LINux on MOBile

Weekly GNU-like Mobile Linux Update (16/2025): Counting Easter Eggs

2025-04-21T17:25:42+00:00

FuriOS update 13.0.9 adds Pipewire camera support (and other things), GNOME Clocks gains boottime alarms that work while suspended, Nemo Mobile demonstrates device locking on video, Sailfish OS Community News and a Ubuntu Touch Q&A, and way, way more. Enjoy!

+ +

Commentary in italics.

Worth Reading

Community News: Sailfish Community News, 17th April 2025 - Easter
FuriLabs: Update 13.0.9 +
- goatwildernesscollective: "Solid furios 13.0.9 upgrade!…"
+
Purism: PureOS Crimson Development Report: March 2025 +
- Sunshine: PureOS Crimson Development Report: March 2025 https://lemmy.ca/post/42357405
+
PINE64: April Update: Risc It For A Biscuit No phone news, but still a good read. +
- PINE64official (Reddit): April 2025 Community Update
+
Ergaster: Social media affect me more than I thought
Drew DeVaults blog: Resistance from the tech sector

Worth Watching

UBports: Ubuntu Touch Q&A 163. Home folder encryption, new Apps and other good stuff!
neochapay: Device locking on nemomobile
Continuum Gaming: Continuum Gaming E465: SFOS – Update 5.0.0.67 for all supported devices
Living In Harmony: 2026 global ready to go! OpenHarmony + Oniro rewrite operating system landscape of smart devices?
Sohag H4ckZ: DanctNIX Arch Linux ARM First Boot on PinePhone Pro | Pure Linux on Mobile!
NekoCWD: Cat printing time lapse 🐱Shot on close to mainline linux @postmarketOS Using OnePlus 6 camera and notebook GPU for video encoding Non-compresed 1.4hrs video: https://youtu.be/AFlWGR7XvR8 #ShotOnMainline #ShotOnOnePlus #mobilelinux #linuxonmobile

Worth Noting

Events

More Software News

Ubuntu Touch

Distributions

Apps

linuxphoneapps: "If you have a #PinePhone or another #LinuxMobile device where Firefox feels a bit sluggish, Kumo may be worth a look: https://linuxphoneapps.org/apps/org.catacombing.kumo/These days installing has become a lot easier, as Kumo is now available on Flathub: https://flathub.org/apps/org.catacombing.kumo"
camiloh: Pix is coming with a new image editor for the upcoming release. #mauikit and more@mauiproject
afranke: "Really Cool? Reasonably Complete? Rose Colored? Release Candidate, of course!#Fractal 11.rc is out.https://discourse.gnome.org/t/fractal-11-rc-released/28427"
Pascal Graber: "Tried out Highscore (formerly GNOME Games) on my OnePlus 6T via the Flatpak developer builds under GNOME Mobile — and wow, it runs beautifully on a touch-based mobile form factor! 💜🎮…"
profdiggity: Hell Yeah we've got @privacysafe apps running on the #PinePhone #smartphone Thanks @mikalai for the photos. We'll get more website-ready ones up soon but I had to share with our #social community!!!!!!111 🥳 Stay Tuned https://privacysafe.app
LinuxPhoneApps.org: Apps: Interstellar. One for the Lemmy, Mbin etc. enthusiasts.
LinuxPhoneApps.org: Apps: BMI Calculator
LinuxPhoneApps.org: Apps: Learn 6502 Assembly
LinuxPhoneApps.org: Apps: GaticTacToe
LinuxPhoneApps.org: Apps: Delineate
LinuxPhoneApps.org: Apps: Hex Colordle
LinuxPhoneApps.org: Apps: PedantiK
LinuxPhoneApps.org: Apps: Reddy
LinuxPhoneApps.org: Apps: SemantiK
LinuxPhoneApps.org: Apps: Crosswords
LinuxPhoneApps.org: Apps: Mahjongg
LinuxPhoneApps.org: Apps: Main Menu
Planet KDE: Haruna 1.4

Kernel

phone-devel: [PATCH v2 0/2] Add interconnect nodes and paths for MSM8953 SoC
phone-devel: [PATCH] ARM: dts: qcom: msm8974-samsung-hlte: Add touchkey support
phone-devel: [PATCH 0/3] Add devicetree aliases for mmc on multiple MSM8974 devices
phone-devel: [PATCH 0/4] Add support for Sony Xperia Z Ultra (togari)
phone-devel: [PATCH] ASoC: wm8998: Add Kconfig prompt
phone-devel: Re: [PATCH v2 0/3] Fairphone 5 DisplayPort over USB-C support

Stack

Phoronix: Sway 1.11-rc1 Released With Many New Features & New Wayland Protocols
Phoronix: Linux 6.13 Series Ends With The Linux 6.13.12 Release
Phoronix: GCC 15.1 Compiler Release Candidate For Testing, GCC 15.1.0 Potentially Next Week
Phoronix: GCC 15 Compiler Branched Ahead Of GCC 15.1 Stable Release

Matrix

Matrix.org: This Week in Matrix 2025-04-18
Matrix.org: Introducing Policy Servers

Thanks

Huge thanks to Plata for the nifty set of Python scripts that speed up collecting links from feeds by a lot.

Something missing? Want to contribute?

If your project's cool story (or your awesome video or nifty blog post or ...) is missing and you don't want that to happen again, please just put it into the hedgedoc pad for the next one! Since I am collecting many things there, this get's you early access if you will ;-) If you just stumble on a thing, please put it in there too - all help is appreciated!

If you can imagine to put this collection together (it's mostly deleting irrelevant stuff, after scripts have collected it), please get in touch via email (see below)! It would really help to have someone else taking on the responsibility for this collection every once in a while!

Weekly GNU-like Mobile Linux Update (15/2025): Boot your phone from USB

2025-04-13T21:31:28+00:00

This past week:

USB boot capability demonstrated for multiple Linux phones,
a loaded postmarketOS monthly update,
Furilabs FLX1 gains PipeWire camera support ... and way, way more!

+ +

Commentary in italics.

Worth Reading

tbernard: GNOME STF 2024 Project Report
postmarketOS Blog: postmarketOS in 2025-03: OP6 & MSM89x7 Camera, Generic SM7150, COSMIC, Musl Collation + I18n +
- Lemmy - postmarketOS: postmarketOS in 2025-03: OP6 & MSM89x7 Camera, Generic SM7150, COSMIC, Musl Collation + I18n
+
Liliputing: Phosh 0.46.0 brings customization, UI improvements to the mobile Linux user interface
LinuxPhoneApps.org: Q1/2025 Progress: Over 20 apps added and many improvements +
- Lemmy.ca - linuxphones: Q1/2025 Progress: Over 20 apps added and many improvements
+
Purism: Made in America: Purism’s Liberty Phone and the Vision of Security, Privacy, and Independence
404 Media: How a $2,000 'Made in the USA' Phone Is Manufactured +
- How a $2k 'Made in the USA' Phone Is Manufactured | Hacker News
+

Worth Watching

Continuum Gaming: Continuum Gaming E464: SFOS – App Fahrplan: Not only for German train rides
neochapay: NemoMobile first start on OrangePI 3b v2.1
Pai (The Dev): I speed run port PostmarketOS to galaxy J7 2016 (Kinda?)(19:01Min)
Sad panic: Droidian (Mobian / Debian for Android) - Samsung Galaxy M21 (2025-04-08)
Jitube: Tester PostMarketOs sur Nokia N900
Linux Nation: FuriPhone FLX1 Linux Smartphone nach 6 Monaten (Langzeit-Review). German; unfortunately the automatically generated (and then translated) subtitles are quite inaccurate. Definitely worth watching though if you can understand German.

Worth Noting

Events

More Software News

Gnome Ecosystem

This Week in GNOME: #195 Typed Weather
tbernard: GNOME STF 2024 Project Report
Planet GNOME: Foundry.DocumentationManager
Phoronix: GNOME Now Has A Second Core App Written In TypeScript

Phosh

Plasma Ecosystem

Nate Graham: This Week in Plasma: The beginnings of Wayland session restore
Carl Schwan et al.: This Week in KDE Apps
KDE Announcements: KDE Ships Frameworks 6.13.0
Phoronix: KDE Plasma 6.4 Lands Initial Support For The Wayland Session Restore Protocol

Sailfish OS

#sailfishOS: How does using the #Jolla #JollaC2 (@jolla) with #SailfishOS for about a week as a daily driver now (with my old #iPhone at home as a backup)?
flypig's NewPipe log: Day 35
flypig's NewPipe log: Day 34
flypig's NewPipe log: Day 33
flypig's NewPipe log: Day 32
flypig's NewPipe log: Day 31
flypig's NewPipe log: Day 30
flypig's NewPipe log: Day 29

Ubuntu Touch

jmlich: I am playing with #UbuntuTouch user metrics and #Amazfish ...I hope I don't burn my lunch ;-D https://github.com/piggz/harbour-amazfish/pull/488
UBports - Development - Issues: Fix test failure on armhf + Qt 6
UBports - Development - Issues: New Wallpapers (New Kaleidoscope and Ubuntu Ocean)

Distributions

postmarketOS Blog: postmarketOS in 2025-03: OP6 & MSM89x7 Camera, Generic SM7150, COSMIC, Musl Collation + I18n +
- Lemmy - postmarketOS: postmarketOS in 2025-03: OP6 & MSM89x7 Camera, Generic SM7150, COSMIC, Musl Collation + I18n
- Lemmy.ml - linuxphones: postmarketOS: OP6 & MSM89x7 Camera, Generic SM7150, COSMIC, Musl Collation + I18n
+
Breaking updates in pmOS edge: GTK4 apps from Flatpak/Flathub fail to start with the new GTK4 rendering backend It's not just edge, my lenovo-21bx on 24.12 is affected, too. +
- craftyguy: "@postmarketOS I found that disabling dmabuf gets gtk4 working again with the default vulkan renderer (using turnip, the adreno vk driver)This is not an issue in the older Mesa 24.3.x in Alpine Linux when gtk4 apps run outside flatpak. Flatpaks are using Mesa 25.0.x.I'm not sure if this is a regression in Mesa, in flatpak, and/or in gtk4. Vulkan tools seem to indicate that vk with dmabuf is functional in flatpaks...Help debugging this further is appreciated!#gtk #flatpak #mesa3d #vulkan".
+
pabloyoyoista: "After many months, we finally have an upstreamable path for merging /usr in postmarketOS and hence Alpine! Still lots of work to be done, I just ruined one of my test installations LOL. But it's so cool to see it become real: https://gitlab.postmarketos.org/postmarketOS/pmaports/-/merge_requests/6389 #postmarketos #alpinelinux #linuxmobile"
Mobian mobian-recipes Merge Requests: Fix APT configuration for new sources format
Phoronix: Fedora 42 Will Be Released Next Tuesday

Apps

Kernel

phone-devel: [PATCH] arm64: dts: qcom: Remove unnecessary MM_[UD]L audio routes
phone-devel: [PATCH v5 0/7] Input: synaptics-rmi4 - add quirks for third party touchscreen controllers
phone-devel: [PATCH v15 0/4] Initial Marvell PXA1908 support
Phoronix: A Fresh Take On Virtual Swap Space Being Pursued For The Linux Kernel
Phoronix: Qualcomm USB Audio Offloading Poised For Linux 6.16 After Going Through 38 Revisions
Phoronix: Linux 6.15 Lands Patches To Further Clean Up Its Spectre RSB Mitigations
Phoronix: Graphics/Display Driver Changes Begin Queuing For Linux 6.16 This Summer

Stack

Phoronix: SDL Merges Wayland Multi-Seat Support
Phoronix: Gallium Nine Has Been Deprecated, Planned For Removal In Mesa 25.2

Matrix

Matrix.org: This Week in Matrix 2025-04-11
Matrix.org: Matrix.org is now running MAS!

Thanks

Huge thanks to Plata for the nifty set of Python scripts that speed up collecting links from feeds by a lot.

Something missing? Want to contribute?

Weekly GNU-like Mobile Linux Update (14/2025): Wallpapered Lockscreens

2025-04-06T21:35:02+00:00

Highlights of the past week:

mobile-config-firefox gets user-agent spoofing in version 4.6.0 to enhance site compatibility,
Ubuntu Touch makes progress on eSIM and VoLTE support + Snap integration in 24.04,
Another collection of Sailfish OS Community News,
Hardware: Liberux Nexx PCBs arrive and OnePlus 6 gets unexpected JTAG access
Phosh 0.46.0 released with lockscreen wallpapers and a lot more!

+ +

Commentary in italics.

