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Untitled Linux Show 182: Sketchy Patches
01:08:38
Battlemage, BadRam, and Fedora Cosmic
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- [00:01]
Leo Laporte
Hey folks. This week Jeff joins me and we talk about a whole lot of stuff from the Intel Ark battlemage card to the bad RAM hardware attack. We talk about CentOS Stream 9, the new Proton version and the new spin of Fedora with Cosmic that and more. It's a whole lot of fun. You don't want to miss it, so stay tuned.
- [00:19]
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- [00:49]
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- [02:37]
Leo Laporte
This is Twit. This is the Untitled Linux show, episode 182, recorded Saturday, December 14th. Sketchy patches. Hey folks, it is Saturday and it is time to get geeky with Linux and Open Source and well, Firefox and browsers and all kinds of stuff we're talking about before the show and it's going to be a lot of fun. Now it is a little bit different. We've got. It's a, it's an all star show. It's a superstars only show. It's me and Jeff.
- [03:11]
Jeff
Yeah, we've done this before, you know, on this show and other shows. Yes, so we got it.
- [03:18]
Leo Laporte
Oh yeah, no, it's not a problem. I've just always said, please don't make me do a monologue. I need somebody else there. But the two of us, we got it, no problem. We got a lot of news to talk about. It seems like this was the week that a lot of things happened.
- [03:31]
Jeff
It did, There was quite a bit and I'm going to warn you now, I got a lot of stories and they're longer stories. So yeah, we got a lot to cover.
- [03:42]
Leo Laporte
So we're going to do hardware first, right? There's something new in the hardware world. There's several new things in the hardware world, but one in particular I'm interested in and obviously Jeff is too. What's the big new thing?
- [03:56]
Jeff
Well, in case you've not been paying attention to the tech news, intel has released a couple of Battle Mage video cards. Now, Michael Larabal over at Phronix has been doing some benchmarking on the B580, which is the faster the cards and has results in both compute and gaming. I don't know if the embargo is released yet on the 570, so we're only going to talk the 580 today. Now, the Battlemage cards, Battle Mage cards use the XE2 graphics from intel and he does make mention that to get the cards to work, kernel 6.12 or greater will be required along with Mesa 24.3 or greater. If you can run even newer, it will be better as intel has been pushing out updates quite frequently to fix minor issues that have come up in certain situations. Now, the tests compare the 580 to older intel cards and several 40 series Nvidia and 7000 series AMD cards. Now first we're going to look at compute, which the results are all kind of rather all over the place. There are many compute benchmarks, the cards hanging with a 4070 or 7800AMD card and there's others where it doesn't do so hot. For example blender the 580 is behind the last gen intel cards, but there is a high kernel latency bug or high latency kernel bug in the driver and expect that to be fixed in the near future. Michael even does mention that he's going to really monitor the drivers and as improvements go in he's probably going to re benchmark a bunch of things. So now in cases where it doesn't excel and there isn't a driver issue, the Battle Mage cards run right around an Nvidia 460 or an AMD 7600. I do need to mention that this card is 250 US and that is if you can find it. As of Saturday the 14th as as we're doing the podcast now, the cards are out of stock at all major retailers I believe. The reason being while it isn't the fastest card out there, it is the fastest at the 250 price price point in the cost for performance. The Intel 580, you know, for cost versus performance I should say the Intel 580 card is crushing AMD and Nvidia. You know it's, it's a very high bang for your buck in that lower price point which a lot of people are at. You know, not everybody can drop monstrous amounts of money on a new video card. Now I know some of you are saying fine Jeff, Compute is all well and good but I plan to play games and I'm not going to do scientific research on my machine. To that I say look at the second article in the Show Notes where Michael has the gaming benchmarks. Michael has an Intel 285 CPU for these benchmarks and he had it as well in the Compute benchmarks and he and he doesn't make mention of it in the article. But you do need to have resizable bar to get the most out of this GPU. So you need an Intel 10th generation or newer CPU or you need an AMD 3000 series CPU or newer. Now you can use it on an older system but the performance is going to be reduced so the benchmarks won't apply if you're putting it on an even older machine. Now the games that he tried are a mix of proton and native and we get mixed results. So while most all of the games ran, F122 did have a problem where the game would hang so it doesn't have a good benchmark. Result on that one. Hardware unboxed ran the B580 across a ton of games, and while there were a few that had some issues, almost all of them ran fine. So the card isn't perfect, but the reviewers I've seen have said that intel is acknowledging the issues and working on the driver to fix the problems. On the Linux side, it's the same story where things are not 100% perfect, but they're 98% perfect and the drivers are still getting love, so we should see issues fixed soon. Kind of a side note, the first generation from when they originally launched to current state had massive uplift in performance because they were continuously working on the driver and they know there's issues with the driver. So it's, it's going to get, it's going to get love. Now that might also mean if you're getting a card, that you might have to upgrade the kernel to fix an issue, if your distribution is a little behind on kernel updates, or if there's something coming out in a kernel version or MESA version that you deem that you have to have right away. But after all this benchmarking, bottom line is a card cost per performance is just like the computation benchmarks, and that there isn't anything that can touch it for the price. It's it runs probably around this AMD 7600 or Nvidia 460 in performance. You know, maybe slightly behind it right now with the current state of drivers, but it's, it's solidly in the neighborhood. I think it's great that Intel's getting the win across the review sites for the card which intel needs right now. And keep in mind, the GPU and the CPU teams are totally different. So while we might have issues with our Trust in the CPUs, the GPUs are different Beast and have not had any cause for concern. Temperature and power draw for the card's been good. It runs around 65C and 140 watts. Throwing a little cold water on the party for intel though. I think I would be remiss if I didn't say that we'll be having new cards from both AMD and Nvidia coming out soon though. Nvidia is expected to come in and the Nvidia cards are expected to come out in January or at least announce the 590 and 580, so getting a 560 series of card might take a while. I don't know of the timing of the AMD 8000 series cards, so I know they're not going to compete on the high end, but with this series of cards, you know, I don't know when the 8,600 level of card is going to come out. You know, is it going to be about the same time as Nvidia a lot sooner? I don't know. But we also don't know the pricing. So they might come out, you know, be faster but might be a lot more expensive or they come out at the 250 price point and intel drops their price. So it's kind of expected that Intel's probably going to drop their price in the future when the other cards are released, depending on their performance and value. So if you want to get a new video card and want to try something new, the Intel Battle Mage is a good card, it's good value and it's definitely a recommended purchase across all the different reviewers I've seen both at Pharonix and across the major, you know, gamers, Nexus JS2 cents, Linus tech tips and so on. Hardware unboxed. They all really like the card. So, you know, it's definitely something people have good reviews on. Let me know your thoughts on the discord about the Intel GPUs and I look forward to reading the comments.
