Untitled Linux Show 176 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 folks, this week we're talking about VMware, moving to KVM, ubuntu's missing a kernel PPA and Microsoft's sort of endorsement of AlmaLinux. Then we do a live update to Fedora 41. That mostly goes well. X has yet another vulnerability, the kernel gets a minor fix and a Valve engineer finds a really big performance fix in the AMD drivers. It's a lot of fun. You don't want to miss it, so stay tuned. Podcasts you love From people you trust. This is Twit.

00:35
This is the Untitled Linux Show, episode 176, recorded Saturday, november the 2nd. That install went sideways. Hey folks, it is Saturday and you know what that means. It is time for the Untitled Linux Show. That's where we geek out about Linux and software and open source and some hardware and all kinds of other stuff. It's going to be a lot of fun. So it's not just me, of course. We've got the whole crew here. We've got Rob, ken and Jeff. Feels like we play the Brady Bunch every time. When we do that we should all look at each other like hi. But we've got some great stories for you this week and we're actually going to let Rob get started. I think we let Rob get started because Rob was the first one that put his stories in the document. First come, first serve. Around here, rob was the early bird that got the worm. What's new with VMware? There are still memes out there about break glass in case of Broadcom and all of that. What's new with VMware?

01:32 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Well, this week I bring stories about most of my favorite Linux topics. And to start, vms are awesome, virtual machines not voicemails. Voicemails are not so awesome, but I am always telling these guys and other people on Linux groups that there's no point to using a type 2 hypervisor like VirtualBox or VMware Workstation or anything else when Linux has a fast type 1 hypervisor built right into the kernel. And of course I'm talking about KVM there. And Broadcom yes, the Broadcom I love to hate appears to agree with me, as they are working to switch the CPU virtualization of their VMware workstation on Linux from their own proprietary code to using Linux's built-in KVM. We're not sure when this will be available, but the general thinking is sometime in 2025, but that depends on how quickly their necessary KVM changes can be upstreamed and if they're accepted and and in turn how quickly they're picked up by the major distributions and even though I'm sure Broadcom is looking for free labor here to to do this part of the work for them. This, you know this also brings up another potential benefit to KVM. You know as much as I'm not a fan of Broadcom. Vmware has been a leader in virtualization for many, many years, since the beginning of virtualization. And you know, if they were to start contributing to KVM, maybe we could see some more vast improvements. Or maybe this is just their way of saying you know, we made our product free because the, the workstation was made free I want to say the summer spring we we had on the show. Maybe they're just saying you know, we made it free and so now it doesn't really matter to us. Let's uh, let the community essentially maintain at least part of it, because we don't really care anymore. We'll see.

03:47
Uh, along with this, it sounds like it sounds like the windows and mac versions have already moved to the os's native virtualization. You know the windows one, hyper v and mac. I believe I kind of caught that somewhere. I never saw a story about it, but I saw somebody said that. So you know that is that's one way to get out of the business. Uh, in the end, you know, all they really care about maybe is their uh subscriptions for their esx, uh, b-sphere and b-center stuff. But in the end my advice is still to just go native use kvmq, emu. Uh, you know, virtual manager boxes or or any other front end makes it just as easy as any other more commercial options. Yet it's can be made super lightweight when you run it headless without that bloated front end gooey. So you know, other people are seeing the light moving over to kvm I, I think you should too.

04:47 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, it's real fascinating that VMware raised their prices, right? Isn't that where all of this started? Vmware got bought out and then raised their prices significantly and a bunch of people jumped ship, and now they're moving to the KVM backend, so it seems like they're getting rid of some of their secret sauce.

05:07 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Well, they raise their prices on their vCenter, vsphere, their ESX, more enterprise, you know, like a Proxmox kind of thing free because I suppose they just didn't want to focus on it or they saw that this product really isn't doing anything. They probably couldn't sell it, since there's so many free versions anyway. So it's like, well, let's just give it away so we don't die here.

05:41 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Does that mean we've just basically added another graphic user interface on top of KVM?

05:48 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Yes and no. I mean I like to say yep, just another one, but really they're still going to use their own GPU virtualization and another hardware virtualization is still going to be theirs for now.

06:01 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, there's a lot. There's. Actually I made the joke about the secret sauce is a. There is a lot of secret sauce in vmware. There's a lot of like value add that they have. Um, I would love to see more of it become open source and less proprietary. I think that'd be good for everybody and maybe that's the direction that vmware is moving now here's. Here's the question for you do we think this is a result of influence from broadcom? After broadcom bought them, did they say all right, guys, it's time to get rid of you know a million lines of proprietary code. Let's just get rid of it and move to something open source. Is that a conversation that you think happened?

06:36 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I think it's something to do with their accounting team in one way or another the support model yeah, yeah that's that's fair yeah, you know what? One benefit I heard, um, I believe, is like I've never tried this before. I've never ran, uh, vmware, workstation and kvm at the same time. I thought somebody said something about you can only have like one hypervisor running at a time, because I suppose, uh, so now you could potentially be running vmware, workstation and kvm. Theoretically I could see how that would be a problem.

07:15 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I've never tried that it probably depends on how you're running it right, because, like, you can run kvm without it being a hypervisor. Uh, technically speaking, a hypervisor is not the linux kernel. Hypervisor is something that's like actually on top of it, runs on well, like underneath it. Whichever way you want to do the stack here, but it's the hypervisor, is closer to bare metal, and then you've got your linux kernel and kvm inside of that. Um, so yeah, by definition, I think you cannot run more than one hypervisor. But but, anyway, we will see. Definitely something to keep track of. Keep an eye on, jeff. Jeff, sir, what's up with Ubuntu and their mainline kernel PPA?

07:56 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I know right. Let's talk about kernels and get back to Linux here. Pure Linux, no virtual machines. Ubuntu's mainline kernel PPA has been down since mid-September. What's the mainline kernel PPA, you ask? Well, we've covered this in the past, but I think it's been a couple years or longer, and actually it was about two years when I looked it up. So we'll give it a little refresher course. So, while not as relevant maybe as it once was, because Ubuntu is releasing with more recent kernels, you know they still age and maybe a person needs or wants to try a newer kernel. There's always an option of compiling it yourself, but Ubuntu makes it easier.

08:34
The mainline kernel PPA contains the latest kernels which are compiled to work with Ubuntu, meaning the options they use to compile the normal Ubuntu kernel are also used to compile the new kernels. So while they're not considered enterprise safe, they are still flagged as stable. So while I wouldn't run the server farm on it unless you really know what you're doing, they're fine for normal users and, like most of us listening to the podcast, just for your standard computer, they work just fine. They compile the release candidates as well, so a person can try the freshest versions out there. You know, the downside is the updates are done manually, meaning you know they're not part of the normal package updater. But if you listen back to episode 75 on november 5th 2022, I cover a tool called Mainline which will install the Mainline kernels for you. So it's at least semi-automated and you know you can pause at specific versions or jump over versions or you can do whatever you want with it if you so desire. So you know I ran that tool for quite a while keeping on the latest kernels on my system and I never had a problem.