Worth Reading

Phosh.mobi: Phosh 0.46.0
Community News - Sailfish OS Forum: Sailfish Community News, 3rd April 2025 - Harbour
LINux on MOBile: MCF18: Dodging a bullet
Purism: The Signal Noise: A Wake-Up Call for Secure Communications

Worth Watching

UBports: Ubuntu Touch Q& 162. New apps, VoLTE, eSIM, Qt6 Morph browser progress, ...
Cuspitech: I installed Ubuntu Touch on my phone! Does it work as an alternative to Android?
M: "Size comparison: F(x)tec Pro1 (Droidian) vs Linglong Lunar 2-in-1 keyboard (Ryzen 8840U, 32GB, 1TB)"
Linux Galaxy!: "Portland Linux/Unix Group General Monthly Meeting: PostmarketOS with Clayton Craft April 3, 2025"
foss-backstage: Tobias Bernard – GNOME Design: A Report From the Trenches #FOSSDesign

Worth Noting

Events

akademy: "#Akademy2025 is happening in Berlin, Germany, and online from Saturday the 6th to Thursday the 11th of September.Mark your calendars!More details: https://akademy.kde.org/2025/#KDE #FOSS #techevent #fossevent #linux @akademy@lemmy.kde.social"

More Software News

mobile-config-firefox

postmarketOS mobile-config-firefox tags: 4.6.0 +
- ollieparanoid: ":firefox: less than 10 days after the last release --- happy to announce that mobile-config-firefox 4.6.0 is out:* Adjustments for the latest FF 137 (thanks @linmob!)* Per-site user-agent spoofing (makes e.g. youtube use its proper mobile site, thanks @dannycolin and people working on furios-firefox-tweaks! also: sad that this is needed 😵‍💫)* Using defaultPref() instead of pref() where possible, allowing users to override them via about:config (thanks @dannycolin!)https://gitlab.postmarketos.org/postmarketOS/mobile-config-firefox/-/tags/4.6.0"
- LINux on MOBile: MCF18: Dodging a bullet
+

Gnome Ecosystem

This Week in GNOME: #194 Nineteen Years Old
Phoronix: Resources 1.8 Released As A Great System Resource Monitor For GNOME

Phosh

Plasma Ecosystem

Sailfish OS

Ubuntu Touch

Distributions

postmarketOS Blog: In search for a better keyboard +
- Lemmy - postmarketOS: In search for a better keyboard
+
postmarketOS Blog: Matrix/IRC bridge is now self-hosted +
- Lemmy - postmarketOS: Matrix/IRC bridge is now self-hosted
+
Lemmy - postmarketOS: RISC-V Support
Lemmy - postmarketOS: Setting spanish keyboard layout on PostmarketOS with Sway

Apps

jmlich: "Amazfish 2.6.0 has been released! #UbuntuTouch #Flatpak (and hopefully soon in the #SailfishOS Chum repo)Among other updates, there is a documentation page that tries to answer the question of what actually works—please help fill in the gaps!https://amazfish.github.io/Changes in 2.6.0:- Kospet DK08, improved Bangle.js- Auto-profile switching- Reworked pairing/unpairing/reconnect timer- UI Performance- build with cmake- many translations"
LinuxPhoneApps.org: Apps: Extension Manager
LinuxPhoneApps.org: Apps: Extensions
LinuxPhoneApps.org: Apps: Libellus
LinuxPhoneApps.org: Apps: Camp Counselor
LinuxPhoneApps.org: Apps: File Roller

Kernel

phone-devel: [PATCH] arm64: dts: qcom: msm8953: Add uart_5
phone-devel: [PATCH 0/3] Add support for AW8898 Amplifier
phone-devel: [PATCH] arm64: dts: qcom: sc7280: Stop setting dmic01 pinctrl for va-macro
phone-devel: [PATCH v4 0/7] Input: synaptics-rmi4 - add quirks for third party touchscreen controllers
phone-devel: Re: [PATCH v2 0/3] Fairphone 5 DisplayPort over USB-C support
Phoronix: Linux 6.15's New "hugetlb_alloc_threads" Option Can Help Speed-Up Boot Times

Stack

libcamera: libcamera v0.5.0
Phoronix: FEX 2504 Ships More Optimizations For Running x86_64 Linux Binaries On ARM64
Phoronix: Debian APT 3.0 Stable Released With New Package Solver & Refined Text UI
Phoronix: Rust Is Looking For Your Feedback To Help Guide Its Future
Phoronix: Coreboot 25.03 Released With Support For 22 More Motherboards
Phoronix: Wine 10.5 Brings Vulkan H.264 Video Decoding, Mono 10.0 & Bluetooth Pairing
Phoronix: Vulkan 1.4.312 Brings Two New Extensions From NVIDIA & Qualcomm

Matrix

Matrix.org: This Week in Matrix 2025-04-04
Matrix.org: Matrix.org will migrate to MAS on Apr 7th 2025

Thanks

Huge thanks to Plata for the nifty set of Python scripts that speed up collecting links from feeds by a lot.

Something missing? Want to contribute?

MCF18: Dodging a bullet

2025-04-06T13:36:14+00:00

Since the previous post in this series, mobile-config-firefox has seen not one, but two releases:

In part, this due to me not noticing prior to the first release that the breakage I had observed with Firefox Nightly would come and hit with the Firefox 137 release.

Avoiding a broken experience with Firefox 137

Here's what I wrote:

+
Unfortunately, since playing with Firefox Nightly (using the Debian package in a distrobox), I know that this fix won't last until 140 (the [next ESR](- https://whattrainisitnow.com/release/?version=esr)), so a follow-up MR will have to happen.
+

At that point I had not realized, that having a Debian distrobox with Mozilla's repo also made installing the beta possible, and I think I had also not realized, that trying the beta is way more interesting than Nightly, as what's in beta, will make it to the very next release.

I was a bit shocked when I realized that after running make && make FIREFOX_DIR=/usr/lib/firefox-beta install in my Debian distrobox, beta looked just as broken as nightly had in my brief stint with nightly.

The entire userChrome was at the top of the window, tab-width was very where small, applying "mcf.addressbarontop" and similar had no effect - what had happened?

Well, two things:

The first was easy to figure out, some random web search landed me on this reddit thread. I just had to go through the busywork and adjust all media queries with -moz-bool-pref and add the new way with -moz-pref right below, and these would work again.

That worked nicely. After this first change, tab-width was still broken. I connected my Laptops Firefox Nightly (Nightly, as I had that installed on the laptop) with the one on the phone, picked a tab as element to inspect and looked what was going on. I was prepared that this could be annoying and take a bit, but fortunately I quickly noticed that there was a (new to me) variable called --tab-min-width-pref. I added a --tab-min-width-pref line after every --tab-min-width line, deployed the hastlily changed configuration, and, luckily: Problem solved.

Minutes later, the MR was filed. Fortunately, two more merge requests could be landed with 4.6.0, so it was not just a "Peter ~~missed~~ ignored this important upcoming breakage" release.

A follow-up to the URL bar fix

+
This is not the fix I want, but it's the one I could deliver now. See the linked MR above for why I am not super happy with this.
+

Previous to submitting Fixing urlbar popout on current Firefox (!75) I had played with a solution I liked better on current, but that could not be submitted at the time, as it broke ESR - the URL bar would move to the right when activated.

Just today I found a way to fix this: Gating the customizations so they won't be applied on ESR 128 (and, actually, until 132 - but we fortunately don't need to care about no longer supported interim releases). It still needs more testing - help welcome!

How to help test this?

You need to have git and `make installed.

First clone my fork and checkout the branch feature/wider-url-bar:

git clone https://gitlab.postmarketos.org/1peter10/mobile-config-firefox.git
+git checkout feature/wider-url-bar
+

Then build it:

make
+

And install it:

sudo make install
+

for current Firefox.

To test with ESR, Beta, Nightly or Librewolf respectively run:

sudo make FIREFOX_DIR=/usr/lib/firefox-esr install 
+sudo make FIREFOX_DIR=/usr/lib/firefox-beta install 
+sudo make FIREFOX_DIR=/usr/lib/firefox-nightly install
+sudo make FIREFOX_DIR=/usr/lib/librewolf install
+

Note that all these install methods only work for native distribution packages, not flatpak/snap etc.

The commit is also merged into my 'next' branch, so if you like breakage, try that one out ;-)

Other things to tackle

Here's a brief list of things that I want to look into before Firefox 140 is out:

check for (and remove) leftovers from the pre ESR 128 days,
land non-glitchy popups (needs a fix for installing extensions and potentially other broken popups I have not come across yet),
hide "Browser Layout - Show sidebar" option (or make the sidebar work somewhat on mobile,
make extension popups scrollable again (e.g. for uBlock Origin),
change media queries (meaning, upstream Emma's media query tweaks) so that landscape usage feels more similar (meaning: URL bar stays on the bottom unless mcf.addressbarontop is set to true) - see #37).
adding an option to hide container indicators (see !66
improve the README: better display of mcf.* options, link related projects/forks, help installing the config.

Want to get involved?

If you are interested in making Firefox work better on #LinuxMobile devices, make sure to take a look at the open issues!

If you need help getting in touch, feel free to reach out - via the issue tracker, so that we can improve the README, or just to me via email. It may take me a bit to get back to you, but I will definitely try to do so ASAP.

Thank you for reading this!

Weekly GNU-like Mobile Linux Update (13/2025): Crossing Platforms, Breaking Barriers

2025-03-30T22:00:35+00:00

This past week in #LinuxMobile:

FuriOS now runs Ubuntu Touch apps,
Phosh 0.46 release candidates tagged (final release expected March 31st),
Megapixels 2.0 progress,
postmarketOS announces 2025 priorities: reliability, audio, cameras,

... and more, including a mobile-config-firefox release!

+ +

Commentary in italics.

Worth Reading

postmarketOS blog: postmarketOS // 2025 Priorities: Reliability, Audio, Cameras and More
Martijn Braam: Megapixels 2.0: Small fixes and GTK breakage
CNX-Software: Linux 6.14 release - Main changes, Arm, RISC-V, and MIPS architecture
Android Authority: Exclusive: Google will develop the Android OS fully in private, and here's why. _Gut feeling: "Insert name of web application used to manage the localisation of GNOME here". ;-) _

Worth Listening

Linux After Dark – Episode 92. Nice episode! +
- Lemmy - postmarketOS: Linux After Dark - Episode 92 looks at postmarketos
+

Worth Watching

Nicco Loves Linux: Is Android your next Linux Desktop?, (PeerTube)
Continuum Gaming: Continuum Gaming E462: SFOS – Battery health, Charging helper apps
Cards By The Hill: KALI NETHUNTER PRO FULLY LOADED ON PINE PHONE 64!
Microlabs: Run Alpine Linux in Nokia N900
Никита Армагеддонов: nexus 5 Ubuntu touch #nexus #ubuntu #ubuntutouch

Worth Noting

Events

FuriOS running Ubuntu Touch apps

fakeshell: "in an attempt to achieve the highest app compatibility known to man, i ended up writing a daemon that allows to install, configure and run #UbuntuTouch applications on our beloved #flx1 and it actually turned out pretty nice.this is yet another service/client setup where now the store server is refactored to work alongside android-store (used to install android apps) to lower memory usage and the client is a #GNOME software plugin #ubports #furilabs #LinuxOnMobile #LinuxMobile #furiphoneflx1". I've been hoping for something like this for years, (see here for evidence). Awesome work!

Hardware

More Software News

Gnome Ecosystem

This Week in GNOME: #193 Image Loading
GNOME Foundation: GUADEC 2025 Registrations are Open!
Curiosity-driven development: GNOME Calculator updates
GTK: "GTK 4.18.3 is now available; this is a bug fix release of the stable branch of GTK, including fixes for Vulkan, accessibility, introspection annotations, HiDPI GL rendering on Windows, and macOS event handling.You can read all the changes here: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/commit/a4033016969298dfedb5b96ae6fde41c332e3675The main branch is now open for the next development cycle.#gtk #gtk4"

Phosh

Plasma Ecosystem

Nate Graham: This Week in Plasma: zero VHI bugs and much more
Carl Schwan et al.: This Week in KDE Apps
KDE Mentorship: The Open Source Promotion Program
Volker Krause: February/March in KDE Itinerary
Nate Graham: 2025 15-Minute Bug Initiative update
KDE Eco: KdeGuiTest (KdeEcoTest) in SoK25: Debugging, Building an Interactive User Interface, and More

Sailfish OS

#sailfishOS: There is an update for Sailfish OS to version 5.0.0.62. my xperia 10III showed me the update option so i think updating is ok. the update went smoothly, no problems right afterwards. let's hope this lack of problems persists ...#^https://forum.sailfishos.org/t/release-notes-tampella-5-0-0-62/22378#smartphone #handy #SailfishOS #android #FreeOfGoogle #jolla
flypig's NewPipe Diary: Day 20
flypig's NewPipe Diary: Day 19
flypig's NewPipe Diary: Day 18
flypig's NewPipe Diary: Day 17
flypig's NewPipe Diary: Day 16
flypig's NewPipe Diary: Day 15
flypig's NewPipe Diary: Day 14

Ubuntu Touch

#UbuntuTouch: Xiaomi Note 9 Pro (miatoll) is another linux phone with working VoLTE, that was a really missing feature for me, now I can finally call while using internet, either on mobile itself or using hotspot :)#ubuntutouch #linuxmobile

Distributions

Phoronix: Debian 13 "Trixie" Freeze Process Begins. This is definitely going to affect Mobian, Droidian and co.
postmarketOS blog: postmarketOS // 2025 Priorities: Reliability, Audio, Cameras and More
Breaking updates in pmOS edge: Alpine repositories are broken due to the ICU upgrade. Be aware. You have never heard of icu, but ... so much depends on it!
postmarketOS pmaports Merge Requests: GNOME Mobile 48
postmarketOS pmaports Merge Requests: device-apple-tonga: GPU fixed by adding proper mesa and gallium packages (mesa-asahi)
postmarketOS: "Update regarding the Matrix / OFTC IRC bridge for postmarketOS channels (+ related like Sxmo): We will keep a bridge around. We have set up a selfhosted bridge and are waiting on OFTC to increase our connection limit before we can start using it, which will probably happen any day now."

Chimera Mobile

adrianyyy: it's coming together
adrianyyy: "on that note, here's some more Chimera Mobile progress"

Apps

CalcProgrammer1: "I submitted a merge request to #AlpineLinux aports to get #TouchpadEmulator added."
YaLTeR: "Published Video Trimmer and Identity v25.03.…"
LinuxPhoneApps.org: Apps: Cashbox
LinuxPhoneApps.org: Apps: Ignition
LinuxPhoneApps.org: Apps: SaveDesktop
LinuxPhoneApps.org: Apps: Hunt
LinuxPhoneApps.org: Apps: Bustle
LinuxPhoneApps.org: Apps: D-Spy
LinuxPhoneApps.org: Apps: Frigoligo
postmarketOS: Apps by Category: Fossdd: /* IRC */ goguma aport
Martijn Braam: Megapixels 2.0: Small fixes and GTK breakage

mobile-config-firefox

postmarketOS mobile-config-firefox tags: 4.5.0 +
- ollieparanoid: ":firefoxnew: mobile-config-firefox 4.5.0 is out. This release mostly contains fixes and adjustments for FF >= 133.Thanks to everybody who contributed, especially @linmob and @dannycolin!https://gitlab.postmarketos.org/postmarketOS/mobile-config-firefox/-/tags/4.5.0See also https://linmob.net/mcf17-getting-back-into-userchrome/ with some development background from @linmob."
- linmob: "@pocketvj It's not really different. It's mostly fixes to make stuff work with current Firefox 136. Before this release, you would get "Failed to read the configuration file. Please contact your system administrator." with Firefox 136. Aside from that, it's minor cosmetic things, see screenshots. @ollieparanoid @dannycolin"
+

Kernel

CNX-Software: Linux 6.14 release - Main changes, Arm, RISC-V, and MIPS architecture
phone-devel: [PATCH v3] rpmsg: qcom_smd: Improve error handling for qcom_smd_parse_edge
phone-devel: [PATCH v2 0/4] Add video clock controller for SM6350
Phoronix: Linux 6.15 Landing Backlight Driver For Various Apple iPhones & iPads
Phoronix: Linux 6.15 SoC/DT Additions: Arm Morello, Versal NET, Apple T2, MNT Reform 2 & More
Phoronix: EXT4 Better Hardened Against Maliciously-Fuzzed File-Systems

Stack

Phoronix: Chromium Web Browser Lands Support For Wayland XDG-Session-Management
Phoronix: Mesa's Exciting Q1 With More Ray-Tracing, NVK Progress & Performance Optimizations
Phoronix: Xiph.Org's Theora libtheora 1.2 Officially Released: 16 Years After v1.0

Matrix

Matrix.org: This Week in Matrix 2025-03-28
Matrix.org: Matrix v1.14 release

Thanks

Huge thanks to Plata for the nifty set of Python scripts that speed up collecting links from feeds by a lot.