- [11:03]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, I've been looking very interestingly at this as well. I don't think it would be, I don't remember exactly what I'm running. I'm not sure that it would be an upgrade at this point, but for $250 it's really compelling.
- [11:19]
Jeff
Oh yeah. Especially if you're, you know, there's a lot of people still on 900 series cards, AMD 580s. If you're in a thousand series, Nvidia definitely an upgrade and it's basically.
- [11:36]
Leo Laporte
The first card that's really worth looking at in this price point. For a long time now it seems like this is kind of the price point that everybody has abandoned is the under 300 range. There's not been much there. So.
- [11:50]
Jeff
Yeah, and that's why, you know, people say, well it's barely hangs with a 460. Well, the 460 costs more money. You know, it doesn't have. When you look at, you know, frames per price or per dollar, this intel card is just really top, top of the charts.
- [12:07]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah, it's very cool. Very cool. So there's a. This is interesting timing. There's a thing that I am going to talk about. I don't know how much Jeff is going to be able to talk about this because it's sort of in the realm of where he actually works. So there are certain things that he's just not allowed to really comment on. But I found it super interesting. And then we'll see if Jeff has any comments at the end of it. But I want to talk about something called bad RAM and what exactly this means and why it's important and why it's not entirely specific to Linux, but why it's related to Linux. So bad RAM is. It is an attack on AMD's secure virtualization. So. And it's, it's all about how RAM chips work. I happen to have one here. Now this is a, this is a DIMM from a laptop, but it is actually recent enough. I don't think I can get this close enough. You've got your memory chips, right? So you've got like you see on this side you've got four memory chips. If you look on the back. And again, I don't think I can get this close enough. There's a little tiny here, I'll lean way towards the camera. There's a little tiny chip right there. And that is actually, actually an eeprom E E P R O M And that's just a. It's a piece of memory. So a lot of times they'll be, you know, as little as like 1,000 bytes or even 512 bytes, you know, 1k2k. It's sort of in that range. It does not take very much. A lot of ephroms are very small and they just, they store some bytes and they're usually at. They're usually I2C, so I squared C. And in my experience they tend to be on address 50 for 0x50. So hexadecimal 50. That's pretty much the standard. And it's just you send a request and you say, hey, send me your bytes back. And it'll send back a string of bytes. Useful for a lot of things, for doing programming configuration on hardware in the RAM specification, the size of RAM and things like the timing. So like it's a 4 gigabyte stick, it's an 8 gigabyte stick. Here's the different timings that this stick supports. Those are stored on the eeprom. And so you plug it, you plug the eeprom or you plug the entire stick into your motherboard. You turn the computer on. And one of the first things it does, I mean this happens faster than you can even think about it. It sends out a signal and says, hey, send me back the bits from that eeprom, the EEPROM sends it back and then the motherboard goes, okay, I've got three sticks of ram. These are the sizes and these are the timings, and brings up the ram, starts to initialize the system. That's what EEPROM on a RAM stick does. The idea of bad RAM is, what if we told that eeprom, what if we put something different in there? What if the EPROM lied? So say you've got a 2 gigabyte stick and the eProm says, oh no, I'm a 4 gigabyte stick. What is going to happen? And it turns out that you get something called aliasing, which aliasing pops up in a lot of different, a lot of different contexts. You know, in graphics you have aliasing to worry about, in audio you have aliasing to worry about. And to put it very simply, it's sort of when things appear that aren't really there because of various reasons. And so in this context, what will happen is you have almost like a second copy of ram, because you have to think about it like if your ram, say your select lines, if you were to give them a bit value. And so if you only have two gigabytes, and this is obviously not going to be entirely accurate, it's just to understand what's going on here. So if you have two gigabytes, your select line might be eight bits long. It's obviously more than eight bits. But just stick with me here, it'll be eight bits long. And if you have a 16 gigabyte card, it's going to be longer, let's say 12 bits or nine bits, whatever, what have you. On the smaller card you can set, or on the smaller RAM stick you can set those extra bits, the ones hanging off the end, to whatever you want to. And it doesn't matter because there are, there are just, you know, there's this amount of RAM physically to get to. And then, so what happens is if the, if the computer thinks that it has more RAM than it actually does, you end up getting the same physical RAM twice on the memory address. So, like, you'll have one address that points to a specific bit of ram and then you have aliased another address that points to the same bit of ram. And why that turns into a problem is because the processor is managing security based on the RAM addresses. And so it's saying this memory address is reserved for such and such virtual machine. We're not going to let anything but that virtual machine change it. Well, if you have an Aliased address. You can start at the virtual machine, the processor can do its fancy cryptography thing and then another process can use the other memory address and go in and fiddle with that memory. So they call it bad ram. It's all about this idea of aliasing bits so that you can get to them more than once. And it is quite a security problem. But AMD already has a fix out for it. I think it's AMD specific. They are now during boot up they're checking for aliased addresses and if they find any I think it just fails to boot. But super interesting security story and that's why it's Linux specific, because it has to do with virtual machines and some things like that. But I found it really, really fascinating. I've got links in there to go in and learn more about it if you want to.
- [17:59]
Jeff
Now is that coming from when you purchase the RAM or is it on your machine? They have ability to.
- [18:06]
Leo Laporte
Right, right, right, right, right. So the, the deal is that it's what they're thinking about with it, it's not when you purchase it. What they're thinking about is like if someone is in a cloud environment and so they've got a virtual machine that's off in a data center somewhere maybe where someone else owns the actual hardware and they're just running a virtual machine. Well you've got AMD's secure virtualization stuff that is designed to give you some assurances that your virtual machine is not being tampered with even if somebody else owns the hardware. And so what this does is it can be used to defeat that assurance. Now if you're talking about your own computer, it's nothing to worry about. You know, you've got to literally get to the RAM either with like probes or maybe even desolder that EPROM and hang something else off of it. Like this is not an entirely trivial attack but for that particular instance it could be a problem.
