I'll soon be flying to Greece for GUADEC but wanted to mention one of the things I worked on the past couple of weeks: the low-memory-monitor project is off the ground, though not production-ready.
low-memory-monitor, as its name implies, monitors the amount of free physical memory on the system and will shoot off signals to interested user-space applications, usually session managers, or sandboxing helpers, when that memory runs low, making it possible for applications to shrink their memory footprints before it's too late either to recover a usable system, or avoid taking a performance hit.
It's similar to Android's lowmemorykiller daemon, Facebook's oomd, Endless' psi-monitor, amongst others
Finally a GLib helper and a Flatpak portal are planned to make it easier for applications to use, with an API similar to iOS' or Android's.
Combined with work in Fedora to use zswap and remove the use of disk-backed swap, this should make most workstation uses more responsive and enjoyable.
Wednesday, 21 August 2019
Thursday, 8 August 2019
libfprint 1.0 (and fprintd 0.9.0)
After more than a year of work libfprint 1.0 has just been released!
It contains a lot of bug fixes for a number of different drivers, which would make it better for any stable or unstable release of your OS.
There was a small ABI break between versions 0.8.1 and 0.8.2, which means that any dependency (really just fprintd) will need to be recompiled. And it's good seeing as we also have a new fprintd release which also fixes a number of bugs.
Benjamin Berg will take over maintenance and development of libfprint with the goal of having a version 2 in the coming months that supports more types of fingerprint readers that cannot be supported with the current API.
From my side, the next step will be some much needed modernisation for fprintd, both in terms of code as well as in the way it interacts with users.
It contains a lot of bug fixes for a number of different drivers, which would make it better for any stable or unstable release of your OS.
There was a small ABI break between versions 0.8.1 and 0.8.2, which means that any dependency (really just fprintd) will need to be recompiled. And it's good seeing as we also have a new fprintd release which also fixes a number of bugs.
Benjamin Berg will take over maintenance and development of libfprint with the goal of having a version 2 in the coming months that supports more types of fingerprint readers that cannot be supported with the current API.
From my side, the next step will be some much needed modernisation for fprintd, both in terms of code as well as in the way it interacts with users.