Something missing? Want to contribute?

Weekly GNU-like Mobile Linux Update (12/2025): GNOME 48 and other goodies

2025-03-23T17:32:08+00:00

Another week, another roundup: GNOME goes 48, more on the Mecha Comet improvements/delay, some Firefox things, a Ubuntu Touch Q&A, SailfishOS Community News, UT and SFOS coming to the FuriLabs FLX1, an update on postmarketOS finances and more!

+ +

Commentary in italics.

Worth Reading

Gabriel Simmer: Recyling a OnePlus 6T into a Kubernetes Node
Liliputing: Mecha Comet modular Linux handheld gets pre-launch upgrade, coming to Kickstarter in Q4, 2025. Later, but better!
Android Authority: Google says its new Linux Terminal feature isn't a replacement for Android's desktop mode
OMG! Ubuntu: Firefox is Finally (Re)Adding Support for Web Apps
LINux on MOBile: MCF17: Getting back into userChrome
Marius Welt: Pinephone: Megapixels starten auf Fedora 42. German post. An alternate solution (with hardware acceleration) would be using this flatpak, which just uses older GTK (GNOME 46 runtime, sadly (soon?) EOL).
nlnet: 56 Projects Receive Grants for Improving Core Technological Building Blocks
Drew DeVaults blog: Please stop externalizing your costs directly into my face

Worth Watching

UBports: Ubuntu Touch Q&A 161
Anino Ni Kugi: Work and Play in Ubuntu Touch | Lomiri Plus (Air Mouse)
Ram Ram Android: Ubuntu Touch
Efstathios Iosifidis: Ubuntu Touch for Xiaomi Redmi Note 4 | Ubuntu Touch Review (GR)
CapBoyan RUS [Boyan Mobile]: NFS Undercover на Nokia N900. webOS-версия
veggero: The Next-Gen Browsers: Comparing Performance, Budget, and Development Pace
veggero: Open Source Infrastructure has an AI problem
David Heidelberg at InstallFest: Linux na telefonu v roce 2025. Czech, with automatically generated english subtitles. The title translates to "Linux on Mobile in 2025" (Source).
Jozef Mlich at InstallFest: Poslední míle mezi uživateli a linuxovými telefony. Czech, with automatically generated english subtitles. The title translates to "Last Mile Between Users and Mobile Linux" (Source).

Worth Noting

Events

craftyguy: Are there any folks out there who want to help organize a Mobile track with me at #FOSSY this year? 😁#fossy2025 #linuxmobile

More Software News

Gnome Ecosystem

This Week in GNOME: #192 Forty-eight! +
- GNOME Release Notes
- GNOME Developer Release Notes
+
Michael Catanzaro: GNOME 48 Core Apps Update
GNOME Foundation: Introducing GNOME 48
monster: Cleaner Code With GObject
feborg.es: Flock to Fedora is coming to Prague!
GNOME Foundation: Linux App Summit 2025 – Registrations are now open!
monster: Introducing Adwaita Fonts

Phosh

Plasma Ecosystem

Nate Graham: This Week in Plasma: 6.4 Improvements
Carl Schwan et al.: This Week in KDE Apps
Bhushan Shah: Professional update and Plasma Mobile NGI0 Core grant
Phoronix: KDE Continues Prepping More Features For Plasma 6.4

Sxmo

#sxmo: We now have a short "getting started" page featuring nice gesture videos made by magdesign. These demo gestures to newcomers so they can quickly and visually grasp how Sxmo works and get going with it. It came to our attention at FOSDEM that this was something that people struggled with when they start out:https://sxmo.org/docs/gettingstarted/

Sailfish OS

Ubuntu Touch

Distributions

q66: we got a gui going with @adrianyyy in chimera somehow on xiaomi mi 9t / sm7150somehow using gdm makes the screen die so this is manually launched from a tty session :) need to debug thatand half the firmware loading is broken :)we got phosh and gnome shell :3chimera mobile soon~
@linmob@fosstodon.org: Look at that: If you dislike systemd and like debian packages, but want Phosh instead of hildon (on Maemo Leste), Movuan has you covered: https://gitlab.com/l2385/movuan/movuan-recipes Basically, that's a #devuan for your #PinePhone
postmarketOS Blog: Financial update: first year and first budget +
- Lemmy - postmarketOS: Financial update: first year and first budget
+
postmarketOS Wiki New Pages: Huawei Y3 II 4G (huawei-lua-l21)
postmarketOS Wiki New Pages: Newmobi Technology
postmarketOS Wiki New Pages: Fbkeyboard
postmarketOS Wiki New Pages: Working with Downstream DTBs
Mobian mobian-recipes Issues: phrog not coming up on the screen

Apps

Kernel

phone-devel: [PATCH v2] power: supply: bq27xxx: do not report incorrect zero values
phone-devel: [PATCH 0/3] Add video clock controller for SM6350
phone-devel: [PATCH] arm64: dts: qcom: sm6350: add APR and some audio-related services
phone-devel: [PATCH] ath10k: snoc: fix unbalanced IRQ enable in crash recovery
Phoronix: Linux 6.15 Plans To Drop Support For A Useless CRC-32 Checksum In The Kernel Image
Phoronix: Google Developing "Live Update Orchestrator" As New Means Of Live Linux Kernel Updates
Phoronix: Code Submitted Ahead Of Linux 6.15 For Enabling Block Sizes Greater Than Page Size
Phoronix: Linux 6.14 Sees Last Minute Fix For A Two Year Old Regression Causing A 30% Performance Drop
Phoronix: Arm Bringing Up Support For Newer Mali GPUs With The Open-Source Panthor Driver
Phoronix: Qualcomm Iris Video Decode Driver & DesignWare HDMI Input Support Ready For Linux 6.15

Stack

Phoronix: FreeDesktop.org GitLab Transitions To New Server Infrastructure
Phoronix: Vulkan 1.4.311 Released With New Extension For BFloat16

Matrix

Matrix.org: This Week in Matrix 2025-03-21

Thanks

Huge thanks to Plata for the nifty set of Python scripts that speed up collecting links from feeds by a lot.

Something missing? Want to contribute?

If you can imagine to put this collection together (it's mostly deleting irrelevant stuff, after scripts have collected it), please get in touch! I (Peter) am struggling with stress-related health issues currently, and it would really put me at ease to have someone to just do this from time to time!

MCF17: Getting back into userChrome

2025-03-23T14:27:17+00:00

Before I started contributing to mobile-config-firefox, I always believed that, aside from bigger, code-named UI redesigns, Firefox's UI code would not change much at all.

These days I know better. Due to these changes, mobile-config-firefox does currently not work all that well with (current) Firefox 136, and I am reviving this little series, to keep me motivated, to hopefully attract contributors and to document the process.¹

A late discovery

But let's start with something completely different. When playing with a FuriLabs FLX1 at FOSDEM, I noticed that they ship a very nicely customized Firefox. The code can be found at

FuriLabs/furios-firefox-tweaks

They have done a really great job. Aside from incorporating the Firefox GNOME Theme, they have (through lots of hard work) managed to made popups not glitchy.

I recommend you giving it a try. It's currently optimized for Firefox 135 and generally targeting current. This means, working with Firefox 136, you will have to apply the fix suggested in ESMification of mobile-config-firefox (#100) to src/mobile-config-autoconfig.js. Also, if you are on postmarketOS/Alpine, you will need to install coreutils in order to install the configuration successfully.

But 136 is not all gloom and doom - popups can now be scrolled without using the scrollbar. So if you have tons of tabs open (or tons of extensions installed), your experience with 136 is substantially better - thanks Mozilla!

What I am trying to tackle

In the past weeks, I have been working on the following things:

Fixing tab-width on FF 133+

With this pending Merge Request tabmenu.css: rework tab width for FF 133+ (!74). The element with the id #tabmenu was removed with Firefox 133, hence this change was necessary. At first I went for a different solution which can be found in my experiment/tab-width-and-firefox-view branch.

Unfortunately, since playing with Firefox Nightly (using the Debian package in a distrobox), I know that this fix won't last until 140 (the next ESR), so a follow-up MR will have to happen.

Also support for different values of browser.uidensity ~~should be~~has been added on March 24~~, but is not part of the current MR yet~~.

The disappearing URL bar issue

Another gift Mozilla gave us is a disappearing URL bar. I have managed to come up with a pending Merge Request: Fixing urlbar popout on current Firefox (!75)

This is not the fix I want, but it's the one I could deliver now. See the linked MR above for why I am not super happy with this.

+ +

Of course, I aim to cherry-pick commits to bring the better popup handling from furios-firefox-tweaks to mobile-config-firefox. This is a major change, that will touch many userChrome customizations. +You can see my progress on this in my feature/better-popups-from-furios branch, which is still a work-in-progress.

The main issue (among others), is the current state significantly worsens the behavior of some "popupnotifcations". It basically, as is makes installing extensions impossible. FuriLabs are fixing these with JavaScript, I am still hopeful to find a CSS-based solution.

That said, as is, it already fixes a few issues, which may seem unrelated:

The stuff I've decided not to introduce

experiment/findbar: It keeps the feature set, but makes the find bar (you know, Ctrl + f) eat less precious screen space. Unfortunately, it also impacts translations and may be harder to understand, which is why I have decided to not look into this further.
experiment/tab-width-and-firefox-view: This is an alternate fix for the tab-width issue, that does things differently. It colors the tab-bar to indicate private mode (via two different variables), adds an option to use Firefox View and introduces a userContent modification to make about:firefoxview work. Here, I just don't want to introduce the maintenance burden.

(I was going to put a "to do list/stuff I am thinking about"-section into this post, but it is already too long. Maybe the next post will have room for this.)

Want to get involved?

If you are interested in making Firefox work better on #LinuxMobile devices, make sure to take a look at the open issues!

Thank you for reading this!

¹ +

I have also decided to stop contributing once Firefox ESR 140 is out (and works well with m-c-f – it's better to stop before it's not fun anymore, and I feel that I may be reaching that point sooner than I was hoping for.

Weekly GNU-like Mobile Linux Update (11/2025): libadwaita 1.7 and news from Sxmo

2025-03-16T22:50:22+00:00

This past week in #LinuxMobile:

Purism share Librem 5 Crimson progress,
libadwaita 1.7 brings new widget and makes creating convergent GNOME apps possible without having a device at hand,
Sxmo introduce an intuitive getting-started guide with gesture videos,
Sailfish OS community ports now available for 10 different devices (and a NewPipe port),
Lomiri on Mir 2.20 getting closer,
postmarketOS adds the COSMIC desktop environment to edge repositories.

Plus: numerous app updates, kernel developments, and community contributions across the ecosystem! Enjoy!

+ +

Commentary in italics; and please check the last paragraph of this post.

Worth Reading

FuriLabs: Spy-Free FuriOS
Purism: PureOS Crimson Development Report: February 2025
Ars Technica: RCS texting updates will bring end-to-end encryption to green bubble chats. With this, RCS will be a feature that people may actually miss when they don't have it. ... Now, how do we get proper RCS support for #LinuxMobile, be it ModemManager or Ofono based?

German PinePhone Corner

Marius Welt: Pinephone: OOTB Full-HD Videoplayback
Marius Welt: Pinephone – 4 Jahre später. Things are so good these days (even on Fedora). It's really sad that current GTK4 no longer offers GPU acceleration on GLES 2 hardware.