09:45
Well, fast forward to today and we got the story in the show notes, which is the mainline kernel. Ppa has stopped compiling kernels. If you go back and scroll all the way to the bottom of the list, it looks like things are fine, and checking version numbers reveals that the latest kernel out there is 6.11 and it was released September 15th on the website. There's been nothing added since. So none of the 6.12 series is there and even the 6.11 point releases are not there. As of today, november 2nd 2024, the latest kernel is 6.12-RC5, and for the stable release it's 6.11.6.

10:24
Michael Larable comments on this because most of his testing is done with the mainline kernels and the reason he does. That is when a vendor will reach out to him to try and reproduce something. It's easy to point to the PPA and say I use this kernel. There's no guessing on the compiler, the settings, no having to send large files around the internet. You know all configurations are known. So he can just point there and say that's what I used.

10:55
Doing some searching I've not been able to find out why it's down. In the past, when there were errors, it would still have the kernel series but there would be errors inside the series. So you would maybe see the RC5, but it would not have the target files that you could download but it would give some errors. So you at least have kind of some clues on what the issue was. This time it's like the entire process has stopped. They're not even trying to compile the kernels or even create the directories for those kernels, because in the past it would at least create the directories. And sometimes you know arm would compile but x86 wouldn't, or you know you and and you'd see it sometimes the other way as well. But at least something was showing up.

11:39
So I'll keep an eye out when this gets fixed. But if you're curious you can check out our previous show and install the mainline tool and install the latest and greatest kernel when it becomes available. In the meantime, there are guides on how to compile it from scratch. But you know I've done both and, I'll be honest, I like to be lazy and just use the mainline tool and the PPA. You know I'll personally be waiting because you know I'll be honest too, I don't have a killer feature or hardware issue that the kernel can fix for me right now. So I don't have any pressing reason to get off of 6.11 and try to test out 6.12. Check out the link in the show notes for the details, as it has a link to the Ubuntu mainline PPA and everyone can keep track of the updates themselves.

12:23 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
So happy updating yeah, with something like that, I always have to wonder, like, was this just a script that was running and nobody touched it? And so, like the how can I say this without being very macabre? The way that almost said that would be very dark. Um, let's just say that somebody forgot about it and never touched it for a while, and like, we're just now discovering that something is broken in one of the latest kernel versions. Um, so, not not necessarily saying broken in the kernel itself, but just like the interaction between the kernel and the script I don't think it's broken at all.

12:54 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I think it's a feature canonical.

12:56 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Realize that people who want the latest and greatest just mostly aren't using ubuntu it's a, it's a ppa, so it's not official canonical at all yeah it, you know it is compiled in the official canonical way, so it it does work with all with ubuntu and all and all that it's. It's very debian, ubuntu uh friendly. But yeah, I kind of wonder if something broke, because it normally it would. You'd see, last time it was like compile errors. There was like a package that that they it needed rev. You know there was some dependency issues and so you could kind of see what was going on there and they went in and they fixed it. This one, yeah, the whole script just stopped or it's not able to reach the source code for some reason.

13:43 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
One feedback on what you just said in that line there, the PPA being Debian, ubuntu friendly, I believe you're not supposed to use PPAs on Debian. I think you're pretty much always recommended using that Ubuntu and Ubuntu derivatives as supposedly it can break things. I believe is what my understanding of that. That makes sense.

14:04 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Well, if you've been club twitch discord, uh, keith 512 had mentioned it as early as uh the 10th of october. That it seems to not be updating broken for a bit and you can technically run ppas on debian.

14:25 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
But just for the audience psa, it's not recommended to run ppas on debian it's very much your mileage may vary sort of a deal yeah, well, there's a lot of.

14:35 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
You're running a lot of rc candidates too, so you know, you just I mean for that well not always. We're just going pedal to the metal.

14:43 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
There's plenty of times to run a PPA just because it's not in the regular repo too. Yeah.

14:49 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
All right, ken, let's talk about Azure from our favorite development company, our favorite software company out there.

14:59 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Microsoft.

15:00 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I don't know about that, but I do want to thank SK for writing about this for us. He wrote that Linux is now the top operating system on Azure. Sk states over 60% of Azure customer workloads run on Linux. He also states Microsoft is committed to making Linux work even better on Azure to meet customer needs, by announcing that Alma Linux is an officially supported Linux distribution on Azure, with a link to the recent announcement in his article even. Is this great news for the Linux community? I'm going to say yes, we recently achieved a 5% desktop market share and this adds just another feather to our hat, or should I say fedora.

15:53
Sk's article describes AlmaLinux as the new star in enterprise Linux because of its key features it's always free. It's always free, community-led, long-term stability, easy migration thanks to tools like Alma Linux, deploy and Elevate, and it has wide platform support. Microsoft's endorsement of Alma Linux on Azure shows a high level of trust in Alma Linux's capabilities. Now, to earn this endorsement, alma Linux had to meet several important criteria set by Microsoft. It had to have a proven demand. We saw that. Contractual agreement, strong engineering collaboration between Microsoft and Alma Linux engineers and a dedicated Azure content mirror, according to SK, the growing popularity of Linux on Azure, along with the endorsement of AlmaLinux, is an important moment in the evolution of cloud computing. This trend is likely to continue solidifying Linux's position as the dominant operating system in the cloud as more businesses adopt Linux-based solutions. You can now find AmoLinux available through the Azure Marketplace for both x86 and ARM64 architectures. For more details, I do recommend following the link in our show notes to SK's article.

17:28 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, that's fascinating. Do you know? Is Rocky on the list, or is it just AlmaLinux?

17:35 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
SK didn't talk too much about Rocky. Actually, he didn't say anything about Rocky.

17:40 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I do have to wonder. So, like Rocky is the one that's sort of being stubborn and still trying to be, bug for bug, compatible with RHEL, and I wonder if Microsoft would look at that and go it's a little dicey, we don't want to be a part of that.

17:54 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
If you want that feature, just go with RHEL.

17:58 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
That's true, there are pros and cons to that.

18:01 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
No, I'm saying, that's probably their viewpoint.

18:03 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Well indeed, and it's true, there are just pros and cons to it.

18:08 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I wonder if you know with them. Well, maybe they don't realize, I'm sure they realize Linux being a top guest operating system on there. I wonder if they'll start to work on any of the other improvements that, like I'll be talking about with qe, maybe later I would dare say that they already have been.

18:30 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
If you look at, like, the list of who who's who in the kernel each year, microsoft is basically always in the top 10 as far as kernel contributions I wonder if they have like special drivers, liketio drivers?

18:45
I'm not sure. One would hope that they would use VRTio and just make that work, but anyway. So, talking about Red Hat stuff, fedora 41 is out and I'm going to do something a little crazy. I am going to make this machine behind me um, go away. And uh, yeah, there we go, it's gone. Now what I don't know is whether you're going to get to see the upgrade on this screen or if it's going to be on the screen directly behind me, which, if it's directly behind you, won't be able to see it at all. But anyway, we're doing it live. We're doing an upgrade to fedora 41 and we will see during the show if it actually comes up and works or if it crashes and burns.

19:28
Um, fedora 41 does have a couple of really cool things in it. The one that, weirdly, I'm most excited for is dnf5. Dnf is the, the updater, it's. It is the command line tool for getting updates from installing new packages, and dnf is so much faster. It's ridiculously better than the DNF four. I've heard it's good. Yeah, it's. I. I've run it in beta. I think it was running it in alpha actually before it went beta, and so, yeah, it's really good. It does some really cool stuff. You know.

