LINUX Unplugged - 460: CPU as a Service

Episode Date: May 30, 2022

A new Linux update allows Intel to control features in your CPU using hardware-level DRM.

Wes's buddy, Lenat Pottering, the creator of Pulse Audio and SystemD, says that we should popularize image-based OSs with modern security properties built around immutability, secure boot, TPM2, adaptability, auto-updating, factory reset, and uniformity deployed via images. And they've updated SystemD to help start this it's kind of like creating a chrome os like update or a silver blue like update process systemd sys update automatically and atomically updates the host os container images portable service images or other sources and of

course you get a new config file sys update.d i think you i think you might be a fan of this you're pro images i am pro images i know it's funny because I'm going to be like the devil's advocate guy, I think, this week on the show. And so I guess I'm starting early. I think this is a great idea. I know it's probably not going to get adopted by maybe anybody but Fedora and a few enterprise distros. But the idea is you always have a known good OS partition available that you can boot into. And you could have a scenario where perhaps system D is taking care of the A-B image stuff

and making sure you've always got a working base image. And then your favorite distributions package manager is taking care of applications and stuff like that. Like you could have a world where these two things coexist. It does seem especially nice. Like it's probably going to do a better job than the sort of sketchy bash script I might write if I was trying to do this myself, say with Arch or something. So in that sense, I'm for it too. I could see it. I mean, look at other OSs are getting these features. It's about time, right? It's about time, Linux. Come on, let's not patch this one out. Let's try it.

Give it a go. Hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. And my name is Brent. Hello, gentlemen. Hello. Nice to see you. Well, guess what? Linux just landed support for something called software-defined

silicon. Kernel-level support to enable or disable a built-in CPU feature, as in the CPU ships with all the features, but only certain ones get turned on depending on what the user has or hasn't paid for, Intel can issue a license. It's coming in the next generation of systems, and Linux is already getting support for it as of this week. And as you can imagine, we've got a whole range of thoughts on this. So we'll dig into that, and then we'll round out the show with some boosts, some picks, and more. So before we get any further, let's say time appropriate greetings to our virtual lug. Hello, Mumble Room. Hello, Chris.

Hello, Chris. And hello, Brent. Aw. Hello. More and more folks showing up in the quiet listening and just getting, you know, a free software version encoded in Opus straight from our mixer. We can't hear you, but we see you. We see you. And I'm going to give that another mention this week because we have a project that I think we're going to work on after the show.

And I think Mumble could be an option that's more viable for people who like low latency versions of the stream because we may be changing things up and going to a peer-to-peer system in the future. More on that. So our Mumble is like the best way to get absolutely low latency, high quality audio. And you can get in that quiet listening.

And if you want to move into the lobby and chat with us or the on-air area, I should say, you totally can. So you can get the details at linuxunplugged.com slash mumble. And then we do the show live on Sundays at noon Pacific, 3 p.m. Eastern over at jblive.tv. And we'll have more details to share on that kind of stuff coming up in the future. This week, though, we wanted to talk about this software-defined silicon that is landing support that's coming in Linux in 5.18 and is probably something that's going to be a huge topic in tech circles, I would imagine within a generation or so of Intel processors. We touched on a lot of the details in Linux Action News this week.

And we got some feedback in our matrix room that it was probably worth bumping this to a wider discussion because it seemed that people were not aware that this was a thing that was even coming. And we haven't talked a lot about it because we didn't want to sound like the sky was falling, right? We didn't want to sound the alarm that, you know, the next generation of Intel CPUs are going to have essentially featured DRM and Linux is totally supporting it because it's the capability to do it. It's all free software.

It's all GPL. That's right. This is a tricky spot. And so we thought, let's talk about what it is so you guys have the right context we're not gonna like you know hype it up or anything like that we're just gonna talk about what software defined silicon is and lwn has a good write-up too that we'll link to but can you give us i don't know the highlights that you think we should probably know wes yeah so uh software defined silicon or sdsi if you want to be hip and abbreviate it is is kind of as you say, right?

