Recent Posts

81

Applications and Porting / [DEV] JIT support for Firefox

« Last post by tle on April 22, 2026, 10:59:24 pm »

Firstly, all credits go to @ClassicHasClass for his great JIT support work for the v86 Firefox (basically baseline JIT is fully working). He had submitted the patches against upstream at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1860412 but unfortunately the patch has become stale and no longer work with post-140ESR codebase.

So after spending 3 weeks with help from few people in the PPC community and help of AI agents to track down errors pattern (lacking of tooling like rr-debugger made the work super hard - at one stage I was resolving to all sort of blind hypothesis and nearly gave up), I have successfully revived and fixed number of bugs of the original JIT codes. Please check out https://github.com/runlevel5/firefox/pull/1 to all members here for reviewing.

TL;DR; LE path for POWER8, POWER9 and POWER10 is fully implemented (including ION JIT, WASM SIMD, JSPI and Simulator). The BE path and POWER10 optimization are still in progress atm. Please give JIT work a go and let me know if you happen to find any bug. I have tried my best to hand test and ran many stress test / benchmarks and have addressed quite a number of edge cases.

So what's next? Trying to get it polished as much as possible then get it upstreamed (for release 153 - why? new ESR would be branched off this version) or simply try to get the patch accepted in downstream sources like Fedora, Debian/Ubuntu.

82

Applications and Porting / Re: [DEV] LuaJIT PPC64 support

« Last post by tle on April 22, 2026, 09:13:46 pm »

It's painful to convince Mike to review and merge such huge delta of changes to support PPC64 JIT. It's understandable taking into consideration and assumption that Mike does not own a POWER8/9 hardware.

I think I could try to review one of those stale JIT work and get it patched downstream in Fedora. If that approach proves successful, I strongly believe Mike would likely give his blessing to the JIT port after few years of real world usage downstream.

83

Applications and Porting / Re: Little Snitch for Linux!

« Last post by rjzak on April 20, 2026, 07:55:32 pm »

PPC64le port is now available: https://obdev.at/products/littlesnitch-linux/download.html, direct link: https://obdev.at/downloads/littlesnitch-linux/littlesnitch_1.0.3_ppc64el.deb

I haven't been able to get it to work. On Debian 13 with kernel 6.12.74, I'm getting an bpf error:
Apr 20 20:08:32 behemoth littlesnitch[28597]: Error: `bpf_raw_tracepoint_open` failed
Apr 20 20:08:32 behemoth littlesnitch[28597]: Caused by:
Apr 20 20:08:32 behemoth littlesnitch[28597]:     Unknown error 524 (os error 524)
Apr 20 20:08:32 behemoth systemd[1]: littlesnitch.service: Main process exited, code=exited, status=1/FAILURE
Apr 20 20:08:32 behemoth systemd[1]: littlesnitch.service: Failed with result 'exit-code'.

84

Applications and Porting / Re: Little Snitch for Linux!

« Last post by rjzak on April 20, 2026, 07:53:14 pm »

I use it for OS X, and it is a fine product, but in reality it has limited usefulness due to the consolidation on cloud computing and the control of the Internet by Google.  It is not possible to limit connections to miscreant sites without blocking legitimate ones, if they share the same ip address(es) or blocks, as is common with cloud computing.  It is not possible to block Google without breaking some or all functionality of perhaps 90% of web sites, since so many sites rely on Google APIs for the creating of their sites.

You can block some of Google and on a per-app basis, which is what's cool about Little Snitch.

85

User Zone / Re: Unable to boot with NVIDIA GT710 installed

« Last post by carlosgonz on April 20, 2026, 10:15:47 am »

Bernie looks like 64k still not on gnulinux 7.0 for nouveau. I need to look  what happened.

Also i got NVK work on PPC: https://trisquel.info/files/gnuark.png

86

User Zone / Re: Unable to boot with NVIDIA GT710 installed

« Last post by bernie on April 20, 2026, 01:05:19 am »

Hi carlosgonz,


Sorry, I didn't see this message in time. That's exciting news, but I'd like to verify it works myself before recommending to Trisquel that they switch back. I'll update here once I've done so.

Regards,


Bernie

87

Open Source and Libre Systems / ActBlue: disappearance of IT director, Decklin Foster & Debian

« Last post by pocock on April 17, 2026, 08:31:38 am »

ActBlue is the fundraising platform for the US Democrats and some affiliated groups.

There is quite some controversy about their ability to protect the system from foreign interference.  It is well covered in the press and some official reports from committees so I'm not going to elaborate on whether those accusations are valid or not.

Nonetheless, their former IT director is a Debian Developer.  They also worked in Harvard helping with research into depression.  They disappeared.

I pulled out various messages and links to relevant material and published them all in a single page for those who want to do fact checking.

Some of their old blog posts may be worth a deep-dive.  The names of people they were connected to.

88

Operating Systems and Porting / Re: [NEWS] Linux 7.0

« Last post by tle on April 12, 2026, 07:49:16 pm »

I've just manually built the kernel for Fedora 44 (as of now Fedora has not yet, likely they are going to stick to 6.19 for the F44 release). So far no issue, everything just work for me. Having said that I do not run DB, web server or NAS on the blackbird system so I could not verify if there are regressions to those applications

89

Operating Systems and Porting / [NEWS] Linux 7.0

« Last post by tle on April 12, 2026, 06:20:30 pm »

More information: https://kernelnewbies.org/LinuxChanges

Key highlights from the Linux 7.0 changelog include:

File Systems:

* XFS: Introduction of autonomous self-healing capabilities.
* EXT4: Enhanced performance for concurrent direct I/O writes.
* Performance & Memory:
* Faster swap mechanisms.
* Improved memory reclamation for file caches.
* Standardized generic I/O handling.

Architecture & Security:

* Intel TSX optimizations.
* Quantum-resistant kernel module signing.

Language Support:

* The Rust language experiment is considered complete and is now a core, non-experimental part of the kernel.

Hardware Support:

*General improvements and support for new hardware devices


POWERPC
kdump: Add support for crashkernel CMA reservation
powernv: Enable cpuidle state detection for POWER11
book3s64: Hash / SLB fixes & improvements (cover)
smp: Expose die_id and die_cpumask

90

Applications and Porting / Re: Little Snitch for Linux!

« Last post by TimKelly on April 12, 2026, 05:15:22 pm »

I use it for OS X, and it is a fine product, but in reality it has limited usefulness due to the consolidation on cloud computing and the control of the Internet by Google.  It is not possible to limit connections to miscreant sites without blocking legitimate ones, if they share the same ip address(es) or blocks, as is common with cloud computing.  It is not possible to block Google without breaking some or all functionality of perhaps 90% of web sites, since so many sites rely on Google APIs for the creating of their sites.