know, plasma six up, they're going all in on Wayland, they're they're really trying to leave X11 behind. So that's why this is such a big step. Now, fedora's had it for a bit longer, but this is, this is uh, the the Debian side of the house for for uh, making this jump, uh so far on six one, you know, other than some minor glitches like I talked about, it's running as good as my X 11 experience, maybe a little better. You know I now this is all anecdotal and maybe it's oh, it's new, it's gotta be cooler, but seems, seems to be doing just fine. Uh, I would tell people to take a look at the article in the show notes for more details, as I've only lightly touched on a lot of things and I totally skipped a lot of features and other upgrades, just for the sake of brevity.

48:17
You don't want to hear me talk for hours on end, that's for sure, yeah, yeah, I mean I didn't want to start Rob on his diatribe, so know. I would say also, if you've upgraded to 24 10, any flavor, let me let me know how it's going. You know, on our discord server give it, you know, just post in there of like, hey, what, what went right, what didn't go right, what do you like what you know? I'd love to hear others experiences with the 24 24 10 upgrade.

48:47 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, uh, interesting stuff. Glad to hear that it is finally working. You know, for the longest time, for the longest time nvidia and wayland just did not, just was not a thing, like I think for a while. There just would not even load the desktop at all.

49:01 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Um so, it's great I had. I had problems where it would kind of load the desktop but unless you were constantly moving the mouse things didn't update and it would just freeze. And unless you were constantly moving the mouse things didn't update. I remember that. And it would just freeze and then you had to shake the mouse and then things would load and it would go. It was funny. But you know, okay, it's got a 6.11 kernel, so it's got a new kernel. I'm running the 560 driver, which is the latest new feature released, you know, non-beta driver from NVIDIA 6.1, which is a fairly recent release of Plasma, so it's all pretty new. So if you're not running the latest everything, your experience may not match what I'm seeing.

49:47 - David Ruggles (Co-host)
Is your NVIDIA setup, a laptop or a desktop desktop. Okay, because the part that keeps biting me is, uh, the optimus, which is where it switches between integrated gpu and your discrete nvidia, and, uh, sometimes it'll work perfectly, and then I'll, you know, do some updates or something and it'll break, and I won't know which did it, and then they'll start working and it's just. That's been a pain.

50:16 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
So yeah, I'm going to go ahead. Oh, I was going to just say that. You know, that's a good point that I should mention I'm on a 4000 series card, so I've got fairly new hardware as well.

50:29 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Can make a difference. Yeah, I know there's. There's been potential solutions for the optimist problem over the years, like I think it was bumblebee and all sorts of. It's a weird thing though, right like so. Like you've got, uh, your internal card and most of the time it runs through that, but you've got to farm your gpu calls out to the external card and then copy the frame buffer back over. It's a weird system. It's pretty interesting that it works the way it does.

50:56 - David Ruggles (Co-host)
And this may tie into your video muxing story previously. But the other thing you run into is when you've got multiple outs on your laptop. Some of them are hardwired to the internal GPU, and some of them are hardwired to the internal GPU and some of them are hardwired to the discrete GPU, and so to be able to use them both simultaneously with either driver, it's having to copy stuff back and forth all over the place and keep it straight.

51:20 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah what fun, what fun.

51:23 - David Ruggles (Co-host)
Oh yeah.

51:25 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
All right, david, you want to talk about OpenRazor. Sure, withor, sure we shaving. No, the beer quartet, no Shaving.

51:37 - David Ruggles (Co-host)
No, we're talking about the Razor product line which, if you do any gaming on Linux or otherwise any computer gaming you are probably familiar with Razer. They make a lot of different products. I think they started with mice gaming mice and now they make keyboards and mouse pads and laptop coolers and all kinds of different devices. I specifically have one that's called the Orb Weaver. It's a left-handed keyboard that you can remap the keys, but OpenRazor is the software package that supports all of the configuration for the Razor devices.

52:23
Razor is really big on RGB, the multicolor stuff RGB, the multicolor stuff and so being able to go in and configure the device and turn the colors on and off and all that sort of stuff is built into OpenRazor. They've released 3.9 this week and with it they've released support for a bunch of new devices along with still supporting all of the older devices. So if you game linux or have a razor device, I actually use my orb weaver when I'm doing cad drawing because I can have a trackball in one hand and a keyboard in the other hand and do all of my cad stuff much more efficiently that way. But if you have one of these devices, it's probably a product that you want to look into or a software package you want to look into, but anyway, it just popped out there.