It's a quote-unquote feature that lets Intel ship some hardware capabilities that have to then later be enabled. A little more technical, it appears as a device on your system that offers a couple of new operations. One is to install a authentication key certificate or a capability activation payload. But basically you have a certificate that is then used to verify the requests that are a capability activation payload. But basically, you have a certificate that is then used to verify the requests that are contained in the payload. And the idea being here that you've bought this chip or some piece of hardware, it has a base set of features. And then if you want to enable those additional features that are kind of hidden behind this

new SDSI capability, you have to go talk to Intel in some capacity to pay them a fee. Maybe it's a recurring monthly fee. We don't really have details yet on what exact features this is going to be used to gate or what the sort of, how you're going to get access to them process might be. Yeah, is it going to be like they issue you a package that writes the files to these places

now that are on your, these devices are on your system? Or is it some service that's calling home to their cloud service? I don't know. Any of those, you know, the stuff in the kernel is really just the bare bones stuff to, you know, so that user space can make it work at all. That's how the nuts and bolts of it work.

From an implementation standpoint, you know, it's sort of almost perfectly Linux. It's you drop a file in a directory that the file says, yes, no, properly licensed. And then another one that, you know, is the actual license. properly licensed, and then another one that is the actual license. And then there's code in the CPU that verifies those files, verifies the functionality request, and then either turns it on or turns it off. It's really at this point kind of up in the air how all of that's going to work. But of course, the kernel team isn't necessarily looking to block this kind of stuff. There's not a whole lot of arguments that can be made against denying this.

It's GPL software. It's just adding a couple of devices. It simply enables another piece of functionality in the upcoming CPUs. And the kernel community hasn't made a practice of rejecting this kind of stuff for other devices out there that do this that are maybe not CPUs. Right. Yeah. I mean, there's all kinds of weird gadgets or proprietary things that end up running

Linux, even if it's in a data center that I'm never going to have access to or hardware I'm never going to be able to purchase outright. So this is what's coming. It landed in 5.18. It's going to be probably a little while before you get it trickled down to your distribution for most of you. I am using it right now, though. Actually, let me double check.

But I think, yeah, I have 5.18.0 installed on this machine. You hipster, you. I am using it right now, though. Actually, let me double check. But I think, yeah, I have 5.18.0 installed on this machine. You hipster, you. Yeah. I love it. And this is an Ubuntu box. I'll tell you how I did that later in the show. So, you know, my system hasn't broken.

In fact, when Linus announced this release, he was like pretty low key about it. He's like, yeah, yeah, pretty minor update. Nothing really too big in here. Nothing, I think his words were, nothing's surprising. Like, maybe not too surprising for you, but I don't think most of the community realizes that we're just kind of laying down and letting this stuff land in the Linux kernel. Yeah, right. I suppose his commentary is more on the like, oh, there's no crazy new subsystem or radical change or we didn't suddenly enable rust everywhere yeah no wild bug yeah right yeah that kind of stuff so it's just sort of unceremoniously went out and i there was really no red flags like because linus didn't say hey this is the one that includes the intel you may not want to upgrade yeah so it was just sort of a low-key release we'll link to

lwn which has thoughts on this before it came out, and we'll also link to the actual original patch conversation. I'm also not quite clear on the parties involved here, because it seems to be that the parties introducing the idea is a developer from Red Hat working on behalf of Intel, even though Intel has plenty of kernel engineers on their own. But so there is some relationship with this there as well. Linode.com slash unplugged. That's where you go to get $100 in 60 day credit on a new account. And that's where you go to support the show. I love getting to talk about Linode. This is my moment every single week. And I really appreciate it because there's always something to talk about.

How great is that? And you know, Linode really has been our secret sauce. I was just thinking about this morning. There's a project I'm working on. Of course, I'm going to Linode to deploy this thing. Right. And I realized sometimes it's like I just I like I just pop off a server super quick and I get up and working and, you know, I probably have the thing done in two minutes. and working and, you know, I probably have the thing done in two minutes. And then sometimes, sometimes I sit here and I really think like, well, how am I going to build this? What do I want to do? Like, what should we use on the back end to deploy it? Because Linode works with all of that stuff too. So if you like to just do a one-click deploy and get up and running really easy, you can. But if you want to tie it in with some infrastructure management, maybe do a little Terraform and some bulk. Yeah, Linode supports all of that. You see, they've been around for nearly 19 years. And in that time, they figured out what features are worth spending energy and effort on and which features are just silly platform features that are checking a box. And their mission has remained unchanged in that 19

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kick the tires. Go to linode.com slash unplugged. So let's talk about the moralities of this software-defined silicon, and really if the free software community should be taking a stand here. Because you could make the argument, perhaps, that Linux is big enough and relevant enough for enough market segments, not just the server, that if we put up a hard stand and said, no, this is a free software platform.

It's not just a license that's free. It's about making something for people that is forever, right? It's about creating something that's for the general good, for humanity. It's not a tool for corporations to have successful platforms, although it can be. It's free software. It's GPL software. It's code for the people. And it should be commons.