- [19:04]
Jeff
Okay, well I was just wondering if it was maybe something larger they had sending out a bunch of sticks of RAM like that or something. Because that's where I was going to say make sure you buy your RAM from a known company. Get it from crucial, Samsung, Hynix, Corsair, you know, Kingston something that, you know the name. It's a trusted brand, don't go with any third party off brands. I don't care how cheap it is and how good of a deal it is. Just stick with the brands, you know.
- [19:34]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, absolutely.
- [19:36]
Jeff
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- [21:21]
Leo Laporte
So that's what's going on with Badram with memory. Jeff there's something going on with desktops that's maybe some better news than this.
- [21:30]
Jeff
Yes, it definitely is better news. And I have another pair of stories, and this time centered around kde. I know we all talk a lot about kde, but it's a popular desktop and there's a lot going on with the new focus on Wayland and the version 6 of the desktop. So it's it's pretty active right now. The first story is About KDE Gear 24.12 being released, and for those new to KDE, the desktop is basically built into three major components. You have the plasma where the graphics are handled, KDE Gears where the programs are. And Framework is kind of like it sounds. It's the structure that lets everything interconnect. It's kind of the glue that holds the the other two pieces together. Focusing on gear, we had a lot. We have a lot of updates to several programs. For example, Ocular, which is a document reader. Its main claim to fame is PDFs, but it can open all sorts of files and can sign and verify documents. They've now added support for more types of items in combo boxes and PDF forms. They've made the printing faster and more correct, so now you should get the correct output when you send it to a printer. And they've also fixed an issue when signing a document where the signature window would prematurely go away. We've got Cleopatra, which keeps track of your digital signatures and encryption keys and certificates, and it helps you sign, encrypt and decrypt emails and confidential messages. They have redesigned the notepad and signing encryption dialogue and they put in the work to make sure messages and errors are a lot clearer. They also made a change so the recipients of your messages are shown beside the notepad. So you can see when you're typing something out who this is going to on the same. On the same window. Dolphin, which is the file manager for kde, which if you're a user of kde, you know it well. In this release they put a lot of effort into accessibility and usability. They've overhauled the main view, so it should now work smoothly with screen readers. Something which I think will be of help to me. They've upgraded the keyboard navigation so pressing Control L multiple times will switch back and forth between focusing and selecting the location bar path and focusing the view. So your, your window, your pane where your actual files and stuff are pressing Escape in the location bar will now move the focus to the active view. This will be handy especially when you have a split view. You know the Commander style layout in Dolphin, which I personally use every once in a while, depending, you know, not always, but it's nice when you're working with a remote machine. You can. You can have both things up at once. Sorting is also improved in Dolphin. Now a file called a.txt will appear before a file called a space2.txt, so a little more human readable sorting. You can now also sort your videos by duration. So if you have a big directory that you want to find the longest or shortest or whatever. Now it's easy to do the properties, dialogs, checksum and Permissions tab have been redesigned for easier file integrity checks. A change that will that change will also appear in other KDE applications as well. Now, if you listen to this show for a few episodes, you've heard us talk about KDEN Live or KDENLive, which is a video editor, and they've added the ability to resize multiple items on a timeline all at once. So that might not sound like a lot, but there's a lot of people that are really excited about this being able to resize multiple things at once. Did you know KDE has a sound editor? K Wave has been on the back burner for a while, but it's getting love again and it's been ported to Qt6, so now it will work natively with KDE 6. They've also refreshed the interface by changing some of the icons to better match with the current desktop style. And by doing this it will also allow for easier indication when playback is paused. Now there are more updates that have happened, so take a look at the first link in the Show Notes for the full details of the applications I've skipped over or details I've skipped over on the applications I did cover, so I definitely had some brevity in that story. The second link in the Show Notes talks about Updates to Plasma 6.3. Biggest information coming from Nate Graham's blog is there is now better fractional scaling support. So when using scaling there should be a sharper image now and no gaps between windows and their shadows and other weird little artifacts like that when you're, when you're zooming in and using scaling. When zooming in at high levels, the interface switches to a pixel perfect representation and overlays a grid on the screen so you can see how each individual pixel looks. So designers and artists should love to see this feature because it should make the detail work much easier when you're designing like, you know, maybe you're into fonts, windows, icons or something like that, and you can really zoom in and see how it actually looks on your desktop and see which pixels you might have to tweak a little bit. Now speaking of artists, there's now an option for screen color accuracy, but it's going to have an effect on system performance, so gamers are probably not going to want to throw that switch. But if you have to have exact color accuracy, well there's, there's a switch for that now. Now if you hate the double click on an edge of a window to max maximize it horizontally or vertically. Now they've added a toggle so you can turn it on or off in settings so you don't always have to be forced with that. Now there's many more bugs squashed, which I won't go into. But one thing I did want to touch on is performance increase for the Clipboard. So instead of a custom internal format, the clipboard is now going to use an SQL Light database. This improves reliability, support for saving many data types, and memory efficiency, especially with images. So take a look at the article in the Show Notes for more details. It also has a link to Nate's blog for each and every change. And you know, I'll be honest, I can't wait till my distribution of choice, which is Kubuntu, moves to 6.3 or later, as it seems like there's a lot of polish at this point and the desktop is really getting defined for KDE 6.
- [27:53]
Leo Laporte
Mm. I've been. I've been enjoying it. You mentioned KdenLive and I recently discovered something KdenLive on Fedora has had a problem with. When you go to render something out, at least the way I've been doing it, 1080pMPV, the audio and video is desynced for me. So you go to some of the Floss Weekly episodes. Yeah. So go three or four weeks back, go to Floss Weekly and just watch and you'll see some of them are pretty bad a second desynced. And that's a lot. You definitely can notice that. Yeah. And so I, you know, I sat down like, all right, what can I do to fix this? There's got to be something. And I ended up installing kdenlive, the flatpak version through Discover and the last couple of times I've rendered out with that and it's not been a problem. So it must be something with the Fedora because kdenlive uses your codecs from your system. Right. So it must be something with the codecs that Fedora is using that you get a different codec pack inside of the flatpak version.
- [28:54]
Jeff
Yeah, maybe there's a FFMPEG version or something that's off, or one of those libraries that just either either picked up a regression or is one behind and there's a bug squash that hasn't been picked up yet.