53:14 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, does this actually work without the kernel? Let's see. I think it's an auditory kernel module that you had to run for at least some devices to work.

53:25 - David Ruggles (Co-host)
Is it still the case? I don't think they have support without the kernel module yet I think it still depends on that Gotcha, which isn't ideal, but unless you ever get official support, you probably won't get there.

53:43 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yeah, interesting, and I'm running a DeathAdder mouse right now. Okay, which is a Razer mouse?

53:52 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, I don't use any of the Razer mice, but I've got a couple of the Razer keyboards around. One on the desktop behind me is a Razer still Enjoy them quite a bit.

54:01 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Buckling, spring for the keyboards. Nothing else exists.

54:07 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, it's the fake Buckling Springs, of course, but what are you going to do? Not everybody can afford one of the real ones. It lasts forever. Just about they just about do.

54:21 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, All right, Rob, let's continue talking about GNOME and the GNnome Foundation. Yeah, you know, considering, you always like to pick on my beloved Gnome and you try to tell me how much better KDE is compared to Gnome.

54:41 - David Ruggles (Co-host)
I didn't think that was up for debate.

54:45 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Okay, so it seems you may be right, at least financially. Maybe GNOME isn't quite as good as KDE when you're talking about money, and although there have been some stories lately leading up to all this with concerns and wanting more money in and wanting more money, but now that their fiscal year has started October 1st which is an odd time for a fiscal year to start, I think, but maybe that's part of the problem. Anyway, now that that fiscal year has started, they have had to take some actions because their fundraising wasn't where it was hoped to be. So they've announced some cutbacks, and the first cutback on their list is they let go of their creative director, and I'm sure Jonathan has some smug comments to say about that.

55:46 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
But I'll be nice.

55:49 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, what kind of create? Yeah, anyway, next on their list is letting go of their director of community development, and you know I didn't think about it when I was writing up my notes. But, um, I know, um jonathan has had some comments in the past about their uh has had some comments in the past about their community involvement and at least to the respect of how they listen to or don't listen to their community perhaps, but to save some money, they're also making adjustments to event organization and representation, marketing initiatives, fundraising efforts, um, which hopefully they're increasing that but and graphic design. Fortunately this isn't going to be affecting their key events such as las uh good, no, gnome asia and guadict, as uh as these, as these still probably pay for themselves. Lots of big conferences often do.

56:57
But I still I find it odd that even the gonna, even though gnome seems to be the flagship choice for the majority of distributions out there, you know it's odd that they're still financially struggling more than KDE. Is it because none of the distributions are shipping in to help Gnome at all? I get it. The little guys aren't helping at all to maybe be providing some financial support. Or now Rocky with their big good $25,000 non-support support agreement? Um, or are they just spending too much money? It'd be interesting to compare the two side by side to see what they're bringing in what they're spending. I would think a gnome would be good. Maybe they've just upset too many in the community with some of their direction that they've gone. I don't know. But their financial woes are shown to be true, not just rumors, and they make a cutback. So hopefully that doesn't hurt the actual desktop environment, which some of us still think is pretty good, because I prefer my desktop environment default, not to look like Windows.

58:27 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
You know, there's this new one called Cosmic that you might want to try out.

58:31
And that very well might be what I go to when that's completed Out of beta yeah, there's an interesting question here that I think maybe it's the most interesting thing to talk about, and that is if the gnome foundation goes away completely, what becomes of gnome? And I think the answer is the people that are not getting paid to develop gnome, which I don't know that the gnome foundation is actually paying any developers which maybe is part of the problem just directors, yeah, yeah, literally, like that's that would. That would be the problem with one of these organizations when they, when they work that way, like that would be the problem. Anyway, if the dome foundation goes away, known will continue. It'll just be run by the people writing the code.

59:22
And, uh, the source code does not go away. It's, it's on, you know, it's. People have it in their git repositories, it's probably on github, it's you know, or gitlab, wherever they run it. Um, the source code doesn't go away. People will be able to continue to work on it. You may see a situation where there's a couple of forks of it and it takes a little while to figure out. All right, this is the fork that's going to to carry the flag and going to be the official gnome going forwards but I wonder if, uh, if it would stop being the flagship for a number of uh distributions well.