And so when we add things that restrict functionality, it's sort of inherent to the spirit of what we're trying to do here. Maybe it's not against the law of the GPL. It's definitely against the spirit of the GPL. That's, I think, the big argument being made. I think I'll play devil's advocate on this one, and I'm going to take Intel's side because I think I actually could make an argument for why it could be a good thing, too. But I'm curious, Brent, because Wes and I have dug into this a lot for Linux Action News. I know you caught that coverage and you're coming at this with some information, but it's still kind of newest to you right now. So I'm curious what your impressions are on just the moralities around software-defined silicon and being able to turn CPU features on and off through Linux. I'm looking forward to hearing your perspective

as the Intel spokesperson in this hour. My initial sort of internal gut reaction is that it feels like a really slippery slope, or it could be. Is it going to lead to subscriptions for all your hardware, you know, like five years down the road where you're very, very hampered with what you can do with the stuff you quote unquote own and thus you are limited because you're not paying them on a monthly basis or whatnot. That is the first thing that comes to mind for me and is a bit of a scary perspective. Locking features up behind a monthly subscription.

Well, that's it. I mean, we're subscriptionifying everything these days, it seems. And the last sort of thing that we have that's our own is the hardware that we've purchased or come by. And it seems to me like it would be a darn shame to see that go away and to have it be sort of like the Peloton model. And they can take it away from you anytime. That's my initial sort of reaction when I hear this. I could definitely accept that from a business point of view, it probably makes a lot of sense.

You know, they're creating the same chips for a whole bunch of different sort of, you know, as you might say, models of their CPU. But for them, it's much, much easier to do the manufacturing and stuff. So I could see that point of view. I love that we're talking about this because it's not an easy, not an easy answer, is it? Not as black and white as it might be on Windows or on the Mac platform, right? This might just be par for the course, but here we kind of are the beacon of freedom in the software world at Linux is, and this, where does that freedom, where do we draw the line on that freedom? And what role does Linux have on protecting that freedom?

Because we've pushed this until the breaking point with NVIDIA. We just kept dogmatic at the issue. The kernel team is currently pushing this to the breaking point with ZFS. They will just not relent on that like there are some like hills they are just willing to die on why not this hill west and should they be dying on this hill well you're the devil's advocate huh i don't think we've

heard your position yet get me to do your work for you over there no i'm i i i i'm my take on why is a little more cynical i think it's because Intel is an influential partner, a major code contributor, and because the code they are contributing is GPL. But I'm curious if there's a moral obligation there. Yeah, I mean, it does make us ask some questions around the relationship with Intel. You know, it's not even just some random provider. This is a company we like to laud as sort of doing open source and working with the kernel the right way. a company we like to laud is sort of doing open source and working with the kernel the right way. So you can see if the kernel were to take a stand here, I mean, that could really affect the way Intel is used to doing business, right? It seems like they are willing to do that model. They've

adopted to that model. So then having to sort of, would they start shipping their own? Or would we be booting into FreeDOS to sort of load these certificates or doing some other, you know, would the alternative be that this would still have to happen until it would keep moving forward? It would just be a worse interface to do so because you couldn't do it as easily directly with the kernel. Yeah, I guess we don't know. It seems like with the dominance of the x86 world and the popularity we see amongst developers and Hollywood production shops, Intel would have to be pressured into at least a few workstation and consumer line Intel chips, too, that were functional enough.

But here's the devil's advocate's position, I think, for doing this. And I don't know if I fully buy it, but this is where I think Intel's coming from. And because, Brent, you touched on it. There are real genuine economies of scale when it comes here. And we've seen how screwed up chip manufacturing has gotten in the last couple of years. And so if there is a way for Intel to create a chip at one price point that they can then make millions of, and that makes it possible to actually meet demand, supply demand, and that makes it possible to sell at price points that give us devices that are like Chromebooks in cost

or give us high-end workstation devices, depending on what people are willing to spend. I get it. I mean, it also helps Intel maximize revenue, but having a company that's making good revenue, that is one of the few American-owned companies, I'm just going to throw that in too, you know, maybe that's a good thing. While also they reduce the amount of different testing surfaces they have, so perhaps the products become more reliable. And it also means that you could buy something today for a cheaper price, like a $300 laptop or something like that. And then later on, you could add another feature, like maybe you could turn on virtualization for $80 or something like that. And then later on, you could add another feature, like maybe you could turn on virtualization for 80 bucks or something like that. And it means customers who have minimal needs, but are very price sensitive, could technically get access

to something that later on could become more advanced as their skill set becomes more advanced. So it really opens up the world to a whole new price point, and it gives a whole new stability and production pipeline for Intel. And we've seen in the last few years how important that is. It is just a shame. It feels like we're going backwards in some ways. It makes me think of the whole stuff with getting your Pi codecs in place and just what a pain. It's all fine, right? You can do it.