- [29:09]
Leo Laporte
Or honestly, it might even be where Fedora does not want to ship some version of a library because there's patent issues and you get that a lot with codecs. So it could even be something like that. There is one other little bit of News that goes along with this. And we've been watching the Wayland color management protocol and that's basically the thing that's got to land in Wayland before we start getting HDR across all of the desktops and then also supported in browsers. And it has now hit three acts. That's the term they use, acknowledgements. And that is the, that is essentially the requirement for something to land. One of the big requirements is three of the right people had to say, yes, we agree, we sign off on this. And that has now happened. And so I expect within the next probably couple of weeks for this to land. And I also expect that once it lands you're going to see things like hopefully, hopefully engineers at Google, with Google Chrome will start adding support for it. So hopefully soon.
- [30:19]
Jeff
Hello, hdr.
- [30:21]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah. All right. I want to talk about a desktop option that is not kde. I am not running it yet, but boy, I'm really thinking about it. And that's Cosmic and Cosmic. Not on POP os, but Cosmic on Fedora. Everybody's favorite. Well, some of our favorite distros, I guess. It's not everybody's favorite. It should be everybody's favorite distro. So I've got a link off to the Fedora wiki. I think I originally saw this on Phronix, but the actual story is on the wiki here and that is that they are proposing a change for Fedora. What is this going to be? Fedora 42. Fedora 42 coming soon to do a full on spin of the Cosmic desktop. So they are already planning, there's already a sig. They are already planning to add support for Cosmic for Fedora. In fact, I think in Fedora 41 you may be able to run it already. And so there is. The plan is it's a proposal. It's not approved, but I imagine it's going to get approved. The plan is that there's going to be an actual spin so you can get a live dvd, you could do an install of Fedora Cosmic now. And I'm pretty excited about this and I find it fascinating that Cosmic is so new and there are so many people as excited about it as they are. And I think having a Fedora spin is going to be just kind of the next step in really it coming into its own. So it's going to be cool.
- [31:54]
Jeff
I think that's going to really, you know, it seems like KDE's kind of got its legs now and it's really, you know, it stumbled there for a while. Gnome, I don't know, seems like they've kind of, they're in a stumble period. But Cosmic seems like it's really coming up fast and I could see it being a number one desktop, give it a couple more years, you know, get it polished, you know, and get it kind of ready for production, as they say. I could see Cosmic taking over, you know, surpassing KDE and Gnome and, or at the very least hanging right in there.
- [32:30]
Leo Laporte
I don't think it's, I don't think it's ridiculous to suggest that in another few years the big two desktops on Linux are going to be KDE and Cosmic.
- [32:42]
Jeff
Well, I hope Gnome just really kind of gets their legs back under them and kind of gets a direction and stops breaking compatibility because it seems like every so often they rev up and then it really upsets a lot of people, which just think you've written some application, widget, whatever, and you know, it, it took hours and you worked your, you poured your heart into it.
- [33:08]
Leo Laporte
Yep.
- [33:09]
Jeff
And then they went, oh, we changed, changed the API, it's not compatible, so now you have to rewrite everything and you're just like, oh, do I even want to go through that again? Yep, you know, it was working great. And.
- [33:22]
Leo Laporte
It'S not that, it's just, it's not even just GNOME that's doing that though. You know, there's been, there's been deals, especially KDE going to six. There's been some things that had to be rewritten to get six working. I think the thing that really annoyed people with gnome though, is that in kde there were still ways to do it. In Gnome there were some of those features that they kind of just removed and there suddenly weren't way like some of the theming things just did, went away altogether, or at least it was threatened to.
- [33:53]
Jeff
Well, and I think it's a little different. So KDE went through this from version 3 to version 4. They had to do a major rewrite and it was painful and it was long and arduous, but at that time they wrote in the ability to be more flexible. So any future major changes were a lot smoother. So 4 to 5 was not near the issue that 3 to 4 was. And going from 5 to 6 isn't as bad as it was going from 3 to 4. Now you could also argue that going from 5 to 6, I mean, you were going, you're changing from X to Wayland. That's a major overhaul versus some of the GNOME stuff. They kind of change things, but I don't know that. I mean, it's not like they were going through that big of a, okay, we need to break compatibility or really change things because we're going strictly to Wayland or we're going. I mean, sometimes they kind of just, well, we're kind of changing direction and break things.
- [34:54]
Leo Laporte
And so I would say that GNOME is more opinionated than KDE is. And when they change things and they're opinionated, that is where you tend to run some people away. I would say that is the main difference that.
- [35:12]
Jeff
Well, I, you know, I can't argue with that. I mean, I can totally, I can totally see that viewpoint and I can totally see how being so opinionated, it kind of, you know, when you really put your stake in the sand and say, here's the line and this is. This is it. Some people are going to go, I'm not. I'm not on your side.
- [35:31]
Leo Laporte
That's not it for me. Yep.
- [35:32]
Jeff
Yeah.
- [35:33]
Leo Laporte
Yep.
- [35:33]
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- [37:03]
Jeff
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- [37:32]
Leo Laporte
CT mobile.com all right, well let's move on and let's talk gaming a little bit. And Proton I see there's a new Proton release out.
- [37:45]
Jeff
There is and I guess I was kind of really glomming on this because if anybody didn't know if you're using Steam it was I believe Friday night they had the Steam Game Awards. So if you like to see what's coming and see all that stuff, it's on there. So you can see it on YouTube, you can see it on Steam. But what we're going to talk about right now is Proton 9.04 has been released and you know, I think my propensity for gaming is rather well known on the podcast. So you know, just always love to see this do Protons and make things play better. Now this release comes three months after the Dash 3 release came out and brings a lot of games which are now playable so like Conqueror's Blade Cube, Hero Odyssey, Disgaea or dig de Gea 4 complete plus Star Quest Sniper Elite, Nazi Zombie Army 2 now only that's AMD GPUs only Total War Shogun 2 Warhammer 40K Space Marine 2 which requires disabling the Steam overlay. But that's just a few of the games that are that they've now added to playable. I cut out several that you know, I didn't you didn't want to hear me read for that long. Now there is even some regressions fixed like Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic no longer launches to a black screen when in full screen mode and games now launch on the correct screen on setups with multiple monitors connected to multiple GPUs. Again, many many others are fixed. That's just a small sampling of of things they fixed. There are other fixes to games that were playable but they just made things better such as improved font rendering in Spellforce 3 versus edition and reliable mod support in Doom Eternal. Along with improved video playback in games like March of Empires and devil may cry 3 special edition. You know who doesn't love smooth cinematic sequences? Now you've got them back. Now they've also added things which are a little more under the hood, such as adding support for Nvidia Optical Flow API and DLSS3. And if, if you don't know what DLSS is, it's a technology that allows smoother and faster frame rates in games that are demanding. While it's keeping most of the visual quality, it's a way that they can kind of fudge textures, you know, add frames in between. So if you're. If you're having a video card that's kind of struggling to play the game, this can get you up to your 60 frames or higher to make it a smoother play by kind of fudging things a little bit. Also under the hood are several updates to components that are used in Proton. So they updated Xyla OR xalia to 0.4.4 and enabled it for several games such as Odd World, Strangers Wrath HD and Fallout New Vegas. They've updated wine motto to 9.3.1, which gives better. Net support. They've upgraded DXVK to version 2.5.1, and they've also included a regression fix from that version. So they patched the new version. They've updated DXVK NVAPI to 0.7.194. So that's for Nvidia integration. The VKD3D Proton moved up to version 2.13, 241, which improves direct 3D12 support. Now they've also updated the VKD3D Shader to VKD3D one point, and they added a hack to make sure it runs with optimal performance and stability. So take a look at the article in the show notes. You know, they also have a link to the release notes and there's a ton of things I left out. Just. I'm. I'm just trying to hit the high points here. There's. There's a ton of games which had regression fixes. Many have been added to the playable list. And there's. There's a big number which ran but might have had a little niggle that needed fixed. You know, improve performance, improve stability, or, you know, enabled some features. So take a look at the article and see what changed. Install a new Proton and go enjoy some games.