59:53
So I mean, at first, probably what would happen would be you would have, uh, those distributions would have their own fork of it. Uh, you know, like fedora red hat, they would almost certainly have their own fork of it. You know, like Fedora Red Hat, they would almost certainly have a local fork of GNOME if GNOME itself kind of went away. But the point really I want to make there is there's no particular reason to fret over this, like, gnome is not going away. For those few of you that really like GNOME, you don't have to get worried.

01:00:18
It's not going away, both of you are fine, yeah, both of you are fine yeah, both of you are fine they're new, uh, their new executive director, I think it's.

01:00:26 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
That's the title. Whoever's leading uh leaving leading the foundation now? Um, they plan to make? They're working on some new strategic plans to uh keep things going with them at the helm.

01:00:41 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
So yeah, yeah, strategy, strategy would be good. I have to think about all that stuff for a little while but I think you hit the nail on the head too spend some time thinking about how you got into this situation.

01:00:52 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I think hit the nail on the head too is kind of one of the questions is what? What are they making? Are they trying to keep up with the mozilla foundation, with their person in charge, or is it really a shoestring budget?

01:01:06 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I haven't had a chance to look, but I remember when we looked at KD's budget not too long ago because they made less. I can't remember what it was, but it was. They ran a deficit.

01:01:19 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
They ran a deficit for a year or two.

01:01:20 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
They ran a deficit, that's what it was, but they were only like $400,000 a year give or take, which doesn't sound like a lot for.

01:01:32 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
It's a lot for an individual, but a small amount for an organization Right.

01:01:36 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Well, and they had quite a bit of money in the coffers too, I believe, so it wasn't that big of a yeah they did.

01:01:40 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, their deficit wasn't really a problem. It was. It was a problem of having extra money saved up they had to spend it's always quite a different problem.

01:01:51
But yeah, I don't know, I it must. I don't know if it's out there or not, but I should look it up and then a chance after I read this. But I'm real curious Is their budget around that $400,000 or is it less, or is it like $2 million? Well, actually I want to say I thought there were some stories about the past executive director and how much they got paid and I almost feel like that was close to 400 000 alone.

01:02:22
But I could be imagining things I don't, I don't remember, I don't remember how much it is, so we're not with google or something or you're thinking of mozilla, where the person was making a making a crap ton of money.

01:02:34 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
They became a I don't know consultant or they had another position still making that same amount. They brought somebody new in, making just an ungodly amount of money as well.

01:02:48 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yeah, I could be thinking about that completely.

01:02:51 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, sometimes those sorts of things the organization can take on a life of its own, and so then you have fewer and fewer people working on the code and more and more people caring about the organization and I know the last one was like some kind of yogi or something, but a shaman.

01:03:08 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
She was a shaman there we go professional shaman.

01:03:11 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Lots of people looked at that and had questions, apparently validated questions at this point.

01:03:19 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
But they didn't even make it a year. Yeah, Maybe. I mean, I don't know how their finances were in the past, but maybe there's a reason they only made it a year and at this moment they're making a cutback, so maybe they didn't run it too well this past year.

01:03:38 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I would say so. All right, let's talk about a company that is run well.

01:03:46 - David Ruggles (Co-host)
Jeff.

01:03:47 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
AMD. Yeah, yeah. Well, there's many different levels to that and I'm like, well, I'm sure he means me, but that's a tough segue there. There's some good branches and some bad branches in that.

01:04:03 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Well, I mean you talk about the whole company of AMD and you talk about Lisa Su, and just a spectacular CEO made some amazing gains at AMD over the what like 10 years she's been running it.

