Operating System News

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Aug 19, 2023

• Simon Ser: Status update, August 2023

  Hi!

  Let me start this status update with an announcement: from 2023-08-28 to 2023-10-01 (!), I will be on leave, so I will have reduced availability. Don’t be surprised if I miss some e-mails, and feel free to ping me again (more generally, please do ping me if I forget about a discussion — that also tends to happen when I’m not on leave). During that time, I will be traveling to Korea and Japan. If you live there and want to say hello, please reach out! :)

  This month, Rose has continued working on wlroots frame scheduling. After a fair amount of discussion, she’s found a pretty nice API design. She still needs to address and cleanup a few things, but that merge request is on a good track! I’ve also merged a new API to embed a compositor inside a Wayland client, and sent patches to remove some cases where we were waiting for a reply from Xwayland in a blocking fashion.

• Sam Thursfield: Status update, 17/08/2023

  Hello!
  As often, these are some thoughts without any grand announcements to accompany them.

  It’s just passed 5 years since I arrived in Santiago de Compostela, without much of a plan, and here I am. Summer a bit milder than last year which is great as I have got really back into cycling again. Compostela apparently has the highest ratio of tourists to locals at the moment in all Spain – 1.3 visitors for every resident, its very noticeable if you go to the old town. Meanwhile in the UK even Conservative news outlets now recommend leaving. I personally miss UK life but what I really miss is the UK of 2013, before the last decade of Conservative-led self destruction.

• Microsoft Finally Realizes Nobody Wants Its Windows 11 Preinstalled Bloatware [Ed: Nobody wants Vista 11 either, but Microsoft colludes with OEMs]

  Windows 11 users will soon be able to remove more of the bloatware that gets preinstalled with Microsoft’s operating system.

• [GSoC 2023] VPN Support Project Update #6

  So last time I posted I was able to say that I got the client side for OpenVPN on Haiku working but not the server but I am proud to say that now both the server and client work extremely well now on Haiku :) I was able to get the server from not working to working and was able to get the latency for the entire VPN operation down from 1000ms average to anywhere between 2ms to 9ms (that’s a caveat as that is without blocking which will be discussed later). I had a check in my tun_read() function wrong where I wanted any side that is non-blocking to send a signal to the other side’s condition variable that something is now in their queue but had it backwards with a not statement in there. The simplest mistakes slip the mind huh :p Anyway, the server also follows suit with the faster latency so now that the read and write functions are basically complete, lets get on with what I was dealing with for the past 2ish weeks.