For portability Vulkan is the way (it also gets you GPU compute for free without needing vendor libraries). That said the ruttabaga encapsulation is useful for things like Wayland over virtio-gpu which is useful for some use cases.

I should note for even closer to native performance you want virtio-gpu with native context. Patches for that are currently being reviewed on the mailing list: https://patchew.org/QEMU/20241024233355.136867-1-dmitry.osipenko@collabora.com/

I don’t quite follow what this is. Is it a from scratch implementation of the vscode experience or a fork which has removed propriety bits and telemetry?

Is it worth raising an issue with the project? Also enable logging to see if there are any clues as to why a rescan is being done?

Syncthing should have inotify support which allows it to watch for changes rather than polling. Does that help?

Nice. A friend of mine built one with ball bearings: https://youtu.be/40DkJ9vt5CI?si=2TupxpdiZkEg3nVB

I work for a company that makes money supporting FLOSS. Our members pay fairly hefty membership fees because they have a vested interest in their chips being well supported by Linux and the wider ecosystem. That money funds common projects they all benefit from all well as numerous maintainers in projects keeping those projects ticking.

The engineers on the project I mostly work on are predominantly paid to work on it. We value our hobbyist itch scratchers (~10% off contributors) but it’s commercial money that keeps those patches reviewed and flowing.

Very binary, much wow.

QEMU is always going to focus on emulation fidelity first and there are few shortcuts. With floating point the differences aren’t generally in the numbers but in how the NaNs and other edge cases are handled. If you want to execute FP heavy code you should be cross compiling anyway.

QEMU absolutely will use hardware floating point where it can but only when it will give the correct results. FEX and Box64 are user mode emulators which achieve their speed by avoiding emulation where they can buy thunking at API boundaries.

Btrfs never really worked out for me (I think default COW doesn’t play nice with VM images) and ext4 works great.

Pretty much. From v8.0 onwards all the extra features are indicated by id flags. Stuff that is relevant to kernel mode will generally be automatically handled by the kernel patching itself on booting up and in user space some libraries will select appropriately accelerated functions when the ISA extensions are probed. There are a bunch off advisory instructions encoded in the hint space that will be effectively NOPs on older hardware but will enhance execution if run on newer hardware.

If you want to play with newer instructions have a look at QEMUs “max” CPU.

Something like this: https://apt.izzysoft.de/fdroid/index/apk/de.westnordost.streetmeasure

ETA: oops, I didn’t realise this uses a non-free component.

Virt-manager isn’t super scriptable but the underlying libvirt can be controlled by virsh which is a shell interface to libvirt. You can use both at the same time, e.g. start and stop via virsh and access to gui container via virt-manager/virt-viewer.

I write assembly for test cases and early setup code. I read far more assembly than I write.

TIL

It’s called vrms (virtual RMS) and Debian at least packages it.

SystemReady is already a thing. When it becomes mandatory for design wins hopefully it will become more common place.

I wouldn’t say that, it’s just there is a lot in vendor kernels and little incentive to upstream stuff for older SoCs that have already shipped. It’s true Google has come around to the importance of not drifting too far from upstream and hopefully we are starting to see the results of that change in attitude.

As I understand it my colleges in the QC landing team @ Linaro spend a lot of time getting stuff into the various upstreams.

It really depends how you see the firmware boundary. You can either treat it as a set of magic numbers you load onto the hardware so it works or see it as an intrinsically programmable part of your system that you should be able to see the source code for or live without support for the device.