Worth Watching

Sunshine: Testing PostMarketOS On MS Surface GO 2
Continuum Gaming: Continuum Gaming E460: Kilometer & AppSupport for 10 IV / V
Anino Ni Kugi: Ubuntu Touch Exclusive Games (?)
Random Informative Videos: Unlocking Ubuntu Touch & A explanation !
Ivo Xavier: Updating Fairphone4 with UbuntuTouch OTA-8 from UBports
Bits & Bytes with Eliza: The Rise and Fall of Maemo: A Story of Innovation and Incompetence

Worth Noting

Event corner

More Software News

Gnome Ecosystem

Phosh

Plasma Ecosystem

Nate Graham: This Week in Plasma: File Transfer Progress Graphs +
- Phoronix: KDE Plasma 6.4 Adding Support For P010 Formatted Videos, KWin Improving Pixel Perfection
+
Carl Schwan et al.: This Week in KDE Apps
KDE Announcements: KDE Ships Frameworks 6.12.0
KDE Announcements: KDE Plasma 6.3.3, Bugfix Release for March
Planet KDE: kwin_x11 and kwin_wayland split
Nate Graham: Personal and professional updates — announcing Techpaladin Software
anditosan: Plasma Design System – March 2025 Update

Sxmo

Sailfish OS

flypigs' NewPipe corner

Ubuntu Touch

fredldotme: "After a bit of fixing in Mir, QtMir & Lomiri I am happy to report better stability of the desktop with Mir 2.20.It's far from finished but needless to say it's nice that using Firefox doesn't crash the desktop anymore.Also some screenshots of the workspace management."
UBports - Development - Issues: Expose more features through Wayland or other Linux-standard ways
UBports - Development - Issues: screenshot from readme in mobile
#UbuntuTouch: @sesivany I am currently for a year running on 40€ used Xiaomi Note 9 Pro from bazos.cz, flashed with #ubuntutouch :D

Distributions

Apps

servo: "This month in Servo…🔍🌡️
, , 📐🕳️ full layout support for 🕸️🪟 new delegate and rendering API🌐⌨️ pre-edit text for IME📂📄 directory listingshttps://servo.org/blog/2025/03/10/this-month-in-servo/"
Lemmy - linuxphones: What are people usong as thei music player app nowadays?
Purism forums: List of Apps that fit and function well: Demo of streamtuner2.
LinuxPhoneApps.org: Apps: LPTK
LinuxPhoneApps.org: Apps: Geobug
postmarketOS: Apps by Category: Eloitor: /* Images */ Add curtail

Kernel

phone-devel: [PATCH 0/3] Fixes/improvements for SM6350 UFS
phone-devel: [PATCH] remoteproc: qcom: pas: add minidump_id to SC7280 WPSS
phone-devel: [PATCH] arm64: dts: qcom: sm8650: Fix domain-idle-state for CPU2
phone-devel: [PATCH 1/2] dt-bindings: input: touchscreen: edt-ft5x06: Document FT8716 support
Phoronix: Linux Kernel's Rust Support Being Expanded To HID Drivers
Phoronix: Arm Changing Linux Default To Costly "KPTI" Mitigation For Some Newer CPUs
Phoronix: Huawei Matebook E Go Laptops To Be Better Supported With Linux 6.15
Phoronix: Mediatek DRM Driver Adding MT8365 "Genio 350" Support In Linux 6.15
Phoronix: Arm Shows Off Great Performance Results For PGO & BOLT With LLVM/Clang
Phoronix: Glibc's Hyperbolic Functions Score Nice Speed-Ups With FMA Optimizations
phone-devel: [PATCH v4 0/6] Initial support of MSM8937 and Xiaomi Redmi 3S

Stack

Phoronix: Rusticl Wins: Mesa Officially Deprecates Clover OpenCL
Phoronix: Debian 12.10 Released With More Bugs Fixed & Security Updates
Phoronix: digiKam 8.6 Released With Working To Better Its AI Integration
Phoronix: Git 2.49 Released With Faster Packing, Rust Foreign Language Interface
Phoronix: Free95 0.2 Alpha Released As Open-Source Windows Compatible OS
Phoronix: IGT GPU Tools 2.0 Released For Helping To Develop DRM Drivers
Phoronix: Shotcut 25.03 Beta Released For Advancing This Free Software Video Editor

Matrix

Matrix.org: This Week in Matrix 2025-03-14
FuriLabs: Docker on your FLX1

Thanks

Huge thanks to Plata for the nifty set of Python scripts that speed up collecting links from feeds by a lot.

Something missing? Want to contribute?

Weekly GNU-like Mobile Linux Update (09, 10/2025): Too much to put in a title

2025-03-09T23:11:08+00:00

Two weeks full of exciting progress in the mobile Linux ecosystem!

The FLX1 phone gets display-out capability with full GNOME shell support, promising a superior desktop experience when connected to external displays,
more examples of Camera support on the OnePlus 6(T),
Ubuntu Touch celebrates its OTA-8 Focal release with much-needed WPA3 support,
Sailfish OS 5.0 Tampella officially launches alongside the Jolla C2 MWC debut (+ more Community News),
postmarketOS share the progress they've made in February,
the Mecha Comet goes +1 (and thus better, but later),
and way, way more! Enjoy!

+ +

Commentary in italics. Find Week 9 below.

Worth Reading

Sam Thursfield: Media playback tablet running GNOME and postmarketOS
Ploum: 20 years of Linux on the Desktop (part 3)
fossphones.com: Linux Phone News - March 4, 2025
UBports News: Ubuntu Touch OTA-8 Focal Release. WPA3 alone makes this one important! +
- 0to5Linux: Ubuntu Touch OTA-8 Released with VoLTE Support for Volla Phone Users
+
postmarketOS Blog: postmarketOS in 2025-02: MSM89x7 Audio, Modern Xiaomis in Community, New Name Foreshadowing. My highlight are the devices moved to Community and the pmbootstrap improvmeents! +
- Lemmy - postmarketOS: postmarketOS in 2025-02: MSM89x7 Audio, Modern Xiaomis in Community, New Name Foreshadowing
+
FuriLabs: Docker on your FLX1
FuriLabs: Batch #2 Update

Worth Watching

UBports: Ubuntu Touch Q&A 160
FuriLabs: FuriPhone FLX1 Docker Tutorial
Mecha: Mecha Comet Announcements - Mar 8, 2025 +
- David Hamner: Linux Phone Upgrade | Comet +1
+
David Hamner: Maemo Leste SystemV Hackjob #music Just some AI generated song-thing.
PC-FREEDOM＠なんちゃってエンジニアリング: 今日は Ubuntu Touch とカスタム ROM の話をしよう。
Lup Yuen Lee: #SDWire MicroSD Multiplexer + #PinePhone ... On #Pine64 Avaota-A1 SBC and Apache #NuttX RTOS
Jozef Mlich: nemomobile - glacier-settings + lipstick
MN Entertainment: Furilabs Review | Is Furilabs.com a Scam or Legit Website?

Worth Noting

FLX1 corner

Camera corner

adrianyyy: Welcome to Mobile Linux in 2025! Generic device packages and U-Boot :), "Shot on OnePlus 6T running SXMO, now with camera support . #postmarketos #linuxphone #oneplus #linux". This is so impressive. Also, manual focus control sounds worse than it is; the slider implementation is really good. All you need is enough light, and you will have nice photos. So many thanks to everyone involved!
CalcProgrammer1: Got the camera actuator on my #OnePlus 6T to focus with the help of @NekoCWD and poking i2c registers with i2cset. It looks like the actuator on my camera needs an enable register set.This is at focus 1700:#postmarketOS
pocketvj: @CalcProgrammer1 you can create fast #gmic pipeline to do this corrections for you....i am experimenting with stable-diffusion.cpp to enhance the image quality, but after 30min waiting (#pocof1), the quality stays the same while the content changes 😂#linuxmobile

Events

cccac: Our Mainlining-Workshop last month was very well received - so well that we decided to host a monthly Mainlining-Evening on the first Tuesday of every month for seeking assistance and hacking together.More info: https://ccc.ac/post/2025-03-09-mainlining-evenings

Watch stuff

bailuk: I've released 'script-shell'. It's an app for @AsteroidOS that lets you select and run custom scripts from the display of your watch. https://github.com/bailuk/script-shell

More Software News

Gnome Ecosystem

This Week in GNOME: #190 Cross Platform
ADETOYE ANOINTING: More Than Code: Outreachy Gnome Experience
Phoronix: GTK On Android & macOS Seeing Improvements
Phoronix: GNOME 48 Release Candidate Brings Late Mutter Features & Other Changes

Phosh

Plasma Ecosystem

Nate Graham: This Week in Plasma: A Very Fixy Week
KDE Announcements: KDE Gear 24.12.3
Volker Krause: KDE Android News (March 2025)
Planet KDE: KDE Gear 25.04 branches created
Planet KDE: Controls for OpenType
Planet KDE: cursor-shape-v1 support landed in GTK3
Planet KDE: 3D Rendering Solutions in Qt – an Overview
Phoronix: KDE This Week Took Care Of "A Very Large Number Of Bugs"

Sxmo

Sailfish OS

Ubuntu Touch

Distributions

Mobian

Mobian mobian-recipes Merge Requests: rockchip: add dkms and gcc for installing PineTab2 Wi-Fi driver
Mobian mobian-recipes Issues: phrog not coming up on the screen

postmarketOS

postmarketOS Blog: postmarketOS in 2025-02: MSM89x7 Audio, Modern Xiaomis in Community, New Name Foreshadowing +
- Lemmy - postmarketOS: postmarketOS in 2025-02: MSM89x7 Audio, Modern Xiaomis in Community, New Name Foreshadowing
+
postmarketOS pmaports Merge Requests: Add a generic qcom-sm7150 device package
postmarketOS Wiki New Pages: Generic SM7150 (qcom-sm7150)
postmarketOS Wiki New Pages: Mediaberry
mistersixt: "In case you are running #postmarketos with #phosh : with the latest packages (pmo 24.12.) the GUI was no longer starting up on my librem5, ending up with the login prompt on the console. The reason is that "phoc" does not know the parameter -v , and removing that entry in /usr/bin/phosh-session brings back the GUI upon a reboot:exec $SYSTEMD_CAT "${COMPOSITOR}" -v -S -C "${PHOC_INI}" -E "bash -lc 'exec ${GNOME_SESSION} --disable-acceleration-check --session=phosh'""

Apps

LinuxPhoneApps.org: Apps: Clapgrep
LinuxPhoneApps.org: Apps: Quick Web Apps
LinuxPhoneApps.org: Apps: Countdown
LinuxPhoneApps.org: Apps: CoBang
LinuxPhoneApps.org: Apps: Tally +
- vtrlx: Tally has been updated to allow the app to properly display on mobile devices. Big thanks to @1peter10 for contributing the code for this change—I just made a few extra tweaks from there.Get it on Linux from Flathub at https://flathub.org/apps/ca.vlacroix.Tally/
+
LinuxPhoneApps.org: Apps: Spotube
LinuxPhoneApps.org: Apps: Tagger
LinuxPhoneApps.org: Apps: Sly +
- pocketvj: "@NekoCWD i just found a promising, quick and easy #linuxmobile friendly photo editor:flatpak install https://dl.flathub.org/build-repo/167819/page.kramo.Sly.flatpakref"
+
camiloh: Pix upcoming version is coming with image text identification to copy the text contained in images quickly.@mauiproject @Nitrux_NX#mauikit

Kernel

Non-Linux

lupyuen: #PinePhone connected to #SDWire MicroSD Multiplexer ... Moment of truth 😬Article: https://lupyuen.org/articles/testbot2.html#real-hardware-arm-and-esp32 Maybe interesting for others looking into automated testing, too!

Stack

Phoronix: PipeWire 1.4 Released With MIDI 2.0 Support & Other New Features
Phoronix: Mesa's Venus Driver Adds Vulkan Ray-Tracing Support For VMs
Phoronix: Mesa Lands A Shader Statistics Framework For More Unification Across Drivers
Phoronix: Vulkan Video Continues Making Inroads, VP9 Decode Planned For This Year
Phoronix: Blender's Vulkan Renderer Is Making Great Progress To Production Readiness This Year
Phoronix: FEX 2503 Brings Fixes & Multi-Block By Default For x86_64 Linux Binaries On ARM64

Matrix

Matrix.org: This Week in Matrix 2025-03-07

Week 9

Late due to

@linmob@fosstodon.org: Due to personal health issues (nothing too critical, don't worry), Peter won't be able to publish a "Weekly #MobileLinux Update" post this weekend. The current plan is to have a combined post about two weeks on the 8th of March.Sorry about that! If you're impatient you can always use the pipeline (by re-running this https://framagit.org/linmob/linmob.frama.io/-/jobs/2738005 job tomorrow 🙂 If someone wants to step up, merging a MR or applying a patch/uploading a file is something I feel able to 🙂 I can't rule out that this will not happen again. If you're up to be a "Weekly Update Stand-In", please get in touch - best by email!

Worth Reading

FuriLabs: Community Contributions – FastFLX1
FuriLabs: iPhone Gives Up Your Data
Velvet Reindeer: Papr

Worth Watching

Continuum Gaming: Continuum Gaming E458: SFOS-Update 5.0.0.61/62 for all supported smartphones (stable release)
レトロモバイルチャンネル2: 【CyberDeck】Let's make a small computer
OS-SCi: ubports and Ubuntu Touch
DHOCNET Store: Cara Install VSCode Pada HaPlay GO Zero 1 | PostmarketOS v24.06 Linux | Visual Studio Code
David Hamner: Are Linux Phones Ready in 2025?
Bird Zhang: Running Openpilot on SailfishOS #sailfish #openpilot
Don White: Robert Braxman - Ubports
mic li: postmarketos ttyescape show
Öcülü kuş kebabı: Weird postmarketOS issue
𝙰𝙻𝙲𝙷𝙴𝙼𝙸𝚂𝚃: Cyberdeck Game Devlog 1 - Getting started
OS-SCi: Crowd Bounty The launch of a honest bug bounty system.
Radio and Electronics Engineering: 3D Printed Cyberdeck Laptop using @benmakeseverythingbuild and @FrameworkComputer parts
Benny Malik: Tema Ubuntu Touch full Transparan For Xiaomi Redmi Ubah Tampilan Xiaomi Jadi Ubuntu
Приключения Электроника: Экспресс распаковка: Jolla C2 на Sailfish OS - долгожданная альтернатива!
Jozef Mlich: nemomobile - glacier-settings + lipstick

Worth Noting

pocketvj: new to #sxmo #postmarketos #linuxmobile? thanks to #friction2d i made gifs on how to use gestures 🤩 (let me know if you are motivated to create a greeter...)
r/MobileLinux: Are Linux Phones Ready in 2025?
Purism community: Charging with iPhone charger
r/linux: Would you recommend the Finnish Jolla Linux phone?

More Software News

Gnome Ecosystem

This Week in GNOME: #189 Global Shortcuts
Aryan Kaushik: GNOME in GSoC 2025
hansdegoede: ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 12 camera support and other IPU6 camera work
who-t: libinput and 3-finger dragging
who-t: GNOME 48 and a changed tap-and-drag drag lock behaviour
Phoronix: GNOME's Mutter Now Supports The Wayland Cursor Shape Protocol

Phosh

Plasma Ecosystem

Nate Graham: This Week in Plasma: Great Stuff for 6.4 +
- Phoronix: KDE Developers Begin More Feature Work On Plasma 6.4
+
Carl Schwan et al.: This Week in KDE Apps
KDE Announcements: KDE Plasma 6.3.2, Bugfix Release for February
KDE e.V. News: KDE e.V. is looking for a Plasma software engineer
Qt blog: Qt Creator 16 RC released

Sxmo

Sailfish OS

Ubuntu Touch

Ubuntu Touch Forums News: OTA8 Release Delay
UBports - Development - Issues: screenshot from readme in mobile

Nemo Mobile

Jozef Mlich on Fosstodon: I have applied to #installfest with the talk "Last Mile from Mobile Linux to the User." The talk will be in Czech, and I’m available only on Sunday. Give me a vote if you’d like to see it! I plan to complement @okias's talk on Mobile Linux.https://pretalx.installfest.cz/installfest-2025/p/voting/signup/

Distributions

Mobian mobian-recipes Merge Requests: rockchip: add dkms and gcc for installing PineTab2 Wi-Fi driver
postmarketOS pmaports Merge Requests: main/postmarketos-ui-plasma-mobile: switch to Dolphin from Index
postmarketOS Wiki New Pages: Office hours
Lemmy - postmarketOS: How are mimetypes defined?
postmarketOS pmbootstrap tags: 3.3.1
postmarketOS pmbootstrap tags: 3.3.0

Apps

@pocketvj@fosstodon.org: @linmob finally we have a beautiful modern #gemini browser with certs support on #linuxmobile 🎉#alhena https://metaloupe.com/alhena/alhena.html launching it is still a bit a pain since we have to run it with agem java and alpine is missing jpackage to create a bin 🤷but its way nicer to use than ncgopher (the others are missing certs support)...

