LINUX Unplugged - 608: Linus' NT Surprise

Episode Date: March 30, 2025

Linux 6.14 lands with big improvements for gaming, laptops, and filesystems—but why is a Windows feature sneaking into our kernel?Sponsored By:Tailscale: Tailscale is a programmable networking software that is private and secure by default - get it free on up to 100 devices! 1Password Extended Access Management: 1Password Extended Access Management is a device trust solution for companies with Okta, and they ensure that if a device isn't trusted and secure, it can't log into your cloud apps. River: River is the most trusted place in the U.S. for individuals and businesses to buy, sell, send, and receive Bitcoin. Support LINUX UnpluggedLinks:💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike📻 LINUX Unplugged on Fountain.FMLinuxFest Northwest 2025 ScheduleLINUX Unplugged LIVE Sunday — Sunday 10:00 AM · 1h · HC 108Linux-Powered Payments: Running a Lightning Node with nix-bitcoin — Sunday 1:30 PM · 45 min · HC 204Linux 6.14Linux 6.14 from Linux Kernel NewbiesBtrfs Support for uncached buffered I/OFUSE and io_uringWindows NT synchronization primitives for LinuxNixOS/nixos-hardware: A collection of NixOS modules covering hardware quirks.NerfyGek0/MeshtasticIOAddon — Documentation of how to use Meshtastic serial and MQTT functionality to automation custom hardwarePick: Eloquent — Eloquent is a proofreading software for English and more than 20 other languages.Eloquent - Flathublanguagetool — Style and Grammar Checker; it finds many errors that a simple spell checker cannot detect.LanguageTool standalone server

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, coming up on the show today, Linux 6.14 is landing and there are big improvements in there for gaming, file systems and a lot more. But you might have noticed there's a Windows feature that's sneaking into Linux kernel. We'll dig into what that's all about. We'll round out the show with some great boosts and feedbacks and picks and more. So before we get into all of that, let's say hello to our virtual Lugtime Appropriate Greetings

Mumble Room. Hello, hello. Thank you, Hey Wes and mumble room. Hello. Hello Thank you. Hey, Wes and hello Brian. Hi Hello, gotta get a handful of you on the on air and a handful in the quiet listening the mumble room Of course is always going when we get our stream up and running on a Sunday morning and a big good morning to our friends It tail scale tail scale comm Slash unplug tail scales the easiest way to connect your devices and services to each other wherever they are.

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the show and get started by going to tailscale.com slash unplugged. Go there, get it for free on 100 devices. Tailscale.com slash unplugged. and I just heard from Noah that he'll be joining us from the AskNoah program. And also Wes has a talk after the show. And he's going to be talking about the next episode of Linux Fest. And I'm going to be talking about the next episode of Linux Fest. And I'm going to be talking about the next episode of Linux Fest. And I'm going to be talking about the next episode from Linux Fest, and I just heard from Noah that he'll be joining us from the Ask Noah program. And also, Wes has a talk after the live show

in the same area, maybe not the same room, but the same building. Definitely the same conference. Same conference, same building, I think, but maybe upstairs. Linux powered payments running the Lightning node with Nix Bitcoin at 1.30 p.m. Yeah, trying to just share some of the stuff we found useful.

If you do want to engage with the Lightning Network, probably the best way to run a node, at least if you want full control, is something like Nix Bitcoin powered by Nix and NixOS. Also, you can just come say hi to us, because probably a lot of us will be there. We're going to have to figure that out, because there's no way we are done with the show by 1 30. I mean, we might be done streaming. There's no way we are done with the show by 1.30. I mean, we might be done streaming. There's no way we're done with the show by 1.30.

Yeah, maybe it publishes a bit late. Publishes after my talk. I don't even know what we're doing. It's gonna be crazy, but we've got 25 days to figure it out. And we'd love to see it at Linux Fest Northwest. I'm feeling like it's gonna be a good weather year. I'm hoping. We'll see.

Yeah, we've heard that after last year. Is it like a seven year cycle? I think it's a good weather year. I'm hoping we'll see. Yeah. We've heard that after last year. Is it like a seven year cycle? I think it's a two year cycle. I don't know. We'll see. This will be the trendsetter. Yeah. If Brent doesn't do his cloud seeding like last year, stupid lobes, weather lobes.

Hey, it worked well. I think we got like good seed funds from that one. Oh, okay. Well, speaking of funds, I just want to take a moment up front in the show and thank our members and our boosters who have been supporting the show. The show really is trying to do something unique in this space.

We're trying to make the highest quality product we know how. We aspire to make a magazine's worth of content in nearly every episode, every single week, for free. And we're doing it for a market, the Linux listener base, that historically has failed to make this kind of thing sustainable via sponsorships alone. And of course, we seem to prefer to do things the hard way.

So we're not leaning into where the money is these days. YouTube, clickbait drama topics. We're using an open platform with an open standard that doesn't have an algo that pushes us in front of you. One of the things we would like to do in the next couple of months is raise some funds to buy some gear, some headsets that we can use on our Linux Fest Northwest coverage and the BangBus trip to rescue Brent's new BangBus,

which we expect to be doing live shows from the van on the road. Brent's got a bang bus. What's he gonna do? And you know our standards are fairly high and I've been researching this for weeks. I've asked around to people's opinions that I respect to see what they suggest. And I've landed on a set of headphone-microphone combos that I would like to buy for the boys. It's the Sennheiser HMD26 dual ear broadcast headset. Now these things are not cheap. They're $500 each and they don't even come with their proprietary cable, which is also another $100. So it's not that I come to this conclusion easily

and I have ordered one for myself already just so I can get some experience and test it. But these are really in the sweet spot for a quality that I think we could accept on air that are under $1,000. And we should be able to EQ and process them. I'm gonna talk to editor Drew on his opinion about that. And we hope to make them sound decent. And I'd love for each of the boys to be able to get one too. So it's around $1,300 we're gonna raise.

