NetBSD 9.0 Released On Valentine's Day

Although this blog has its focus on Linux operating systems, we don't want to exclude other excellent operating systems. NetBSD 9.0 has been released a few days ago, on Valentine's Day.

The NetBSD project ("Of course it runs NetBSD") dates back to 1993. Founded by Chris Demetriou, Theo de Raadt (going his own ways with OpenBSD later), Adam Glass and Charles M. Hannum, the NetBSD project has released 17 major versions of their operating system.

NetBSD 9.0 includes:

+ support for AArch64 machines
+ enhanced hardware support for Armv7-A
+ upgraded GPU drivers on x86 (Linux 4.4 DRM/KMS)
+ new GPU drivers for Arm
+ support for hardware-accelerated virtualization via the NVMM hypervisor
+ loads of other improvements (see release notes)

Installing NetBSD 9.0 is relatively easy and I found a short video that illustrates the process of installing NetBSD 9.0.

NetBSD 9.1 was released in October, 2020.

Boost Your Debian / Ubuntu Performance With The XanMod Kernel

If you haven't been a Linux user for a long time, you're probably on Ubuntu or any of the other "standard" Debian derivatives (Xubuntu, Kubuntu, or even Devuan). The standard kernel that ships with the LTS variants of Ubuntu operating systems is not optimized for performance but rather for compatibility. If you want to get more out of your hardware, it's recommended to install an optimized kernel for that purpose. There are several alternatives to the mainline kernel. The XanMod Kernel is one of these alternatives and relatively easy to install on your own Ubuntu / Debian machine. You can learn more about the XanMod Kernel here: https://xanmod.org The latest release by the XanMod developer team includes the following changes : - Preemptive Full Tickless Kernel at 500Hz w/ Tuned CPU Core Scheduler. - Tuned Multi-Queue Block Layer w/ Low-Latency BFQ I/O Scheduler. - Caching, Virtual Memory Manager and CPU Governor improvements. - RCU Boost for bett...

Firefox 73 Released With "Smarter Console"

Firefox 73.0 was released yesterday as the new stable Firefox browser version used by millions of people around the globe. Whether it's to avoid yet another Google spyware product (like Chrome) or just because Firefox offers so much more flexibility through extensions, Firefox is still going strong. With the new update, Mozilla introduces several useful things that users might have missed before. One feature seems to be extremely useful for web developers: the console has become smarter, according to the Firefox devs. Console output can be styled pretty easily via options added to the console.log() function. The following is the example from the Mozilla blog: console.log('There has been a problem with your fetch operation: %c' + e.message, 'color: red; padding: 2px 2px 2px 20px; background: yellow 3px no-repeat url(data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAwAAAAMCAYAAABWdVznAAAACXBIWXMAAA 7EAAAOxAGVKw4bAAAApUlEQVQoz5WSwQ3DIBAE50wEEkWkABdBT+bhNqwoldBHJ...

Intel considering CPU undervolting driver for Linux

Windows users have it easy. The XTU (Intel Extreme Tuning Utility) allows laptop users to undervolt their laptop processors. On Linux, you have to rely on either a good fan setup in your notebook, or on intel-undervolt , the unofficial undervolting project. It seems like Intel is considering to implement their own Kernel driver solution for undervolting Intel CPUs in laptops. See this Kernel mailing list: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20200907094843.1949-1-Jason@zx2c4.com/T/#u There is some discussion going on about the undocumented MSR and if it should be permitted to play around with it for the sake of cooler laptop CPUs. Most developers seem to agree that it would be indeed a good idea to implement CPU undervolting on the Kernel level. Intel needs to provide better documentation of their CPU features, including MSR. Since Intel has a huge team of open source developers on their payroll, the development of a new Intel undervolting solution for Linux users seems to be very likely ...

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