Open Source - Page 8 of 17

Streaming platform: Apache Kafka 2.7 gets new inter-broker API

The Kafka message broker, which has been further developed by the community and Confluent under the umbrella of the Apache Software Foundation, is officially available in version 2.7. The update of the open source project, which is designed for real-time processing of large amounts of data, contains numerous bug fixes, various improvements and some new functions. The Kafka team has made progress especially in efforts to replace ZooKeeper with a self-managed metadata quorum with a view to Release 3.0 (KIP – 500).

Apache Kafka 2.7 offers a new Inter-Broker API for this purpose. It should create the prerequisites for making changes in the In-sync Replica (ISR) faster and more safely. The previous approach, updates of the controller (broker responsible in the Kafka cluster for the status management of partitions and replicas) and the partition leaders in ZooKeeper (znode “https://www.heise.de/brokers/topics/ / partitions / [partitionId] / state “) saved information about zkVersion was accompanied by time delays. In particular, the forwarding of zkVersion by the leader to the controller takes place up to 60 seconds delayed. To prevent future metadata queries from delivering outdated information, the new AlterIsr – API help. It grants the controller the exclusive privilege to update Partition Leader and ISR.

Bill Bejeck from the Developer Relations Team Confluent gives a compact overview of Apache Kafka 2.7

in the video Another measure that should help to replace ZooKeeper is the introduction of a broker-side SCRAM configuration API. As stated in the Kafka Improvement Proposal KIP – 554 in front seen, SCRAM credentials can in future be managed via the Kafka protocol. Version 2.7 of the associated tool kafka-configs has been adapted to the new protocol API.

In the update of the Message Broker there is also a Core Raft implementation in accordance with KIP- 595. A separate “Raft” module contains the core of the consensus protocol. As long as the integration with the controller has not yet been completed, however, Kafka users have a separate server available to test the performance of the Raft implementation.

More details and a complete one The Confluent blog post announcing the new version and the release notes for Apache Kafka 2.7 provide an overview of all new features.

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Algorithms: The New Image of the Old

Rapid advances in machine learning allow a completely new look at the past: Companies such as DeOldify or neural.love use neural networks to clean photos and historical films of scratches, flickering and wobbling, and up to 54 to extrapolate and recolor images per second and 4K resolution. The results are astounding, but historians and media scholars are skeptical, reports Technology Review in its current issue.

The idea of using machine learning to do this To process old pictures and films and to color them automatically is technically obvious. Coloring is, however, much more difficult for an AI than to distinguish between cat and dog pictures, for example. In order to continuously come closer to reality, the AI needs a calculable measure of the quality of the coloring. The simplest way to compare the colored image pixel by pixel with the original color image works rather poorly than right. The catch with this method: “Neural networks have a tendency to cheat,” says Dana Kelley from the start-up DeOldify. They tend to produce “averaged images” as far as possible in terms of color.

Fake or reality? With his software of the same name, which 2018 was published as an open source project, the start-up had its first technical breakthrough that circumvents these difficulties: DeOldify uses a technology that is now mainly associated with deepfake videos: Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). In the meantime, Antic has licensed a revised version of its software to the genealogy platform MyHeritage – which aims to attract potential new customers by processing historical family photos.

This article is from issue 1 / 2021 of the Technology Review. The booklet is from 17. 12. 2020 available in stores and directly in the heise shop. Highlights from the magazine:

To not only have photos, Instead, transforming moving images from historical films into new-looking videos is even more necessary than true-to-life coloring: the film must be freed from scratches and flickering, extrapolated to a higher resolution, then colored and finally post-processed. In order to automate all of these steps, the Polish start-up neural.love has set up a software pipeline that relies partly on open source solutions and partly on software developed in-house.

No reconstructions The results look amazingly real – but they are completely Not. Therefore neural.love repeatedly emphasizes that the videos from the computer are not reconstructions of the historical material. “We don’t want to replace the old films,” says Elizbeth Peck from neural.love. “But we’re making it more accessible”.

Lorenz Engell, media scientist at the Bauhaus University Weimar, does not want to know anything about the “rhetoric of the closer, of the more tangible”. There is no evidence whatsoever that processed images are perceived by viewers as more authentic, he says. The photo historian Anton Holzer grants the new computer-generated images of the story “a certain fascination”, but from a scientific point of view, he also views the technical processing with due skepticism. “Of course, that slightly distorts the view of the original document,” he says. “Is it our goal to read this historical material without historical breaks, as if what can be seen in the picture only happened yesterday?”

The new picture (11 Pictures) Children deliver vegetables to be sold in a market in Boston. The picture, restored and colored by DeOldify, looks almost idyllic in color …

(Image: DeOldify) (wst)

OSSSO brings cleanliness and order to open workshops

Want to saw something quickly, but can’t find the saw and quickly vacuum up the wood chips that have been flying around for weeks while searching – anyone who is regularly in an open workshop or hack space probably knows the problem. But instead of always doing the same work, it should be possible to design the systems behind it better. At least that’s what people thought in the hobby heaven of Stuttgart and developed OSSO. The abbreviation is quite self-explanatory for O pen S ource – S ystem for S tidiness and O guideline for open workshops.

