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Tux Machines
Posted by Roy Schestowitz on Oct 05, 2022
> The facts about the video codec acceleration on Fedora 37.
> There’s been some articles that have gotten the current situation extremely wrong about video codec hardware acceleration on Fedora 37.
> Here are the facts:
> Fedora 37’s Mesa3d package has split out the video codec acceleration libraries, but it has since started building them again as separate packages.
> It only affects users of open source AMD GPU drivers.
> In 1977, David Mills, an eccentric engineer and computer scientist, took a job at comsat, a satellite corporation headquartered in Washington, D.C. Mills was an inveterate tinkerer: he’d once built a hearing aid for a girlfriend’s uncle, and had consulted for Ford on how paper-tape computers might be put into cars. Now, at comsat, Mills became involved in the arpanet, the computer network that would become the precursor to the Internet. A handful of researchers were already using the network to connect their distant computers and trade information. But the fidelity of that exchanged data was threatened by a distinct deficiency: the machines did not share a single, reliable synchronized time.
> Over decades, Mills had gained wide-ranging expertise in mathematics, engineering, and computer science. In the early seventies, as a lecturer at the University of Edinburgh, he’d written programs that decoded shortwave radio and telegraph signals. Later, largely for fun, he’d studied how the clocks in a power grid could wander several seconds in the course of a hot summer’s day. (The extent of their shifts depended not just on the temperature but on whether the grid used coal or hydropower.) Now he concentrated on the problem of keeping time across a far-flung computer network. Clock time, Mills learned, is the result of an unending search for consensus. Even the times told by the world’s most precise government-maintained “master clocks” are composites of the readings of several atomic clocks. The master clocks, in turn, are averaged to help create international civil time, known as Coördinated Universal Time and initialized as U.T.C.
> David P. Reed talks with Doc Searls and Simon Phipps on this episode of FLOSS Weekly. Reed, one of the Internet's founding figures, discusses online freedom, openness operating systems (including the end-of-life for Linux) and about how standards and patents are naturally opposed.
> …that I misspoke in the course of my XDC presentation. I want to apologize first to the live audience, for hearing such grave information firsthand, then to my fans, for disappointing them, and lastly to the ANGLE team:
> During a Q&A, I stated that ANGLE uses Vulkan secondary command buffers. This is false. ANGLE does not use secondary command buffers.
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