- [42:17]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, I'm going to tag on a quick little story that I saw this week, and that is the NTsync driver. There are some differences between the way that Windows NT and Linux does synchronization. And because of those differences, and because they're having to be dealt with, excuse me, in user space, it slows games down. And there has been some work done to try to essentially port the Windows NT synchronization things over to Linux specifically for use in Wine and Proton. And the patch set, we just got a version 7 and coming along, it's being. If I could, if I see correctly, it's being fairly well received in the kernel mailing list. No one is, you know, no one is throwing a fit over it. And it's just. It's good to see this making. Making its way through and hopefully eventually landing. The thing that really caught my attention is if you go to the Phronix article, there is a kind of a chart. It's not one of Michael's normal charts. It's just a text chart taken right from the mailing list, I think. But it shows the improvement for some of these games in frame rate. And the one that really got me was the 678% improvement on Dirt 3, which jumped from 110 frames per second to 860 frames per second. And then you also see here, Resident Evil 2 was running at 26 frames per second and with the patches, it's running at 77 frames per second. That's 196% improvement. So this is not. Not a little deal. This is a big deal. It is a big improvement for some of these games and I would love to see this actually land.
- [44:08]
Jeff
Oh, yeah. Well, I mean, I'm just looking at the data here and the lowest improvement is 21%, which is Metro 2033 goes from 164 frames to 199 frames. That's significant.
- [44:22]
Leo Laporte
I mean, that is a significant change. And that's the smallest one on the.
- [44:26]
Jeff
Yeah, that's your worst case in the sampling that is here. So, yeah, that's huge.
- [44:34]
Leo Laporte
I am hopeful that that will eventually land. Hopeful, Hopeful. And Michael seems to be as well. He talked about maybe within the next couple of kernel versions we'll see it finally get into the kernel.
- [44:46]
Jeff
Well, it's good when nobody's complaining. Nobody's throwing a fit. I think that really should.
- [44:50]
Leo Laporte
It's a good sign.
- [44:51]
Jeff
That's a good sign. Yes.
- [44:54]
Leo Laporte
All right, let's see. I think it is time to talk about. Oh, yes. My weekly screed against hardware manufacturers being terrible. Present company excluded, of course. Qualcomm.
- [45:08]
Jeff
Thank you.
- [45:08]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. So this one is Qualcomm actually Qualcomm makes ARM Core processors and even ARM core processors had problems with the Spectre flaw. That was one of those speculative execution. Basically there is a way to read RAM bits that you're not supposed to be able to read. This is different than the aliasing we talked about at the beginning of the show. It's a side channel attack. It's the ability to look at timing things with the cache and figure out what's inside of ram. Super interesting. If you want. We've talked about it before, I've covered it on Hackaday. You go and look for Spectre and you can find all kinds of more information about it. The problem here is that Qualcomm CPUs, some of them have problems with Spectre and need mitigations to really run securely. And Qualcomm never bothered to upstream any of that information into the Linux kernel. And so you've got Douglas Anderson from Google, an engineer at Google sent out patches for the kernel for the Qualcomm CPU cores. And he said, just so you know, he says, I've made an attempt at guessing. And he's got that, not in quotes, but very, very bold guessing what the write patches should be to enable mitigations from Qualcomm cpu. This is mostly me searching the web to figure out what ARM cores, various Qualcomm cores are based out of. He says the patches get more and more sketchy as the series progresses. And I've noted that the later patches don't even compile. I've included them to make it obvious that I think these cores are affected even if I don't have all the right information to mitigate them. Hopefully Qualcomm can come and fix this mess for me. Ah, come on Qualcomm, get with it. This is, this is just your, as I said, your weekly reminder that some of these companies are just terrible members of the community and are not doing any of the things that they're supposed to be doing with getting their products supported in the Linux kernel. Shame on you, Qualcomm. Do better.
- [47:24]
Jeff
Yeah, guessing. Oh, that's.
- [47:28]
Leo Laporte
That's not what you want to hear.
- [47:29]
Jeff
Yeah, we got a security mitigation. Maybe this will work.
- [47:33]
Leo Laporte
Give it a shot, you know, although, so to be, to be clear, no, no shade whatsoever thrown on Douglas Anderson. Almost said Douglas Adams. That's somebody different. No shade whatsoever on Douglas Anderson and he's doing the right thing here. He is bringing, he's letting folks know that it is a problem. He's doing his best. And he is making it quite clearly known when it is a guess and the state of things.
- [47:56]
Jeff
So I should say it's. It's a sad state of affairs that he has to try to pick up the slack.
- [48:01]
Leo Laporte
Exactly.
- [48:02]
Jeff
You know, if only, if only they had, you know, billions in revenue that they could just, you know, take a little time out of somebody's day to go, hey, why don't you fix this?
- [48:12]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. I tell you what is interesting to do is to pull up the Linux maintainers file and then search for it and see how many Qualcomm addresses there are. I'm sure there are some. There have to be some.
- [48:34]
Jeff
You're hoping now? I hope so.
