Brief items

Kernel release status

The current development kernel is 5.19-rc1, released on June 5. ""Judging by the merge window, this release is going to be on the bigger side, but certainly not breaking any records, and nothing looks particularly odd or crazy."

Stable updates: 5.18.2, 5.17.13, 5.15.45, 5.10.120, 5.4.197, 4.19.246, 4.14.282, and 4.9.317 were all released on June 6. The large 5.18.3, 5.17.14, 5.15.46, and 5.10.121 updates are in the review process; they are due on June 9.

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Mazzoli: How fast are Linux pipes anyway?

Francesco Mazzoli delves deeply into the kernel's implementation of pipes (and more) in an attempt to maximize the throughput of data.

The post was inspired by reading a highly optimized FizzBuzz program, which pushes output to a pipe at a rate of ~35GiB/s on my laptop. Our first goal will be to match that speed, explaining every step as we go along. We’ll also add an additional performance-improving measure, which is not needed in FizzBuzz since the bottleneck is actually computing the output, not IO, at least on my machine.

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Rosenzweig: Conformant open source support for Mali-G57

Alyssa Rosenzweig announces a milestone for support of Mali GPUs with free software:

The open source Panfrost driver for Mali GPUs now supports the new Valhall architecture with fully-conformant OpenGL ES 3.1 on Mali-G57, a Valhall GPU. The final Mesa patches are landing today, and the required kernel patches are queued for merge upstream.

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Fedora 34 is EOL

The Fedora 34 distribution release has gone out of the supported mode: "No further updates, including security updates, will be available for Fedora 34". Users should update to the Fedora 35 or 36 release.

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NixOS 22.05 released

Version 22.05 of the NixOS distribution is out. "NixOS is already known as the most up to date distribution and is the distribution with the most packages. This release saw 9345 new packages and 10666 updated packages". Significant changes include an update to version 2.8.0 of the Nix package manager with experimental support for flakes, GNOME 42, and many new services; see the release notes for details.

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OpenSUSE Leap 15.4 released

Version 15.4 of the openSUSE Leap distribution has been released. "Leap 15.4 is a feature release version and provides a significant amount of updates from previous Leap 15.x versions along with new offerings". Changes include the addition of openSUSE Leap Micro, improved codec support, KDE Plasma 5.24, and more. This release also deprecates Python 2 support.

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Tails 5.1 released

Version 5.1 of the Tor-oriented Tails distribution has been released. It includes some improvements to the Tor connection assistant and to handling of captive-portals, but the most significant change is arguably the delayed fix to a severe security vulnerability that had sparked suggestions that some users, at least, should stop using Tails temporarily.

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Mozilla releases a machine-translation plugin

Mozilla has announced the release of a translation plugin for Firefox as part of the Project Bergamot initiative.

The ultimate goal of this consortium was to build a set of neural machine translation tools that would enable Mozilla to develop a website translation add-on that operates locally, i.e. the engines, language models and in-page translation algorithms would need to reside and be executed entirely in the user’s computer, so none of the data would be sent to the cloud, making it entirely private.

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