And I'm comfortable buying them with boost sats or something like that. So if you would like to help support us getting that gear and getting us ready for the van trip and for Linux Fest Northwest, please consider boosting the next few weeks episodes. We do come to the audience from time to time with these kinds of things, not always, but with fewer sponsors out there. This is kind of how we have to finance these types of things. The show goes on if we don't reach our goal, but it is about trying to make the show as good as possible on the road, not just from an audio quality standpoint. But I'm also looking for something that we can reasonably manage in a small

backpack gear kind of thing, something compact on the go. So and again, like when we're at a booth at Linux Fest, something where we don't have to have a bunch of microphone stands and all of that. And, you know, if you think about it from a gear piece, it's a microphone. It's the stand, it's the cable, and then it's another set of headphones. And if you can slim all that down into one device, it makes it just a lot easier from a operational standpoint. Yeah, investing in simplicity,

which makes it cheaper in a variety of ways, less secure to bring around, less complex, and hopefully makes it easier for us to be able to do this at more places or more events. Yeah, so if you'd like to, that's probably, you know, that's probably about 1.3 million sats, so if you'd like to boost in for the next few weeks and have a go to that, just note it in your boost,

and we'd appreciate that, and of course the members, your support keeps the show going there, and we really appreciate that as well. And the show will go on if we don't raise the funds, but I wanted to put it out there, as it's a goal of ours, and we'll have more if it works out, and thank you everybody well. And the show will go on if we don't raise the funds, but I wanted to put it out there as it's a goal of ours and we'll have more if it works out. And thank you everybody who does support the show

in either way you do by either through treasury, through time or through your talent. We really appreciate it. Well, just as we're sitting here recording, Linux 6.14 is cooking and it is a major release. It's 2025 has got some barn burners and this particular release is going to be in the next Fedora and Ubuntu releases as well as a bunch of other distros. So it's an important release and it's a banger release. Also, can we should we just note at the top that it was the rare event where in a way that didn't matter at all,

Linus Torvalds released a day late. Yeah. I'd love to have some good excuse for why I didn't do the 614 release yesterday on my regular Sunday afternoon release schedule. I'd like to say that some important last minute thing came up and delayed things. But no, it's just pure incompetence. I love it after all this time. Because absolutely nothing last minute happened. And I was just cleaning up some unrelated things

in order to be ready for the Merge window. And in the process, just entirely forgot to cut the release. That's alright. Yeah, it still, it turns out, a great kernel. It really is. And we're going to get into some of our favorite improvements and updates. There's a lot more to this kernel,

and we could do a three-part episode series on it. So please feel free to nerd out with the links in the show notes we have, I think, links to some of the best coverage. But let's start with the one that's close to our heart. Wes is running it on his laptop right now. BcacheFS saw a major step towards stability in Linux 6.14. Yeah, well, it was kind of the catch-up release, right?

So there was a good, lots of good stuff in 6.12 and then 6.13 due to the code of conduct ruling, Kent could not contribute, so we didn't see any updates in 6.13. So now we're getting a lot of good stuff in 6.14. In particular, there is hopefully the last planned big major expensive but still automatic and required on disk format upgrade coming with 6.14. So it just happens automatically in the background but if you have like a giant array

that could be some work to do. So you might not even notice. Yeah, in the past I have not for just running it's my root of S. Okay, so with that comes major scalability enhancements. Yeah, and that's the thing, right? A lot of this stuff is as, you know, the file system gets used in actual scenarios

and goes through bug reports, you kind of find out, oh, it turns out we wanted to slightly tweak the structure or a lot of times it's adding points where they can keep more information or more statistics or metrics or like information or back pointers a lot of times it's adding points where they can keep more information or more statistics or metrics or like information or back pointers. A lot of times where you kind of have more of the structure preserved to make it faster when you're trying to do some repair operation so that you don't have to like go scan as much data.

To that point, they say in here there's a dramatic speed up for FSCK. And they tested it on, do you see that in there? Yeah, right. 10 petabyte file systems. They have 10 petabyte file systems out there running bcachefs right now. Yeah, so I don't think my 500 gig root fs is really gonna sweat that.

So good to know. Yeah. Good to know. And it's just- If you do ever get that stuff. It's a good reminder, right? Like if you're not willing to test on disk format upgrades with giant arrays, then bc of S is not yet for you, which is totally fine, it's still experimental. But also, this is good signs, I think,

of signs of stability going forward that we're hitting places where, once you get to a point of at least not even expecting on-dis format changes, there still could be some if a major issue needs it. But that's the first step towards it being more trustworthy for actual serious data arrays. Very much so.

I should have looked more into this. I just noticed in my notes here, the default runtime has been set to self-healing enabled. Yeah, there's been a lot of self-healing work going on. There was already ways that you could trigger that. We don't yet have a full scrub, but we do have self-healing. And coming in 6.15, it's already merged upstream.

I think in 6.15 we should see full scrub support. It's already also in the upstream user land utils, but I think in a future release. So again, right, you need the self-healing capability at all, having it happen when it detects things on the fly. And then from there, you can have Scrub that just sort of walks the whole file system to trigger that checking.

It's a bones release, maybe not one that you'll see a ton of changes from a user perspective, but that's a sign of where we're at with the infrastructure. It was interesting, so the moment the 614 window opens, Kent, he does a poll that is just like, here's syncing everything up, and then here is, here's all these improvements too. So it's really fascinating just to read through his description of all of it.