- [48:39]
Leo Laporte
Oh, well, maybe Qualcomm is not at Qualcomm, because that didn't come up with anything. Arm Qualcomm. Let's see.
- [48:54]
Jeff
Well, I mean they had to get the original drivers in there and the original code, so I would think there's got to be somebody.
- [49:04]
Leo Laporte
You would think so. You would hope so. At kernel.org@kernel.org yeah. @gmail.comorly.run there's some hilarious email addresses in here too, by the way. Yeah, I will look in the next story and see if we have any actual Qualcomm employees. I went kind of on a rant against Rockchip back a few weeks ago and made it clear. Even then though, there's like two or three at Rock, Rocket Chip or at Rock, you know, whatever their domain is in the kernel maintainers list. So they're doing some. It would be kind of sad if Qualcomm doesn't even have any in here.
- [49:46]
Jeff
Unless they're thinking that the end companies are going to be the ones that will supply all the code and they supply the hardware and then the equivalent would be like intel supplying a CPU and then like the Dells and HP's having to write the code to handle this stuff. But I don't know.
- [50:10]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. All right, let's see what is up next. We've got.
- [50:16]
Jeff
We're going to talk about kernels, well.
- [50:19]
Leo Laporte
Kernels and Arch Linux. Are you going to run Arch, by the way?
- [50:25]
Jeff
I don't think so yet. In all honesty, if, if Kubuntu doesn't go with a more, a much more Modern KDE on 25.04, I would probably jump to. There's a good chance I might go to Fedora Waters.
- [50:45]
Leo Laporte
The water's nice. Come on in.
- [50:46]
Jeff
Yeah, I mean, well, and partially because when I ran 40, it ran good even when it was, you know, KDE 6.1 and beta and it was pretty rough. But man, it was smooth. It was good. It was, I don't know, that possibility or maybe go nuts and go and get on Cosmic or something. I don't know. We'll see in a couple months what happens if they're going to update what they use.
- [51:17]
Leo Laporte
So I do want to make clear there are quite a few@lenaro.com email addresses that appears to be Qualcomm. So there are some Lenaro employees working on the kernel stuff and those appear to be the Qualcomm people. So no rant needed.
- [51:37]
Jeff
Yeah, but it's kind of cathartic.
- [51:41]
Leo Laporte
Well, yeah, it was okay. So tell us about the kernel now.
- [51:48]
Jeff
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- [53:58]
Jeff
Once in a while we talk about Arch in this show and I know it can be a bit of a decisive distribution and you know, it generally boils down to it's too cutting edge and breaks too much, you know, too hard to install versus you get the latest software and have more control of what you install. So I'm not going to answer that today, but since our audience is made up of people taking their first steps into Linux to people hacking the kernel, I thought today we'd touch on the mid level of person. You know, the person that you know your way around a distribution and you're looking at getting it the next getting into the next level of playing. So the fourth story I have in the show notes is about installing and switching between kernels and architecture. Now, I've done this with other distributions, but I didn't realize there are multiple flavors of kernels for Arch. I learned some things while writing the show notes today. I didn't realize all this, and honestly it kind of made Arch a little more appealing to me. One of the first things I learned was there are five official kernels for Arch, and these are kernels that are either supported directly by Arch or trusted contributors. The first, of course, is the standard kernel, and that's the default. And when you load up Arch, that's what you get. But if you happen to be on something else and need to go back to the back to the standard vanilla kernel, the command line default for that is sudo PacMan space-capital S space Linux space Linux headers so that'll install the generic kernel. The second kernel is the lts. Basically, if you need more stability, you can load up an lts. You get a kernel that doesn't change much other than updates for security fixes and critical bugs. Now, one could argue why are you running Arch if you need server stability? But I'm not one to dictate what you should or shouldn't do, and I just give you the tools and let you decide what's best for your situation to Install the LTS. It's like much like the previous commands, only dash lts has added the command so you'd get pseudo space pac man space dash capital ace s space Linux dash lts and it's all lowercase space linux dash lts headers. So that'll get you the lts. Now third on the list is the hardened kernel. Now this kernel is as it sounds. It's all about security and comes with patches and configurations which make your kernel as secure as it can be. To install it, replace the dash lts from the last command with dash hardened and again all lowercase fourth on the list is a real time kernel. Now we've covered real time kernels in the past, but what they are is to make sure tasks get handled when they need it. You know they get, they get kernel attention when they need it. Now this isn't a faster kernel, it just prioritizes things differently. Main uses in audio production, video editing and other time sensitive tasks where delays can be disruptive such as, you know, like if you, you're using the kernel in a self driving car or some medical situation. So now this is the same as the last one. Change the LTS or the hardened out for a dash rt. Again all lowercase. Fifth one is one that would appeal to gamers. It's the Zen kernel which is a community driven project to get the most performance out of the kernel if they can. It contains multiple performance enhancements, scheduler tweaks and other modifications to improve desktop interactivity and system responsiveness. Now this would be a kernel for gamers, multimedia users, things like that. Now installation of course is the same pattern. Sudo Pacman Space Dash Capital S Space Linux Zen Space Linux Zen headers. So easy to go between the kernels. Now one side note here, there might be someone who's wondering what the difference is between the RT kernel and the Zen kernel. And I think a decent analogy is people at a restaurant with a Zen kernel. It's like a sir, you have a server who's trying to serve a dinner rush and there are a few large tables. Now the server is working as fast as they can and balancing extra plates to try and serve everyone and but they're taking care of some of the large tables first because they can get more stuff out, you know, out of the kitchen. The person who's at the corner table alone could be waiting a while before they get attention. Now while in the RT kernel exam, RT example, a person at the along sitting alone at the corner table is going to get taken care of much sooner but because the server is running all around to take care of everyone, the overall service is slower. So I think that's kind of a high level decent analogy between the RT and the performance kernel. Now, in addition to the kernels I've mentioned, there are five more unofficial kernels in the article. They do, they do say that there's a lot of overlap on the unofficial kernels with the official, but the unofficial ones are more focused for a lot more specific use cases because they're unofficial you will need to use something like yay Y A Y to install them. Now while they're not official they are in the AUR which is the official arch repositories. The article in the show notes goes over how to use Yay we we have the Liquorix kernel I think L I Q U O R I X which is best for gamers and desktop users who want snappier performance. There's the XAN mod xanmod, which is a performance kernel but more targeted at heavy multitasking. The Libre kernel Libre, which is kind of what it sounds like. It removes all proprietary firmware and drivers. Everything in the Libre kernel is going to be open source. The clear kernel, which is like the kernel which is found in Intel's Clear Linux distribution. It's known which that the Intel Clear Linux distribution is known for having performance improvements and being a very fast distribution for Intel CPUs and to a level lesser extent AMD CPUs. But clear Linux isn't friendly to being a general purpose distribution. It's geared more for like cloud computing, database work and other enterprise tasks. It's also kind of a playground for intel, so it's not always user friendly for newer users anyway. But this way you can have the performance of the kernel of the clear kernel in a more friendly distribution. And finally we have the CK kernel, which is also meant for heavy multitasking and intense workloads. So not only do you have a lot of things you're doing with your machine, but you have the machine maxed out with what it can handle. You're basically hammering the hardware as hard as you can. That's where the C the CK kernel would come in. So now if you take a look at the article in the show notes, it does go in how to switch between the kernels with Grub and System D boot and in both cases they give you examples how to save the last kernel you booted in as the default until you use the menu to pick a new kernel, which then makes that one the Default, so it's got persistence across reboots. So that's kind of good. If you're running a few different ones based on workloads and you want to boot into several different ones, there's a lot of good information in there and really go have a look and have a great time playing with kernels.