Kernel

phone-devel: [PATCH 0/3] Fixes for IPA v4.7
phone-devel: [PATCH 0/3] Fairphone 5 DisplayPort over USB-C support
Phoronix: ARM Linux Kernel May Shift To Generic Entry Code: Less Assembly But Lower Performance

Stack

Phoronix: Linux 6.14-rc5 Released: "Nothing Strange Stands Out"
Phoronix: TurnkeyML 6.0 Released With OpenAI-Compatible Server, Other Changes
Phoronix: SDL 3.2.6 Released With HiDPI Icons & Color Management On Wayland
Phoronix: GCC 15.1 Compiler Nears Release As Bugs Whittled Away
Phoronix: Linux's New Way Of Informing User-Space Over Hung GPUs May Become More Useful
Phoronix: FreeDesktop.org Devises New Hosting Plan For GitLab Infrastructure
Phoronix: NetworkManager 1.52 Brings IPVLAN Interface Support, Ethtool FEC Mode

Matrix

Matrix.org: This Week in Matrix 2025-02-28

Thanks

Huge thanks to Plata for the nifty set of Python scripts that speed up collecting links from feeds by a lot.

Something missing? Want to contribute?

Weekly GNU-like Mobile Linux Update (08/2025): Cameras and Project Updates

2025-02-23T22:08:51+00:00

Mobian gives an update on present and future changes, an interesting Ubuntu Touch Q&A, another collection of Sailfish Community News, some Flathub news and more! Enjoy!

+ +

Commentary in italics.

Worth Reading

Mobian Blog: 2025: off to a flying start! +
- Lemmy - linuxphones: 2025: off to a flying start! // Mobian's Blog
+
Nico's blog: Blocking phone numbers from CLI in Sailfish OS
Flathub blog: Flathub Safety: A Layered Approach from Source to User
alatiera: The Fedora Project Leader is willfully ignorant about Flathub

Worth Watching

veggero: Solving Burnout via Flathub Paid Apps
UBports: Ubuntu Touch Q&A 159 Qt6, VoLTE, hardware ... a lot of cool new stuff in this, make sure to watch!
1337 Sheets: Unboxing The PinePhone Pro First Look. Woah, that pre-installed software is ancient!
Nicholas LaBonte: Cyberdeck Handheld. Nice build!
The Unboxing Gadget: uConsole by Clockwork: I Waited 1 Year for This … Was It Worth It?
Romactu: How to use Touchscreen on Ubuntu 24.10, How to use #touchscreen on Ubuntu 24.10
Taylor Hay: Blackberry Pi - Portable Handheld Kali Linux Hacking Computer / Cyberdeck

Worth Noting

Mainline vs. Halium debate

Hardware support

More Software News

Gnome Ecosystem

This Week in GNOME: #188 Software Fixes
Sam Thursfield: Status update, 19/02/2025

Phosh

Plasma Ecosystem

Nate Graham: This Week in Plasma: Refinements All Around
Carl Schwan et al.: This Week in KDE Apps
KDE Announcements: KDE Plasma 6.3.1, Bugfix Release for February
Volker Krause: OSM Hack Weekend February 2025
Phoronix: KDE Plasma 6.4 Preps Improvement To Help KWin Reduce Frame Drops

Sxmo

Sailfish OS

Ubuntu Touch

UBports News: Ubuntu Touch Q&A 158
UBports News: Ubuntu Touch Q&A 157
UBports News: Ubuntu Touch OTA-8 Call for Testing
Ubuntu Touch Forums News: OTA-8 Call for Testing
Ubuntu Touch Forums News: Ubuntu Touch Q&A 159 call for questions
#UbuntuTouch: Das Volla Tablet mit Ubuntu Touch im Test
#UbuntuTouch: Ubuntu Touch Alpha für 24.04 Noble

Nemo Mobile

Nemo Mobile UX team: Nemomobile in February 2025

Distributions

Apps

Kernel

phone-devel: [PATCH 0/4] Add display support for Fairphone 3 smartphone
phone-devel: [PATCH 0/4] Some cleanups for Fairphone 3, set firmware-name, enable modem
phone-devel: [PATCH v5 01/13] dt-bindings: remoteproc: qcom,msm8916-mss-pil: Support platforms with one power domain
Phoronix: Linus Torvalds Clearly Lays Out Linux Maintainer Roles - Or Not - Around Rust Code
Phoronix: Linux Finally Introducing A Standardized Way Of Informing User-Space Over Hung GPUs

Stack

Matrix

Matrix.org: This Week in Matrix 2025-02-21
Matrix.org: We're at a crossroads
Matrix.org: Switching to Curated Room Directories

Thanks

Huge thanks to Plata for the nifty set of Python scripts that speed up collecting links from feeds by a lot.

Something missing? Want to contribute?

Star City

Tue, 03 Jun 2003 09:39:21 GMT

How do Americans get ready to work with Russians aboard the International Space Station? They take a crash course in culture, language and protocol at Russia's Star City.

Fri, 30 May 2003 11:06:42 GMT

Sky watchers in Europe, Asia, and parts of Alaska and Canada will experience a partial eclipse of the Sun on Saturday, May 31st.

The Engine That Does More

Tue, 27 May 2003 08:37:32 GMT

Before man travels to Mars, NASA hopes to design new engines that will let us fly through the Solar System more quickly. The proposed VASIMR engine would do that.

Astronauts' Dirty Laundry

Tue, 20 May 2003 08:56:02 GMT

Compared to earlier spacecraft, the International Space Station has many luxuries, but laundry facilities are not one of them. Instead, astronauts have other options.

This month in Servo: new elements, IME support, delegate API, and more!

2025-03-10T00:00:00Z

Servo now supports more HTML and CSS features:

the <details> element (@simonwuelker, #35261)
the <meter> element (@simonwuelker, #35524)
the <progress> element (@simonwuelker, #35531)
the ‘quotes’ property (@xiaochengh, @Loirooriol, #34770, #35420)
the ‘isolation’ property (@kkoyung, @Loirooriol, #35552)
‘overflow: clip’ (@longvatrong111, #35103)
‘overflow’ property with two values (@yezhizhen, @mrobinson, #35414)
the ‘::slotted’ selector (@simonwuelker, #35352)

+ +

Plus several new web API features:

contextmenu events (@pewsheen, #35364)
WritableStream (@gterzian, @jdm, #34844)
ReadableStreamBYOBRequest (@Taym95, #35074)
initial support for FontFace and its load() method (@mukilan, #35262)
toBlob() and toDataURL() on WebGPU canvases (@sagudev, #35237)
bytes() on Request, Response, and Blob (@shanehandley, @yoseio, @gterzian, @Taym95, #35250, #35151)
href, origin, protocol, username, password, host, hostname, port, pathname, search, and hash properties on HTMLAreaElement (@shanehandley, #35482)
insertRule() with no argument on CSSGroupingRule (@Loirooriol, #35295)

<slot> elements are now fully supported including layout (@simonwuelker, #35220, #35519), and we’ve also landed support for the ‘::slotted’ selector (@simonwuelker, #35352). +Shadow roots are now supported in devtools (@simonwuelker, #35294), and we’ve fixed some bugs related to shadow DOM trees (@simonwuelker, #35276, #35338), event handling (@simonwuelker, #35380), and custom elements (@maxtidev, @jdm, #35382).

We’ve landed layout improvements around ‘border-collapse’ (@Loirooriol, #35219), ‘align-content: normal’ (@rayguo17, #35178), ‘place-self’ with ‘position: absolute’ (@Loirooriol, #35208), the intrinsic sizing keywords (@Loirooriol, #35413, #35469, #35471, #35630, #35642, #35663, #35652, #35688), and ‘position: absolute’ now works correctly in a ‘position: relative’ grid item (@stevennovaryo, #35014).

Input has also been improved, with better IME support (@dklassic, #35535, #35623) and several fixes to touch input (@kongbai1996, @jschwe, @shubhamg13, #35450, #35031, #35550, #35537, #35692).

Servo-the-browser (servoshell) + +

Directory listings are now enabled for local files (@mrobinson, #35317).

+ +

servoshell’s dialogs now use egui (@chickenleaf, #34823, #35399, #35464, #35507, #35564, #35577, #35657, #35671), rather than shelling out to a program like zenity (@chickenleaf, #35674), making them more secure and no longer falling back to terminal input.

+ +

We’ve also fixed a bug when closing a tab other than the current one (@pewsheen, #35569).

Servo-the-engine (embedding) + +

We’ve simplified our embedding API by merging all input event delivery into WebView::notify_input_event (@mrobinson, @mukilan, #35430), making bluetooth optional (@jdm, @webbeef, #35479, #35590), making the “background hang monitor” optional (@jdm, #35256), and eliminating the need to depend on webxr (@mrobinson, #35229). +We’ve also moved some servoshell-only options out of Opts (@mrobinson, #35377, #35407), since they have no effect on Servo’s behaviour.

We’ve landed our initial delegate-based API (@delan, @mrobinson, @mukilan, #35196, #35260, #35297, #35396, #35400, #35544, #35579, #35662, #35672), which replaces our old message-based API for integrating Servo with your app (@mrobinson, @delan, @mukilan, #35284, #35315, #35366). +By implementing WebViewDelegate and ServoDelegate and installing them, you can have Servo call back into your app’s logic with ease.

We’ve simplified the RenderingContext trait (@wusyong, @mrobinson, #35251, #35553) and added three built-in RenderingContext impls (@mrobinson, @mukilan, #35465, #35501), making it easier to set up a context Servo can render to:

WindowRenderingContext renders to a whole window
OffscreenRenderingContext renders to part of a window
SoftwareRenderingContext renders to an image, without hardware acceleration

We’ve heavily reworked and documented our webview rendering model (@mrobinson, @wusyong, @mukilan, #35522, #35621), moved image output and shutdown logic out of the compositor (@mrobinson, @wusyong, #35538), and removed some complicated logic around synchronous repaints when a window is resized (@mrobinson, #35283, #35277). +These changes should make it a lot clearer how to get Servo’s webviews onto your display.

One part of this model that we’re starting to move away from is the support for multiple webviews in one rendering context (@mrobinson, @wusyong, #35536). +First landed in #31417, this was an expedient way to add support for multiple webviews, but it imposed some serious limitations on how webviews could be interleaved with other app content, and the performance and security was inadequate.

We’ve updated our winit_minimal example to take advantage of these changes (@webbeef, #35350, #35686), simplify it further (@robertohuertasm, #35253), and fix window resizing (@webbeef, #35691).

Perf and stability + +

The compositor now notifies the embedder of new frames immediately (@mrobinson, #35369), not via the constellation thread.

Servo’s typical memory usage has been reduced by over 1% thanks to Node object optimisations (@webbeef, #35592, #35554), and we’ve also improved our memory profiler (@webbeef, #35618, #35607).

We’ve fixed a bug causing very high CPU usage on sites like wikipedia.org (@webbeef, #35245), as well as bugs affecting requestAnimationFrame (@mukilan, #35387, #35435).

You can now configure our tracing-based profiler (--features tracing) with servo --tracing-filter instead of SERVO_TRACING (@jschwe, #35370).

We’ve continued reducing our use of unsafe in script (@nscaife, @stephenmuss, #35351, #35360, #35367, #35411), and moving parts of script to script_bindings (@jdm, #35279, #35280, #35292, #35457, #35459, #35578, #35620). +Breaking up our massive script crate is absolutely critical for reducing Servo’s build times.

We’ve fixed crashes that happen when moving windows past the edge of your monitor (@webbeef, #35235), when unpaired UTF-16 surrogates are sent to the DOM (@mrobinson, #35381), when focusing elements inside shadow roots (@simonwuelker, #35606), and when calling getAsString() on a DataTransferItem (@Gae24, #35699). +We’ve also continued working on static analysis that will help catch crashes due to GC borrow hazards (@augustebaum, @yerke, @jdm, @Gae24, #35541, #35593, #35565, #35610, #35591, #35609, #35601, #35596, #35595, #35594, #35597, #35622, #35604, #35616, #35605, #35640, #35647, #35646).

Donations + +

Thanks again for your generous support! +We are now receiving 4363 USD/month (+13.7% over January) in recurring donations. +This helps cover the cost of our self-hosted CI runners and Outreachy internships.

Servo is also on thanks.dev, and already 21 GitHub users (+5 over January) that depend on Servo are sponsoring us there. +If you use Servo libraries like url, html5ever, selectors, or cssparser, signing up for thanks.dev could be a good way for you (or your employer) to give back to the community.

4363 USD/month

10000

+ +

As always, use of these funds will be decided transparently in the Technical Steering Committee. +For more details, head to our Sponsorship page.

+ +

Servo Security Report: findings and solutions

2025-02-26T00:00:00Z

The Servo project has received several grants from NLnet Foundation, and as part of these grants, NLnet offers different support services. These services include security audits from Radically Open Security.

In one of our projects with NLnet, we were working on adding support for CSS floats and tables in Servo. Once the project was completed, we reached out to Radically Open Security to run a security audit. The focus of the audit was in the code related to that project, so the main components investigated were the CSS code paths in the layout engine and Stylo. As part of this audit, four vulnerabilities were identified:

+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +

ID	Type	Description	Threat level
`CLN-009`	Third-Party Library Vulnerability	Servo uses an outdated version of the time crate that is vulnerable to a known issue.	Moderate
`CLN-004`	Arithmetic underflow	By calling methods on a TableBuilder object in a specific order, an integer underflow can be triggered, followed by an attempted out-of-bounds access, which is caught by Rust, resulting in a panic.	Low
`CLN-002`	Arithmetic underflow	An arithmetic underflow condition is currently impossible to trigger, but may become accessible as its surrounding logic evolves.	N/A
`CLN-007`	Unguarded casting	Casting from an unsigned platform pointer-width integer into a fixed-width signed integer may result in erroneous layouts.	N/A

If you want to know more details you can read the full report.