And to see him just right back at it. And I wouldn't be surprised if by the end of the year, or before the end of the year, the experimental flag is removed or. Yeah. I like that as a 2025 prediction. Could be a low key predict. I can't remember if I actually made that

in the actual predictions episode. Do you have the lock it in sound somewhere? that as a 2025 prediction could be a low key predictor. I can't remember if I actually made that in the actual predictions episode. Do you have the lock it in sound somewhere? All right. Well, the file system that's actually shipping right now, the lot of folks are using is Butter FS. And there has been some really good improvements landing in Butter FS, including three new raid one read balancing methods, which improves how reads are distributed across devices.

So you have rotation, which actively rotates and reads to keep all devices engaged. That's the preferred default going forward. You have latency, which optimizes for unstable or failing device transports. And then there's dev ID, which gives you manual control over which device handles the reads, which I could definitely see workflows where that would be used.

Yeah, absolutely. And maybe even just as like an operational thing for you know, while you're having issues with the disk you're going to replace or something. And of course, not just like changes to raid one but also other improvements to butter FSS have landed which includes support for uncatched buffered IO. And here's a bit from Colonel newbies. They say this release add support for optionally sending buffered I.O. whose pages will be dropped from the page cache once the data is read or written.

The reason for this feature are fast storage devices that can and do fill the RAM with too much page cache that will not be needed. With this feature, it is possible for the read and write data and to drop it from the cache without facing the disadvantages and complexity of dealing with direct I.O. Man, I wish I had that problem, where my disk I.O. was so fast that I was overfilling my RAM with stuff I didn't need. But isn't it great that the file systems in the kernel are attempting to keep up with the latest and greatest hardware, or at least a version ago of that.

I think there's actually been some work generally around on cache buffer IO and the latest couple of kernels to just make that better. Okay, one last file system thing. Had to get the file system things out of the way because these probably really impact the most of us, some of these features. And the one that really sees some love

is actually your Fuse file systems. They're gonna get a big performance boost via IO U-Ring. So this is a fascinating story. A gentleman who works at DDN Storage, he had a talk at the 2023 Linux Storage Summit and also at BPF Summit. And he talked about discovering a odd issue when really taxing his NVMe disk.

He says, I was looking at an NVMe driver and was wondering why it was able to avoid the bottlenecks, why it wasn't, or was, I'm not sure, able to avoid the bottlenecks I was seeing. Oh, it was, it was because it was using IO ring, but U-ring, but it was in the wrong direction, he says. It was going from user space to the kernel, but what Fuse really needed was for it to go the other way.

Can you help me make sense of that, Wes? Yeah, I think they were investigating issues with Fuse and noticed that the NVMe driver wasn't having the same problems. Okay. And the way it was using IOU ring, which is a new IOU mechanism in the kernel that makes it really fast and cheap to be able to have the kernel, you know, like fill a section of memory with data, say coming off of a network driver or something. I think our last kernel deep dive episode, we did go into that a little bit.

We did, yeah. And then user space can read from that, and then it avoids a whole bunch of context switching between the two, which is always expensive. So now we're having some of these techniques being able to be applied to Fuse to speed up basically whatever you're doing with Fuse, which is a whole bunch of stuff, because Fuse is, as a reminder,

file systems in user space. So you can have a user space process managing things, but the kernel and other programs, crucially, treat it like it's kernel file system, right? And this is where you can have stuff like SSHFS. And there's a whole bunch of very cool FUSE file systems. But because you have to have, right, you're talking the kernel API for file systems,

but then the kernel has to go and talk to the user space thing managing the FUSE file system. That's a ripe area where you need a whole bunch of data exchange that can be expensive if you're doing context switches, but with IOU ring, it can be faster. You avoid some of that. One of the interesting insights to this is this could have broad ramifications for all types of FUSE file systems. We use one, it's essentially a web-dev FUSE file system, for managing file system, for managing the files on our next cloud. And this could be really nice to see, something we've considered generally a little bit slower

than a real native file system, actually get a nice little boost here. And we're seeing IOU ring, which we talked about before, really kind of come in and change the game, which is fascinating to see it kind of get rolled out in different areas. And I think the discovery here is probably gonna be applicable in other areas,

like Fuse is where they're starting, but I bet you this idea ends up kind of spreading out in other places. Yeah, it usually does. Now that is all the file system stuff. Great job, everybody. There's more in there, of course, including there's a fascinating history with Fuse. There has been a couple of goes at replacing Fuse to try to solve some of these problems and

a couple of different attempts at like Fuse 2 and a different type of fuse all together to specifically try to solve these problems. They never really got adoption and then we kind of came along and solved it at the kernel level. I have good news and bad news. We're actually not done with file systems. Oh, we're not? No. Okay. Because XFS gained enhanced real-time device support. Oh, you're right, you're right, you're right. XFS got some love this cycle. Yeah, and it's, you know, I think this is particularly

worth noting just because last year we covered the XFS maintainer swap, or maybe it was a little bit longer than that. And that maintainer that stepped down was a long time really trusted maintainer. And the person coming in, we weren't quite sure what direction they would take the project.

And what we've seen is just impressive development after impressive development. So the XFS developer Derek Wong explained on some of the real-time reverse mapping and relink support that's landing in this patch series. He says, Christophe and I have been working on getting the long delayed port of reverse mapping and ref link to the real time device into a manageable shape. With these changes, the real time volume finally reaches the feature parity with the data device.

This is the base for building more functionality into XFS, such as the zone storage support that Christoph posted about last week. I think it continues the story of, I mean, just XFS being a great, you know, if you don't need the kind of things that things like Butterfess and CFS and Bcache address, XFS is just a great file system. And they're really pressing to keep up with in the ways that its architecture supports

a impressive subset of modern file system functionality. Okay, now that is all of the file system stuff. And this next category is holy crap. There's a lot of AMD stuff landing But first we should acknowledge the very important addition at the kernel level Support for the most Microsoft co-pilot key on modern laptops. Hey, did you know that was the thing? There you go Brent. So if you get a framework now, and you know, some of those new frameworks come with a copilot key, don't worry, it's going to work. So is this in addition to the existing Windows key? Yeah, it's on the other side now. You know, so that you got the on the other side of the keyboard on the right side, I guess.