19:57
There's other things in there, of course, like a gnome 47, it actually ships with KDE 6.2, which I think is already on fedora 40, so that's not that new um there are. There are a few things in there, like fire. Firefox is now going to ship with pipe wire camera support, which is really cool. Um, just some interesting things like that. Um, but dnf5 is the is the big one, at least for me, for user facing. Oh yeah, there you go, it is showing up on the screen. So if you look, you got to turn your head the right way to be able to see it, but it's installing packages, it's doing its thing. So we'll see what happens with that.

20:39 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Can we say the install went sideways on you during the show.

20:44 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I think we just found the show title. The install went sideways on you during the show. I think we just found the show title. The install went sideways. Oh, all right. Well, Jeff, since I am doing an update of KDE Plasma, what can I look forward to in future versions of KDE Plasma?

21:00 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Well, this week in Plasma, our friend Nate Graham has a few updates that he would like to share. So the first is the link in the show notes doesn't take you to his normal blog spot. He now has a new home for this week in Plasma. He now has his blog posted, hosted on the KDE infrastructure. So this means that others can help contribute the KDE infrastructure. So this means that others can help contribute. He has a link to a merge request page and after it's published, if there's a typo or a broken link it can be fixed by the audience. So Nate's blog is even going more open source.

21:38
So now in the past we have talked about the kernel is going to be more friendly to shortages of memory by shutting down things instead of just crashing, and we've had other shows where we talk about that. It's trying to be more graceful and not come to a screeching halt. Well, kde is now going to announce when the kernel needs to terminate a program. So there's a service that runs in the background that will detect when the kernel has done this and will give a notification so the user can be aware of what's going on. Now, just to be clear, kde is only notifying when this happens. The actual killing of apps is all done on the kernel side. I say that because I know there's going to be somebody going what is KDE doing? They're killing my apps. No, no, no. It's just telling you about what the kernel is doing. Katie, what are you doing? They're killing my apps. No, no, no. It's just telling you about what the kernel is doing. So there will even be a little bit of helpful hints in the notification on how to save memory and basically just help people that maybe not quite as computer savvy to better manage their memory.

22:40
There are a couple of UI improvements this week, but just a couple, as most of the work is just chasing down bugs. On the improvement side, the emoji selector now can match substrings in the middle of words, so finding your perfect emojis that you're looking for will be even easier. The grouping indicator on the task manager, which is a little green-looking plus sign, won't always be green now and will follow the current accent. Color. Grouping is when you have several of the same type of applications open. Instead of showing four Firefox icons, for example, it'll show you one with a little grouping indicator. I should note that there's an option for stacking, so if you really want to see all four of those Firefox icons in the taskbar, you can do that as well, but for those of us that group, they're just going to better color match with your, color, match with everything. So it keeps your feng shui happy.

23:39 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
On the bug stomping your feng shui oh sorry, Continue.

23:42 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Oh, on the bug stomping side, they fixed a way that misbehaving ex-Wayland apps could cause KWin to freeze, and one that caused notifications about modifier key changes to not actually appear. And they removed an issue where the task manager widget setting to reverse the direction that new tasks appear on your taskbar will actually work as originally intended. So that's always nice, you know, having a feature that actually works. Solved a bug that caused the show logout screen item in the desktop context menu to not show enough items if you had customized the default logout option in the past when it was offered as an option. So some legacy options that could cause issues going forward if you actually had used them.

24:32
When the global animations are set to instant the window thumbnails in KWin's desktop grid effect are no longer too small, Excuse me, and there's a bunch more bugs which have been removed. And there's a bunch more bugs which have been removed. But I'll let the curious follow the link in the show notes to Nate's blog for all the details and the links to see the code and to help with the project. Small ending note if you look at the comments, there's already someone improving the blog, as they put in a tag to link to an RSS feed for the blog and next week Nate will have the return of the dashboard where he reports the critical and 15 minute bug changes from the last week.

25:12 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
So, happy reading. Yeah, fun stuff. Um, it is. Uh, it's always fun to go and see his stuff where they're doing crazy new things with KDE. Um, I, I was, I was, I was humored by the Feng Shui. I was going to jump in and talk about that, but the moment has passed. The moment has passed.

25:28 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Don't mess with the feng shui, it's just you know bad karma.

25:31 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Is that like messing with QMU?

25:36 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
So something else that we passed over unintentionally was Rob.

25:40 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
See, I thought see, now I was going to play it off, as you did it on purpose, because my story better match with yours, and then you were going to go back to Rob to merge it in.

25:49 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
No, I jumped to you because yours made more sense but I wasn't going to go back to Rob. But Rob convinced me in the back chat that I really better let him get his story in. Yeah, he always whines yeah we're going to let Rob talk about Vulcan and QEMU.

26:03 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
This is a good one, because virtualization is fun, so I'm going to talk about another cool improvement.

26:10
Coming to my favorite hypervisor, kvm QEMU Well, it's coming to QEMU.

26:25
So for those familiar with KVM virtualization, you may or QEMU, I guess really you may be familiar with virtio drivers that I mentioned earlier. So these are drivers that can be ran on the client or guest OS for specific pieces of hardware. So their hardware drivers are ran on the guest to provide better hardware support within QEMU. You don't have to use these if you don't want, you can use generic drivers, but when you do use these it increases performance quite a bit and it's kind of like using the right driver for the right hardware. Use it for the right virtualized hardware. So the virtio GPU driver for Linux is getting a major improvement soon, with Vul in support and this along with the mesa support that was added earlier this year, uh, it may soon be much easier to run games in a virtual machine, at least run them well, uh, with good performance, without fiddling with complex things like a gpu pastor, because that's definitely not an easy task, unless, maybe, if you got multiple gpus, but even then, even then, that is challenging.

27:33
Yeah, you're, you're right, it's challenging when you look at it. So, going through, going to the, the pharonix comments, there's a link to a video with someone testing it out uh, so they have. Obviously the host machine is uh, is a linux. I can't remember what it was, but it was linux. He showed the the new of him or something, and then he went to his virtual machine showed the new of him again, so the guest machine was also linux. Then he played a Steam game on there and the performance seemed pretty smooth, close enough to native that I didn't really notice a difference.

28:12
And you know, although the use case for running games on a Linux guest within a Linux virtual machine it might be pretty small, I could see maybe doing it within my Proxmox, possibly Maybe some use cases there. But there's also a Windows guest driver that has similar aspirations coming and I haven't found an article, but I found this also in the comments. Dug through took a look and they also plan to add vulcan and stuff like that. So at some point this may be a decent alternative, alternative for a few games. When they don't run well on proton, you could maybe actually run them pretty well on um, on a windows virtual machine with uh with this new vertio gpu drivers, so I think that could be pretty cool.

29:06 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I tell you what else comes to mind. I remember when the the cosmic alpha first came out, it was real unstable because it needed hardware acceleration. Oh yeah, so you know we're. We're getting to the point to where you you just about have to have some hardware acceleration to be able to do just normal running your desktop at all. So it's, it's a good thing to finally have it working and looking forward to that being more common.