The first issue (CLN-009) was related to a known vulnerability in version 0.1 of the time crate that Servo depended on (RUSTSEC-2020-0071). We had removed this in most of Servo, but there was one remaining dependency in WebRender. We have since addressed this vulnerability by removing it from the version of WebRender used in Servo (@mrobinson, #35325), and we will also try to upstream our changes so that Firefox is unaffected.

We have also fixed the second (CLN-004) and third (CLN-002) issues by making the affected code more robust (@Loirooriol, #34247, #35437), in the event web content can trigger them.

The fourth issue (CLN-007) is not urgent, since the values are constrained elsewhere and it would otherwise only affect layout correctness and not security, but it’s worth fixing at some point too.

Servo has long been highlighted for being a memory-safe and concurrency-safe web rendering engine, thanks to the guarantees provided by the Rust programming language, including its ownership system, borrow checker, and built-in data structures that enable safe concurrent programming. These features help prevent memory and concurrency vulnerabilities, such as use-after-free bugs and data races.

We find it promising that this security audit, although smaller and of limited scope, identified no severe vulnerabilities, especially none of that nature, and that we were able to address any vulnerabilities identified. This was a positive experience for Servo and the web, and we’re keen to explore more security auditing for Servo in the future.

Thanks to the folks at Radically Open Security for their work on this audit, and NLnet Foundation for continuously supporting the Servo project.

This month in Servo: new webview API, relative colors, canvas buffs, and more!

2025-02-19T00:00:00Z

Servo now supports several new web API features:

:host selector (@simonwuelker, #34870)
<slot> elements in the DOM (@simonwuelker, #35013, #35177, #35191, #35221, #35137, #35222), with layout support landing next month
Relative CSS colors, like color(from …) and rgb(from …) (@Loirooriol, #34897)
ClipboardEvent (@Gae24, #33576, #35146), with --pref dom_clipboardevent_enabled
Detecting WGSL extensions via WGSLLanguageFeatures (@sagudev, #34928)
pointer_composite_access WGSL extension (@sagudev, #35161)
blitFramebuffer() on WebGL2RenderingContext (@jdm, Istvan, #26389)
media property on HTMLStyleElement (@webbeef, #35148)

We’ve landed a bunch of HTMLCanvasElement improvements:

toDataURL() now supports image/jpeg and image/webp (@webbeef, #34861)
toBlob() is now supported (@webbeef, #34938)
transferControlToOffscreen() is now supported (@webbeef, #34959)

+ " /> + +

Streams are a lot more useful now, with ReadableStreamBYOBReader now supporting read() (@Taym95, #35040), cancel(), close(), and releaseLock() (@Taym95, #34958).

Servo now passes 40.6% (+7.5pp) of enabled Shadow DOM tests, thanks to our landing support for the :host selector (@simonwuelker, #34870) and the <slot> element (@simonwuelker, #35013, #35177, #35191, #35221, #35137, #35222), plus improvements to event handling (@simonwuelker, #34788, #34884), script (@willypuzzle, #34787), style (@simonwuelker, @jdm, #35198, #35132), and the DOM tree (@simonwuelker, @Taym95, #34803, #34834, #34863, #34909, #35076).

Table layout is significantly better now, particularly in ‘table-layout: fixed’ (@Loirooriol, #35170), table sizing (@Loirooriol, @mrobinson, #34889, #34947, #35167), rowspan sizing (@mrobinson, @Loirooriol, #35095), interaction with floats (@Loirooriol, #35207), and ‘border-collapse’ layout (@Loirooriol, #34932, #34908, #35097, #35122, #35165) and painting (@Loirooriol, #34933, #35003, #35100, #35075, #35129, #35163).

As a result, Servo now passes 90.2% (+11.5pp) of enabled CSS tables tests, and of the tests that are in CSS 2, we now pass more than Blink and WebKit! +We literally stood on the shoulders of giants here, because this would not have been possible without Blink’s robust table impl. +Despite their age, tables are surprisingly underspecified, so we also needed to report several spec issues along the way (@Loirooriol).

Embedding + +

Servo aims to be an embeddable web engine, but so far it’s been a lot harder to embed Servo than it should be.

For one, configuring and starting Servo is complicated. +We found that getting Servo running at all, even without wiring up input or handling resizes correctly, took over 200 lines of Rust code (@delan, @mrobinson, #35118). +Embedders (apps) could only control Servo by sending and receiving a variety of “messages” and “events”, and simple questions like “what’s the current URL?” were impossible to answer without keeping track of extra state in the app.

Contrast this with WebKitGTK, where you can write a minimal kiosk app with a fully-functional webview in under 50 lines of C. +To close that gap, we’ve started reworking our embedding API towards something more idiomatic and ergonomic, starting with the concept embedders care about most: the webview.

Our new webview API is controlled by calling methods on a WebView handle (@delan, @mrobinson, #35119, #35183, #35192), including navigation and user input. +Handles will eventually represent the lifecycle of the webview itself; if you have one, the webview is valid, and if you drop them, the webview is destroyed.

Servo needs to call into the embedder too, and here we’ve started replacing the old EmbedderMsg API with a webview delegate (@delan, @mrobinson, #35211), much like the delegates in Apple’s WebKit API. +In Rust, a delegate is a trait that the embedder can install its own impl for. +Stay tuned for more on this next month!

Embedders can now intercept any request, not just navigation (@zhuhaichao518, #34961), and you can now identify the webview that caused an HTTP credentials prompt (@pewsheen, @mrobinson, #34808).

Other embedding improvements include:

Adding a trait to allow for alternative rendering contexts that are better suited to certain applications (@dklassic, @wusyong, #35052, #34813, #34780)
Simplifying types used by consumers of libservo (@delan, @mrobinson, #35156)
Making it easier to build Servo without crown (@jdm, #35055)

Other changes + +

We’ve reworked Servo’s preferences system, making all prefs optional with reasonable defaults (@mrobinson, #34966, #34999, #34994). +As a result:

The names of all preferences have changed; see the Prefs docs for a list
Embedders no longer need a prefs.json resource to get Servo running
Some debug options were converted to preferences (@mrobinson, #34998)

Devtools now highlights console.log() arguments according to their types (@simonwuelker, #34810).

Servo’s networking is more efficient now, with the ability to cancel fetches for navigation that contain redirects (@mrobinson, #34919) and cancel fetches for <video> and <media> when the document is unloaded (@mrobinson, #34883). +Those changes also eliminate per-request IPC channels for navigation and cancellation respectively, and in the same vein, we’ve eliminated them for image loading too (@mrobinson, #35041).

We’ve continued splitting up our massive script crate (@jdm, #34359, #35157, #35169, #35172), which will eventually make Servo much faster to build.

A few crashes have been fixed, including when exiting Servo (@mukilan, #34917), when using the internal memory profiler (@jdm, #35058), and when running ResizeObserver callbacks (@willypuzzle, #35168).

For developers + +

We now run CI smoketests on OpenHarmony using a real device (@jschwe, @mukilan, #35006), increasing confidence in your changes beyond compile-time errors.

We’ve also tripled our self-hosted CI runner capacity (@delan, #34983, #35002), making concurrent Windows and macOS builds possible without falling back to the much slower GitHub-hosted runners.

Servo can’t yet run WebDriver-based tests on wpt.fyi, wpt.servo.org, or CI, because the servo executor for the Web Platform Tests does not support testdriver.js. +servodriver does, though, so we’ve started fixing test regressions with that executor with the goal of eventually switching to it (@jdm, #34957, #34997).

Donations + +

Thanks again for your generous support! +We are now receiving 3835 USD/month (−11.4% over December) in recurring donations. +With this money, we’ve been able to expand our capacity for self-hosted CI runners on Windows, Linux, and macOS builds, halving mach try build times from over an hour to under 30 minutes!

Servo is also on thanks.dev, and already 21 GitHub users (+5 over December) that depend on Servo are sponsoring us there. +If you use Servo libraries like url, html5ever, selectors, or cssparser, signing up for thanks.dev could be a good way for you (or your employer) to give back to the community.

3835 USD/month

10000

+ +

As always, use of these funds will be decided transparently in the Technical Steering Committee. +For more details, head to our Sponsorship page.

Conference talks + +

Why Build a New Browser Engine in Rust? (slides) — Martin Robinson spoke about Servo’s unique benefits as a Rust-based browser and web engine, and how browser diversity can create a new renaissance for the web platform

+ +

Servo in 2024: stats, features and donations

2025-01-31T00:00:00Z

Two years after the renewed activity on the project we can confirm that Servo is fully back.

If we ignore the bots, in 2024 we’ve had 129 unique contributors (+143% over 54 last year), landing 1,771 pull requests (+163% over 673), and that’s just in our main repo!

Including bots, the total number of PRs merged goes up to 2,674 (+144% over 1094). From all this work, 26% of the PRs were made by Igalia, 40% by other contributors and the rest by the bots (34%). This shows how the Servo community has been growing and becoming more diverse with new actors participating actively in the project.

+ + +

+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +

	2018	2019	2020	2021	2022	2023	2024
Merged PRs	1,188	986	669	118	65	776	1,771
Unique contributors	142	141	87	37	20	54	129
Average unique contributors per month	27.33	27.17	14.75	4.92	2.83	11.33	26.33

+ + +

Now let’s take a look to the data and chart above, which show the evolution since 2018 in number of merged PRs, unique contributors per year and average contributors per month (excluding bots). We can see the project is back to numbers of 2018 and 2019 when it was been developed in full speed!

It’s worth noting that Servo popularity keeps growing, with many folks realizing there has been new activity on the project last year, and we have more and more people interested in the project.

Servo GitHub stars haven't stopped growing, surpassing now 25K threshold.

+ +

During 2024 Servo has been present in 8 events with 9 talks: FOSDEM, Open Source Summit North America, Seattle Rust user meetup, GOSIM Europe, Global Software Technology Summit, Linux Foundation Europe Member Summit, GOSIM China, Ubuntu Summit.

If we focus on development there has been many things moving forward during the year. Servo main dependencies (SpiderMonkey, Stylo and WebRender) have been upgraded, the new layout engine has kept evolving adding support for floats, tables, flexbox, fonts, etc. By the end of 2024 Servo passes 1,515,229 WPT subtests (79%). Many other new features have been under active development: WebGPU, Shadow DOM, ReadableStream, WebXR, … Servo now supports two new platforms: Android and OpenHarmony. And we have got the first experiments of applications using Servo as a web engine (like Tauri, Blitz, QtWebView, Cuervo, Verso and Moto).

In 2024 we have raised 33,632.64 USD with donations via Open Collective and GitHub Sponsors from 500 different people and organizations. Thank you all for supporting us!

With this money we have now 3 servers that provides self-hosted runners for Linux, macOS, and Windows reducing our build times from over an hour to under 30 minutes.

Talking about the future, the Servo TSC has been discussing the roadmap for 2025 which has been updated on the Servo’s wiki. We have many plans to keep Servo thriving with new features and improvements. Let’s hope for a great 2025!

This month in Servo: dark mode, keyword sizes, XPath, and more!

2025-01-10T00:00:00Z

Servo now supports dark mode (@arthmis, @lazypassion, #34532), respecting the platform dark mode in servoshell and ‘prefers-color-scheme’ (@nicoburns, #34423, stylo#93) on Windows and macOS.

+ + +

MDN article for ‘prefers-color-scheme’ in dark mode (left) and light mode (right), with --pref dom.resize_observer.enabled.

+ +

CSS transitions can now be triggered properly by script (@mrobinson, #34486), and we now support ‘min-height’ and ‘max-height’ on column flex containers (@Loirooriol, @mrobinson, #34450), ‘min-content’, ‘max-content’, ‘fit-content’, and ‘stretch’ in block layout (@Loirooriol, #34641, #34568, #34695), ‘stretch’ on replaced positioned elements (@Loirooriol, #34430), as well as ‘align-self: self-start’, ‘self-end’, ‘left’, and ‘right’ on positioned elements (@taniishkaaa, @Loirooriol, #34365).

Servo can now run Discord well enough to log in and read messages, though you can’t send messages yet. +To get this working, we landed some bare-bones AbortController support (@jdm, @syvb, #34519) and a WebSocket fix (@jdm, #34634). +Try it yourself with --pref dom.svg.enabled --pref dom.intersection_observer.enabled --pref dom.abort_controller.enabled!

+ + +

We now support console.trace() (@simonwuelker, #34629), PointerEvent (@wusyong, #34437), and the clonable property on ShadowRoot (@simonwuelker, #34514). +Shadow DOM support continues to improve (@jdm, #34503), including very basic Shadow DOM layout (@mrobinson, #34701) when enabled via --pref dom.shadowdom.enabled.

script underwent (and continues to undergo) major rework towards being more reliable and faster to build. +We’ve landed better synchronisation for DOM tree mutations (@jdm, #34505) and continued work on splitting up the script crate (@jdm, #34366). +We’ve moved our ReadableStream support into Servo, eliminating the maintenance burden of a downstream SpiderMonkey patch (@gterzian, @wusyong, @Taym95, #34064, #34675).

The web platform guarantees that same-origin frames and their parents can synchronously observe resizes and their effects. +Many tests rely on this, and not doing this correctly made Servo’s test results much flakier than they could otherwise be. +We’ve made very good progress towards fixing this (@mrobinson, #34643, #34656, #34702, #34609), with correct resizing in all cases except when a same-origin frame is in another script thread, which is rare.

We now support enough of XPath to get htmx working (@vlindhol, #34463), when enabled via --pref dom.xpath.enabled.