I don't know what it does on Linux. Maybe you can just map it to something. Maybe it'll trigger your home assistant for you. Sure. I think it should be your compose key. But if you don't know what that is, then maybe it's not useful for you. Hmm. All right. Well, let's talk about the plethora of AMD GPU driver updates.

New DRM panic supports. You get the fancy blue screen now with AMD devices. Yeah, we talked about that a whole bunch. But as a reminder, to take advantage of some of that new functionality, there needed to be per graphics driver support. So now we're finally seeing that on the AMD side. It was already in a bunch of like the base ones and the Intel side. We're seeing early support land for the RX90 Zero Series GPUs and beyond. And the big one

is the AMD P state driver update which Makes big improvements for laptop power management and efficiency for AMD systems, but there's an interesting twist in here the maintainer of the Linux power management subsystem is an Intel employee And you know this release was just a lot of AMD code. And so the Intel guy is the one that is, you know, actually going through this and submitting it upstream. And this is what he wrote for the patch for 614. He writes, the majority of changes are CPU frequency updates, which are dominated by AMD P state driver changes like in the previous cycle.

Moreover, changes related to AMD P state are also the majority of the CPU power utility updates. Indeed, there are some pieces of new hardware support like the addition of the Clearwater force processors to support the Intel idle. And there are some other improvements for other Intel chips in there. But the vast majority of the updates for this 613 and 614 kernel have been from AMD and this Intel maintainers, maintainer is doing his job, doing a great job, is submitting all of this upstream.

And I just find that to be a beautiful irony of free software development. It also makes me think, I mean, A, is there, there's probably a lot of nice benefits for these employees of diverse companies working together on some of this stuff. Maybe there's insights or learnings from each other, but also like in a way, just open source sort of erode some of the, artificial's too strong of a stuff, maybe there's insights or, you know, learnings from each other, but also like in a way, just open source sort of erode some of the,

artificial is too strong of a word, but I'm gonna say artificial boundaries imposed by like the corporate structure of things. Like here are a bunch of CPU nerds who are now nerdy enough to get them to make all of the CPUs work better. Seeing what common problems they're solving and also both actively contributing to these release cycles,

Intel and AMD and both actively contributing to these release cycles, Intel and AMD, and both actively preemptively contributing bits before the products are even in the marketplace, which is so critical when you think about the time delay, right? So Linux 6.14 is going to be in the most recent Fedora and Ubuntu, but it'll be quite a while before 6.14 is in any of the LTSs or REL. So they, you know, when they get that groundwork in there now, people that take advantage of the in-between distribution releases get to use the drivers, but it takes years before it's in the enterprise grade stuff. And so it's really incumbent upon

them to try to get this stuff in as early as possible. And that's why, and before they've even finished all of the driver work, they're getting the primitives in now as early as they can. So that way the next cycle, they can just get a little bit more in there and then hopefully get it out to end users as fast as possible. We'll see. But that's the that's the interesting game that they both have to play. And both AMD and Intel, just by watching this, do seem very committed to that process. They're getting it done. just by watching this do seem very committed to that process.

They're getting it done. OnePassword.com slash unplugged. That's the number one password dot com and then unplugged all lowercase. You want to go there to support the show and to learn more about OnePassword. Here's how I like to think about this. I have a question for you. Do your end users always and I mean, always use the IT approved applications, services, and devices? I don't know if any users do. I think there's just so much out there now. There's so much getting pushed at them from a consumer level, from this is going to change how you work level. So how do you keep your company's data safe when

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They have the industry's largest bug bounty. And it's really great to say that one password exceeds those standards that are just set by other authorities and other, you know, whatever the whatever the letter of the law might be, they go above and beyond. I love to see that. It's really the first security solution that brings all these unmanaged devices and apps and identities under your control. That's the big deal.

That's the big shift. So go check it out and support the show. Go make sure every app, every device, every identity is secure, even the unmanaged ones. Go to one password dot com slash unplugged. to onepassword.com slash unplugged. That's onepassword.com slash unplugged. As with many previous kernels, we do see a little bit of gaming love in Linux 6.14 as well.

Looks like the Linux 6.14 kernel will officially include the completed NT sync driver, which is a major improvement for Linux gamers using Wine and Proton, especially via Steam Play or SteamOS. An NT sync feature in our Linux kernel? Yeah, that's right. It's kind of neat, right? Now we have a specific synchronization primitive enabled inside the kernel specifically to support compatibility with Windows applications. Very fascinating. They say here the driver enhances the emulation of Windows NT synchronization primitives,

which are critical for accurately replicating Windows behavior and improving performance in many Windows games running on Linux. Though NT sync was introduced in Linux 13, it was initially incomplete and not functional. 6.14 marks its full implementation and usability. As for the motivation behind the work, well, it's clear in the benchmarks. The gains vary widely depending on the application and the user's hardware, but for some games, NTSynchronization is not a bottleneck and so no change will be noticed. Some other games though, improvements 50 to even 150 percent are normal. Yeah, okay, so there is some nuance here as well. Right now, this is specifically helpful for,

or going to be for upstream wine, and it is the newest and shiniest and most compatible with Windows implementation, but there's been earlier attempts, specifically E-Sync and F-Sync, which have basically been like gaming focused mechanisms to enable improvements to emulating games specifically. And since I think like kernel 5.14, we've had few techs too in the kernel, which Proton is patched upstream wine to take advantage of, but I think upstream wine does not, partially because it was kind of gaming focused and there was some thoughts that it was kind of a hack and didn't really like the specific interface

