IBM and Red Hat/Fedora Leftovers, Firefox on PPC

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Sep 18, 2023

• Flatpak integration in Qubes OS templates

  I recently wanted to improve Qubes OS accessibility to new users a bit, yesterday I found why GNOME Software wasn't working in the offline templates. Today, I'll explain how to install programs from Flatpak in a template to provide to other qubes. I really like flatpak as it provides extra security features and a lot of software choice, and all the data created by Flatpak packaged software are compartmentalized into their own tree in `~/.var/app/program.some.fqdn/`.

• A statistics update in Open vSwitch user space datapath

  With the demands for higher bandwidth, came the need for scaling and processing packets on more CPU resources. In Open vSwitch (OVS) using DPDK for faster IO, this translated to using more receive and transmit queues to allow more PMD threads to process the packets. This adds some complexity to a system not easy to understand in the first place. Support or operation people still want to know how much traffic is received and how it is distributed across the CPU resources. To offer help, this article describes new statistics added for the user space datapath in OVS 2.17 and later.

  Per queue statistics for DPDK ports

  A first evolution in OVS 2.17 consisted of exposing receive and transmit queues statistics per DPDK physical ports in ovsdb.

• Anaconda F40's Advanced Partitioner (Blivet-GUI) on Fedora Rawhide

• Comparing OpenShift Service Mesh and Service Interconnect

  In today's digital landscape, where organizations increasingly rely on interconnected applications and services to execute business operations, the ability to connect software and data across different environments is becoming increasingly vital. However, achieving seamless connectivity is no easy feat, as varying application architectures and on-premises and cloud infrastructures often present disparities that require careful management of interconnections for optimal operation, risk management, managing skill sets across the technical team, ensuring enough observability, and how security is being handled.

  This article discusses two Red Hat technologies, Red Hat OpenShift Service Mesh and Red Hat Service Interconnect, that offer different approaches to address these requirements and provides guidance to help you make informed decisions on which to use when.

  What is OpenShift Service Mesh?

• The Talospace Project: Partial ppc64le JIT available again for Firefox 115ESR

  I've been rehabilitating the old ppc64le JIT against more current Firefoxes and there is now available a set of patches you can apply to the current 115ESR. This does not yet include support for Ion or Wasm; the first still has some regressions, and the second has multiple outright crashes. Still, even with just the Baseline Interpreter and Baseline Compiler it is several times faster on benchmarks than the interpreter-only 115. I've included also the relevant LTO-PGO and WebRTC patches so you can just apply the changesets numerically and build.