Open Hardware/Modding: Raspberry Pi 3, RISC-V Foundation and More

• $38 Compute Module PoE Board Works with Raspberry Pi CM3/CM3+ Modules

  Raspberry Pi 3 Compute Module was first introduced in 2017 with CM3 and CM3L systems-on-module with or without 4GB eMMC flash for $25 and up before the company launched an update earlier this year...

• IoT ugly Christmas sweaters

  If there’s one thing we Brits love, it’s an ugly Christmas sweater. Jim Bennett, a Senior Cloud Advocate at Microsoft, has taken his ugly sweater game to the next level by adding IoT-controlled, Twitter-connected LEDs thanks to a Raspberry Pi Zero.

• A Look at Ubuntu on MINIX NEO G41V-4 and J50C-4 Mini PCs

• iCommSemi SV6166F is a Low-Power WiFi SoC for IoT and Embedded Systems

• RISC-V Foundation Says Goodbye to the United States

  For over thirty years U.S. companies have enjoyed a home court advantage in developing information and communications technology (ICT) standards. Specifically, the overwhelming majority of the more than five hundred consortia founded over the last thirty-five years to develop ICT standards have been formed under U.S. laws and headquartered in the U.S. That’s hardly a surprise because the vast majority of the companies that founded these same consortia were also American companies. Now the times may be a-changing. The ability to form and maintain standards consortia in the founders’ backyards provides significant advantages. They include convenience, reduced travel costs, predictability of legal results, choice of language, demonstration of national leadership, standardization of governance structures and more. For decades, foreign companies were amenable to this practice, so long as a sufficient percentage of face to face meetings were held outside the U.S. That tolerance began to erode after 9/11. New security measures made crossing the U.S. border more tedious, sometimes even requiring fingerprinting as a precondition to entry. Some members couldn’t obtain visas at all, an issue that became more critical as Chinese companies became more active in standards development. Privacy concerns also escalated, leading to European objections to hosting the information of its citizens in the U.S. at all. Those concerns were temporarily abated when new rules were put in place, but anxieties have heightened again – this time with the U.S. as well as in Europe – over the privacy policies of the largest U.S. IT companies. This year, concerns increased again when ZTE, and then Huawei and scores of that Chinese company’s affiliates, were added to the U.S. “Entity List.” Huawei and its affiliates are reportedly members of over 400 ICT standards organizations, each of which was suddenly tasked with figuring out which of its activities, if any, it could now permit the Chinese companies to participate in.

Android Leftovers

• How to clear suggested searches on Instagram on your Android device

• iOS/Android/Steam sales case study: Golf Peaks

• Android Phones Might Soon Stop Asking for Unlock Password After Reboot for Update Installation

• Malicious mobile apps could ruin your Android phone this Christmas

• Best Android apps of 2019

• Samsung Galaxy M20 and M30 get stable Android 10 with One UI 2.0 in India

• Nokia 7.1 Gets Android 10 Goodness Now, With More Phones Lined up For The Update

• Google Could Be Adding A New Screenshot Editor In Chrome For Android: Report

• Tasker 5.9 opens the door wider for the ultimate Android control

Graphics: AMD, Intel, Vulkan/Flycast and NVIDIA

• AMD Publishes Vega 7nm ISA Documentation - 300 More Pages Of GPU Docs

  Beyond AMD's open-source graphics driver stack of the past decade, part of their original open-source plans have also involved providing public (NDA-free) GPU hardware documentation. That has come with time though the documentation drops are not coordinated in-step with code drops. Out today, for example, is the ISA documentation on Vega 7nm. Back in 2017 was the timely release of the Vega ISA documentation and earlier this summer was even the RDNA 1.0 ISA documentation but missing out until now was the Vega 7nm ISA documentation.

• Intel's Iris Gallium3D Driver Continuing To See Performance Optimizations On Mesa 20.0

  With the current Mesa 19.3 there is the Intel Gallium3D driver generally performing much better than their "classic" i965 driver and for Mesa 20.0 it looks to only make more ground as it switches over to this driver by default. Beyond the recent build system changes for supporting an Intel Gallium3D default and building it as part of the default x86/x86_64 Gallium3D drivers with hopes of soon flipping the switch for Broadwell and newer, more performance optimizations are still being done.

• Dreamcast emulator Flycast adds a Vulkan renderer

  There seems to be quite a lot of interest in Vulkan lately, as more projects begin using it. Now we have the Dreamcast emulator Flycast adding Vulkan support. In the technical blog post announcing it on the Libretro site, it gives a bit of brief history of the Dreamcast GPU and mentions the usual "less overhead, more reliability and better performance in many cases" when it comes to using Vulkan although it's a lot more complicated to use.

• NVIDIA have two new Linux drivers available, one stable and one Vulkan Beta

  NVIDIA continue pushing their drivers forwards with two new Linux driver updates available. Let's take a quick look. First, the stable 440.44 driver release as part of their long-lived branch. This adds support for the Quadro T2000 with Max-Q Design, you can now use the "__GL_SYNC_DISPLAY_DEVICE" environment variable for Vulkan applications and it fixes a few bugs like tearing with a G-SYNC or G-SYNC Compatible monitor when you've got something running directly on a display (like VR).