being created for wine Proton. And it doesn't solve it for all games, it like solves it for some of the games, which is why some of these games won't see an improvement. Yeah, and the root of this is, okay, so in the Windows world, you've got the Windows NT kernel. It's pretty different than a Unix-y, Linux-style kernel influenced by stuff like VMS,

and there's a whole bunch of objects and you have handles to these objects, which if you've ever done Windows programming, you've seen handles freaking everywhere, right? And if you're a game or just a program, often you need to wait for things, right? So like in a game or just a program often you need to wait for things right so like in a game it might be wait to be told that like the frame I wanted to draw is done painting or copying to the GPU memory or

whatever it is or I need to wait for a keyboard or a mouse and event for the user to do my next thing or maybe a network package shows up telling you what the enemy participant didn't how to update their game state and so there's often times where you've done your immediate work. And so you want to say like, hey, wake me up when any of these things happens. And then based on what it is, I know what to do next to advance the process. And due to the way Windows is designed, they've got some pretty nice APIs for this, including wait for multiple objects.

So you can kind of just hand it a whole smattering of things that you want to wait for, regardless of it's like a file handle or a network thing or some status update to a particular process or thread, and Windows will set that up for you. And while Linux has things like ePoll and other mechanisms to specifically wait for things like file handles, there's various equivalencies, of course,

because ultimately Windows and Linux make your computer work in roughly the same way. But the APIs are different enough that, like, originally Wine had to have kind of like a helper thread or process that could sort of translate between the Windows system call in user space and then implement it under the hood with the right kernel features. And as you can imagine, like, that's not going to perform super great. It was fine for some things. It did work, but like it was just going to hit bottlenecks, especially with games. And so that's where we've had multiple attempts with

E-sync and then F-sync, which has been the most successful and widely used with Proton. But now, finally, we're getting NTSync, which is it prioritizes compatibility. So it's like the best translation in the kernel for this style of synchronization primitive, but it also looks like it has some quite nice performance gain. So especially for upstream wine, you're gonna see those big numbers that you're seeing reported.

If you're doing Proton, there's still, it has not yet adapted. In theory, in the future, they'll probably switch to NTSync and there'll be some slight performance improvements and compatibility improvements. And like from a practical standpoint, in the future, they'll probably switch to NTSync and there'll be some slight performance improvements and compatibility improvements. And like from a practical standpoint, for end users, they're gonna get essentially a new device, a new virtual device, right?

Like a slash dev slash NTSync device. Yeah, and that's the mechanism for how things can sort of go request that and wait on it from the kernel. Yeah, and each time, each process opens up the device, they get a unique instance, but it's shared across threads, so they get their own ID, but there's some shared space there too. Yeah, and that's usually the case, right?

So for processes, they have different memory space and threads get to share, so that way you can have multiple threads that are doing things, but they can all be, they can share weighting or locks, or use that for a shared synchronization primitive to communicate between threads.

Sort of like the Fuse IOU ring improvements we talked about earlier in the show, this NTSync that is definitely targeted at gaming right now seems like there would be other complex windows applications that would benefit from this. And so while it is initially useful for gaming, I could see in a year or two, we've discovered some other application

that didn't work before is now working because of this too. Yeah, right in the big picture, it's just like a big, nice step up for our Linux's ability to be compatible with Windows applications through Wine. It's just cool because, I mean, there's already, again, there's already been some of these kinds of efforts, but just the idea that the kernel is being adapted

to support this not emulation user space thing of wine that somehow seems to work surprisingly well. That's just, that takes a lot of coordination and planning and years of effort to get across the finish line. And like, you know, folks had to make the case that, hey, you know, people are trying to run programs not even intended for the operating system you designed,

but can you make this change, please? They were gonna sell on this proprietary hardware. Right. But it does show you that if you've got good code that works and you're willing to do the work and you show up to the Linux community, kernel community with, you know, proof of receipts, they're probably gonna take it.

They're really pretty much down to take most things. If you're doing the maintenance, you're doing the leg work, you know, like, yeah. And you have, you can point to real use cases or people who want it. This is how Samsung got a Samba server in the Colonel West. Jeff makes a good point too. And this is definitely true, right? Through the history of computing, games have often been one of the best ways to sort of like push the limits for how to make these things happen. I agree, I agree. And that's why I think we'll fix it for gaming and then we'll discover some other complicated application. Just in time so Brent can switch back to Lightroom.

Right. Now, we were thinking, and we'd like to hear your thoughts about maybe doing a gaming episode next week. Nothing crazy, maybe just one or two games and then also a bit of a hardware update. So even if you're not a gaming episode next week. Nothing crazy, maybe just one or two games, and then also a bit of a hardware update. So even if you're not a gaming person, there'll be some hardware talking there too.

So if you have thoughts on gaming on Linux, game you're loving right now, particularly those that support co-op, send them into us. Boost them in or go to linuxunplug.com slash contact and let us know, because we've been thinking about doing a gaming episode literally for about two years. So maybe we'll do it next week. We've got a couple of things.

I got a new device in house. Remind me to show it to you after the episode. It's pretty slick. I want to talk about that next week. So that's been on our mind. It's been a long time. The gaming episodes tend not to be super popular. So if you don't want us to do it, you can let us know too.

I don't know. It's like, it's always hit and miss. You know, if we really got ahead of it, we could do like a gaming meetup. If we were playing a game that people could join. Well, okay, how about this is a goal. We come up with a co-op land style game that we could try that we could use at Linux Fest.

Okay, there we go. And we demo it. So we would love some suggestions for that because I literally don't know. Maybe producer Jeff could help. The other thing to, the other thing to kind of just sort of just think on for Linux Fest is where we, maybe in the room where we do luck. Maybe we could do it in the room. That could be interesting.

