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Introduced to the Linux 4.12 kernel’s staging area back in 2017 was the Realtek RTL8723BS WiFi driver. The Realtek RTL8723BS is an 802.11 b/g/ SDIO WLAN adapter with Bluetooth 4.0 connectivity too. In the nearly decade since this driver was added to the staging area, it’s continued to be cleaned up and with the Linux 7.0 merge window there is yet again a lot of work on cleaning up this WiFi driver for the old Realtek hardware.

It’s not over the finish line and still in the kernel’s staging area, but the Realtek RTL8723BS driver continues seeing more clean-ups. This driver started out as based on Realtek downstream vendor driver code and cleaned up in the year since by various kernel developers. As for its popularity, the RTL8723BS did appear in the original Intel Compute Stick as well as various Intel Atom and ARM devices.

We should just outlaw realtek. The world would be a better place.

So I would like to know from experts working on Realtek or those who are following closely enough to understand the details what exactly does the “Big HAL layer” entail interms of so much refactoring?

From what I can understand it looks like most of the vendor released stuff is not inline to the design of the kernel and thus it works in a different manner than the rest of the kernel.

But then, why wouldn’t experts try to clean room implement the driver by mimicking the official driver?

This is the 1.6 release that is API and ABI compatible with previous 1.4.x releases. This release contains some of the bigger changes that happened since the 1.4 release last year, including:

• An LDAC decoder was added for bluetooth.
• SpanDSP for bluetooth packet loss concealment.
• Safe parsing and building of PODs in shared memory.
• Added support for metadata features. This is used to signal that the sync_timeline metadata supports the RELEASE operation.
• Node commands and events can contain extra user data.
• Support for more compressed format helper functions to create and parse formats.
• Support for compile time max channels. The max channels was increased to 128.
• Support for audio channel layouts was added. This makes it possible to set “audio.layout” = “5.1” instead of the more verbose audio.position = [ FL, FR, FC, LFE, SL, SR ]
• Support for Capability Params was added. This can be used to negotiate capabilities on a link before format and buffer negotiation takes place.
• More HDR colortypes are added.
• Loops now have locking with priority inversion. Most code was adapted to use the faster locks instead of epoll/eventfd to update shared state.
• Channel position are parsed from EDID data.
• Channel maps are now set on ALSA.
• The resampler now supports configurable window functions such as blackman and kaiser windows. The phases are now also calculated with fixed point math, which makes it more accurate.
• Many bluetooth updates and improvements.
• The filter-graph has an ffmpeg and ONNX plugin. The ffmpeg plugin can run an audio AVFilterGraph. The ONNX plugin can run some models such as the silero VAD.
• Many AVB updates. Work is ongoing to merge the Milan protocol.
• Support for v0 clients was removed.
• The jack-tunnel module can now autoconnect ports.
• ROC support multitrack layouts now.
• Many RTP updates.
• rlimits can now be set in the config file.
• Thread reset on fork can now be configured. JACK clients expect this to be disabled.
• node.exclusive is now enforced.
• node.reliable enables reliable transport.
• pw-cat supports sysex and midiclip as well as some more uncompressed formats. Options were added to set the container and codec formats as well as list the supported containers, codecs, layouts and channel names.
• Documentation updates.

Just wanted to share an alias I have in use and found it useful again. It’s a simple wrapper around xargs, which I always forget how to use properly, so I set up an alias for. All it does is operate on each line on stdout.

The arguments are interpreted as the command to execute. The only thing to remember is using the {} as a placeholder for the input line. Look in the examples to understand how its used.

# Pipe each line and execute a command. The "{}" will be replaced by the line.
#
# Example:
#   cat url.txt | foreach echo download {} to directory
#   ls -1 | foreach echo {}
#   find . -maxdepth 2 -type f -name 'M*' | foreach grep "USB" {}
alias foreach='xargs -d "\n" -I{}'

Useful for quickly operating on each line of a file (in example to download from list of urls) or do something with any stdout output line by line. Without remembering or typing a for loop in terminal.

OC by @thingsiplay@lemmy.ml

See the link in this users profile which explains why

I know why. The OP decided to post where they decided to post, it’s frankly unethical to steal OP’s shit and not crosspost properly.

I love MPD and RMPC, it’s probably the closest I have gotten to a “perfect” music player, it is super customisable and functional, but there are just a few things that I need to figure out how to change.

First, after each restart, the queue is cleared. How do I make sure that the queue by default is all the songs in my music directory?

Second, after each restart, shuffle (randomise) is reset to off, how do I change it so that shuffle is enabled by default?

Thirdly, is there a way to make MPD pause when headphones are disconnected?

Finally, how do I make MPD block screen lock when music is playing?