01:04:14 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yeah, you know, and I've said this many times, I think you need a technology person in a technology company just to help guide, guide the direction. I, I and I think there's a few examples we can give where they had, uh, business people running companies and that didn't fare so well because they didn't understand the technology. But I digress. A lot of the press this week was about intel announcing their new 200s series of processors, which we won't actually see until the end of the press this week was about Intel announcing their new 200S series of processors, which we won't actually see until the end of the month. But at the same time AMD had an advancing AI event where they announced their fifth generation Epic Turin processors with up to 192 cores and 384 threads per socket threads per socket. Now it comes with a 70% IPC instruction per clock uplift and AVX 512 instructions with a full 512 bit data path, along with the general Zen 5 architecture improvements. In the show notes I've linked two articles. The first one discusses the launch of the new CPU and includes a couple different benchmark links, and you know I'll cut to the chase and just say that in general the new chips are beasts and provide really good competition for Intel counterparts. Which one comes out on top depends on the workload you have. So you'll want to look at the cornucopia benchmarks that Michael Larable over at Phronix has run. You know, for example, intel does a little better with some of the memory access. They have a little higher speed, but some of the computational stuff AMD comes out on top. So it's it's going to be very specific, but if you, if you're buying one of these processors, you probably have a very specific workload in mind. You know. Now I will say, with that statement, amd does have one win hands down and and that's in price. So while a 192 core AMD Epic costs $14,813, the Intel equivalent goes for $17,800. So this is not for grandma's computer.

01:06:17
The second article in the show notes is where things get interesting. The second article in the show notes is where things get interesting. Michael looks at the AVX-512 performance with a 256-bit data path versus a 512-bit data path for the new EPYC CPUs. Michael mentions in his articles that while he enjoys benchmarking, his true love is examining very specific details of the processor, such as the change in data path. He says there's going to be a lot more benchmarks in the future to look at the small details in the chips and find out how much performance and improvement is packed into this new generation. So he really likes looking under the hood in the details versus just overall flat performance.

01:06:54
Now on Zen 4 chips, when they've used AVX 512 instructions they double pumped or had to use two cycles to execute one instruction because they didn't have the data path to do it all at once. It was a 256-bit wide data path. With a Zen 5 chip you can execute the AVX512 instructions all at once. Now you can change how that runs, so you can. Now you can run them all at once. You can double pump, like the older Zen architecture, or completely turn off the instruction set. So Michael has all three modes in his benchmarking to look at the difference not only in the improvements of the data path but also in how much performance the AVX 512 instructions actually give in specific workloads. So just to be doubly clear, this is the same CPU. He just in software, in the BIOS, controlled what mode the CPU ran in. So when looking at the benchmark results, having the AVX 512 instructions greatly increased performance in certain workloads and yielded a 1.45x performance increase compared to not having access to the instructions. Having the full 512 data path gave a 1.12x performance increase. So while having the instructions execute in one cycle was very good for performance, having them available overall was even more important. So even if you have to double pump the instruction, that's better than not having it at all.

01:08:31
Now, keep in mind some of these tests could have been limited by other parts of the CPU, such as computation time or memory bottlenecks. Computation time or memory bottlenecks. So when you see a benchmark where the wider pipe doesn't seem to help that much, you know it's. It was either. At worst it was on par with the double pump. A lot of times it was faster.

01:08:50
But if you see a match, it could be why? Because it was bottlenecked somewhere else. You know. If it's waiting for memory, well, it can take. It can spend those two cycles to double pump the AVX512 instruction and it's going to be hidden behind. You're still waiting on memory. When comparing the results, the clock speed didn't change, the CPU power consumption did not change and the temperature measured in the chips did not change. So turning on the instructions and having them run at full width pipeline didn't make any noticeable difference. So hence there's no reason not to run it in full 512-bit mode, unless you have a specific compatibility reason, otherwise just let the full 512 bus fly. Take a look at the article's link in the show notes for all the benchmarks and the details you'd ever want to know about the new EPYC CPUs and how they compare with the latest Intel competition, which Intel released their server chips here I think about a month ago it was pretty recently and the older generation AMD chips. And you know, maybe there's a future upgrade coming your way for our enterprise people.

01:10:05 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, so there's some really interesting things with AVX-512. For the longest time it used to be oh, avx-512, that's just for the math stuff you math nerds doing big science, that's all that cares about it. But people have discovered some interesting little optimizations you can do. You can do string compares with the AVX 512 instructions and if you do the math that's like 32 characters at a time you can load into one of those 512-bit registers. It's really pretty big, and the idea is then that you could do that entire string compare with a single instruction rather than a loop where you loop all the way through it one at a time and that's a pretty big speed up. I found one article, somebody working on this and he found like a 5x speed up of doing string compares using AVX 512. So like this is not something that nobody uses, it's actually some really really useful instructions. So some very cool stuff.