29:32 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Maybe that was the fix that System76 was talking about. I don't know how Cosmic threw on better in a VM. I doubt it, but maybe, maybe Could be.

29:45 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
We can hope Well. Alright, I think now we're ready for Ken talking about the supply chain focused startup StackLock. Who is StackLock? What is StackLock? Why is StackLock?

30:04 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Well, let's hope I can answer some of those questions, but I want to thank Christine Hall, who wrote about a recent donation to the Open Source Software Foundation. The donation was StackLock's flagship platform, minder. What is Minder Minder? What is Minder? Minder is an open source platform that helps development teams and open source communities build more secure software and prove to others that what they've built is secure. Minder helps project owners proactively manage their security posture by providing a set of checks and policies to minimize risk along the software supply chain and attest their security practices to downstream consumers. Minder will begin as a sandbox project for a minimum of three months before it's elevated to be an incubating project like any software project entering the Linux Foundation ecosystem.

31:06
Stacklock's co-founder and CTO, luke Hines, pointed out that OpenSSF should be a good fit for Minder, since the platform was created to make it possible to integrate supply chain tools such as those that are already part of the OpenSSF ecosystem, so that they can be used in tandem. To quote him, minder isn't just about being able to assert policies. In fact, he recently told Christine, it's about being able to tap into the full richness of the open source security ecosystem and set up policies using all these wonderful tools like Trivi, bandit and other open source tools. We want to make sure that we provide a framework that unlocks those tools for communities and then for enterprises at scale. According to Christine, in a nutshell, minder is a way for developers and security teams to find and do away with security risks that might be hiding in open source code before it's merged into a project. It draws on OpenSSF scorecard, sigstore and other best practices and integrates them into a single platform that can be a part of, say, a DevOps practice.

32:32
Craig McLuckie, stacklock's co-founder and CEO, compares the platform to Kubernetes. He said our ambition with this platform is to create something that has that kind of Kubernetes-like ethos where it enables you to look across your organization and organize everything into resources and then map policies to resources by selectors and then run reconciliation. It's got a very strong kind of Kubernetes flavor to it. Now I'm going to recommend reading Christine's article. I do have it linked in the show notes so you can get more details, including a link to Mindr's GitHub page if you want to check it out.

33:18 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, you know, we interviewed Anchor one of the guys from Anchor just the other day on Floss Weekly and it's a very similar thing that they're looking at, that they're working on, and it's intriguing how many companies and people and developers are trying more and more to take all of this seriously of, like you know, let's make sure we have software bill of materials, s bombs that we're keeping up on top of all of that. Uh, you've got the. The guys at the colonel are, you know, pushing out untold numbers of cves for every release. Um, not have any s bombs on the show. No, no, s bombs are good software bill of materials. There are other kinds of bombs that we're not allowed to have on the show, but s bombs are okay.

34:02
Uh, but some bombs we don't even want at home that's true, that's true, uh yeah I've never done the bath bomb thing, I'm more of a shower guy, but anyway, um, yeah, I'm gonna touch that one Indeed.

34:21
Uh, so let's talk about the Mesa fix. This one is really interesting. So this is something that is, it's very specific to AMD and the fidelity FX super resolution two, which, for those that don't remember that's, that's the AMD solution for rendering your scenes at a lower resolution and then using some AI trickery to upscale them on the fly, and that gets used in things like the Steam Deck, basically to be able to run to push more pixels faster. Well, it turns out that there was a problem in Mesa with doing this, and one of the Valve Linux driver team, samuel Pudicet, discovered the issue and apparently this has been known for a couple of years now. There's about a two-year-old bug report that the Mesa RADB driver performs significantly less I'm basically reading from Foronix there Significantly less than AMD GPUpu pro, which this is always interesting.

35:26
So like, okay, there are, there are multiple, there are multiple drivers out there. Most of us know this, but I'll go over it real quickly. There are multiple drivers out there for amd, on linux, same thing for nvidia, but on amd, on linux, there's like three different drivers you can actually use. So you, you've got the old closed source legacy AMD driver, you've got the new closed source AMD driver. And then there's Radv, the open source AMD driver, and one of the things that developers will do people will do is they'll run the same application on the different drivers and compare how they act.

35:59
And so when you have something like this, where one of them is significantly worse, it generally means that you've got a bug in whichever one is performing worse, or sometimes it means that you have a something's not rendering correctly. Usually you can see that. So, anyway, samuel from Valve finally went in and he figured it out, and the fix is to cull all of the triangles and lines when W positions are zero, which I basically believe. What that means is it's just not rendering the stuff that it's not supposed to render, whereas before there were things that were technically rendered but not actually visible, and so it's an optimization to be able to just ignore things that should be ignored. So, yeah, he says the pro driver was culling more than Rad-V, because in FSR 2, it was not specifying a cull mode is what he says. And so, yeah, it was rendering things that weren't even on screen.

37:12
So this is it's a 228% improvement. It's a 228% improvement. That is ridiculously huge. 128% improvement. That is ridiculously huge. It is specific to the demo, the FSR2 demo. So not every game is going to see necessarily that sort of improvement, but I would imagine that some games are going to see a pretty big improvement. And so that is again, that's with RD, uh, rdna2, with fsr2 and, like, like I said, that's fidelity, super fidelity, fx, super resolution 2, that's amds. Let's not, let's not actually render all the pixels, let's just make up some of the pixels and it looks basically as good. It's magic. Gpu stuff these days are just magic, it really is.

38:02 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
It's AI.

38:03 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Yeah, Now it's interesting that this was Valve that brought this instead of AMD proper.

38:12 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
AMD is focusing right now on their compute stack. They're going after the AI and data market. They're carrying less right now for the gaming market and Steam is well. That's their whole bread and butter right now for the gaming market and steam is well that's their whole bread and butter.

38:27 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
This is also the. This is also the rad v driver. The rad v driver that is, it's for radeon cards. It does vulcan, but rad v is being developed entirely by the community, entirely, mostly by the community. It is not a. It is not an amd product. So this is why it is not amd engineers that are fixing things in it, but it is valve, because valve has a. Valve has a bit of a vested interest, yes, in making amd graphics work well that's what valve does good things valve generally does good things.

39:03
Yes, yeah, I would agree with that. All right, it pays off it pays off for all of us. Yeah, um, oh, rob, for a second there. I thought you were talking about a certain social network.

39:17 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Oh, I might be I've been saying for a while. It's you know, I'll keep saying it, you know it is. It is time to get off of X and you know, as, as you know you indicated, although I think Mastodon is way better than Twitter, I'm talking about X dot org or X 11. So the bloated old code bloated old code, you know it's. It's seen series of cve vulnerabilities in the past. Yeah, mostly nothing to really pull your hair out of, jeff, but it has issues, um, and major tech debt.

40:00
Sometimes, you know when I, when I talk about it in groups, you know it's time to move over to Whalen. You know the response I hear is like, yeah, the CVEs are fixed, they're all good. Now, I mean generally. I mean not necessarily in those words, but you know they weren't fixed. They weren't fixed, they were just weren't discovered or made public yet. So this week CVE 2024-9632 was made public and this is a security vulnerability that has been in Xorg display server since 2006. That's 18 years ago. Back in I think it was 1.1.1. So this it's a local privilege.

