The Call for Nominations for the openSUSE Ad-hoc Board Election ended last night. The Election Committee received the nominations of two openSUSE members and both nominees accepted to run as candidate for this election.

The names of the candidates are:

• Pierre Böckmann
• Stasiek Michalski

The announcement was made on the project mailing list by Ariez Vachha on behalf of the Election Committee.

As from today the election campaign begins. Electronic vote will begin on the 17th of August and ballots will close on the 30th of August.

All the best to both candidates! 👍

Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

Week 31 has seen a steady flow of snapshots. The biggest snapshot was 0721, for which we had to do a full rebuild due to changes in the krb5 package, that moved some files around. In order for all packages to keep up with this change, the full rebuild was needed. The week in total has seen 7 snapshots being published (0721, 0724, 0726, 0727, 0728, 0729 and 0730)

The changes included in those snapshots were:

• krb5 file system layout changes (moved to default locations)
• Mesa 20.1.3 & 20.1.4
• NetworkManager 1.26.0
• Flatpak 1.8.1
• Python3 package was renamed to python38, allowing for further parallel packages like python39
• sudo 1.9.2
• KDE Plasma 5.19.4
• Mozilla Firefox 79.0
• Nano 5.0

The changes currently in stagings are around the topics of:

• grub2 to address Boothole issues (will come with a new signing key for grub/kernel/shim)
• GCC 10.2
• LibreOffice 7.0rc2
• Change of /tmp to tmpfs
• openSSL 3.0
• RPM changes: %{_libexecdir} is being changed to /usr/libexec. This exposes quite a lot of packages that abuse %{_libexecdir} and fail to build. Additionally, the payload compression is being changed to zstd

As leader of the openSUSE Innovator initiative, openSUSE member and official oneAPI innovator, I tested the new release of the tool on openSUSE Leap 15.1, 15.2 and Tumbleweed. With the total success of the work, I made available in the SDB an article on how to install this solution on the openSUSE platform. More information here: https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:Install_oneAPI.

oneAPI is an Unified, Standards-Based Programming Model. Modern workload diversity necessitates the need for architectural diversity; no single architecture is best for every workload. XPUs, including CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, and other accelerators, are required to extract high performance.

This technology have the tools needed to deploy applications and solutions across these architectures. Its set of complementary toolkits—a base kit and specialty add-ons—simplify programming and help developers improve efficiency and innovation. The core Intel oneAPI DPC++ Compiler and libraries implement the oneAPI industry specifications available at https://www.oneapi.com/open-source/.

Some features

DPC++: Data Parallel C++ (DPC++) is an open, standards-based evolution of ISO C++ that incorporates Khronos SYCL and community extensions to simplify data parallel programming.

CUDA Source Code Migration: The DPC++ Compatibility Tool is a migration engine that transforms CUDA code into a standards-based DPC++ code.

AI: Designed for end-to-end machine learning and data science pipelines, these toolkits are comprised of optimized Python libraries and high-performance, deep learning frameworks and tools based on oneAPI libraries.

Libraries : Powerful libraries—including deep learning, math, and video and media processing-are preoptimized for domain-specific functions and custom coded to accelerate compute-intense workloads.

For more information: https://software.intel.com/content/www/us/en/develop/tools/oneapi.html

Intro

We made an important change for our Container Host OS openSUSE MicroOS, which our Kubernetes platform openSUSE Kubic will inherit since it is based on openSUSE MicroOS: we use now tmpfs for /tmp.

tmpfs is a temporary filesystem that resides in memory. Mounting directories as tmpfs can be an effective way of speeding up accesses to their files and to ensure that their contents are automatically cleared upon reboot.

A fresh installation will use tmpfs for /tmp by default. Old installations needs to be converted to this manually, but it is still possible to switch back to use disk space for /tmp. This is especially useful and important, if big files are stored in /tmp.

If temporary files or directories are needed below /tmp, this can be created at boot by using tmpfiles.d. But never store important files in /tmp, they will not survive the next reboot.

Converting old installations to use tmpfs

As tmpfs will be mounted on top of /tmp, existing files will be no longer accessible. The following steps will cleanup /tmp and enable /tmpfs:

1. Backup all important files currently stored in /tmp!
2. Remove the line for /tmp from /etc/fstab
3. Remove all files in /tmp
4. Reboot

After reboot, tmpfs should be used for /tmp.

Using disk space for /tmp

After creating a new btrfs subvolume for /tmp and adding this to /etc/fstab, tmpfs will no longer be used for /tmp.

The easierst way to archive this is to use mksubvolume from snapper 0.8.12 or newer:

# transactional-update shell
transactional update # mksubvolume /tmp
transactional update # exit
# systemctl reboot

Afterwards, all files are stored again on the disk and will survive a reboot.

Future plans

In the future we plan to harden the system by default even more, e.g. by marking /tmp and other write-able parts of the filesystem with noexec.

I am thinking about making a formal proposal for one of two new
unmoderated groups. The group would either be comp.internet.history or
soc.history.internet. I think you can see where these two names could
possibly overlap.

The general idea of the new group is to discuss retro internet
technologies such as IRC, ftp sites, BBSs (telnet and otherwise), MUDS,
MOOs, and of course Usenet and others. We could also discuss the culture
that surrounded many of these technologies especially IRC and Usenet as
they were maturing. Many of use don’t consider these technologies to be
“retro” because we use them everyday and yet interest in them is waning
and in order for them to continue, fresh interest must be continually be
added.

I don’t know if anyone could possibly be interested, but the only way to
find out is to ask. If I get enough positive feedback, I’ll write up an
official CFD and submit it to the board. I won’t do anything if no one is
interested.