You can run the right scripts or figure it out. But just practically, it sucks. You can do it. You can run the right scripts or figure it out. But just practically, it sucks. There have been some interesting questions. I'm like Kenji in our IRC room wondering, you know, how's this going to work around? Is it per machine or CPU or person? So like, you know, I buy it and then I give my computer to Brent.

Do I have to, is that a separate thing? Does he need to buy a new copy of that from Intel himself? Or can you transfer it from one machine to the next? For instance, if you have a personal license and you have two computers and you change the workload on one and you decide it's more suited to the other can you just move that over yeah or what happens when you reload your box because these are getting written to this virtual device that has to happen somehow and if you nuke and pave your system uh what makes that stick around yeah the administration

side will be interesting too what what's persisting this, and is it? Devil's advocate aside now, this is clearly a step back. This is absolutely something that I will be voting with my wallet on. I made that comment quickly in LAN, but just to expand on that, the Ryzen systems have never looked any better as far as I'm concerned. I could live a long, happy life with Ryzen systems and Apple M-based systems. And as long as I can run Linux on both, I may never need Intel again. You know, you combine that with Raspberry Pis, Intel's been less relevant than ever for me. And I see this kind of stuff.

And I understand that because it's GPL software and they're just creating a device that you write files to, it's going to land in the kernel. Because it's Intel, there's not going to be a lot of pushback. I wish this stuff got more scrutiny. I have a ton of love and respect for the kernel team. I think they get away with this kind of stuff all the time. You know, the University of Minnesota stuff should have gotten more scrutiny. This should be getting more scrutiny. But because we love these people and because they work so hard,

I think we are hesitant to criticize. I don't know if criticism is the right place though. I don't know that insisting that they take this moral judgment is... I think I could see you making the opposite argument of wanting them to remain a useful neutral tool to be used for whatever purpose

especially considering that that's so much of what makes it successful, right? Like we often kind of on the show talk about like, yeah, there's the philosophy part, which I think matters to us, at least the hosts of the show a fair amount, but matters seemingly less and less to the general cloud public who just sort of use it as a tool. Yeah, I think where I really get concerned and I feel like where I've kind of landed on this one is you're right it's not their role but it's sort of like our last line of defense that's where i just go if anybody was

going to stop this if or if anybody was just going to embarrass intel for doing this right it would be these developers with this with this platform even if it just kind of raised awareness in the consumer population so they could start voting with their wallets. But instead, it's just been totally quiet. Yeah, it has been very quiet. It does make me think it's one of those areas that seems to come up a lot these days of sort of not necessarily the letter of the law, but the spirit and what their behavior will be. If this is really a thing that's limited to, say, a feature that's only used by giant data centers when they're training models or, you know, doing some specific task that really is not applicable to my sort of use case, even as a somewhat odd user of software, you know, a technological enthusiast, then maybe it's not that big of a deal.

But if it's something that, like, you know, most Intel buyers start running into, that'll sour things pretty quick. I imagine not, right? I imagine it's the enterprise that's really going to get it. Well, I mean, they're the ones who are going to shell out the money anyway, right? Right. And there's so many nickel and dime ways you can do this. And you could see like a CPU that maybe has more cores you can turn on. And you got to license it for that.

And then it's a lot more manageable problem too, because then you're making Red Hat, SUSE, and Debian packages. And you pretty much covered all of the enterprise deployments that are going to be using this thing. I suppose so, right. You know, but again, I want to just mention LW one more time because there was a bit in here that I think resonated with me. They're talking about business models in here and talking about how car manufacturers like Tesla want to include features that you pay for to turn them on. And we've kind of just accepted this. They're calling these rent-based business models. And they say it's been spreading through the technology industry for some time. Many of us have no longer purchased and even run our own

servers. We run them from a cloud provider. Companies are still in the proprietary software business, but they're finding that monthly subscription models are appealing. Simply, it just works better than regular software licensing. And, of course, there's dodgy websites out there that handle payments for all kinds of different content. He's making a joke about LWN, which is a paid-for content website there. But the issue really comes down to free software is supposed to enable freedom and access to these machines. But now we're going to find ourselves using it to, our free software is going to ask the hardware for permission to be available to do things.