40:47
Escalation A little less makes it a little less severe than a remote code execution. But you know, if the server is run as root and you know it could become a remote code execution with x11 over ssh or something like that. And you know, you know who else thinks it's time to move over to wayland, the raspberry pi foundation. They they didn't exactly say that in those words, but their actions speak louder than their words, as Raspberry Pi OS now ships with Wayland being used by default. This week's Raspberry Pi OS update also brings better touchscreen support, better Raspberry Pi Connect integration, a new screen configuration tool called Raindrop and other improvements. So if Raspberry Pi, on this nice little system on a chip, thinks they can run Wayland, so can you.

41:56 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Have we talked about the leak of the CM5 for the Pi? Have we talked about that on the show? Yet, guys, we may. Have we talked about that?

42:03 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
on the show yet, guys?

42:03 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
uh, we may have touched on it because it sounds familiar uh, yeah, so, speaking of raspberry pi, this just comes to mind because you said raspberry pi and I don't know that we've talked about it. So we've got the um, the, the cm5, the compute module 5 is coming, and we know that it's coming because I think it was Mouser, one of the places that sell, you know, one of the parts vendors. It may have been Mouser, it may have been somebody else Bleaked the coming of a whole bunch of add-ons for it and had like a date. It's coming up very soon. Yeah, it's super interesting that that is coming to CM5. So that is actually confirmed, that CM5 is about to release.

42:55 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
You know, I told my wife I was going to order a Raspberry Pi and she got really excited until it came several weeks later and saw what the raspberry pi was and that nobody could eat it yeah, you really, you really can't eat those.

43:12 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Um, there's also a. There's also a picture on the internet now of a cm5 engineering sample. So it's uh, it's coming very soon. We also know that the Pi 500 is coming very soon because there is in the Raspberry Pi GitHub repository there is now a DTS for Broadcom slash, bcm 2712, dash, rpi, dash 500. So those things are coming and they are coming sooner rather than later. I'm personally super excited for the Pi 500. So those things are coming and they are coming sooner rather than later. I'm personally super excited for the Pi 500. I just think it's cool. I'm looking forward to that a lot. It's going to be neat. I really hope that they put an NVMe slot in it. That's really going to make it a very nice, very usable computer.

43:58 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
We may have talked about the CN5 sometime toward the end of september, because I've got a bookmark for this for a uh first things to buy well, actually it's for a pharonix news article about the ubuntu making preparations for the Raspberry Pi's Compute Module 5.

44:24 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, there was that too. I'm trying to find the thing where I saw it. Here we go. Yeah, there's a new carrier board that got announced. Yeah, there's some cool stuff coming. So anyway, it it's coming. They're both coming. We're looking forward to it and you can run wayland on it now that's as kyra says.

44:50
At least this raspberry pi never gets moldy I mean, unless you get it too wet, and then it might. Yeah, I wonder, I wonder if you'll see on the on the uh, on the precise hardware that is the Raspberry Pi. I wonder if we'll see a performance improvement from Wayland as opposed to X.

45:09 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
You might. Probably will with their new compositor.

45:13 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, I think we might. I think we might. All right, Jeff, you've got some Linux bytes, some little stories that you want to run through.

45:23 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yeah. So this next segment is what I'm going to call Linux bytes. These are a few stories which are too short for a single segment, but I found them interesting and this is like when I have the hardware corner, but these are software, so bytes. So first up is Ubuntu 25.04, which is named Plucky Puffin. It's going to be defaulting to the 03 optimizations.

45:44
Now we've talked about this in the past how Ubuntu was. You know they had some releases that they weren't main releases but they were ones that you could try and they were compiled with the 03 optimizations because they were just trying it out to see kind of how it shook out. And you know we talked about it. And while overall it doesn't have much of an increase in speed for most things, there are some applications which see a huge improvement. Now, some of those are compute and things where you can get the AVX 512 instructions, certain things like that really see a huge improvement. But you know, overall, like when you look at the benchmarking, at worst case they were the same as the O2 optimizations and at best they had a significant speed increase. So there wasn't really a downside for almost most everything. Now, on a side note too, that 2504 is now open for development for those that want to get a peek under the hood. So there's an opportunity there if you really want to play around really early. But it's pre-alpha at this stage. So you know, tread with care.

46:58
The second story deals with Fedora looking at going to the 03 optimizations with care. The second story deals with Fedora looking at going to the O3 optimizations. Now they're simply going work. Canonical saying they're going to do it as a default. Fedora saying we're we want comments, we're open for comments. See what everyone thinks about the pros and cons and you know a lot of it comes down as people are concerned about code size, you know, and call out not a lot of performance increase outside of some special applications. Others want to see the code move forward with optimizations and, you know, fully take advantage of the latest, greatest hardware. Right now they're still getting the comments, so nothing's decided. But with Canonical moving that way, there is some pressure on red hat to follow suit with their fedora spin. Now I should mention that this will be like canonical and while it could go to default doesn't mean that you won't be able to get the less optimized versions as well. So there will probably be a couple different versions and if you look at the article, the show notes, they even talk about different ways they could optimize and stuff. But it something more like what susa does, but how they handle things is a little different. So if you're really curious you can take a look, but right now there's no decision. Red hatch just looking at it with fedora.

48:13
Uh, the next story is linus torvalds and you know he's proving he can still write code and not just flame others for their code. So linus contributed a patch which gave which gave a 2.6 speed up increase in 21 lines. The intent of the patch is avoiding the use of barrier underscore, underscore no spec within the 64-bit function copy from user function. So Linus explains that in the 21 line kernel patch and this is a quote the barrier underscore no spec in 64 bit copy from user is slow. Instead, use pointer mass to force the user pointer to all ones for invalid addresses. The kernel test robot reports a 2.6% improvement in the per thread operations benchmark and we'll have to wait and see how it shakes out in the real world, but the benchmark looks like there was some real improvement. Now, while this might seem small, you got to keep in mind each small improvement stacks up and that's how we get the very most out of our OS. So a percent here and a percent there after a while really start to add up.

49:27
Now our final story is about BcashFS and how they're squashing bugs. Lead developer Kent Overstreet said test dashboard failures are down 40% from a month ago and critical bug reports have dropped off dramatically. And we're starting to crank through the SysBot stuff S-Y-Z-B-O-T. So I'd pronounce that how you will. So this is what he said. Been hitting some bugs in compaction and lately I've been seeing some sporadic tests hang due to what looks like a block layer right back throttling. So there's still some problems.

50:10
It's not perfect yet but for those wanting to test the latest Bcash FS, it will be coming out in 6.12 RC6, which might be out tomorrow or already is by the time you hear this podcast, which might be out tomorrow or already is by the time you hear this podcast. Just a little note BcashFS is considered by some as a possible replacement for ZFS, but at this point it's still really young, so time will tell if it makes it. But it's supposed to be that level of performance and security and safety for a file system kind of like ZFS. But we'll see where that goes. So take a look at the show notes for the links to all the articles I've mentioned to get the details of what I have left out for brevity. But you know, like I said, short stories, but I thought they were kind of interesting.

50:57 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, all very interesting stories.

51:00 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Especially that improvement by Linus.

51:04 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, you know, 2.6% or whatever. That's not anything on its own that you're going to really feel, but in the long run that makes a difference. Every little bit counts.

