JRepin

JRepin OP , 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago) to RISC-V in RISC-V takes first step toward international standardization as ISO/IEC JTC1 grants PAS Submitter status

Well for x86 software still needs to be testing if some instructions are supported dynamically if they want to take adventage of the latest ones. For example you still neeed to test for different versions of AVX or even older SSE versions, since not all the x86 CPUs support everything. In 2020 something similar to RISC-V profiles was also defined for x86: microarchitectural levels. And most software just is compiled for the lowest commonly supported set of x86 instructions, in essence x86-64-v1 or x86-64-v2, depends on the software or GNU/Linux distribution. Although recently some distributions started to provide additional higher levels of packages for programs that benefit most from the use of latest x86 instructions. And then glibc HWCAPS feature enables the system to load the most optimized binary of the appliation. For example see openSUSE Tumbleweed gains optional x86-64-v3 optimization.

JRepin OP , 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago) to RISC-V in RISC-V takes first step toward international standardization as ISO/IEC JTC1 grants PAS Submitter status

To make this easier RISC-V has profiles (the latest being RVA23), which specify a base extension set. So software can target a specific profile, and CPUs advertises which profile they support (+ possible additional extensions). Regarding naming schemes, AMD and Intel are not so clear here either, so it would not be so much different :)

JRepin OP , 8 months ago to Linux in Linux 6.15 released

On openSUSE they have snapper snapshotting integrated into package management, so it automatically creates a snapshot before and after updates. And if something would go wrong you could easily select an old snappshot to boot from in the GRUB menu.

JRepin , 9 months ago to RISC-V in Banana Pi BPI f3 - Spacemit K1 anyone?

I have the BPI-F3 and it comes with Bianbu distribution by default. It is based on old LTS versions of Ubuntu with some updated packages (like Mesa) and some packages optimized for the X60/K1 CPU. The problem with this CPU/SBC is that SpacemiT is bad at upstreaming the support, they do support only in their own forks of Linux kernel and other software. So upstreaming is done by volunteers and is progressing very slowly (example only for the Linux kernel), so usual distros like Debian do not have support out of the box. Also it is a problem that the K1/X60 has some Imagination PowerVR BXE-2-32 integrated graphics and this one is not supported by Mesa and only has closed binary drivers which Imagination provides to SpacemiT and they then add it into Bianbu. Also keep in mind that even this driver does not support OpenGL (the normal desktop one). Only OpenGL ES and Vulkan. So in essence this means that the compositor/windowmanager and the toolkits like Qt need to be compiled with this support which is generaly not the case in more normal distros. Sometimes they provide two sets of compiled packags, one with normal desktop OpenGL which you then have to replace with the openGL ES variants. And these are usually not so well tested in the normal daily desktop use case.

So for daily use you more or less have to stick with Bianbu Linux on it. If you do that, I would it is quite usable, if you do not find GNOME-based desktop it has limiting as I do, since I am used to the power and plethora of features in KDE Plasma :) It is a bit slow for some more demanding tasks like video, graphics, games and stuff like that, but yeah, for simple office usecases, it is fine. So depends on what you would use it to do.

JRepin , 10 months ago to Linux in This Week in Plasma: The beginnings of Wayland session restore

Oh yeah. Can't wait for this. Bad session management/restore is basically the only major thing I still miss a lot on Wayland. Hopefully Firefox and other apps will gain support for this soon (I guess all Qt/KDE apps will get support at once when they also add support to Qt and KDE Frameworks). Anyways I just opened the enhancement request for Firefox for this just hoping they will add support soon.

JRepin OP , 10 months ago to Gaming in BDS calls for boycott of Microsoft and Xbox gaming products over alleged Israeli military connections

Read more about it here Boycott, Divest, Sanction movement, details about BDS on Microsoft

JRepin OP , 10 months ago to RISC-V in RISC-V With Linux 6.15 Adds Support For BFloat16 "BF16" Instructions [and more]

I would guess these are for device-tree specifications and run-time detection of what extensions some RISC-V CPU supports. Also might be some support for using these extensions in some common kernel code that is used by other parts of the kernel. But to be sure we would need to check the commits themselves.

JRepin OP , 10 months ago to Europe in Open Letter: Open-Source Chips for Europe

Well as they mention it, they do know.

JRepin , 10 months ago to Qt Framework in Qt 6.9 Released

It does not break anything. Just uses C++ and builds upon it and improves it. And MOC comes in when some niceties are required that are hard to do with plain C++ (and be backwards compatible) or when more flexibility is required. If you know how to do it better, well Qt is free (as in freedom) and opensource and you can join the project and replace MOC with a better implementation. Until then it is a not so important detail and foolish to throw away entire Qt and all the numerous goodies and nice things that it brings just for this small detail.

JRepin , 10 months ago to Qt Framework in Qt 6.9 Released