Essentially, we're going to a model where free software enabled us to explore and use these computers, perhaps in ways that were never intended. And now we're going to a model where free software is relegated to the rest of the world, asking for permission to get these features. If this approach is commercially successful, we're likely going to see more of it and you combine that with kind of like the monthly subscription thing or something like that that brent was saying and then i think we

kind of have a dystopia scenario well you can see like a weird you know like um so it's a range of cpus that are targeting the netbook thing comes back or whatever right there and uh you can't enroll your own tpm keys or something like that or, you know, or the secure boot keys anymore unless you subscribe to the enterprise model. Is there an opportunity here for some of the reverse engineering that we're seeing in like the M1, for instance? Is any of that even possible in this case? That's a good question, Brent, because some of what's made the M1 Linux port possible is a lot of the functionalities at the firmware level. So the drivers just hand it off and the firmware does it. You know, we see this with the NVIDIA card, like this new open source driver

is really being made possible because the firmware is going to handle a lot of the stuff that NVIDIA wanted the driver to handle in the past, for better or for worse. But we're definitely seeing this transition to the software side is a lot simpler, and the complexity is being offloaded to the individual hardware components. And these are like little micro-operating systems and microcomputers all in their own, and it's just becoming more and more common. Well, just at the same time as we see, yeah, right, and way more specialized chips for various roles instead of just one big old old generalized cpu yeah i think it's a good and bad thing i think we're seeing the pros and cons of it like i think in the example of the m1 stuff it's meant the linux port has gone

very very rapidly from what i thought it would and it seems like there's a nice little halves and getting gets that the developers are getting because of the functionality that the firmware handles same thing with nvidia if you of the functionality that the firmware handles. Same thing with NVIDIA. If you want the functionality of an NVIDIA card, or you want access to CUDA and NVIDIA Compute, but you didn't want to have to hassle with the proprietary driver, well, you know, they found a solution around that. And this is the future we're going into, and it's built in at the hardware level.

And it's going to be trickier to navigate. There's going to be different things to consider for consumers now when we're buying hardware. It's not just going to be speed and specs. Yeah, there's more. There's more in there because it's running its own basically software as well. And you're going to have to care about how well that's implemented. Yeah, you're going to have to care about how does that firmware work? What kind of driver does it have now?

It's a whole new kind of nuance that we're going to have to help people navigate. And a reminder that as far as we've gotten at some areas with free and open source software, there's a whole other layer down there. So Jonathan has a great post at LWN. Again, I've mentioned that. We'll link it. I'd love to hear the audience's reaction to this. Because my question to you out there, where do you personally draw the line? Is your Android device fine? Because that requires a bunch of firmware. What about a Nintendo Switch? What about electric concerned about the slide into subscriptions for every little component there? So send us a boost in with a new podcast app or use the Breeze app if you don't

want to switch podcast apps or send us an email at linuxunplugged.com contact and let us know what you think. Bitwarden.com slash Linux. Go get started with a free trial for Teams, Enterprise, or a personal account at bitwarden.com slash Linux. As an individual user, I love it. But of course, as a business owner, it's been, I think, a big part to what keeps our information secure and protected. Bitwarden is the easiest way for an individual or a business to store, share, and sync sensitive information. And Bitwarden is open source. It's trusted by millions of users in their community. It has a self-hosted component as well. And it's what Wes and I use to store all of our passwords, manage our two-factor codes.

We're both customers of Bitwarden Cloud, which is just an unbelievable great deal. Man, and you know, they keep adding new features too. Bitwarden has rolled out account switching. That's great. But now they've just recently added the ability on Android to switch accounts while you're at the password fill out. You know, this is so nice because I have a business account and a personal account. And now right there, when you're at the prompt, you can tap the avatar bubble and switch to another account quickly, get the password access,

authenticate and deploy that one password. How nice is that? Account switching has been great. And one of the features I'm just getting into and it just got better is their username generator. Now this makes it easy to create a random username for a website you're signing up for or a service and add an extra level of security. That's just genius. But now they're making it even easier to use.

When you generate a new username, there will now be an option to create an email address with a sub-selection for choosing something like SimpleLogin, a non-addy, or my favorite, Firefox Relay. Yeah. So you just enter the API key for your individual account for that service, like Firefox Relay. And then upon generation of the username and the password, it'll also generate that email address that's just for them and unique. A new alias is instantly registered to your account, and it's all saved in Bitwarden and then synced across your devices automatically. Ah, using a good password manager is probably one of the number one things you can do for your security.