51:14 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yeah, and every once in a while we talk about, well, we had a percent here and 2% there, and you know they usually say about 10% is where you can kind of feel it when you're just working on a machine. But stack them up and they build up over time Makes sense.

51:34 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Go ahead, rob. I was just going to say what's on your screen behind you.

51:39 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
That is the Fedora 41 login page for KDE. It finished the update in the background and it's up now. I've got it. Yeah, it's successful. I gotta reboot it again to grab the right kernel because, for whatever reason, it's still running like 695 and it should be running 6115. So while ken talks about his story, I'm going to do a reboot and we're going to see if the right kernel is listed in Grub and if it's not, I'm going to what's that Go ahead?

52:07 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I was just going to say we already said the install went sideways.

52:11 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, it worked. Everything's there. It's just not doing the right kernel, for whatever reason. So I'm going to figure that out. Are you sure the rest of it's there? When the rest of it's there, when I tried to do updates, it used DNF5. So, yes, all right. Ken, why don't you tell us quickly about well, not too quickly. Tell us about GStreamer, and I'm going to turn around and read a bit. Be quick about it, don't be too quick about it. I'm going to turn around and read a bit of the computer One minute.

52:36 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Well, first off I want to go ahead and say, bobby Borisov, thank you for writing about the release of GStreamer 1.24.9. He basically starts off by saying it is a new bug fix update in the stable 1.24 series of the popular cross-platform multimedia framework. Yes, we're talking about GStreamer of the popular cross-platform multimedia framework. Yes, we're talking about GStreamer. Now GStreamer 1.24.9 addresses several I repeat, several key issues, including a crucial security fix for the GST-RTSP-server and improvements to handling latency and start times in GST Aggregator for forced live mode. This release also enhances the handling of dynamic mix matrices in AudioConvert and improves parser selection for encoders in EncodeBin.

53:50
Now for those of y'all that don't do much with audio or video on your computers, one of the components that Linux uses is the VL42 component. Some of y'all may also be familiar with the WebRTC tools like WebRTC Sync and WebRTC Bin. Been well, along with qml6, glsrc. They all have received performance updates aiming to smooth your experience with video and real-time streaming. Now gstreamer 1.24.9 includes various bug fixes for stability and reliability, ensuring a more seamless experience across all platforms, not just Linux, mac OS what's that other one, rob? Windows?

54:58 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
BSD, BSD, I think yeah.

55:00 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
BSD. There you go Now. Gstreamer's next major feature release will be 1.26. And, of course, you're going to have version 1.25. It's going to be the unstable development version. If you are curious about the final details of this release, I do recommend checking out Bobby's article or the GStreamer 1.24.9 release notes for a more in-depth overview. I also have included a link to the recent GStreamer conference, where there's about two days worth of video that you could spend watching. I haven't finished watching it all yet.

55:42 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I'm sure there is some super interesting stuff there, because I stretched that out enough yeah, yes, indeed, um so no, it's not too long, was about right um see, I was waiting right in the middle to go and back to you, jonathan so we can.

55:59 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I was ready for it. I was ready for, as you can see, the machine is still booting up behind me. Yeah, there's so much interesting stuff going on with things like GStreamer and you know that's tied up with Pipewire and things even that Firefox and Chrome are doing. It's cool, it's neat to see. I like it, I like it. All right. So we've got, I, I think, one more story, and that is that is. This is something I'm real surprised that, uh, jeff didn't grab, and that is that amd has finally announced the, the ryzen 7 9800, the 9800 x 3d gaming processor, and apparently it's launching november 7th, so in about a week, not even a week from now. Now, how much of those are actually going to be available? I'm not sure, but that is the launch date.

56:54 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I was going to talk about it when the embargo was up.

56:57 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah. So I guess that's the important thing to say here. We only have the announce, we don't have any benchmarks, so we don't know for sure how well it's going to perform, how it's going to work, whether it's going to be.

57:16 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Jeff may have some ideas, information. This well it is, but it comes from places like uh, somebody else linked it first jays to jays two cents, um places like that, and they kind of hint oh yeah, a lot of your gaming charts. The bars are going to look real small compared to what's coming there's. There's a lot of them going. Don't buy anything if you're gaming. Wait until this thing comes out.

57:44 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I thought you said AMD wasn't focused on gaming right now.

57:49 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
For their GPU driver. On the chip side, the 9800X3D is supposed to be about 25% faster overall, if you can believe the rumors. The embargo is still on, so we will. We will see on the seventh when they all come out. But this is kind of gen two of the X3D. Now people are going to say, wait, this is the third chip. Well, true, but both the, the 5,800 and the 7,800 had the cash above the, the cores. Now they're doing underneath and they're not getting the heating and they can have better cooling because the memory's in a different location through via connections and it's. It's going to allow them to clock higher and push things a lot harder, and it's supposed to be a really good design. So this, this is uh from if, if, if, the internet, not insider information. Nothing insider is uh to be believed. Then don't buy any chips until if. If your main thing is gaming, if your production yeah, I get the 90,. You know know, get one of the one of the 16 cores or you can oh, the intel.

59:07 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
But the x3d have done well on compiling too in the past, right like it's not like it's not like they're bad chips for production, it's just there's a few niche things, gaming being one of the big ones where they just scream.

59:20 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Oh, yeah, and and they just doesn't have the core. So, like, if you're hammering right, right, right, some modeling stuff, you know, get the 99, 50 X and just be happy. And I mean, and not like, the other chips won't play games, it's just, if you have a 7,000 series, for example, then you're gonna get I think it's like a five percent uplift or three percent. In gaming it's. It's not really anything better. If you're doing production, it is better and it it does pretty good. The intel chips, same thing.

59:54
If you're doing production, yeah, the 285 does really well. It's less, less power, less heat and crunch's number's just fine. If you're gaming, wait because, or stick to the 14900K, because it's better for gaming than the new chip is. But this new 9800X3D is, if the rumors are to be believed, it's going to be the king of the heap by a long way. Yeah, and whatever number they've got on launch, it's not going to be enough. They're going to be the king of the heat by a long way, yeah and whatever number they've got on launch, it's not gonna be enough they're gonna sell out.

01:00:28 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Oh yeah, oh yeah, for sure. So it's not gonna be really expensive uh, it went up a little bit the.

01:00:35 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
The msrp is 479, which, particularly if you can just do a drop-in replacement on your existing rig, that's not bad at all.

01:00:43 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
I mean, that's cheaper than I paid a few years ago, when prices were just coming down, yeah, or whatever it was at that time.

01:00:51 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
The thing with this one, though, I'm sure is it's going to get scalped for a while.

01:00:56 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Oh yeah.

01:00:57 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
And so you know you won't be able to buy one for $479 for several months, I'm sure.

01:01:04 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yeah, they're going to sell out everything and there's a reason. If you look right now, if you're in the mood for like a 9950X or any of the regular 9000 non-X3D chips, they're all down about $50 plus right now. Plus right now there's some screaming deals because they're trying to move some chips, because they know when that thing releases the average public is not going to look at those chips again. Yeah, Unless you're again, unless you're doing compute or something like that, when you need a bunch of cores, or you're building a budget system.

01:01:35 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Or your real budget. Yeah, those are the two places where the rest of them make sense. Yeah.