+ + +

Servo’s performance continues to improve, with layout caching for flex columns delivering up to 12x speedup (@Loirooriol, @mrobinson, #34461), many unnecessary reflows now eliminated (@mrobinson, #34558, #34599, #34576, #34645), reduced memory usage (@mrobinson, @Loirooriol, #34563, #34666), faster rendering for pages with animations (@mrobinson, #34489), and timers now operating without IPC (@mrobinson, #34581).

servoshell nightlies are up to 20% smaller (@atbrakhi, #34340), WebGPU is now optional at build time (@atbrakhi, #34444), and --features tracing no longer enables --features layout-2013 (@jschwe, #34515) for further binary size savings. +You can also limit the size of several of Servo’s thread pools with --pref threadpools.fallback_worker_num and others (@jschwe, #34478), which is especially useful on machines with many CPU cores.

We’ve started laying the groundwork for full incremental layout in our new layout engine, starting with a general layout caching mechanism (@mrobinson, @Loirooriol, #34507, #34513, #34530, #34586). +This was lost in the switch to our new layout engine, and without it, every time a page changes, we have to rerun layout from scratch. +As you can imagine, this is very, very expensive, and incremental layout is critical for performance on today’s highly dynamic web.

+ +

Donations + +

Thanks again for your generous support! +We are now receiving 4329 USD/month (+0.8% over November) in recurring donations. +With this money, we’ve been able to cover our web hosting and self-hosted CI runners for Windows, Linux, and now macOS builds (@delan, #34868), halving mach try build times from over an hour to under 30 minutes! +Next month, we’ll be expanding our CI capacity further, all made possible thanks to your help.

Servo is also on thanks.dev, and already sixteen GitHub users that depend on Servo are sponsoring us there. +If you use Servo libraries like url, html5ever, selectors, or cssparser, signing up for thanks.dev could be a good way for you (or your employer) to give back to the community.

4329 USD/month

10000

+ +

As always, use of these funds will be decided transparently in the Technical Steering Committee. +For more details, head to our Sponsorship page.

+ +

This month in Servo: :is(), :where(), grid layout, parallel flexbox, and more!

2024-12-09T00:00:00Z

Servo now supports :is() and :where() selectors (@mrobinson, #34066), parallel layout for flexbox (@mrobinson, #34132), and experimentally, CSS grid layout (@nicoburns, @taniishkaa, #32619, #34352, #34421)! +To try our new grid layout support, run Servo with --pref layout.grid.enabled.

We’ve added support for two key Shadow DOM interfaces, the shadowRoot property on Element (@simonwuelker, #34306) and the innerHTML property on ShadowRoot (@simonwuelker, #34335).

We’ve also landed ‘justify-self’ on positioned elements (@chickenleaf, #34235), form submission with <input type=image> (@shanehandley, #34203), DataTransfer (@Gae24, #34205), the close() method on ImageBitmap (@simonwuelker, #34124), plus several new SubtleCrypto API features:

crypto.subtle.deriveKey() (@simonwuelker, #34185)
wrapKey() and unwrapKey() (@msub2, #34262)
“HMAC” algorithm in generateKey() (@simonwuelker, #34278), sign(), verify() (@simonwuelker, #34223), and deriveKey("get key length") (@simonwuelker, #34230)
“AES-GCM” algorithm in encrypt(), decrypt(), generateKey(), and importKey() (@simonwuelker, #34269)
“AES-KW” algorithm in generateKey(), importKey(), wrapKey(), and unwrapKey() (@msub2, #34262)
“PBKDF2” (@simonwuelker, #34164) and “HKDF” (@simonwuelker, #34200) algorithms in deriveBits()

On OpenHarmony, we’ve landed keyboard input and the IME (@jschwe, @jdm, @mukilan, #34188), touch fling gestures (@jschwe, @mrobinson, #33219), and additional CJK fallback fonts (@jschwe, #34410). +You can now build for OpenHarmony on a Windows machine (@jschwe, #34113), and build errors have been improved (@jschwe, #34267).

More engine changes + +

You can now scroll the viewport and scrollable elements with your pointer anywhere in the area, not just when hovering over actual content (@mrobinson, @mukilan, #34347). +--unminify-js, a very useful feature for diagnosing Servo bugs in real websites, now supports module scripts (@jdm, #34206).

We’ve fixed the behaviour of offsetLeft and offsetTop relative to <body> with ‘position: static’ (@nicoburns, @Loirooriol, #32761), which also required spec changes (@nicoburns, @Loirooriol, w3c/csswg-drafts#10549). +We’ve also fixed several layout bugs around:

‘object-fit’ when ‘aspect-ratio’ is set (@Loirooriol, #34413)
clientWidth and friends on floats and replaced inlines (@Loirooriol, #34083)
‘align-items’ and ‘align-self: stretch’ (@mrobinson, @Loirooriol, #34162)
main axis free space in flexbox (@mrobinson, #34150)
min- and max-content block sizes of replaced elements (@Loirooriol, #34284)
sizing of non-replaced positioned elements with ‘place-self’ (@taniishkaa, #34264)

The getClientRects() method on Element now correctly returns a DOMRectList (@chickenleaf, #34025).

Stylo has been updated to 2024-11-01 (@Loirooriol, #34322), and we’ve landed some changes to prepare our fork of Stylo for publishing releases on crates.io (@mrobinson, @nicoburns, #34332, #34353). +We’ve also made more progress towards splitting up our massive script crate (@jdm, @sagudev, #34357, #34356, #34163), which will eventually allow Servo to be built (and rebuilt) much faster.

Performance improvements + +

In addition to parallel layout for flexbox (@mrobinson, #34132), we’ve landed several other performance improvements:

faster layout for ‘column’ flex containers (@Loirooriol, @mrobinson, #34346)
faster caching of intrinsic sizes (@Loirooriol, #34384)
caching of font template matches (@mukilan, @mrobinson, #34325)
fixed warnings and memory leak when WebRender is running late (@mrobinson, @mukilan, #34305)

We’ve also landed some changes to reduce Servo’s binary size:

legacy layout is no longer built by default (@jschwe, #34290)
Servo no longer depends on sparkle, only glow and gleam (@sagudev, #33918, #34292)
Servo can now be built without WebXR support (@wusyong, @augustkline, @jdm, @sagudev, #34241, #34348)
servoshell can now be built without WebXR on OpenHarmony and Android (@jschwe, #34242), with more platforms to come
plus some progress towards a build-time feature flag for WebGPU (@atbrakhi, #34415)

Servo’s tracing-based profiling support (--features tracing-perfetto or tracing-hitrace) now supports filtering events via an environment variable (@delan, #34236, #34256), and no longer includes events from non-Servo crates by default (@delan, #34209). +Note that when the filter matches some span or event, it will also match all of its descendants for now, but this is a limitation we intend to fix.

Most of the events supported by the old interval profiler have been ported to tracing (@delan, #34238, #34337). +ScriptParseHTML and ScriptParseXML events no longer count the time spent doing layout and script while parsing, reducing them to more realistic times (@delan, #34273), while ScriptEvaluate events now count the time spent running scripts in timers, DOM event listeners, and many other situations (@delan, #34286), increasing them to more realistic times.

We’ve added new tracing events for display list building (@atbrakhi, #34392), flex layout, inline layout, and font loading (@delan, #34392). +This will help us diagnose performance issues around things like caching and relayout for ‘stretch’ in flex layout, shaping text runs, and font template creation.

For developers + +

Hacking on Servo is now easier, with our new --profile medium build mode in Cargo (@jschwe, #34035). +medium is more optimised than debug, but unlike release, it supports debuggers, line numbers in backtraces, and incremental builds.

Servo now uses CODEOWNERS to list reviewers that are experts in parts of our main repo. +This should make it much easier to find reviewers that know how to review your code, and helps us maximise the quality of our code reviews by allowing reviewers to specialise.

Donations + +

Thanks again for your generous support! +We are now receiving 4291 USD/month (+2.1% over October) in recurring donations. +We are no longer accepting donations on LFX — if you were donating there, please move your recurring donations to GitHub or Open Collective.

Servo is also on thanks.dev, and already fifteen GitHub users that depend on Servo are sponsoring us there. +If you use Servo libraries like url, html5ever, selectors, or cssparser, signing up for thanks.dev could be a good way for you (or your employer) to give back to the community.

4291 USD/month

10000

+ +

With this money, we’ve been able to cover our web hosting and self-hosted CI runners for Windows and Linux builds. +When the time comes, we’ll also be able to afford macOS runners and perf bots, as well as additional Outreachy interns next year! +As always, use of these funds will be decided transparently in the Technical Steering Committee. +For more details, head to our Sponsorship page.

Conferences and blogs + +

Servo Revival: 2023-2024 — Manuel Rego wrote about Igalia’s role in getting Servo back to life, and now thriving, over the past two years
Porting Servo to OpenHarmony — Jonathan Schwender spoke at GOSIM China 2024 about the work we’ve done towards supporting OpenHarmony in Servo
Taming concurrency with (in)-formal methods in Servo — Gregory Terzian spoke at GOSIM China 2024 about using TLA+ to help us correctly implement concurrent algorithms like the HTML event loop in Servo

+ +

Behind the code: an interview with msub2

2024-11-12T00:00:00Z

Behind the Code is a new series of interviews with the contributors who help propel Servo forward. Ever wondered why people +choose to work on web browsers, or how they get started? We invite you to look beyond the project’s pull requests and issue +reports, and get to know the humans who make it happen.

msub2 + +

Some representative contributions:

Tell us about yourself! + +

My name is Daniel, though I more commonly go by my online handle “msub2”. I’m something of a generalist, but my primary interests +are developing for the web, XR, and games. I created and run the WebXR Discord, which has members from both the Immersive Web Working +Group and the Meta Browser team, among others. In my free time (when I’m not working, doing Servo things, or tending to my other +programming projects) I’m typically watching videos from YouTube/Dropout/Nebula/etc and playing video games.

Why did you start contributing to Servo? + +

A confluence of interests, to put it simply. I was just starting to really get into Rust, having built a CHIP-8 emulator and an +NES emulator to get my hands dirty, but I also had prior experience contributing to other browser projects like Chromium and Gecko. +I was also eyeing Servo’s WebXR implementation (which I had submitted a couple small fixes for last year) as I could see there was +still plenty of work that could be done there. To get started though, I looked for an adjacent area that I could work on to get +familiar with the main Servo codebase, which led to my first contribution being support for non-XR gamepads!

What was challenging about your first contribution? + +

I’d say the most challenging part of my first contribution was twofold: the first was just getting oriented with how data flows +in and out of Servo via the embedding API and the second was understanding how DOM structs, methods, and codegen all worked together +in the script crate. Servo is a big project, but luckily I got lots of good help and feedback as I was working through it, which +definitely made things easier. Looking at existing examples in the codebase of the things I was trying to do got me the rest of the +way there I’d say.

What do you like about contributing to the project? What do you get out of it? + +

The thing I like most about Servo (and perhaps the web platform as an extension) is the amount of interesting problems that there +are to solve when it comes to implementing/supporting all of its different features. While most of my contributions so far have been +focused around Gamepad and WebXR, recently I’ve been working to help implement SubtleCrypto alongside another community member, which +has been really interesting! In addition to the satisfaction I get just from being able to solve interesting problems, I also rather +enjoy the feeling of contributing to a large, communal, open-source project.

+ +

I’d encourage anyone who’s intrigued by the idea of contributing to Servo to give it a shot! The recent waves of attention for projects +like Verso and Ladybird have shown that there is an appetite for new browsers and browser engines, and with Servo’s history it just +feels right that it should finally be able to rise to a more prominent status in the ecosystem.

This month in Servo: faster fonts, fetches, and flexbox!

2024-11-08T00:00:00Z

Servo now supports ‘mix-blend-mode: plus-lighter’ (@mrobinson, #34057) and ‘transition-behavior: allow-discrete’ (@Loirooriol, #33991), including in the ‘transition’ shorthand (@Loirooriol, #34005), along with the fetch metadata request headers ‘Sec-Fetch-Site’, ‘Sec-Fetch-Mode’, ‘Sec-Fetch-User’, and ‘Sec-Fetch-Dest’ (@simonwuelker, #33830).

, ‘transition-behavior: allow-discrete’, ‘mix-blend-mode: plus-lighter’, and ‘width: stretch’" /> +

We now have partial support for the CSS size keywords ‘min-content’, ‘max-content’, ‘fit-content’, and ‘stretch’ (@Loirooriol, #33558, #33659, #33854, #33951), including in floats (@Loirooriol, #33666), atomic inlines (@Loirooriol, #33737), and elements with ‘position: absolute’ or ‘fixed’ (@Loirooriol, #33950).

We’re implementing the SubtleCrypto API, starting with full support for crypto.subtle.digest() (@simonwuelker, #34034), partial support for generateKey() with AES-CBC and AES-CTR (@msub2, #33628, #33963), and partial support for encrypt(), and decrypt() with AES-CBC (@msub2, #33795).

More engine changes + +

Servo’s architecture is improving, with a new cross-process compositor API that reduces memory copy overhead for video (@mrobinson, @crbrz, #33619, #33660, #33817). +We’ve also started phasing out our old OpenGL bindings (gleam and sparkle) in favour of glow, which should reduce Servo’s complexity and binary size (@sagudev, @mrobinson, surfman#318, webxr#248, #33538, #33910, #33911).

We’ve updated to Stylo 2024-10-04 (@Loirooriol, #33767) and wgpu 23 (@sagudev, #34073, #33819, #33635). +The new version of wgpu includes several patches from @sagudev, adding support for const_assert, as well as accessing const arrays with runtime index values. +We’ve also reworked WebGPU canvas presentation to ensure that we never use old buffers by mistake (@sagudev, #33613).

We’ve also landed a bunch of improvements to our DOM geometry APIs, with DOMMatrix now supporting toString() (@simonwuelker, #33792) and updating is2D on mutation (@simonwuelker, #33796), support for DOMRect.fromRect() (@simonwuelker, #33798), and getBounds() on DOMQuad now handling NaN correctly (@simonwuelker, #33794).

We now correctly handle non-ASCII characters in <img srcset> (@evuez, #33873), correctly handle data: URLs in more situations (@webbeef, #33500), and no longer throw an uncaught exception when pages try to use IntersectionObserver (@mrobinson, #33989).