You probably already know that, but if a friend or a family or a colleague or your workplace hasn't really wrapped their noodle around that have them try out bitwarden it's the best way to do this and you can support the show and get a free trial for teams enterprise or an individual plan by going to bitwarden.com slash linux that's where you go go right now support the show and try it out it's like a low-hanging fruit to protect yourself bitwarden.com slash Linux. and it would drive me nuts to sit in front of a laptop all day trying to get anything serious done. Wouldn't the standard pony for a dev or any other heavy PC user be the most powerful desktop with the biggest monitor you could afford? I seem to only use my laptop when I'm on the road. Hmm. Well, Wes, you're a developer by day. Do you use a laptop?

Yes, I do. Yeah, you know, I think you probably would assume it'd be a nice big workstation. I think for folks, you know, open source work or, you know, at homework, that probably is often the case. Maybe this is one of those things that needs to get caught up for our post-pandemic working remotely life. But I think a lot of it comes down to just sort of the lowest common denominator, right? Like your folks need to sometimes go to meetings, they sometimes travel for work, they sometimes go to conferences, therefore, you're either going to get them two machines or you just get them one. And to be clear, no one's really sitting there just like typing on a single laptop unless they have to.

Right. Like these days, you got sort of hotel stations. You just plug into a dock at a little wherever you're sitting down and you got all the monitors you need. I wonder, too, if the work from home trends have maybe accelerated this a bit, so that way you can take your machine back and forth. But, you know, if you look at the sales number, numbers, laptops are selling like gangbusters over desktops. And like, if you look specifically at Apple, they sell way more MacBook Pros than they do regular desktop machines. And they target those things hard at developers. And I think they've done a pretty good job of balancing dedicated CPU versus integrated CPU or disk. And, you know, they, except for when they didn't with the bad

keyboards and stuff and you see Dell adopt the Sputnik model, you see HP with the dev one. And of course, system 76 is catering to that audience. I think there's something nice about having everything in one, you know, that's why the IMAX popular too. I think there's people that like the all in one, but I get where you're from, other Chris, because it's like, for me, I can tell the difference when I'm using a workstation still versus a laptop. It's beginning to change, but I still feel like there's a performance delta between a laptop and a desktop. Right. So you'd be the one sort of complaining to IT, no, I really need a desktop. I need one. And a laptop.

And a tablet. And a phone, obviously. Oh, and a projector too. Now we did get a lot of questions around the Pop!OS and HP sort of project that we touched on last week. And we got some boosts about that too. And now it is time for Le Boost. Nick wrote in with some feedback and the golden dragon wrote in with a boost six days ago with two, two, two, two sats,

which apparently is a row of ducks. I'm a duck. D U K duck loaded with talent. It is. If you type in two, two, two, two, and do like a calculator, it looks like a row of those yellow duckies. You know, I think we got a sad amount last week as well. That was one of those old calculator secrets, which maybe we'll have to look back on that. So the Golden

Dragon wrote in, now this sounds promising. HP plus pop with AMD seems like a stellar dev system. The one question I would have is, what is a killer system like this going to cost? Well, I think we'd know it's going to start around $1,000. I thought it was like $1099, something like that, right? Yeah, something like that.

What we don't know is what the price goes up to when you tweak the specs. Because that came with 16 gigs of RAM and one terabyte of disk space, which is really not too bad for that price, but... And 16 gigs of RAM might be the max, but you might be able to tweak storage and processor. We are collecting these questions, so keep sending them in. Boost.

Yeah, Nick wrote in on about the same lines with some great questions I think are worth exploring in the future as well. One of them being, how long is the laptop going to be supported? Firmware updates, how are those going to work? Will it use the existing

Pop! OS firmware delivery method? I thought those were all really good questions. Yeah, you know, I haven't really used an HP machine for a while. Are they playing nice with some of our fancy

new Linux firmware stuff? Yeah, I hope it has LVFS support, right? It needs that LVFS. It needs that. It needs that. Yeah, that's a good question. Magenta Sheep boosts in

using Breeze, no less, six days ago with 3,142 sats. Is that Pop!OS HP system running core boot? That is probably the number one question we got. Yeah, right there. So I've written that one down. I don't know how much can be shared yet or not, too, so I got to get information on the NDAs around this thing. Keeping secrets from us i don't have the info but i just know that once i get it there's gonna be that kind of thing so

core boots definitely the number one question though we got a double boost from magenta sheep six days ago 3 142 sats again they write zfs's killer feature for me is sending encrypted raw snapshots. Nothing else I know of lets me have better security and integrity. Not just an encrypted snapshot, but an encrypted raw snapshot. I hear from the audience all kinds of clever ways they're using ZFS send and receive. To move things around between data centers and servers. That's an awesome feature. When we get to

poking at BcacheFS in like a real way, I think we got to play around with some of these features that people love about ZFS and ButterFS. Speaking of BcacheFS. Oh yes, user 7620 boosted in five days ago with 10,000 sats.