01:01:40 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
All right, well, let's move. But even then, you might go to the 7 000 series if you yeah, true, if your budget all right, let's move to some command line tips.

01:01:49 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Rob's got it up first and uh, he's talking about bc, because uh, no, no, ken.

01:01:58 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
This is not, uh, not the old days, not not the good old days ken basic campbell bob campbell.

01:02:08
That's what it stands for. Stands for basic calculator, bc. So bc is a real simple command. But if you need a calculator and you're on the command line, if you type bc, there'll be interactive mode. So those who could see I type bc now I'm interactive I type two plus three tells me five. If I type 10 times two, I get 20. If I try to quit, if I try to do control c, it doesn't let me out. Oh, I have to use quit. Okay, so I have to type quit. So I type quit. So other um things.

01:02:43
Obviously it's not always interactive. You can use this with um. If you want to build a script or something and have it calculate um, you could do like echo five, uh plus two and then pipe that to bc and it going to output your number and as always there's. If you want to see all the features, do BC dash, dash help, and you know it'll say that you know dash. I is going to force interactive but it's already interactive anyway. You can use different math libraries. You can do quiet so it doesn't print that banner that you guys watching saw at the beginning, and that's about it. You can dash W warn about non-standard BC constructs. You can see the version too. If you're looking for an exciting BC update to come and know if you have that version of of bc. But real simple command built right in. I don't know if that's I didn't check if that's core utils, but it's been right there on every system I ever checked. I didn't have to install anything.

01:03:53 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
So there is something that bc is notably missing and I'm sure jeff is very sad. No reverse polish notation.

01:04:01 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Oh, yeah, it's basic calculator, not that.

01:04:07 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Well, can it? Can it do like power and square root and things like that?

01:04:12 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
yes, um, with like the carrot, and you can do also, you can do. You know, if I go back into bc here, um, you can do like is one greater than five? And it says zero, because it's not. How about five greater than one, a one? So it's got a boolean there Zero for false, one for true. So you could do things like that too. And yeah, you can do carrots and percents and stuff like that too. If you check the show notes, it'll show a document with the operators and stuff that you can use.

01:04:51 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
All right, jeff, you've got a tip here Baobab.

01:04:57 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Sure, we'll go with that B-A-O-B-A-B Baobab, go with that B-A-O-B-A-B Baobab, something like that. So it's sort of a command line tip. It's a graphical disk usage analyzer, but you can start it from the command line, so we'll call it. It can either scan specific folders, local and remote, or devices in order to give a tree representation including each directory, the size or percentage of the branch. It can also auto-detect any mounted, unmounted device and a graphical representation is also provided for any selected folder. So you can just get specific. There's not a lot of options, it's just the normal help and version information. And the third option is the dash dash all dash, file dash systems, which tells the program not to skip directories on different file systems. So by default it does that. But you can say no, no, I want to, I want everything. You know.

01:06:06
The main use of the programs is kind of find out where your storage is going so you can decide if you're in good shape or not and what's taking all your storage. It's you can. You can traverse up and down in the in the tree and it'll keep drawing new graphs and it'll give you. It gives you kind of a rotary pie pie graph that's stacked or you can there's a tree option as well that you can you can look at to try to decide what you, you know, parse the data how you see fit, but pretty, pretty, simple and basic. But, you know, give it a try and see if it's helpful when trying to sort out where all your drive space went now the question that I have is did gnome rip off kde's file light or did kde rip off gnome's baobab?

01:06:55 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I don't know I guess I'm not familiar with the kde version it's the exact same thing, but made by kde I thought you were a kde guy.

01:07:05 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
What are you doing using the gnome software?

01:07:08 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
hey, we have love for everybody here no, you don't, we don't, we don't have time for your hatred, rob, don't lie the cool thing.

01:07:15 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
The cool thing about linux is that you can do that. You can run gnome software on kde and kde on software on gnome, and it just works so yeah, then both with xfcw you can, or xfce I was like what is xfcw.

01:07:30 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
That's the way that port obviously all right, we established early in the show I do things very dangerously, I'm just. You know, I'm all over the map, don't?

01:07:42 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
pull your hair out over it, All right.

01:07:47 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Ken, let's talk about Pipewire again. Yes, this week I am introducing another Pipewire command line tool. This time it's pw-top. Similar to the top command, it is a dynamic, real-time view of the pipe, wire, node and device statistics, and I'm going to expand that so y'all can see it a little better. How's that?

01:08:17
For those of y'all listening, I've brought up my command line and I've got the first option that I'm going to use with pwtop, just like with robs. It's dash dash help. Now when I hit the enter button it displays how you can use pwtop and some of the options that you can use with it. You have, for example, slash capital V or dash dash version to find out what version of LibWire you have. So we're going to go with the version and in my case, on Ubuntu Studio 24.04, it's only compiled with libpipewire 1.0.5. You also have where you can run it in batch mode. It comes up with continuously just running back. And if you look on the for those of you all listening, there's also a dash in or dash dash iterations, where you can put the number of times you want it to run when it's in bash mode. Here I'm just going to run it twice and because of the size. I've expanded the screen too for those of y'all listening. Some of the stuff's wrapping, but as I go back here you'll see that it's put out the information about the different audio and video devices or nodes that I have twice and it breaks it by showing the column headers at each input. Now, since we want to talk about it, I'm going to go ahead and just run it without any of those options, and that's where it's really handy, and I'm going to size that down a bit so we can get it all completely on the screen. For the most part.

01:10:28
When you're in the TimeDAC dynamic real-time display, it has several columns. The first, starting on the left, is the node status column. Then you have the ID column. This gives you the ID of the pipe, wire, node or device. You've got a Q, u, a and T as a header for the current quantum column that's for drivers and the suggested quantum for follower nodes.

01:11:04
Then you have that, followed by the rate column. This can be either the actual or current rate for drivers or the suggested rate for follower nodes. Then you've got some other columns that give you some information, like waiting time of the node and busy time for some of the nodes, and then you have two columns, w slash q and b dash q, that give you the rate of wait to quant or rate of busy to quant, rate of weight to quant or rate of busy to quant. And one that I'm sure jonathan probably used when he was trying to troubleshoot stuff is a column headed with error err. It gives you the total of x runs and errors that you may be seeing and in my case, for those of y'all listening, I've got one object that's got some error, two objects that have errors. They're both for my OBS setup. Probably frame rate's being dropped, right, jonathan?

01:12:12 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Probably, since that's looking at streaming around an actual video signal.

01:12:17 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Probably, since that's looking at streaming around an actual video signal. And then, of course, you have the format that's used and for the two that are dropping frame rates, it has, for the first part, bgra, which is probably I'm guessing here, since I'm still learning how to read all this the format, the type of format being used, but it's showing that it's got the sample rate for 19 by 1080 or 1080p screen. But it gives you some very useful information and, as I said, it is a real-time update. I'm going to quickly add another device here Living dangerously here.

01:13:08
You go, Ken. Now you'll see that it added another device at the bottom of the screen. It's a Yamaha keyboard that I had hooked up but turned off. All I did was just turn it on. So it's a way to check to see if devices are actually being registered by your system and by Pipewire. Great little tool that I'm going to have fun playing with Now. To get out of it you can do a Control-C, but I found it's probably safer, in trying different keys, to see if there was anything else you could do with it by just hitting Q. Jonathan, have you got any stories about using this one?