01:11:05 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
And there is some video compression, decompression. They're doing it with AVX 512. There's, you know, of course AI is getting used by it. And then, like you said, the normal math. You know, oh, we're doing fluid analysis or simulations, or you know the super sciencey stuff as well yeah but that's.

01:11:26
But that's where it comes in um for us, like, say, the video on some things that you can compress, decompress, it's in the normal uh ryzen chips too. So the 9000 series and the 7000, I don't remember if the 5 had it or not, but they had they support the consumer level, supports AVX 512, where Intel does not on their consumer chips. But we'll see if the 200S coming out they may be. We'll see if they've changed their mind and support it now.

01:11:58 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, that'll be something if they don't support it and they go back to supporting it after pressure from amd. Yeah, interesting, interesting times. Um, all right, let's talk about the berkeley packet filter, the. What does it?

01:12:15 - David Ruggles (Co-host)
stand for embedded no umended.

01:12:20 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
That's right. It's coming to Windows, it is.

01:12:25 - David Ruggles (Co-host)
And it's well on its way. It's actually being done completely in the open, which is quite interesting. I've got a link to an article from the New Stack talking about the virtual eBPF summit last month. Cto and co-founder of IO Surveillant, thomas Graff, talked about the future of the open source filter turned kernel engine. And so to back up a little bit, bpf is the Berkeley Packet Filter. It was originally designed to capture packets and let you specify a filter at the kernel level without having to actually modify the kernel directly. So it created a sandboxed, safe way of getting just the data that you needed out of the kernel and back into it. And then it was extended into eBPF and since it has really taken on a life of its own. It is a it is well to quote the article here.

01:13:39
Since its inclusion in the kernel a decade ago, the Linux-based eBPF has found widespread adoption, particularly for observability, security and compliance tools that benefit from its programmable inline speed to analyze and filter packets without the need for cumbersome modules or dangerous kernel modifications. And the interesting thing about packets here is it's data packets. So while it was originally written specifically for networking, they've extended it. It has kind of its purpose has grown over time, and so it's not just data packets but it's almost anything in the kernel you can get access to through eBPF.

01:14:22
I'm operating at the edge of my own experience. I haven't done any kernel development myself. I tend to operate in higher levels than that, but it's very interesting. I find it very interesting for a couple of reasons. So there is a GitHub project it's got 43 contributors. It's an official Microsoft project. There's got 43 contributors. It's an official Microsoft project. There's a link to it in the article and it is bringing eBPF to Windows. It's going to bring bytecode compatibility with Linux eBPF. Some of the hook points may be different because Windows system calls are different than Linux system calls. But the Internet Engineering Task Force, ietf, is getting involved because they're embarking on a project to solidify the interface so that it can guarantee as much cross-platform compatibility as possible. So, going forward, this should allow packet filter authors to create code that's cross-platform.

01:15:34
The other thing I didn't see it in the article, but just kind of listening to what's going on and stuff, with the big issues that came out of the cloud strike incident, where all the machines crashed and then concern being raised about having ring zero access in the corona, everything, ebpf could be an answer that allows antivirus tools to intercept and act on security issues without having the ability to crash the kernel. So it's an interesting project. It's good to see it being done. Microsoft has taken open source in the past and used it themselves. We were actually talking about that earlier with the NT network driver, but this is an example where they're keeping their development in the open source ecosystem and they're doing it themselves, but then they're also encouraging involvement from the community. So it'd be interesting to see what happens with this.

01:16:39 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
So if that can work with antivirus or help that connection there, how about anti-cheat?

01:16:48 - David Ruggles (Co-host)
It's a possibility, I guess, but it's possible.

01:16:53 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, there's another idea here that really intrigues me, and that is. There's another idea here that really intrigues me, and that is can you make code that would work on both Linux and Windows in eBPF? You're supposed to be able to. And then what all? Can you then write a cross-platform antivirus that uses the same driver for Windows systems and Linux systems? Like that's really fascinating. That's a really interesting idea.

01:17:34 - David Ruggles (Co-host)
I don't know enough to answer that question, but it is an interesting food for thought.

