Operating Systems Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Mar 23, 2025

• Carl Svensson ☛ BRA and KET: String Interpolation in AmigaDOS

  Without getting caught up in semantics, AmigaDOS in this text refers to the command line portion of the Amiga computers' operating system. AmigaDOS is based on TRIPOS, but was expanded and added to by both the original Amiga team and then Commodore. One thing that remains basically the same is the parser for shell scripts, or sequence files as they're called in TRIPOS. The script parser is reasonably competent for a 1980:s home computer OS and can be used for solving real world made up programming problems.

• The New Stack ☛ System76’s COSMIC Rust-Based Desktop Nears Its First Stable Release

  I’ve been using Pop!_OS since I purchased my first System76 desktop (a Leopard Extreme).

• BSD

  • Undeadly ☛ fw_update(8) gains support for arbitrary dmesg files

    Hitherto, fw_update(8) has gathered system information largely from /var/run/dmesg.boot (on the host on which it is invoked).

    Andrew Hewus Fresh (afresh1@) has committed a change which allows specifying an arbitrary dmesg file. The commit message explains the rationale: [...]

• Fedora Family / IBM

  • Kevin Fenzi: Mid Late March infra bits 2025

    Fedora 42 Beta released

    Fedora 42 Beta was released on tuesday. Thanks to everyone in the Fedora community that worked so hard on it. It looks to be a pretty nice relase, lots of things in it and working pretty reasonably already. Do take it for a spin if you like: https://fedoramagazine.org/announcing-fedora-linux-42-beta/

    Of course with the Beta out the door, our infrastructure freeze is lifted and so I merged 11 PR's that were waiting for that on Wed. Also, next week we are going to get in a mass update/reboot cycle before the final freeze the week after.

  • Kubernetes Blog ☛ Introducing JobSet

    Authors: Daniel Vega-Myhre (Google), Abdullah Gharaibeh (Google), Kevin Hannon (Red Hat)

    In this article, we introduce JobSet, an open source API for representing distributed jobs. The goal of JobSet is to provide a unified API for distributed ML training and HPC workloads on Kubernetes.

    Why JobSet?

    The Kubernetes community’s recent enhancements to the batch ecosystem on Kubernetes has attracted ML engineers who have found it to be a natural fit for the requirements of running distributed training workloads.

    Large ML models (particularly LLMs) which cannot fit into the memory of the GPU or TPU chips on a single host are often distributed across tens of thousands of accelerator chips, which in turn may span thousands of hosts.

• Canonical/Ubuntu Family

  • University of Toronto ☛ How we automate installing extra packages during Ubuntu installs

    We have a local system for installing Ubuntu machines, and one of the important things it does is install various additional Ubuntu packages that we want as part of our standard installs. These days we have two sorts of standard installs, a 'base' set of packages that everything gets and a broader set of packages that login servers and compute servers get (to make them more useful and usable by people). Specialized machines need additional packages, and while we can automate installation of those too, they're generally a small enough set of packages that we document them in our install instructions for each machine and install them by hand.