01:13:50 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
It has been a bit since I used it last, I know when I was trying to troubleshoot things in Pipeware having more latency than they should have, I used that. That's one of the things that's pretty useful about it is you can take a look at the kind of latency that something should have, comparing that with doing the actual latency test through. I forget the name of the binary, but there's a program where you can run it and it'll give you an output signal and then you can pipe the input signal back into it and then you can, like you know, hold your earbuds up next to a microphone and it'll it'll do the feedback Loop and then check and see what the actual latency is. Um, and I don't remember what that's called. I think we've covered as a command line tip before, but using the back, no, no, there's an actual binary name um, it's like jack, it's, it's uh, it's jack, something like jack measure or you know, jack delay, maybe jack delay, um, something like that, and you can use those together and kind of compare the two and see if it's where it should be. So I've used it for stuff like that.

01:14:54
All right, I've got a command line tip for you, and this one is actually pretty fun. I've been, I've been messing around with it on the command line myself here, and it's it's sort of a twofer. It's two tips. It is colorize, which is the old way to do it, and then CCZE, which stands for C colorize. Ccze is a little bit easier to use and it is also going to be much faster because it's written in C. And this is it's pretty simple. It just it takes a regular log and it adds color to it. So you know, if you have your normally you look at your logs, they're black and white and they're kind of boring to look at. You run it through CCZE and it's going to do stuff for you like make the errors and the warnings stand out with different colors. So it's going to make it just easier to scan through a log and see what's going on with it. Um, so real, real, real simple little command. But man, it's, it's actually pretty useful, and so I've, like I said, I've been having fun fooling around with that um and something to add to your toolbox. Like I said, very, very simple.

01:16:00
Is that something you would pipe to it? Yeah, that's what I've been doing. I've been piping into it and yeah, it'll just, it'll show you. Now I'm having trouble right now with trying to actually use Journal CTL to pipe into it because it flashes and goes away. But I think that has to do more with journal ctl than it does ccc e, um, let's see, and of course very long messages doesn't exist anymore. What's up with that? Uh, here we'll just go view sudo. There we go, and then, if I pipe it through, huh, I must be missing something with CCZE or there must be a problem with it on this machine, because every time it, like it, flicks to what I want it to show me and then it goes away. So there's either some command line switch that I'm missing or there's something like that. I will see if I can real quick go to where the guy was using it and telling me about it, because he was not having this trouble.

01:17:08 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Could you pipe that output from after piping to CCZE and to the left.

01:17:16 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
You know, I tried that, tried that. Oh okay, apparently dash capital a, I'm not sure why. What does it say that that does?

01:17:25
always keep it on raw and c instead of using curses. Huh, oh, I guess you need dash capital a, that cause that works, and so with that you can do like you know. You can get the the journal CTL so I'm using the command line something like journal CTL dash B for I only want from the last boot, and then you can give it a dash U for a unit, so that's like I only want to see logs from this particular service. Then you give it, say Bluetooth dot, dash, bluetooth dot, service, bluetoothservice, and then you just use the pipe symbol, pipe it into CCZE and then dash capital A and yeah, there you go, it goes through, it colorizes it and if there's an error or something it'll really stand out and you can see it. So, very cool, I like it All. Right, I want to get the guys to let them get in the last word if they want to, if they want to plug anything. We're going to let Rob go first. I have a guess as to what he's going to plug.

01:18:24 - Rob Campbell (Co-host)
Well, I am going to plug my usual stuff, which is first my website, and to get there, it's robertpcampbellcom, and there is a link there, a button there, to go to my LinkedIn, another one to go to my Twitter, another one to go to my Mastodon and another one to go to donate me a coffee. Can't get that to go right, right there, donate me a coffee and you can use the BC command. I taught you to calculate how many coffees you need to get me to get a new car. Um, also, I'm not going to be here next week. I'm going to be at a thing for my, for my kids, uh, birthdays. So if you want me to come back after that, just donate me some coffees and I will return. How much? Do not come?

01:19:21 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
back you beat me to it, jeff, that's what I was gonna ask sorry, I sold your thunder earmark your coffees one way or the other. When I'm buying me a coffee, you can. You can specify, you can put a note in there, so you know it would be like voting. You buy a coffee to vote for or vote for or against. All right, ken.

01:19:43 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Well, I'm going to take this opportunity to wish my son a happy birthday. He just had his birthday today and, since he's out of state, I'm taking this opportunity to say it to him, even though I did text it when I got up today.

01:20:04 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Cool. Happy birthday Curtis. Happy birthday Curtis, all right, jeff.

01:20:10 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I actually have an article in the show notes. You know something interesting, but I don't know how serious this really is. It's an article to the feds say that critical software must drop C and C++ by 2026 or face risk. Basically they're pushing for memory safe software. But reading the article it was a little wishy-washy on whether it's we strongly suggest versus there's going to be actual consequences. And then there's some stuff for open source there's. Take a look at it. I didn't feel like I was qualified to fully speak on it, so it's in there for something to read. And based on a couple weeks ago, the floss weekly I did.

01:20:54
I am now on mastodon, so you can find me at jeff underscore massey. I'm on the twit, twitsocial network or hub or whatever you, whatever you call it. So server you can find server. I don't know I'm I'm new at this. Uh, you can follow me. I can tell you right now it's going to be boring because I don't do a lot on social media. All the excitement is here on the show. But you know, if you want to, at least you know you're not going to get spammed to death if you follow me. Yep, and have a great week, everybody. I love seeing everybody listening live and thank you.

01:21:35 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, it's a lot of fun I am looking for. I am looking for jeff mass. You said it was at jeff underscore massie. Yeah, am I misspelling your name? I don't see a year yet I'm not misspelling your name.

01:21:49
Um, I will keep looking for that because just, uh, yeah, let's see here, cue the jeopardy music. There he is followed. Haha, you have a follower now, jeff, actually two of us, or maybe just me. Anyway, welcome to jeff. He's on mastodon. I'll, I'll, I'll shoot some links out. Um, yeah, so I want to go ahead and plug. Normally I would point in my monitor over here, but right now I guess I'm plugging fedora instead, which that's okay, I'm a fan of fedora as well. But you can find my other work at hackaday.

01:22:32
The we've got the security column goes live every friday, and then a floss weekly is on tuesdays. We record on tuesdays. It goes live every Friday. And then Floss Weekly is on Tuesdays we record on Tuesdays. It goes live on Wednesdays.

01:22:42
We've actually got a really fun. We've got a really neat one coming up this week. I reached out to Daniel Sternberg that's the curl guy and he is coming back. And then, just because that was the guest for episode 51 of Floss Weekly and so because it is such an old guest, I reached out. We've got Randall coming back as a co-host again, so that's going to be fun as well. So that's this Tuesday, if there's, you know, something going on this upcoming Tuesday that you really want to distract yourself from that. You don't want to have to worry about that. You just want to turn the news off for some reason. You can come hang out with us on Floss Weekly and you know what you're going to get there. It's going to be great. Yeah, we appreciate everybody being here, both live and on the download, and we will see you next week on the Untitled Linux Show. Thanks for watching.