01:17:39 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, some very, very cool potential there and yeah, hopefully things will happen as a result. I like it is an interesting food for thought. Yeah, some very, very cool potential there and uh, yeah, hopefully that will things. Hopefully things will happen as a result. I like it all right. Shall we get into some tips? I would say command line tips, but I am the one this week that is bringing a gooey tip. Oh, I know it's a fun one, though it's one that I've used. We're going to let Rob start off and you're looking for something.

01:18:08 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Look, Look at what I have to show you. So my command line tip this week because everyone I kept trying to do before it somehow got stolen. In fact, one, right at the same time as I was ready to type it into the show notes somebody else already took it. I don't know how that works out, but anyway, look, look is my command. So look, just as it sounds, l-o-o-k. If it's used alone, without any files, you can use it to do dictionary lookups. So let's just say, let me get over here to here for those watch. I'm going to type look apple and it's going to look up in the dictionary all the things that it matches. Now you can also look at a file. So if I do look, let's do, let's do David and file that text. And it did find anybody there, don't know why. Let's do Jeff. Let's try dash F, okay, I don't know why it's not finding anybody there.

01:19:26 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
What am?

01:19:26 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I doing wrong here? You're doing something wrong. I have a file here. Maybe cap the file, all right. So I did a look J, so it's only going to go to the beginning of my file. I don't know what's wrong with my file, because I know it has David at the beginning of the file in some spots. If I do look J and then file that text, the ones that have start with a J, so Jonathan is the best and then Jeff is okay, or if I just change that to Jeff and I don't understand what's going on there at all. That's, it worked for me earlier when I was playing around with this. So if I do a dash F, that's supposed to be case insensitive, whereas without the dash F and you know you're supposed to be able to look in files with this too. Otherwise, by default it just looks at your dictionary. So if I do look tree, it's gonna, you know, show all the, everything that starts with the tree. So tree, tree, treeing, treeless. Now if I do look linux what a stupid dictionary.

01:20:47 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Apparently linux is not in the linux dictionary well, it's a, it's a proper term, it's a proper noun, it's not a regular noun, how about this then?

01:20:56 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
look uh, john. Look, john is in there. How about jeff?

01:21:03 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
no, jeff is not in there uh, ken, next week would you, when you come back, would you show Rob the man command, so he can properly learn this.

01:21:22 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
So this is supposedly the proper way to use it. Usually I just use it as a dictionary thing, but when I looked it up I said, hey, you can look at files too. If you do a dash, dash help, you're supposed to be able to do the options, the string and the file. So there's a look command to look on the dictionary and you can try to figure out if the other cases actually work or not?

01:21:55 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I. I bet there's something going on here where, like, you need to put your string in quotes or it's.

01:21:59 - David Ruggles (Co-host)
It's getting the the space in there too, or something, something weird I used tldr um reference to command we mentioned in the past and it notes the lines in the file must be sorted for look to work.

01:22:18 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Interesting. And remember, Rob, a good retort never begins with oops.

01:22:25 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Alphabetically sorted.

01:22:28 - David Ruggles (Co-host)
I don't know. It just says the lines in the file must be sorted.

01:22:35 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I don't know.

01:22:36 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
It worked before we went live.

01:22:39 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Of course it works great still to look. My initial intention here was just to look at the dictionary, and I thought I'd throw in this other stuff too, since they read that that's there and I don't understand it, I guess all right, jeff, let's hope your demo, if you have one, works better than that uh, I don't, I just have a description, probably for the the best.

01:23:07 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yeah, sometimes in our Linux lives on the command line, we want to not run cutting edge or have the latest software because it breaks something or causes a compatibility issue with something else. And you know, sure you can get in there, and if you really wanted a painful way to do it, you could update every package one by one. But oh my gosh, that would be terrible. Package one by one, but oh my gosh, that would be terrible and especially, based on how big of an update and the dependencies that you can get into, not really feasible. Well, if you look at the article in the show notes, it will tell everyone the people that use yum and DNF package managers. So looking at you, fedora and Red Hat how to keep the versions right where you want. So the first option is to use the exclude command with and this applies to both DNF and YUM in the config file, which will always exclude the pattern you've defined. And this is the most blanket approach and will exclude the software until you go and edit the config file again and directions are all you know. There's slight differences between Y and dnf, but it's all listed in the article, in the show notes. The second is the dash dash exclude in the command line itself and this will exclude the specific package or packages each time you run the command. So you say you're going to do an update, you just put in the option with exclude, whatever that is.

