I’ve told LF repeatedly that “education” as the leading point is insulting. Many maintainers know exactly what they need to do, but they lack time and energy for it. Lecturing them, I mean “giving them skills”, is… not actually a solution.

But it allows LF (and friends like GH) to continue elephant-in-the-room-ing the actual solution, which is paying maintainers for the trillions of dollars of value they create.

https://fosstodon.org/@donmccurdy/113512775802077660

I've been expecting something like this since the XZ hack, but still ... frustrated/annoyed/sad to see Microsoft and 13 (!) partners jointly announcing that their answer is to “educate” open source maintainers.

It's nice that they're compensating maintainers for the time spent on that training, but ... compliance with corporate security policies is still a whole lot of ongoing, unpaid work after that? Sigh.

https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/announcing-github-secure-open-source-fund/

Last year, for each of six Linux kernel releases - v6.7, v6.8 ... v6.12 - I was topping the list of most active contributors. This consistency led to a more interesting stat: I am one of the most active Linux kernel contributors for this period (and I don't count Kent here as he just dropped stuff out of tree... and then developed things to his own tree without review or mailing list collaboration) with 1339 commits upstream.

I am however more proud of another impact I made: I am one of the most active reviewers of the last one year of Linux kernel development. Reviewing takes a lot of time, a lot of iterations, a lot of patience, a lot of template answers and results with only "some" of reviewed-by credit going to Linux kernel git history. Yet here I am: ~1000 reviewed-by credits for last year v6.7 - v6.12 Linux kernel.

Source, LWN.net:
https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/997959/377cf2f076306247/

1000 days since the Russian army invaded Ukraine, destroying its cities and murdering civilians, all because Putin needed a "quick victorious war" to remain in power.

I will never forget, and I will never forgive.

TIL: @tuxedocomputers released #Linux #kernel drivers for their machines under the #GPLv3, which makes it impossible for competitors and distros to ship them pre-compiled, as that license is incompatible with the #LinuxKernel's #GPLv2 only license.

They did this purposely, allegedly to "keep control of the upstream pacing" – and want to re-license the code while upstreaming.

https://github.com/tuxedocomputers/tuxedo-keyboard/issues/61

https://gitlab.com/tuxedocomputers/development/packages/tuxedo-drivers/-/issues/137

https://gitlab.com/tuxedocomputers/development/packages/tuxedo-drivers#regarding-upstreaming-of-tuxedo-drivers

https://gitlab.com/tuxedocomputers/development/packages/tuxedo-drivers#regarding-upstreaming-of-tuxedo-drivers

@ptesarik Countries are political concepts, so every country where you move the organization will impose some sort of politics on that organization. Unless you propose moving to Principality of Sealand? :)
Joking aside, Linux Foundation is nowadays business with very big business behind, so change of residency might not change much.

RE: https://fosstodon.org/@ptesarik/113355467229724671

I guess many are watching interesting email thread now. :)
One-time posters, language typo fixers and devs of architecture from a country far away from GMT. And even certain compression library is brought as an argument, while disclosing private emails and using quite aggressive tone.

Heh. The lady doth protest too much, methinks.

I know now which emails will trigger careful patch review, suspecting foreign country involvement. :)

Above of course does not cover known individuals from that thread. I feel sympathetic with Nikita, whose patches I was reviewing over last years, and who should not be put in the same basket with some companies.

3rd Zurich Linux'n'Beer CH meetup will take place on 16th of October, 6:30 PM in Rheinfelder Bierhalle in Zurich. You are welcome to come!
Thanks @Andi for putting this together and booking up the place for us.

Russia kidnaps Ukrainian children, changes their identities and their names. The Polish foreign minister asks: How does that differ from the Nazis who kidnapped Russian and Polish children for the same purpose?

https://www.threads.net/@polandmfa/post/DAVqCpRug4B?xmt=AQGzYBrGsY48nUagk_qkrZv0VT6GBuaYrDDX9FnO5XKjhA

Bartosz Golaszewski from Linaro describing new Power Sequencing subsystem in Linux kernel.
Linux Plumbers Conference 2024 #LinuxPlumbers2024 #lpc2024 #linux
https://lpc.events/event/18/contributions/1908/

Manivannan Sadhasivam leading discussion on PCI Endpoint open items: virtio, QEMU and more. Linux Plumbers Conference 2024 #LinuxPlumbers2024 #lpc2024 #linux
https://lpc.events/event/18/contributions/1683/

The Linux Plumbers Conference is just in three days and I am looking forward to it. I see plenty of interesting topics, so the conference looks promising. If Devicetree is something of interest for you, please come visit "Devicetree Birds of Feather" session on Friday morning:
https://lpc.events/event/18/contributions/1783/

P.S. If you want to grab a beer or chat, find me in the halls or get in touch via email/fedi. I won't be attending OSSE, though. Only Plumbers.