For your information, I am running EndeavourOS with KDE Plasma

When I first switched to Linux, I needed to find a suitable alternative to AIMP on Windows.

At the time I was running Fedora Workstation, so I first tried options that fit the GNOME desktop. The libadwaita apps I tried (G4Music, Amberol, etc) all suffered similar issues to do with shuffle, where it wasn’t able to just go to a random track, instead ordering all the tracks randomly once and having a fixed queue. Amberol in particular had bad shuffling, only randomising all the tracks below the one currently playing (so the ones above are unchanged, which is stupid I think). I ended up using Tauon, which had a workable shuffle but admittedly less nice UI. I also remember that Tauon was not very configurable.

Next, I switched to KDE Plasma, so I ended up using Elisa, which fit the KDE desktop, had nicer UI than Tauon, but suffered from the same shuffle issue as the libadwaita apps, so I had to occasionally reshuffle the music to get consistently random tracks.

Having recently switched to EndeavourOS and really getting into the weeds of command line stuff, I decided to try using MPD and the client RMPC. For god knows what reason, it’s the only option that has proper good shuffle that’s just randomly going to each track (besides Tauon and, on Windows, AIMP), and it is easily the most customisable. RMPC has excellent documentation making changing the configs super easy!

If you know anything about Linux’s history, you’ll remember it all started with Linus Torvalds posting to the Minix Usenet group on August 25, 1991, that he was working on “a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones.” We know that the “hobby” operating system today is Linux, and except for PCs and Macs, it pretty much runs the world.

Did you ever wonder, though, how it went from being one person’s project to being a group effort? I knew most of the story because I’d been using Linux since 1993. But I thought I’d ask Linus, and some of the early Linux developers.

Did a quick search it seems that it’s called Shatner light. Very cool.

Even when it’s running Windows, you’re free to install Linux whenever you want. When that’s no longer true is when it stops being a PC imo

Asahi Linux developers have published a status report following the recent Linux 6.19 kernel release to outline recent progress and upcoming items around Apple Silicon support on Linux. This year will also mark five years that Asahi Linux has been around for bringing Linux to the Apple M-Series hardware.

Their latest progress report began by commenting that the DisplayPort Alt Mode support with USB-C – a very frequent question from users – will be “done when it’s done”. There still is a “fairy dust” branch with their downstream code in current form but not officially supported.

The NTFS3 driver maintained by Paragon Software for Microsoft NTFS file-systems today saw a batch of improvements merged for Linux 7.0 This comes as there is also the competing “NTFS Remake” driver that began a few months ago as the “NTFSPLUS” driver. That NTFS Remake driver isn’t looking like it will be submitted for the Linux 7.0 merge window so at least for now the NTFS3 driver continues seeing improvements with the latest mainline kernel code.

Konstantin Komarov of Paragon Software today sent out the NTFS3 updates for Linux 7.0 and they have since been merged to Git. Highlights include improved readahead for bitmap initialization and large directory scans, fsync files by syncing parent inodes, implementing iomap-based file operations, delayed allocation support, and other improvements as well as a handful of bug fixes.

I migrated a while ago full time. All my data still in ntfs, bring it on!

It’s going to be 7 gigabytes.

My main requirement is that I am using Syncthing to sync my notes from my Android phone, which uses Quillpad. Quillpad is amazing and looks super nice, and functional too, but all the notes are in one big folder rather than being subdivided by notebook. So I require a markdown editor that can create “notebooks” but don’t change the folder structure of the notes (I tested putting notes in subfolders, and quillpad thought the notes were deleted. Silly Quillpad!)

So the notebooks/similar organisation of notes needs to be specific to the app and should not change the folder structure. I would prefer if the app is open-source too, and something that fits with my desktop (KDE Plasma) would be cool too :D

This rules out Obsidian (which puts notes in a folder structure. Obsidian is great, but won’t sync well with Quillpad), Joplin won’t work either.

I am using EndeavourOS with KDE Plasma

https://youtu.be/XRpHIa-2XCE

A 30 minute video about opening up a text box and typing something into it for later, made for people who watch videos about doing that rather than just getting work done.

00:29 Requirements 4:10 Zettlr, VNote, and nb 5:48 Zim 7:50 QOwnNotes 12:31 The end of pretending this is about productivity 14:48 Emacs 21:18 Neovim 25:59 It never ends 27:12 Kakoune, Helix, Vis, Neatvi (I don’t use these)

I use paper scribblers and a pen or pencil, plus an index book so I can compile what I am entering, but I’m not in any hurry though. /s

As always, this is incredible engineering. I’m so excited that M series macs have a supportability path beyond Apple’s proprietary support