B-O-O-S-T. Hooray for BcashFS. I can't wait. Hey, well, user 6.720. We agree. We agree. I still have it on that laptop. I'll run it for a little bit.

I got to also figure out like a good set of benchmarks. So we'll be chatting about that in the future. I agree, though. Very exciting. You know, I'm curious about, you know, those two touch on kind of the same topic we explored last week. And I wondered how ButterFS dealt with, you know, I've been reading tons about it this week, but I wondered how, you know, you mentioned ZFS's encrypted raw snapshots. Well, how does ButterFS compare in there? I want to know for my own purposes here.

Sounds like you have some experimenting to do. I do. Young master brand. Michael wrote in with a boost as well one day ago, 30,000 sats. He writes, helping you, helping others. Smiley face. Supporting open source projects is a great idea. Ah, this is in reference to sending a 15% split to OpenSats, which we're doing this episode as

well, which is a nonprofit charity that gives 100% of the revenue sent to their general funds to free software projects. And so when you boost this here podcast and office hours, we're doing a little experiment, 15% goes to open sets. So for this episode, if my rough quick math as we're doing this is right, we've sent about 3,200 and change to open sets.

Nice. Yeah, that's pretty great. So thank you, everybody, for helping us experiment with that. You did note in there, we have a couple of folks that are now boosting in with Breeze. That's B-R-E-E-Z.

I think it's Breeze.technology for the website. This works on Android or iOS. And what it essentially does is it gives you a lightning node in your pocket. I thought you were just happy to see me. Well done, sir. Well done. Breeze is sort of a front end to different services on the Lightning Network, including value for value podcasts. And so it's a way to send in a boost without having to switch from your favorite podcast app. Eventually, there is discussion for folks like Antenapod, which Antenapod supports a lot of podcasting 2.0 features, but not value and boost yet. Although they're looking at integrating Breeze to accomplish that.

Yeah. So you get a little head start right now. It is pretty cool for better or for worse to run a lightning node in your pocket. You can also grab a new podcast app at newpodcastapps.com. I'm using Fountain FM these days. You can follow me on Fountain. I'm at Chris LAS and I'm clipping the podcast that I listen to, including JB shows and others. So if you're interested in the podcast I listen to, you can follow me on Fountain.

I'm just at Chris LAS and it's Fountain. I think for that new podcast apps dot com has them all. And with that, gentlemen, you know what it's time for the picks. It is time for the picks. And I had a hard time picking one that I felt was on theme for this week. You know, that's the thing I've been trying to do. Yes, you have. Not just some random dirty pick, but one that's on theme.

And I think I found it. I mentioned earlier in the show that my Ubuntu system was using Linux 5.18 already. And it's this tool I'm using to do it. I was suspicious you were compiling these things by hand. Actually, if you recall, what were we doing, Wes? You and I were in here recently recording and a pop-up as we finished came up and said 518's ready. It must have been last week's lap. It must have been last week's lap, yeah. It's really just that. It's not an app you should use. Don't do what Chris does.

Don't do this. To tell you what kind of a lunatic I am and why you should never do this, I'm actually doing this on KDE Neon too. So it's not even like, it's already a kind of a lunatic I am and why you should never do this, I'm actually doing this on KDE Neon, too. So it's not even like it's already a kind of a Frank and Ubuntu setup. So I got Neon on top of Ubuntu, and then I'm also on top of that role in my own kernel. Don't do this. But if you want to, it's called Ubuntu Mainline, and it lets you pick your version. And you can have multiple versions. You can go way back.

You can do all kinds of stuff. Or you can be a madman and literally get a new kernel the day it's posted. And a little pop-up will come up if you leave the notifications on. And it downloads and installs. It's just a PPA away. Does the thing have like RC releases too? If you want to help test out. I think it does, Wes.