Anyways, something that's been on my new hardware and all of that, so let us know your thoughts there. And I don't think anything's ready yet to try out this new NTSync thing. I wish we had an opportunity to test it with a game, but when one does, I'm already going to be on 614, so I'll be ready. Did you know your ad could be right here right now? I could be talking about your company. Your Linux unplugged podcast is looking to book a sponsor and we're running a special

for the second half of Q2. Now you know we're kind of picky who we work with, which has limited us, but if you're listening to this show, well, that's a good start. Chances are you could be a great fit. So if you want to reach the world's largest Linux audience on a show that never misses a week and has been going for nearly 12 years strong,

reach out to me, chris atjupiterbroadcasting.com. I'd love to work out a deal with somebody who's in the community that has a business or a product or a service that they'd like to reach. We'll make a pretty good deal, and I think it could be neat. I don't know, chrisatjupiterbroadcasting.com. That's all you need to know.

Well, we got a special little piece of mail here from Grant who asks a little for some advice let's say. It says, Greetings Chris, Wes and Brent. I keep hearing you guys talk about this Nix thing so I'm finally going for it. I was wondering if you have any tips for NixOS configs on a laptop specifically. From what I researched so far, most of it has to do with power optimization while on battery.

Since using Linux on a laptop is literally Linux unplugged, maybe another question is what are some community recommendations for Linux on a laptop? Love to hear what the best Linux community around Linux Unplugged has to say about this. And thanks in advance from Grant. That's a good question Grant. I feel like I'm going to be in the laptop market towards the end of the year. It has been interesting living on Asahi on the MacBook and very limiting.

And I eventually want to get something, but I want a very nice laptop experience. Something real smooth. Frameworks contender. Of course, when we look at system 76, I'm going to be looking at ThinkPads too. But I think Grant's asking two questions here. Number one, what is a great distro hardware combo?

And what should he look into for Nix to pre-set up his Nix for the best chances on that hardware? I know Brent has looked at configs specifically for framework laptops. Yeah, well, there's the NixOS hardware community repo, so that's one place you can pull in stuff. That's the thing. Right, a lot of it is gonna be making sure you're fully enabled whatever settings or kernel parameters or driver options for your specific rig.

Because after that, honestly, you know, the Linux world's gotten a little bit better. I've been pretty pleased with the power management options, at least in things like Plasma and Gnome. Very true, and even in the last couple of releases, there's been some nice improvements. So there are various daemons and things like PowerTop and tools to monitor, but for the most part,

I'm not currently fussing with those as much as I used to. Yeah, I just leave mine in balanced mode for the most part, and then PowerSaver when I need it, and Boost when I need it. What I'm looking for is, Brent, he has the most part, and then power saver when I need it, and boost when I need it. I just, what I'm looking for is, so Brent, he has the framework with, I think it's the 12th gen MOBO, right Brent? Yes it is.

And you have this problem that I witness all the time when you're around where you close up the laptop and then you come back to it a couple hours later and it's hot. Yeah, I have to say like maybe two out of ten times. I guess that's one out of five. I will pick my laptop out of my bag and it will be roasting. The rest of the time it kind of behaves as it should.

And I've been trying to figure out what is the combination of what I'm doing that causes that to happen. Now, Jeff, I know you've struggled with this kind of thing before and you probably have a bunch of advice for me. But it has, I would say, gotten better. So there's constantly tweaks happening where Wes suggested in the Nexus hardware repo to try to solve some of these common problems. But it seems, I don't know, suspend is just in not so great a place as it was like, let's say on an old ThinkPad laptop from back in the day.

So it is something that's getting better, and there are some tweaks you can do, but I got to say, as a warning, part of the reality is sometimes it just doesn't go so hot. PJ, I'd like to hear your thoughts, but I would think if he's on a pretty modern kernel, and he's using a 12th Gen system, which has been out for a few years,

shouldn't that be best, and it's all Intel, shouldn't that be best case scenario? I think the framework specifically does have S3 sleep and that's one of the biggest problems that we're seeing with modern laptops is Intel and AMD have kind of pushed away from that and it's up to the motherboard, really the upstream laptop maker to to put it back in.

And everything defaults to S5 sleep, which doesn't fully shut down. With the frameworks I've seen that you need to go into the BIOS and turn off USB power, because all of the little dongles will just sit there and suck power down when it's trying to sleep, even if it is an S3. So you might be seeing that that but it's a problem.

My Lenovo does it, my last HP did it, it's all S5 these things aren't actually going to suspend a RAM they're just basically shutting the screen off. Tiny on the other end though you're on a framework using Fedora. Yes, Fedora has just switched from using PPD to Toondi and it's really nice because you can nest profiles so you could have the default balance or laptop profile and then make your own little changes on top. Yeah okay so that's you know maybe the advantage to having a distribution tune that stuff for you something Brent could look into I suppose. On NixOS, I see there's a power management option, which has stuff like CPU frequencies in here, power top, you know, all kinds of stuff. Power profiles, daemons, an option as well.

So there's various things in NixOS too. Boy, I'd love a great experience on my next laptop. Something really, you know, hassle-free, works with distros, just great. Has some decent little performance for maybe some basic gaming, and sleeps. And, you know. Oh, I was gonna say, in general, for laptops, I think we've all been pretty happy,

I mean, it's not laptop-specific, but happy with things like ZRAMP. Yeah, yeah. I think there are also, you know, there are compromises to be made. You know, I could, if I could get it to boot super fast, I could possibly live without sleep, I suppose. I don't love that, but that could always be a route

I could explore if it meant I could have a fantastic laptop that I really loved. That might be a compromise I could make. By fantastic, you mean loud fans, right? Yeah, no, I do not, sir, I do not. And now it is time for the boost. Yes, it is. And we start with our baller booster this week, who is the tech geek

with forty five thousand sats. And he just sends along, hey, JB team, keep up the good work. Well, thank you for the value. team keep up the good work. Well thank you for the value. Turd Ferguson boosts in with $41,088. Turd Ferguson! This is a triple turd. Boosting the TUI challenge. Uh oh. Envy Top, it's not just for Nvidia. Did you know Intel, AMD and even, at least sorta, the M1 and M2 GPUs are supported. NvTop, huh?