- [61:49]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, very cool. One quick. Maybe I misheard or you misspoke, but the aur, that's the arch user repository, that one's more semi official and I think technically anyone can upload packages to the aur. I know they're pretty aggressive about getting rid of bad ones and they've got some things in place to try to keep that as safe as possible, but not exactly the fully official repository that is the user repo.
- [62:13]
Jeff
So. Okay. So it would be trusted.
- [62:17]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, that's. That's neat. I don't know. I don't know if I'm ever going to take the arch plunge myself, but definitely interesting to see the different kernels that they've got there.
- [62:29]
Jeff
Yeah, I don't know. I mean, you know, I've talked to people that love it and I've had friends that have ran it and had, you know, it was. It was painful.
- [62:37]
Leo Laporte
Oh yeah, I'm sure.
- [62:38]
Jeff
And they had a lot of issues and you know, I'm personally it. I'm to the point. I. You know, I used to really play a lot in my distributions but. And I still do somewhat. But I'm okay with like taking a step back from the edge and yeah, rather than being on the alpha edge, I'm okay with just playing with betas, you know.
- [62:57]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [62:58]
Jeff
Yeah, maybe even refined betas, you know, that's. That's good enough without, you know, because Lord knows I've rebuilt my system from, you know, after I messed things up multiple times.
- [63:12]
Leo Laporte
So refined betas. That's an interesting unintentional segue actually. Or maybe it was intentional.
- [63:18]
Jeff
It was not intentional, but it was still.
- [63:20]
Leo Laporte
It was good. So really just fell into that1 then CentOS Stream 10 is now out for general availability and that means. Or it comes along with the fact that RHEL10 just hit beta and some other things that you may be more interested in running than RHEL10. Things like I'll. Almalinux10 are also in beta. And just for a quick reminder of the way this works over in Red Hat land, you have Fedora will have a release and then after a couple of years the Fedora code will then get. It's not even a couple of Years. It depends upon where exactly things happen in the schedule. But the code from a Fedora release, I think in this case it's Fedora 40 gets worked on and refined and any bugs that are found get fixed. Even after support for Fedora, the Fedora version ends and that now becomes a CentOS stream release, which is basically a continuation of what was in Fedora. And the stream release then also becomes the beta for the next Red Hat, Red Hat Enterprise. And so we've got CentOS Stream 10 that is the same code that's going to be in CentOS 10, but the. If you have kind of like a flowchart, right? Like things land in Fedora first and then they get a little bit more stable. They land in centos Stream, that gets more stable, and then it lands in places like Red Hat and Almalinux. So just found it very, very interesting that Stream 10 is now generally available. And so if you want to do CentOS stream on, which is a font, like, is a completely decent operating system, right, like for doing Even enterprise stuff, CentOS stream is going to be a very decent way to go. And the plan is to maintain it until something like 2030. Of course, there's been a few of us that have been burned by trusting Red Hat's CentOS plans for how long they're going to maintain things. So, you know, you have to take it with a grain of Salt. But anyway, CentOS Stream 10 is out and plan to be. Planned to be around until 2030, so definitely something interesting to think about.
- [65:41]
Jeff
You know, I would honestly question the need for that length of support on something that's not an industrial item.
- [65:52]
Leo Laporte
So I've got, I've got bad news for you, Jeff. 2030 is like only five years away.
- [65:59]
Jeff
Oh, damn it. I thought, as far as I thought.
- [66:07]
Leo Laporte
I thought the exact same thing of like 2030. That's a long ways from now. Wait a second, almost 2025 already. 2030 is only five years away.
- [66:18]
Jeff
I thought we had a rule on the show, don't do the math.
- [66:20]
Leo Laporte
We did the math this time.
- [66:22]
Jeff
Yeah.
- [66:23]
Leo Laporte
And the reason why centos Stream will be developed for that long is because centos Stream is the upstream of rhel. And so it's going to be. It's going to be supported for as long as RHEL is supported.
- [66:33]
Jeff
Well, in five years, isn't that. I was, yeah, I was thinking, oh, that's going to be a lot longer. And then you said that.
- [66:38]
Leo Laporte
I'm like, oh, yeah, it's not 2020 anymore, man.
- [66:45]
Jeff
I was living Almost half a decade ago.
- [66:47]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. May have gotten a show title out of that little exchange. We'll see.
- [66:52]
Jeff
Yeah.
- [66:54]
Leo Laporte
All right, let's. Let's do some command line tips. Jeff. Jeff has a. Jess has a rest command line tip.
- [67:01]
Jeff
Well, I can't believe we haven't covered this yet.
- [67:04]
Leo Laporte
Indeed.