Yes, it does. In fact, it does. I just skip them. Sure. Yeah. And you can purge older kernels and you can choose some of this stuff. And I should mention it gives you a GUI to manage all this, which is handy. You can also get the header packages if you need to build stuff and whatnot for your other modules and stuff.

And honestly, as much as I say don't use this. Maybe use it. I've been using it for 10 months on this machine. You're just telling us about this now? Yeah. That's what's been putting that skip in your step. You know why I did it? Is initially I was just a little disappointed in the performance.

It felt like the machine was getting slow. And I'm like, I need a little more pep in my step. Maybe a newer kernel will do it. And you know what? It did. It did break my NVIDIA driver, however. So I'm using the free NVIDIA driver again. This is why we can't have nice things.

I probably could fix that, but I just give, like, no crap at all. You know what I mean? It's an old NVIDIA card, and I I've spent so many years fighting the NVIDIA driver on laptops and stuff that now that it's, like, the lights at the end of the tunnel, I just can't be bothered.

You're done. I'm playing Race the Sun on this thing. Like, what do I need 3D acceleration for, you know? So, good enough. But that might also explain why the machine's been a little leggy. If you'd like to give us a pick idea, you can go to linuxunplugged.com slash contact and send an idea in. We'd love to have them over there. If you want more show, well, there's a few ways you can do it.

You can become a member. Linux Unplugged does have a membership program at unpluggedcore.com. These members get special access to two different feeds. One that's an ad-free feed, nice, tight, full production with all of Drew's editing, who's our summer editor right now. Or you can choose the live version. And then you'd know I just screwed that up right there. But because editor Drew is so smooth, you don't know. But if you listen to live version, you hear all the mess ups,

all the times we stopped the show because Wes has got to go to the bathroom. OK, that doesn't happen very often. But if it did, you'd know actually what you really get with the live show is just more show. There's like almost an entire additional show in the pre and post show. It's just a lot more casual. And as a thank you, because you give us runway to decide which sponsors we do or don't want to work with. It's not something we talk a lot about. But just for a little while, I'm going to just mention that we get the most ridiculous pitches on this show. They get sent in for just all these kinds of crazy products and services that they

want us to pitch to you guys. And it's so nice that our members give us the option to just hit the delete button on all of those emails, right? That's powerful. It keeps us independent. It keeps us focused on making content that's true to our audience and true to our members. So thank you to our members at unpluggedcore.com. And if you're missing Linux Action News, well, then you are missing out on not only that Intel news, but a bunch of other stuff that happens every single week in the world of Linux and free software. So go to linuxactionnews.com for that. Plus you get more Westpain.

Darn right. Darn right. Go get more Westpain at linuxactionnews.com. And last but not least, we'd love to have you join us live. See you next week. Same bad time, same bad station. Yeah, that's right. Why don't you come on over? We do the show on Sundays.

We may be experimenting with some new tools. Maybe experimenting with video streams for this year's show so you can see us doing the show live from the JB1 studio. Could have some announcements in that regard. Perhaps next Sunday would be a good one to join us for at jblive.tv, 12 p.m. Pacific, 3 p.m. Eastern. Now, links to everything we talked about today, that's over at linuxunplugged.com slash 460.

You can find our RSS feed over there, contact page, previous episodes, and then don't forget all the great shows over at jupiterbroadcasting.com. Thanks so much for joining us on this week's episode of The Unplugged Program. See you back here next week. The cone of silence. Do we have any more details on the London meetup? Because we didn't mention that in the show.

I'm wondering, we could like record a thing, but is there any updates? Well, I think as our resident Canadian, which is like halfway to England, is my understanding, Brent might know. You got anything new for us, Brent Lee? Last time we talked about this, which was on Office Hours last Tuesday, there were about 40 people signed up to go to the meetup. And as far as today, this update, as this minute, there are 53 people. So I think the numbers are going up quite considerably.

I think that might end up being a problem in terms of venue, but that's a good problem to have. So I feel like there, those are probably 53 really amazing people to go and meet. I feel kind of jealous. I see one Martin Wimpress on there. So perhaps Martin Wimpress could do some local advising. All right. So this, I think this thing's happening though on August 6th, 2022. I think this is happening so uh what we'll do is let's uh we'll just play it cool we'll pretend like we planned to do this in the post show the entire time so okay you ready here the cone of silence oh hey everybody i just want to make sure that you know that london meetup is on go get details at meetup.com slash jupiter broadcasting hey guys look at this 53 people attending already. Can you believe it?

That is amazing. I never expected that at all. What a surprise.