Hardware and Free, Libre, and Open Source Software Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Feb 22, 2025

Hardware

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • Jeff Geerling ☛ SiFive's HiFive Premier P550 is a strange, powerful RISC-V board

    SiFive's HiFive Premier P550 is a strange board. It's the fastest RISC-V development board I've tested—though I haven't tested a Milk-V Jupiter. It's also Mini DTX, which is an ATX-adjacent standard board size that won't fit in many Mini ITX SFF PC cases, which might be why SiFive and ESWIN are releasing a custom case for it (pictured above, which they sent along with the board for my review).

  • CNX Software ☛ Renesas RA4L1 ultra-low-power MCU family offers 168 µA/MHz operation, dual-bank flash, capacitive touch

    Renesas has recently introduced the RA4L1 ultra-low-power Arm Cortex-M33 MCU family along with two evaluation/development boards. This new lineup consists of 14 ultra-low-power devices based on an 80 MHz Arm Cortex-M33 processor with TrustZone support and designed for metering, IoT sensing, smart locks, digital cameras, and human-machine interface (HMI) applications. The RA4L1 MCU family offers high power efficiency at 168 µA/MHz while active and a standby current of 1.70 µA while retaining SRAM.

• Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

  • Events

    • FSF ☛ FSF Blogs: FSD meeting recap 2025-02-21

      Check out the important work our volunteers accomplished

  • Web Browsers/Web Servers

    • Mozilla

      • Tantek Çelik: CSF_01: Three Steps for IndieWeb Cybersecurity

        Welcome to my first Cybersecurity Friday (CSF) post. Almost exactly one week ago I experienced (and had to fight & recover from) a cybersecurity incident. While that’s a much longer story, this post series is focused on sharing tips and incident learnings from an #indieweb-centric perspective.

      • Karl Dubost: Fixing rowspan=0 on tables on WebKit.

        Last week, I mentioned there were easy ways to fix or help the WebKit project.

  • Programming/Development

    • Jonathan Dowland ☛ Jonathan Dowland: haskell streaming libraries

      For my PhD, my colleagues/collaborators and I built a distributed stream-processing system using Haskell. There are several other Haskell stream-processing systems. How do they compare?

      First, let's briefly discuss and define streaming in this context.

      Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs introduces Streams as an analogue of lists, to support delayed evaluation. In brief, the inductive list type (a list is either an empty list or a head element pre-pended to another list) is replaced with a structure with a head element and a promise which, when evaluated, will generate the tail (which in turn may have a head element and a promise to generate another tail, culminating in the equivalent of an empty list.) Later on SICP also covers lazy evaluation.

  • Linux Foundation

    • SandboxAQ, MITRE, Linux Foundation announce RWPQC 2025 to address quantum threats [Ed: Another meaningless buzzwords bonanza]