- [67:05]
Jeff
And this one's going to be short, kind of. But this, this is one of those that could go into, you know, all the next year could go into covering this one. So my tip is Cargo. So the link in the show notes, even though it's going to be kind of short today, goes to a book. It has seven sections, many subsections, and multiple pages in many of the subsections. So what is Cargo? Cargo is the Rust package manager. Basically, it downloads your Rust packages, dependencies, compiles your packages, makes distributable packages, and uploads them to Crates IO, which is the Rust community package repository. And it does a lot, even more than I just listed there. Where this came from is when you have a Rust library or executable, it's called a crate. Running a crate can be as simple as calling its name, but then there can be dependencies, external libraries, command line arguments which need to be added. To simplify this, there's a higher level of abstraction called a package, which bundles up things that we're talking about into a nice, neat package. So you can almost think of it kind of almost like a. I mean, it's not, it's not necessarily the equivalent, but you can think of it kind of like a flat pack or a snap, where they kind of bundle a bunch of this stuff up for you so you don't have to chase down dependencies and things like that. And that's where Cargo comes in. So now I'm just going to go over the simplest use case that there is for this. And I think it's the install command, which will install a Rust program that you want to have. So a simple sudo space, cargo space, install space, and then your program name that will get you. And I mean, that's what you need. I mean, it's kind of almost like APT or something where you just, you know, so do apt, install whatever package, you know, program you want to have. And it basically, in this case, in this, in this small subset, it kind of works like app, there's an install, uninstall and search, which I think are the most basic. Now, uninstall is just like install, where you just replace install with uninstall. So you just, you know, pseudo Space, cargo, space uninstall space program name and it removes it and search is just a pseudo space, cargo, space search. And then your query, whatever, you know, maybe you know, kind of a program name and it'll, it'll just kick back what, what it can find. Now there's of course, switches to go with all those, and I won't go into any of those, but, but, you know, at least with the link in the show notes and what we've just talked about here, this should get you started if you're new to Cargo. And you know, like I said, there's many other commands and options for creating and publishing Rust programs. And it really, like I said, this hole can go really deep depending on how far down the rabbit hole you want to get with, you know, handling your Rust program. So take a look at the book linked in the show notes for the details to the full power of Cargo. And we're probably going to cover a lot more of this in the future, but until then, happy Rusting.
- [70:42]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, very cool. When I was doing the advent of code on Rust, I was using Cargo quite a bit. The repository I found it's set up to use Cargo to do things like scaffold out the solution and to download the different steps. So doing some, doing some Cargo stuff there for one thing. But two, it was real fascinating to me, the flexibility of things that you could do with Cargo, because like that, you know, that was, that was pulling from something that wasn't necessarily a Rust package. It was, it was adding files. Like it's got some flexibility to do what you need to do.
- [71:16]
Jeff
Oh, yeah, it, you know, I was kind of perusing through and I'm like, oh, wow, yeah, this, there could be command line tips out of that thing for the rest of the year of just different things.
- [71:28]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, absolutely. All right, so my command line tip is I just saw this because one of the other distros put out a news story that they were encouraging people to use this. The name really tickles me. It's Switcheroo ctl. And so, you know, that's one thing that's real interesting about it and it's got a couple of uses. So first off, first off, it's probably already installed. All three machines that I've tried it on now have already had it installed on it. And if you just run it, it's going to tell you about your video cards. So if you've only got one, it's going to tell you. So I just, I ran it on the desktop over there and it Says you've got a Radeon RX590 Fatboy 8 gigabyte card. I think that is the one that's in there. Yeah, but what Switcheroo CTL is really useful for is if you have more than one video card. Switcheroo is the program to use to launch something and pin it to the right video card. And so this is, this is specifically for like laptops that will have an built in AMD graphics card in the CPU and then also has a standalone Nvidia card. And you know, that's all. That's been a problem on Linux for a long time. Honestly. It was a problem on Windows for a long time too. For the longest time it was not a great solution. And there were programs like Bumblebee and other things and Switcheroo is the new fanciness, the new useful thing. And so you can just run Switcheroo CTL and I think you give it, see here, Dash dash help dash H does not do what you want it to do. Dash dash help is what you want. You can just tell it, you launch Switcheroo CTL launch and then you give it a GPU and then the command you want it to run and yeah, it'll launch your, you know, your game or what have you. And you can specify which GPU to run it on. So if you happen to have one of those devices or even I suppose a desktop with more than one GPU in it, that is the way to go about it now, you know.
- [73:49]
Jeff
Very cool. Yeah, I like it.
- [73:53]
Leo Laporte
It tickles me that it's useful just to list what GPU you've got in the system. I find that.
- [73:59]
Jeff
Well, you know, that's. It's funny how you stumble. I mean, I only got Cargo because I was looking at another program that I'm like, oh, I'm going to include this. And then like, well, then there's cargo. I'm like, have we ever talked about cargo? And I looked and I'm like, wow, we've never actually mentioned it, which I thought was surprising. And yep, you never know where those tips are coming from.
- [74:20]
Leo Laporte
It's true. Usually, Usually we get our tips from working on our Linux system throughout the week. That's where I try to find mine at. I find that to be the best kind of tips. Like, oh, I figured out how to do this cool thing. Let's write it down. We'll talk about that on Saturday.
- [74:35]
Jeff
A lot of times. Yeah, sometimes you got to do a little searching, just sometimes see what's out there or you just stumble across them, you know.
- [74:43]
Leo Laporte
True, true. All right. Is there anything you want to plug or any ending thoughts you want to leave us with?
- [74:50]
Jeff
Actually, two things. One, well, one is just going to be Poetry Corner. The other is, I forgot to mention on the intel art card, it is a 12 gigabyte card, which there are some people saying with the, you know, say 4060 being a 8 gigabyte card, it can cause a problem because there's a couple games now. I think there was a Raiders of the Lost Ark or you know, one of those kind of games that it now doesn't run as good on eight gig. It wants more. So the, the how much memory do you need argument is kind of resurfacing again. So just heads up that it comes with 12. So it's, it's, it's, it's got a little more room than some of its competition. The other thing is Poetry Corner. So roses are red, dirt is brown. Users lose their minds when the WI fi goes down. Have a great week, everybody.
- [75:46]
Leo Laporte
I like it, I like it. All right, thank you, Jeff for being here. It was a lot of fun.
- [75:51]
Jeff
Thank you for having me. I really enjoy it. I mean, this is kind of almost getting old school here.
- [75:56]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. All right. Appreciate everyone that's been here. If you want to follow my stuff, there's of course Hackaday. We've got both Floss Weekly and the Security column is there. I've also got a YouTube channel which if I can find some time sometime this weekend, I've got a little hardware hack that I'm gonna record a quick video about. You can find me there on YouTube and give me a follow. We will be, I think back, yes, we will be back next week. I think we're gonna take one week off right around Christmas, but we should be back next week for yet another untitled Linux show. We will see you all then. We appreciate everybody that watches us both live and on the download and we will see you then.
- [76:46]
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