It sounds like it's for Nvidia. Okay, another trip here. Brent's traveling. We could just, if it was a website, is Brent traveling? It should be yes. Pac Trippie, the TUI love child of ping and traceroute. Sounds like you coulda used this just the other day,

actually. Do we know about Trippie? I don't know if we do. It's a two-ee, huh? Let's go look this up. Trippie, a network diagnostic tool. Oh my God, it's a riff on the Clippy logo too, which is funny.

Oh, I like this. I like this a lot, Brent. I think you could use this. I could use this, actually. What's it written in? The question, oh, look at that. Did you know this already? No, I just wanted to know. Yeah 99.6 percent rest It's not a hundred, but I'll take it. Yeah, it's pretty close

So that's trippy. All right, that's good Now do we have you said there was three of them? Yes, I did. There's one more Worried you might get bored during the two-week challenge We have, you said there was three of them? Yes, I did. There's one more. Worried you might get bored during the TUI challenge? Try TTY Solitaire. Now with mouse support. TTY Solitaire. All right. Solid.

They told you your flight would have wifi. It doesn't, but you already downloaded TTY Solitaire. Turd Ferguson coming in with some good 2E picks. Turd Ferguson! I'm feeling the 2E energy. I'm feeling like this challenge is gonna happen, boys. I'm feeling it. Are there any 2E games we can combine these two things? Well, there's the Solitaire, I suppose.

I suppose. You know, on my flight to this here continent, there was someone the entire flight that played Solitaire, and I could not believe it, but maybe... With cards? No no no no no. On their phone.

My wife could do it with cards. She just brings a deck of cards in her purse. It's a great idea to have. We were out and about last night and we had a half hour to kill with the shuttle so she just busts out the cards. Just goes to it. Great battery life. Well Kongaroo Paradox came in with 30,000 sats across three boosts.

Linux or something. Great coverage of the Rust drama recently. I really appreciated the objective breakdown of events and your take on it. Also loved the deep dive. Sorry, Brent, he says. I think... Uh-oh, you know, Brent, you know, hold on. Brent's got a reputation. Right then. No.

Let's get ourselves settled in for a wee deep dive. I was trying to speed right past that one so you wouldn't have a chance to play it. Shakes fist at you both. You can tend to use here, I think you could sprinkle these once in a while, and that could be enjoyable for people who aren't super technical. Good way to learn things too. Also plus one for the TUI challenge. I'm all for spending as much time as possible in the terminal versus the browser.

I think a TUI challenge with a point penalty for mouse usage could be a fun spin. Love the planet Nix coverage. Could not justify flying from Europe to go for a couple days. Over a thousand euros total for that trip. Can we expect you guys to make the trip to Nyxcon EU, maybe, in the coming years? These usually take place October-ish in Germany or around there.

I imagine the price would be an issue, but you know, the beer here is worth it. Mm, yes. The truthful answer is, I imagine when my kids are a bit older, I'll probably be traveling on longer trips where I could go somewhere I could spend like two weeks. Or a week, you know, that would be really great, but that'll probably still be a couple of years, maybe every now and then, you know, I never want to say never. You never know.

Right. Maybe Wes could talk me into something. You guys can be pretty convincing when you put your minds to it. Thank you for the boost, Congo. It's good to hear from you. The music came in with 5,000 sats. You're so boost. Firstly, I finally got around to say

in my own Bitcoin node with Nick's Bitcoin. Hey! That's great to hear. And I'm using AlbieHub thanks to Wes and the community for providing a good starting point to do so. I am personally excited for GNOME 48 as controlling the Orca screen reader under Wayland has taken a big step forward. I've wanted to get XOR off for ages now. Come May and next 2505, I may just be able to do that.

That's great to hear. Yeah, that's rad. Yeah, there is some nice changes there. And Wes, look at you helping people get Albie hub up and going Yeah, and props to folks like the museau and Jiraka who have taken the lead zone getting the module going I got a base flake happening, but also I've been negligent. So this is a great reminder I'll go try to see if I can spend some time in that repo Adversary 17 boosts in with 5000 s ads. Put some macaroni and cheese on there too.

The dynamic we don't even know is pretty funny. Oh yeah, the members version somehow got set up with dynamic AI inserted ads for all kinds of crazy things. You got a good kick out of them the whole show. Thank you. Of course, the only proper song to play on the Clinton sexy saxophone is Careless Whisper. That was true. Yeah, that would have been, yeah, that's true. Nice to hear from you adversaries, thank you. Of course, the only proper song to play on the Clinton sexy saxophone is Careless Whisper. That was true. Yeah, that would have been, yeah, that's true.

Nice to hear from you, adversaries. Thank you. Well, Brooke loves you, sent in 3,535 cents. Allegedly. Hey JB, have y'all tried KD Plasma Mobile yet? I'm daily driving that thing on my Minis for V3 with fedora and it's pretty awesome I recommend giving Linux on a tablet a try if y'all haven't in a while or even at all Keep up the good work and thanks for making my work travel more enjoyable

This is a great suggestion Brooke and you're kind of reading my mind this Friday I was browsing Amazon looking to see if there's quote unquote Linux x86 tablets or even Linux ARM tablets. I do this thing where I have tablets around the home, and I want to have more in the studio to control home assistant in different areas. And why have Android on there when I could have Linux on there?