01:24:33
The third way is to exclude a specific package in a specific repository by editing the repository configuration file.

01:24:43
So this may be, as you've got a repository or two repositories that have the same file and you want to make sure you've got one coming from, you know, maybe a modified version of something Well, I'll just make something up like OBS and you want to make sure you're not getting the standard repository but you're getting an optional one that includes a bunch of great stuff that you want.

01:25:09
So you do that with using that repository configuration file. And the final way is there's a version lock to hold a package at a specific version. You do need to install this plugin and for example, in DNF it would be sudo, dnf, install dnf-plugins-core, and there's no space in that last part, and this will let you lock a specific package and you can also use it to look at the versions you have and unlock when you're ready to get updates for the package again. So again, take a look at the versions you have and unlock when you're ready to get updates for the package again. So again, take a look at the article linked in the show notes for the full details on the command line instructions and to get a better control of your updates. So part two will be next week where we look at things on the app side of the house.

01:26:06 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I have seen the yum config file get used for things like the ARM boards, where a vendor will give you something that runs on their own kernel but with a Fedora user space and so that sort of thing. It's pretty useful to be able to lock your kernel to only grab their kernel versions rather than the ones from Fedora, because in a lot of those cases the one from fedora will just not work and not boot on your machine because arm it's fun. All right, david, let's, uh, let's, let's keep an eye on some progress.

01:26:45 - David Ruggles (Co-host)
Sure, and I also have a real time demo here. I did a screen share. Do you have that? Oh, do I? It's showing up for me here in Restream.

01:27:07 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
See, that's why I don't have a live demo, because I love our listeners, not just only the viewers.

01:27:14 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Oh, there it is there it is we got it okay, okay I was user error on my part all right, let's see here, I guess.

01:27:24 - David Ruggles (Co-host)
All right. So what I've got is the PV command, which is specifically for monitoring the progress of data through a pipe, and there's a lot of different things you can do with it. And, for whatever ironic reason, rob and I both picked the same command this week, but I got it entered first into our show notes so I got to do it. But there's a lot of stuff you can do with this, so there may be other things that Rob brings back later. All I wanted to show with it is three or four weeks ago Ken was demoing a command and he was showing, unplugging and plugging USB devices, and he was scrolling his D message and plugged it in and the thing scrolled off the screen too quickly and I was like, hey, there's got to be a way in those sorts of situations where you're trying to demo something or show something, where you can slow down the output. So I went and did some searching and you can do that with PV. So, for example, here I've got a test file. So if I can't test, it's blank. So, for example, here I've got a test file. So if I cat test, it's blank.

01:28:32
So if I tail, I'm going to use a few different commands here. Obviously, if I tail, slash f, test, which dash f follows, so it's going to keep watching it. And then I come over here and I'm using tmux, which I've talked about before, and I cat warn, piece book one into test, it instantly happens and you see that we're down at the end of it. But if you and I've got the command up here already, spoilers, spoilers what? Well, let's get into the book. I know how it ends now. Oh well, that's just book one.

01:29:11
There's like 972 of them dang things um. So if I do, if I do the tail f test again, but this time I pipe it into pv with dash q, lowercase l, uppercase L13. And I have these commands listed or these options listed out in the show notes. But Q is quiet because one of the things PV it's about monitoring progress of data through a pipe. So one of the things it has by default is a progress meter. We don't care about the progress meter in this case.

01:29:47
Second, as with most things dealing with pipes, it defaults to dealing in bytes. So the lowercase L tells it to worry about lines and then the uppercase L is your rate limit. So in this case I want 13 lines per second. So if I do that and first it caught up to where I was because I didn't empty the file out Now, if I do this cat it happened instantly but it's slowly, relatively slowly, putting it out on the screen. And if I come back over here and kill that and drop it back to like one a second, you'll see that it's painfully slow, but still it's as a proof of concept there.

