• Chrome 86: Improved Focus Highlighting, WebHID, and More

  Unless otherwise noted, changes described below apply to the newest Chrome beta channel release for Android, Chrome OS, Linux, macOS, and Windows. Learn more about the features listed here through the provided links or from the list on ChromeStatus.com. Chrome 86 is beta as of September 3, 2020.

• Chrome 86 Beta Enables Native File-System API By Default, WebCodecs Added

  Building off the recent release of Chrome 85, Google has now released the beta of Chrome 86 with a number of goodies introduced and promotions for some existing functionality.

• Chrome OS 86 to make port forwarding for Linux on Chromebooks generally available [Ed: Google reinvents the wheel with GNU/Linux having locked it down and stripped off very key and rather basic features]

  As I keep running the Dev Channel of Chrome OS 86, I’m seeing more features of the software moving forward. For example, port forwarding, which was enabled with an experimental flag in Chrome OS 84 and 85, is a native, generally available feature in the next Stable Channel release. Chrome OS 86 removes the port forwarding flag.

Having a comprehensive and accelerated graphics stack is essential in today's world. But where would we be without one, or how do we as developers handle the lack or instability of drivers during very early hardware bring up?

Simple - we use drivers which do all the rendering via the CPU. An interesting fact is that during the dawn of 3D graphics CPU rendering was not uncommon.

With time, GPU devices became more popular, powerful and cheaper. Thus CPU (software) rendering, is not so wide spread these days and mainly used as a fallback.

Within this article, we'll provide a high-level introduction of the Linux graphics stack, how it is used within ChromeOS and the work done to improve software rendering (while simultaneously improving GPU rendering, by reducing the boilerplate needed in applications).

• Winmate IQ30 Snapdragon 660 SBC Runs Android 9.0 for HMI Touch Panels

  Winmate, a company specializing in rugged computing technology headquartered in Taiwan, has recently launched Winmate IQ30 SBC powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 660 octa-core coupled with up to 4GB LPDDR4, and 32GB flash storage.

  The single board computer also comes with a Fast Ethernet port with optional PoE, WiFI 5, and optional cellular connectivity thanks to an an M.2 card socket and SIM card slot, as two video interfaces for Android-powered touch screen displays.

• [Coreboot] [GSoC] Address Sanitizer, Part 3

  Hello again! The third and final phase of GSoC is coming to an end and I’m glad that I made it this far. In this blog post, I’d like to outline the work done in the last two weeks.

• GSoC 2020: Report-2: Fuzzing the NetBSD Network Stack in a Rumpkernel Environment

  This report was written by Nisarg S. Joshi as part of Google Summer of Code 2020.

  The objective of this project is to fuzz the various protocols and layers of the network stack of NetBSD using rumpkernel. This project is being carried out as a part of GSoC 2020. This blog post is regarding the project, the concepts and tools involved, the objectives and the current progress and next steps.

• GSoC'20 final report & Project Documentation

  OverviewThe idea was about The UI testing framework in LibreOffice. The UITesting Framework is based on introspection code in c++ interacting with a testing framework in python through a simple UNO interface. To identify objects we use the ids that we introduced for loading dialogs from UI files. We were having unsupported items list in LibreOffice UITesting Framework. So The project mainly goals is to Extend the ability of the existing UI testing framework to support the unsupported items that exist now. So the work done on this list to decrease number of items in it.

• [KDE] GSoC'20 progress : Phase III

  And just like that, the third evaluations for Google Summer of Code are upon us. It seems just like yesterday when I began my work on this project and now the final phase is about to be over. Sort of unbelievable.

• GSoC 2020 @ Pitivi: Work Product

  My GSoC 2020 internship project was improving the usability of Pitivi’s Render dialog. Below is a detailed summary of the work done during the last three months.

• Google Is Still Striving To Upstream Incremental FS In Linux

  After originally publishing the Incremental FS patches back in May of 2019, Google's Android kernel team is still working to upstream this virtual file-system into the mainline Linux kernel and at this week's Linux Plumbers Conference was working to drum up support for it.

  The Incremental File-System back when it was first proposed was advertised as a special-purpose virtual file-system to allow the execution of a program while its binary and resource files are still being lazily downloaded from the Internet or other medium.

• Android AOSP Can Boot Off Mainline Linux 5.9 With Just One Patch

• Backup and restore your Chromebook’s Linux setup

  If you’ve been exploring Linux apps on Chrome OS with us, it’s high time we covered how to save your current setup so you can restore it in a pinch. Full Linux distros have various tools available to run backups and store them locally or off site depending on your personal preference. Chrome OS, however, has a built in tool for this task and you can keep you backup right on you Chromebook or better yet, put it on Google Drive so it’s safe. This is very handy if you run into a situation where you need to power wash your device or heaven forbid have a system crash that requires a full recovery.

• Brave takes brave stand against Google's plan to turn websites into ad-blocker-thwarting Web Bundles

  A proposed Google web specification threatens to turn websites into inscrutable digital blobs that resist content blocking and code scrutiny, according to Peter Snyder, senior privacy researcher at Brave Software.

  On Tuesday, Snyder published a memo warning that Web Bundles threaten user agency and web code observability. He raised this issue back in February, noting that Web Bundles would prevent ad blockers from blocking unwanted subresources. He said at the time he was trying to work with the spec's authors to address concerns but evidently not much progress has been made.

  His company makes the Brave web browser, which is based on Google's open-source Chromium project though implements privacy protections, by addition or omission, not available in Google's commercial incarnation of Chromium, known as Chrome.

• Kubernetes moves to end ‘permanent beta’ for some APIs

  The Kubernetes project has decided the time has come to stop existing in a state of permanent beta.

  The decision, included in the Changelog for version 1.19 of the container-wrangling code and explained in a blog post, reflects the fact that Kubernetes offers plenty of REST APIs and they can evolve … or not.

  The project’s new rules mean that when a new feature's API reaches beta, a nine-month countdown commences. Within that timeframe, the beta must either reach general availability (which deprecates the beta) or start anew (which deprecates the previous beta).

  “The motivation here seems pretty clear: get features stable,” wrote Kubernetes contributor Tim Bannister of The Scale Factory. “Guaranteeing that beta features will be deprecated adds a pretty big incentive so that people who want the feature continue their effort until the code, documentation and tests are ready for this feature to graduate to stable, backed by several Kubernetes' releases of evidence in real-world use.”

As we frequently cover, making use of compiler PGO (Profile Guided Optimizations) can mean some sizable performance wins, assuming the generated usage profile is accurate. With the imminent Chrome 85 availability, Google is now making use of PGO with their default LLVM Clang compiler toolchain for squeezing out around 10% better performance.

Going back four years ago is when Google engineers began experimenting with compiler PGO'ing for better browser performance. Back then they were enabling PGO on Windows builds carried out by the Microsoft MSVC compiler. But with LLVM Clang being Chrome's default compiler, with Chrome 85 they are now making use of profile-guided optimizations there. It took some additional time but Google is comfortable enough now with Chrome's PGO abilities.

Also: WebBundles Harmful to Content Blocking, Security Tools, and the Open Web (Standards Updates #2)