And it would give me an excuse to play with Plasma Mobile properly, which I've only ever done in emulators. And it's probably more realistic. I was gonna say we pressure Brent because it seems like his kind of thing, but if you're already doing it. Or we get double course. Well, I could take my learnings

and use that to pressure him. Or flash his stuff and set him up. With me, if you get me in right, the right mode, I'll do it in a flash, but with Brent, it's gonna take like two years before Brent gets an Android tablet that runs Linux. Well, only one of us carries two devices in a flash, but with Brent, it's like it's gonna take like two years, you know, before Brent gets an Android tablet that runs Linux. Well, you know, only one of us carries two devices in their pockets, so I think, you know,

having a backup built in, you're more suited for this thing. Ha ha ha ha! Thank you for the boost, Brooke, appreciate it. Ambient noise comes in with 3,930 sats. Yes, it is hammer time. And they say, sorry, it took so long, but here is my write up on how to control the front gate via Meshtastic and MQTT.

Oh, yes. Awesome. This was one of the things we wondered. Could you do IoT control with Meshtastic? He sends us his GitHub repo, which we will include in the show notes. And it's instructions to create an MQTT-controlled input and output board that runs his own logic on low-power radio instances.

And you can use it to control your gate. Neat. That is so... A whole bunch of comments in here, too. I'm saving that. I am saving that. That's really great. Thank you for sending in an ambient noise. And well done. Well done. Thank you everybody who participated, including you SAT streamers.

25 of you streamed SATs. We stacked a humble 22,923 SATs. Not too bad for those of you just sitting back and enjoying the show. Thank you very much for doing that. Then we combined that with all the people that generously boosted in with a message We read the ones above the 2000 set cutoff line and we stacked a hundred fifty six thousand four hundred and seventy six sets Not our strongest week smoke if you got them. I'm not gonna say it's a it's a total loss though Good good, but you know it could be better could be better especially with some of our ambitious plans We have coming up for the rest of the year.

So if you'd like to get in on the fun, there's a few ways to do it, but you gotta get some Sats. Strike is a great way to do it in over 110 countries. River in the US, Bitcoin Well in Canada. Get those Sats, send them over to Lightning to a podcasting 2.0 app, like Fountain. Workflows also in Fountain are really simple too now. They're getting easier and easier

to just do it within all one app. And it just keeps getting better. You can send your message in and we'll read it on the show above 2000 sats. Thank you everybody who supports this episode and all 31 of you who boosted in and supported episode 608 of your unplugged program. It really does mean a lot to us. We appreciate it. And of course, big shout out to our members who keep us going too. You are all fantastic and much appreciated. Well, moving right along, gentlemen. Moving right along.

We have a pick that may help some of you break your Grammarly habit. Have you wondered what are you going to do to get over your Grammarly habit? Finally, take back your freedom from big grammar. Yep. Well, that's where Eloquent comes in. It runs as a local service in the background to do local offline, I guess, proofreading. It uses a language tool server, and it's available as a back-end instance to Firefox, LibreOffice, and others. It is GPL 3.

It does also have a little standalone desktop GUI where you can paste your text in and then it gives you a Grammarly-esque pop-up to do spelling and eat. No, if people have never used Grammarly, they have no idea what I'm talking about, but it's sort of like grammar and spelling and sentence structure all in one. And it's a good service, but to do this, they're

reading everything you write and they want to integrate into everything constantly. And the fact that you could actually run this as a backend instance for Firefox, which I have not done, what looks really great. Like that is the perfect combination for me. And it is also available as a flat up. Well, and this backing tool is cool. Language tool opens our proofreading software.

Yeah. English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Polish, Dutch,, open source proofreading software. Yeah. English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Polish, Dutch, and more than 20 other languages. Yeah. Finds many errors that a simple spell checker cannot detect. There's a collection of tooling out there right now.

Like this language tool and Piper from the Homosystem folks in Whisper, which do text to speech and speech to text. And then they have their Wyoming protocol, which lets it communicate. All of it is open source, all of it running on Linux. And we're not doing anything with it. It's really weird. Maybe that's some show projects we need to get ahead of. You can actually even train your own voices with it.

You can have it model on your own voice and generate. It's just right there for the taking. Some project just needs to integrate it into some sort of application or something. I mean, it's very useful in Home Assistant. Right, of course. But Piper alone and Whisper alone, just feels like there's a lot of potential there. Anyways, today we're talking about Eloquent and we'll have a link to that in the show notes,

should you want to check it out. I also see it looks like there's some stuff that does, makes like a language, or an LSP implementation on top of language tool, so you can get this kind of stuff in your VS Code too, baby. And don't forget, we're trying to raise some funds for Headset for the Boys, so if you got any tips for gaming or games you love or co-op games, something we could do at Linux Fest, do boost in and support the show with contribution towards the headsets and a message we could read.

We really do appreciate that. And then we'd love to see you at Linux Fest in just 25 days. Link to the schedule and all of that is in the show notes as well. And you know where you find that? Get ready for this. Linuxunplug.com slash 608. That's all you need to know. Linuxunplug.com slash 608.

See you next week. Same bad time, same bad station. And of course, we love it when you join us live. It just gives it a vibe. And we make it a Tuesday on a Sunday. It begins at 10am Pacific. Of course, we have it in your local time at jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar. If you're enjoying a podcasting 2.0 app, I try to get it marked as pending 24 hours ahead of time so you can just tap play in your podcast and have a choice.

It's pretty cool. It's pretty nice. That mumble room gets fired up to its crank and now that we're going and details for that are jupiterbroadcasting.com slash mumble. Last but not least if you're looking for a little something extra go check out The Launch it's on the JB site and weekly launch.rocks it's a brand new show. Thanks so much for joining us see you next Sunday. So Thanks for watching!