01:30:31
And tail by default shows the last 10 lines of the file before it starts following. So that's why it's already throwing some things out there. So anyway, that's PV. You could do a lot of different stuff with it. I first ran into PV just as a note for future expansion I needed. I had a long copy process using CP and CP does not have a progress bar built into it. So one of the ways you can get progress for CP is by sticking a PV pipe in your CP to monitor the progress. But anyway, that's PV, very cool.

01:31:07 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, neat, neat, neat that button. Yeah, neat, neat, neat that button. No, ah, how do I get back Technology man?

01:31:22 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Turn it to 11.

01:31:23 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, we just did so. I've got a command line tip for you. That is actually. Well, you can run it on the command line. I run it on the command line, but it will start a graphical program and that's Bless. And so this is a graphical hex editor. So if you need to look at the actual bytes, the bits and bytes of something, you can open it with Bless.

01:31:44
And it's not the only hex editor, but the last time that I needed to do something with a binary file, bless was the first thing that came to mind and it's what I use and it's actually a pretty good experience. Um, it's very, very fast, even with opening, you know, fairly large files, uh, but you can search within the file, for you can search by hex, you can search by string. I believe you can also search by a binary pattern, uh, by the bits themselves, as it were. Um, so if you've got a binary, you need to look inside of it to see what's going on. Bless, it's actually, it's quite good. It'll give you like, in in one screen. You'll see the uh, like the raw hex, and then it'll try to give you the equivalent ascii text over the other side, um, and then some more information down at the bottom you can select copy. It'll give you stats about the stuff you selected.

01:32:31
Uh, super, super useful little tool for messing around with binary files. So, bless there you go. Awesome, all right, that is it. That is the show. Um, we have some ending notes that we want to make and, uh, for those of you watching live, something super exciting that I am super excited about, and that is a starship launch. Starship flight 5 is tomorrow and, regardless of what happens, it's going to be exciting because they're going to try to catch the thing. So if you're in time and you want to be up with me at like 6 45 central time am to watch it, I will definitely be tuned in. I will let each of the other guys get the last word or make a note or whatever they want to.

01:33:17 - David Ruggles (Co-host)
When you say catch it, that's the one with the chopsticks right.

01:33:21 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yes, the booster is going to try to fly back and they're going to try to catch it with the chopsticks at the launch tower. It's going to be exciting regardless of what happens. All right, rob, anything you want to plug?

01:33:36 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
So I did play around with my command line tip, and the stuff in the file that you're looking at has to be in alphabetical order. Has to be in alphabetical order, so it's more useful. If you have a text file that is a list and that's sorted in alphabetical order, then it works just fine. I figured that out after I rearranged it. So thanks for that little hint, david. I think that was.

01:34:07 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
So next week Rob's going to cover the sort command. Have we done that yet? I don't know, but if we haven't, somebody needs to yeah.

01:34:17 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I was going to go a different route with my PV command, so we'll see. Maybe I'll add on to that in the future. I was going to have a little more fun with it. That's what I do, I have fun, but anyway. Anyway, on to my normal clothes. Come connect with me. Robertpcampbellcom is where you can find me. I've had, at least over this past week, at least a halfa dozen new mastodon followers, um, and anyway, once you go to my website, robertpcampbellcom, you can find links to my linkedin, my little twitter birdie, which, like I said before, I don't really use much, but you can connect with me there just for, uh, status, simple stuff. You know. Say, hey, I'm connected with this guy, he's cool, uh, mastodon. That's where I do posts, at least sometimes. And if you want to buy me those 5 000 copies so I can get that rocky subscription, that's uh, right here we can donate a copy to me.

01:35:15 - David Ruggles (Co-host)
Have a good week all all right and david oh, I will just plug the usual, and that is if you are listening to us and not getting to watch us, then that means you're not a member of the club. So you should come join club twit, um. And also, if you like all things open source, you should go check out floss weekly. Uh, it's another awesome place. So those would be my two plugs for this week, all right.

01:35:45 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
And Jeff. Uh, quick, quick note here. Uh, rob should check out show number 29, where I did the sort command a while ago. So already been done. Uh, other than that I don't have anything else to plug. So haiku time not a pretty sight. When the web dies screaming loud, the site is not found. Have a great week everybody fun, all right.

01:36:14 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Thank you, guys for being here and thank you to everyone that caught us live, those that watch us on the download. We sure appreciate your support, the support for twit, and we will see you next week on the untitled Linux Show.