Outreachy contributors are doing great work in Servo again, helping us land many of this month’s improvements to GC static analysis (@taniishkaa, @webbeef, @chickenleaf, @jdm, @jahielkomu, @wulanseruniati, @lauwwulan, #33692, #33706, #33800, #33774, #33816, #33808, #33827, #33822, #33820, #33828, #33852, #33843, #33836, #33865, #33862, #33891, #33888, #33880, #33902, #33892, #33893, #33895, #33931, #33924, #33917, #33921, #33958, #33920, #33973, #33960, #33928, #33985, #33984, #33978, #33975, #34003, #34002) and code health (@chickenleaf, @DileepReddyP, @taniishkaa, @mercybassey, @jahielkomu, @cashall-0, @tony-nyagah, @lwz23, @Noble14477, #33959, #33713, #33804, #33618, #33625, #33631, #33632, #33633, #33643, #33643, #33646, #33648, #33653, #33664, #33685, #33686, #33689, #33686, #33690, #33705, #33707, #33724, #33727, #33728, #33729, #33730, #33740, #33744, #33757, #33771, #33757, #33782, #33790, #33809, #33818, #33821, #33835, #33840, #33853, #33849, #33860, #33878, #33881, #33894, #33935, #33936, #33943).

Performance improvements + +

Our font system is faster now, with reduced latency when loading system fonts (@mrobinson, #33638), layout no longer blocking on sending font data to WebRender (@mrobinson, #33600), and memory mapped system fonts on macOS and FreeType platforms like Linux (@mrobinson, @mukilan, #33747).

Servo now has a dedicated fetch thread (@mrobinson, #33863). +This greatly reduces the number of IPC channels we create for individual requests, and should fix crashes related to file descriptor exhaustion on some platforms. +Brotli-compressed responses are also handled more efficiently, such that we run the parser with up to 8 KiB of decompressed data at a time, rather than only 10 bytes of compressed data at a time (@crbrz, #33611).

Flexbox layout now uses caching to avoid doing unnecessary work (@mrobinson, @Loirooriol, #33964, #33967), and now has experimental tracing-based profiling support (@mrobinson, #33647), which in turn no longer spams RUST_LOG=info when not enabled (@delan, #33845). +We’ve also landed optimisations in table layout (@Loirooriol, #33575) and in our layout engine as a whole (@Loirooriol, #33806).

Work continues on making our massive script crate build faster, with improved incremental builds (@sagudev, @mrobinson, #33502) and further patches towards splitting script into smaller crates (@sagudev, @jdm, #33627, #33665).

We’ve also fixed several crashes, including when initiating a WebXR session on macOS (@jdm, #33962), when laying out replaced elements (@Loirooriol, #34006), when running JavaScript modules (@jdm, #33938), and in many situations when garbage collection occurs (@chickenleaf, @taniishkaa, @Loirooriol, @jdm, #33857, #33875, #33904, #33929, #33942, #33976, #34019, #34020, #33965, #33937).

servoshell, embedding, and devtools + +

Devtools support (--devtools 6080) is now compatible with Firefox 131+ (@eerii, #33661), and no longer lists iframes as if they were inspectable tabs (@eerii, #34032).

Servo-the-browser now avoids unnecessary redraws (@webbeef, #34008), massively reducing its CPU usage, and no longer scrolls too slowly on HiDPI systems (@nicoburns, #34063). +We now update the location bar when redirects happen (@rwakulszowa, #34004), and these updates are sent to all embedders of Servo, not just servoshell.

We’ve added a new --unminify-css option (@Taym95, #33919), allowing you to dump the CSS used by a page like you can for JavaScript. +This will pave the way for allowing you to modify that CSS for debugging site compat issues, which is not yet implemented.

We’ve also added a new --screen-size option that can help with testing mobile websites (@mrobinson, #34038), renaming the old --resolution option to --window-size, and we’ve removed --no-minibrowser mode (@Taym95, #33677).

We now publish nightly builds for OpenHarmony on servo.org (@mukilan, #33801). +When running servoshell on OpenHarmony, we now display toasts when pages load or panic (@jschwe, #33621), and you can now pass certain Servo options via hdc shell aa start or a test app (@jschwe, #33588).

Donations + +

Thanks again for your generous support! +We are now receiving 4201 USD/month (+1.3% over September) in recurring donations. +We are no longer accepting donations on LFX — if you were donating there, please move your recurring donations to GitHub or Open Collective.

Servo is also on thanks.dev, and already ten GitHub users that depend on Servo are sponsoring us there. +If you use Servo libraries like url, html5ever, selectors, or cssparser, signing up for thanks.dev could be a good way for you (or your employer) to give back to the community.

4201 USD/month

10000

+ +

With this money, we’ve been able to pay for a second Outreachy intern in this upcoming round, plus our web hosting and self-hosted CI runners for Windows and Linux builds. +When the time comes, we’ll also be able to afford macOS runners and perf bots! +As always, use of these funds will be decided transparently in the Technical Steering Committee. +For more details, head to our Sponsorship page.

Conference talks + +

Servo project update — Manuel Rego spoke at the LF Europe Member Summit about the status and long-term vision of the Servo project
Servo: Building a Browser Rendering Engine in Rust (slides) — Rakhi Sharma spoke at the Ubuntu Summit about Servo’s recent work in embedding, layout, and benchmarking

+ +

This month in Servo: Android nightlies, right-to-left, WebGPU, and more!

2024-10-03T00:00:00Z

Servo has had several new features land in our nightly builds over the last month:

as of 2024-09-10, we now support <ul type> and <ul compact> (@simonwuelker, #33303)
as of 2024-09-10, we now support console.timeLog() (@simonwuelker, #33377)
as of 2024-09-10, we now support the encodeInto() method on TextEncoder (@webbeef, @mrobinson, #33360)
as of 2024-09-10, we now support <link rel=prefetch> (@simonwuelker, #33345)
as of 2024-09-12, we now support right-to-left languages, except for floats (@mrobinson, @atbrakhi, #33375)
as of 2024-09-14, we now support ‘table-layout: fixed’ (@Loirooriol, @mrobinson, #33384, #33442)
as of 2024-09-17, we now support the ‘reset’ event on XRReferenceSpace properties (@msub2, #33460)
as of 2024-09-19, we now support the ‘object-fit’ and ‘object-position’ properties (@mrobinson, @Loirooriol, #33479)
as of 2024-09-19, Crypto.getRandomValues() can now take BigInt64Array or BigUint64Array (@msub2, #33485)
as of 2024-09-25, we now support ‘innerText’ and ‘outerText’ on HTMLElement (@Melchizedek6809, @shanehandley, #33312)

, right-to-left layout, ‘table-layout: fixed’, ‘object-fit’, ‘object-position’, crypto.getRandomValues(BigInt64Array) and (BigUint64Array), and innerText and outerText" /> +

Servo’s flexbox support continues to mature, with support for ‘align-self: normal’ (@Loirooriol, #33314), plus corrections to cross-axis percent units in descendants (@Loirooriol, @mrobinson, #33242), automatic minimum sizes (@Loirooriol, @mrobinson, #33248, #33256), replaced flex items (@Loirooriol, @mrobinson, #33263), baseline alignment (@mrobinson, @Loirooriol, #33347), and absolute descendants (@mrobinson, @Loirooriol, #33346).

Our table layout has improved, with support for width and height presentational attributes (@Loirooriol, @mrobinson, #33405, #33425), as well as better handling of ‘border-collapse’ (@Loirooriol, #33452) and extra <col> and <colgroup> columns (@Loirooriol, #33451).

We’ve also started working on the intrinsic sizing keywords ‘min-content’, ‘max-content’, ‘fit-content’, and ‘stretch’ (@Loirooriol, @mrobinson, #33492). +Before we can support them, though, we needed to land patches to calculate intrinsic sizes, including for percent units (@Loirooriol, @mrobinson, #33204), aspect ratios of replaced elements (@Loirooriol, #33240), column flex containers (@Loirooriol, #33299), and ‘white-space’ (@Loirooriol, #33343).

We’ve also worked on our WebGPU support, with support for pipeline-overridable constants (@sagudev, #33291), and major rework to GPUBuffer (@sagudev, #33154) and our canvas presentation (@sagudev, #33387). +As a result, GPUCanvasContext now properly supports (re)configuration and resize on GPUCanvasContext (@sagudev, #33521), presentation is now faster, and both are now more conformant with the spec.

Performance and reliability + +

Servo now sends font data over shared memory (@mrobinson, @mukilan, #33530), saving a huge amount of time over sending font data over IPC channels.

We now debounce resize events for faster window resizing (@simonwuelker, #33297), limit document title updates (@simonwuelker, #33287), and use DirectWrite kerning info for faster text shaping on Windows (@crbrz, #33123).

Servo has a new kind of experimental profiling support that can send profiling data to Perfetto (on all platforms) and HiTrace (on OpenHarmony) via tracing (@atbrakhi, @delan, #33188, #33301, #33324), and we’ve instrumented Servo with this in several places (@atbrakhi, @delan, #33189, #33417, #33436). +This is in addition to Servo’s existing HTML-trace-based profiling support.

We’ve also added a new profiling Cargo profile that builds Servo with the recommended settings for profiling (@delan, #33432). +For more details on building Servo for profiling, benchmarking, and other perf-related use cases, check out our updated Building Servo chapter (@delan, book#22).

Build times + +

The first patch towards splitting up our massive script crate has landed (@sagudev, #33169), over ten years since that issue was first opened.

script is the heart of the Servo rendering engine — it contains the HTML event loop plus all of our DOM APIs and their bindings to SpiderMonkey, and the script thread drives the page lifecycle from parsing to style to layout. +script is also a monolith, with over 170 000 lines of hand-written Rust plus another 520 000 lines of generated Rust, and it has long dominated Servo’s build times to the point of being unwieldy, so it’s very exciting to see that we may be able to change this.

Contributors to Servo can now enjoy faster self-hosted CI runners for our Linux builds (@delan, @mrobinson, #33321, #33389), cutting a typical Linux-only build from over half an hour to under 8 minutes, and a typical T-full try job from over an hour to under 42 minutes.

We’ve now started exploring self-hosted macOS runners (@delan, ci-runners#3), and in the meantime we’ve landed several fixes for self-hosted build failures (@delan, @sagudev, #33283, #33308, #33315, #33373, #33471, #33596).

Beyond the engine + +

You can now download the Servo browser for Android on servo.org (@mukilan, #33435)! +servoshell now supports gamepads by default (@msub2, #33466), builds for OpenHarmony (@mukilan, #33295), and has better navigation on Android (@msub2, #33294).

Tabbed browsing on desktop platforms has become a lot more polished, with visible close and new tab buttons (@Melchizedek6809, #33244), key bindings for switching tabs (@Melchizedek6809, #33319), as well as better handling of empty tab titles (@Melchizedek6809, @mrobinson, #33354, #33391) and the location bar (@webbeef, #33316).

We’ve also fixed several HiDPI bugs in servoshell (@mukilan, #33529), as well as keyboard input and scrolling on Windows (@crbrz, @jdm, #33225, #33252).

Donations + +

Thanks again for your generous support! +We are now receiving 4147 USD/month (+34.7% over August) in recurring donations. +This includes donations from 12 people on LFX, but we will stop accepting donations there soon — please move your recurring donations to GitHub or Open Collective.

Servo is also on thanks.dev, and already eleven GitHub users that depend on Servo are sponsoring us there. +If you use Servo libraries like url, html5ever, selectors, or cssparser, signing up for thanks.dev could be a good way for you (or your employer) to give back to the community.

4147 USD/month

10000

+ +

With this money, we’ve been able to pay for our web hosting and self-hosted CI runners for Windows and Linux builds, and when the time comes, we’ll be able to afford macOS runners, perf bots, and maybe even an Outreachy intern or two! +As always, use of these funds will be decided transparently in the Technical Steering Committee. +For more details, head to our Sponsorship page.

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Reviving the devtools support in Servo

2024-09-20T00:00:00Z

The HTML and CSS inspector is able to display the DOM elements and their attributes and CSS properties.

Servo has been working on improving our Firefox devtools support as part of the Outreachy internship program since June, and we’re thrilled to share significant progress.

Devtools are a set of browser web developer tools that allows you to examine, edit, and debug HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. +Servo leverages existing work from the Firefox devtools to inspect its own websites, employing the same open protocol that is used for connecting to other Firefox instances.

While relying on a third party API allows us to offer this functionality without building it from scratch, it doesn’t come without downsides. +Back in June last year, with the release of Firefox 110, changes to the protocol broke our previous implementation. +The core issue was that the message structure sent between Servo and Firefox for the devtools functionality had changed.

To address this, we first updated an existing patch to fix the connection and list the webviews running in Servo (@fabricedesre, @eerii, @mrobinson, #32475). +We also had to update the structure of some actors (pieces of code that respond to messages sent by Firefox with relevant information), since they changed significantly (@eerii, #32509).

One of the main challenges was figuring out the messages we needed to send back to Firefox. +The source code for their devtools implementation is very well commented and proved to be invaluable. +However, it was also helpful to see the actual messages being sent. +While Servo can show the ones it sends and receives, debugging another instance of Firefox to observe its messages was very useful. +To facilitate this, we made a helper script (@eerii, #32684) using Wireshark to inspect the connection between the devtools client and server, allowing us to view the contents of each packet and search through them.

Support for the console was fixed, enabling the execution of JavaScript code directly in Servo’s webviews and displaying any warnings or errors that the page emits (@eerii, @mrobinson, #32727).

The JavaScript developer console now displays page logs. +It can also run commands.

Finally, the most significant changes involved the DOM inspector. +Tighter integration with Servo’s script module was required to retrieve the properties of each element. +Viewing CSS styles was particularly challenging, since they can come from many places, including the style attribute, a stylesheet, or from ancestors, but @emilio had great insight into where to look. +As a result, it’s now possible to view the HTML tree, and add, remove, or modify any attribute or CSS property (@eerii, @mrobinson, #32655, #32884, #32888, #33025).

There is still work to be done. +Some valuable features like the Network and Storage tabs are still not functional, and parts of the DOM inspector are still barebones. +For example, now that flexbox is enabled by default (@mrobinson, #33186), it would be a good idea to support it in the Layout panel. +We’re working on developer documentation that will be available in the Servo book to make future contributions easier.

That said, the Console and Inspector support has largely landed, and you can enable them with the --devtools flag in servoshell. +For a step-by-step guide on how to use Servo’s devtools, check out the new devtools chapter in the Servo book. +We’d love to hear your feedback on how these work and what additional features you’d find helpful in your workflow.

Many thanks to @eerii and Outreachy for the internship that made this possible!

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