I’m happy to announce the Amlogic ARM64 Device Tree is now fully documented in linux-next, ready for v6.12!

Since the beginning of Device Tree on Linux, we documented how it should be written so drivers could know what to expect, it’s called “bindings”, it’s a sort of “contract” between Device Tree and drivers.

But those were written in human readable open text format, without any automated way to verify Device Tree files. There were numerous attempts, but ultimately Rob Herring leveraged JSON Schema [1] into “dtschema” [2] leading to this patch serie https://lore.kernel.org/all/20181005165848.3474-1-robh@kernel.org/.

Thus “dtschema” made it possible to write bindings in YAML and the developed scripts would convert Device Tree in YAML and run a validation with JSON Schema validation. This was merged in end of 2018 then conversion of the text files in YAML files started.

For reference, there were 3278 text bindings in Linux 4.20 git tree, in today’s Linux next for v6.12 only 1250 text files remains but there’s 4345 yaml files now! In addition to the transition to yaml bindings, new platforms were introduced using the new format.

Around one year ago, I upstreamed support for the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, and it was fully documented from day 1, and most of the changes was yaml bindings change since the SoC was mainly an upgrade from the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 I helped upstream 2 years ago.

Let’s go back to Amlogic, were I started converting the text file to yaml bindings in August 2019 (see [3]), and finally ended the transition early this month with the patch [4]. This makes the Amlogic ARM64 Device Trees join fully documented along other platforms like Samsung Exynos

If you want to know more about Device Tree validation, you can look at my @LinaroLtd colleague @krzk talk he did in this year's #EOSS in Seattle https://sched.co/1aBEf!

Now the links:
[1] https://json-schema.org/
[2] https://github.com/devicetree-org/dt-schema
[3] https://lore.kernel.org/all/20190801135644.12843-1-narmstrong@baylibre.com/
[4] https://lore.kernel.org/all/20240905-topic-amlogic-upstream-gxlx-drop-iio-compat-v2-1-7a690eb95bc2@linaro.org/
Thanks for reading !

U-Boot on Qualcomm Snapdragon platforms - great work, @calebccff !
https://www.linaro.org/blog/initial-u-boot-release-for-qualcomm-platforms/

@calebccff, Are these releases already using upstream/Linux kernel DTS? Looking at your qcom_defconfig, it seems answer is yes (OF_UPSTREAM)?

@kernellogger The problem is that Qualcomm ships devices with some weird ACPI tables which Linux simply cannot use. I don't know the details good enough to explain more. Maybe it would require rewriting several drivers to work with such Qcom-ACPI-variant.

RE: https://fosstodon.org/@kernellogger/112874114752280325

@mripard Nothing, but the topic shifted towards why usage of such laptops is non-trivial in the beginning.

RE: https://fosstodon.org/@mripard/112874339733019220

@kernellogger It boils down whether ACPI is properly implemented on given platform. There are ARM64 platforms running correctly under ACPI, e.g. most of the ARM64 servers, and you don't care about such differences.
The trouble starts when ACPI is not there (so almost all embedded designs, mobile phones/tables) or ACPI is somehow botched (e.g. Qualcomm Snapdragon compute platforms and laptops based on it), because then you go with Devicetree/DTS and everything starts... But such platforms are not consumer devices, usually. And really the Qualcomm Snapdragon for laptops should have just used ACPI.

RE: https://fosstodon.org/@kernellogger/112871174600451364

A video directly confirms a Russian missile strike on "Okhmatdyt" in Kyiv. It wasn't intercepted and didn't deviate from its coordinates - it was aimed precisely there to cause maximum casualties and inflict the most pain.

SBU investigators have determined that Russia struck "Okhmatdyt" with a Kh-101 missile.

#RussiaIsATerroristState #ArmUkraineNow #Ukraine #EU #Europe #NATOSummit #NatoAllies

Since a year we got some contributions for converting Devicetree bindings from TXT to DT schema as part of some sort mentorship programs. This is great although leads to some misunderstandings in that work, considering mentorships did not ask DT maintainers about some sort of guidance. To clarify:

1. Please convert bindings which have active DTS users. First choose bindings with DTS built by arm64 defconfig, then next choice by arm multi_v7 defconfig. Then any other ARM or different architecture DTS.

2. Be sure dt_bindings_check (including yamllint) and checkpatch pass without any warnings. See writing-schema.rst document.

3. Be sure DTS using this binding passes dtbs_check validation. If this means binding needs to be adapted during conversion, mention briefly in commit message changes done comparing to pure TXT->DT schema conversion. Sometimes DTS has to be fixed. Sometimes both - DTS and binding - must be changed, because actual ABI (Linux drivers) is different.

That's an interesting session: @cas explaining current status of upstream U-Boot on Qualcomm robotic platforms - using mainline kernel DTS and getting to SystemReady IR.
Slides: https://calebs.dev/u-boot24.pdf
https://www.kitefor.events/events/linaro-connect-24/submissions/183