Behind this are six sub-projects: osSHELF, osVAC, osCLEAN, osBOX, osTRAY and osWALL, each of which addresses a known workshop problem and is implemented in different ways. For example, under osVAC, the vacuum cleaner concept of the hobby sky was rethought, which had previously often led to poor air thanks to many different vacuum cleaners with different connections and high bag consumption. Now there is a coupling system with a focus on the D 32 – standard hose and a workshop vacuum cleaner with cyclone separator. The resulting print templates for the numerous adapters that combine the existing vacuum cleaner parts are available for download on the Thingiverse 3D printing platform. Further developments are expressly desired.

Please develop further osCLEAN has also been tried and tested in practice Bringing cleaning and cleaning agents together properly. Plaster walls are now hanging in the workshop, on which the devices required, such as hand brushes and cloth rags, can be stored in a space-saving manner. OsWALL should work according to a similar principle. Since the corona pandemic is currently making it difficult to work together, the project is still in its infancy. There are already a few workshop walls with prepared suspensions, but in Stuttgart there is still room for improvement in the options for conversion and reconstruction. Some tools are difficult to assign to their place and when new devices are moved in, reorganization is often tedious.

More order with OSSSO (4 pictures) With osSHELF, different boxes can also be stowed efficiently.

(Image: OSSSO / Hobbyhimmel) Since the project is open source, everyone in Hobby Heaven is happy about anyone interested in developing the templates or implementing their own ideas and uploading their variants to Thingiverse. Short introductions on YouTube have recently been added to the range to make entry into the workshop as easy as possible. There, equipment such as saws, grinding and drilling machines are presented and it is explained what to look out for when using them. The videos may explicitly be used by other workshops and therefore do not replace the introduction on the respective device.

Competition for Makerspaces Finally, we are looking for other, even smaller, projects in our current Makerspace Challenge. Show us your hacks and little helpers against chaos and disorder in the workshop. We will award the three best entries with a basket full of tools and filaments. In addition to the general awesome factor, the focus is on reproducibility and the price-performance ratio. The deadline for submissions via the new Make Projects platform ends on 31. January 2021. (hch)

Briefly informed: delivery bottlenecks, virus variant, parcel delivery, Threema

Delivery bottlenecks for IT products threaten well into the year 2021 Graphics cards, game consoles, webcams: many hardware components cannot be bought at the moment, the warehouses are empty. Reasons for this are the strong demand, triggered by the boom in home work and video conferences as well as problems with air freight, writes the computer magazine c’t in its current issue. For example, some of the international air freight is transported on board passenger planes, of which far fewer have been flying since spring. An easing of the delivery situation for hardware components is currently not foreseeable. Because of the global vaccine distribution, transport capacities will also be scarce in the first half of the year 2021.

Fortress against Corona: EU seals itself off against virus variant With flight bans and border closings, Europe is arming itself against a highly contagious one discovered in Great Britain Variant of the coronavirus. According to initial analyzes by British scientists, the mutation has an unusually large number of genetic changes, especially in the spike protein, reports the German press agency. Germany has therefore largely stopped flights from Great Britain, landings from the country are prohibited from midnight. This is based on an order issued by the Federal Ministry of Transport on Sunday, with the exception of pure cargo flights.

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Parcel delivery in favor of inner cities Online retail is the big winner of the Corona crisis. Business in the cities is suffering. To compensate for this, politicians from the CDU and CSU are now proposing a package levy with which an “inner city fund” is to be financed. They advocate introducing a package fee for online trading, “the amount of which is proportional to the order value”. The coalition partner SPD supports the proposal. The FDP and especially the retail sector itself are not very enthusiastic.

Threema apps are now completely open-source The paid messenger Threema becomes open source and thus reveals the source code. “To celebrate we are lowering the app price by 28. December by 50 Percent “, writes the provider in an announcement. Threema already had documentation of the cryptographic process, but now the complete inspection and approval of the code follows. For the time being, it can only be compiled reproducibly under Android.

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CoraLibre: The Corona warning app without Google services

The Corona Warning App (CWA), which was or is being developed by SAP and Deutsche Telekom on behalf of the Federal Government, is known to need Google Play Services on Android in order to function. This means that an estimated several million people in Germany cannot install the CWA because their smartphone does not meet this requirement.

This is But not only about people for whom their privacy is particularly important and who have therefore removed all Google services from Android, but also, for example, all customers of the Chinese manufacturer Huawei who do not use Google’s services due to legal requirements of the US government may. In order to solve this problem, a group of developers around the app developer cosee GmbH from Darmstadt is developing the open source app CoraLibre – a fork of the official CWA that is supposed to run on Android phones without Google.

No contact tracing without Play Services Shortly after the presentation of the Contact Tracing API developed together with Apple, Google promised to take care of it that it will eventually get by without Play Services, but that doesn’t seem to have a high priority. The group does not even respond to corresponding inquiries on this topic. So it seems to be up to the open source developers to ensure that more people can use the Android version of the CWA. And that’s no small task. In an interview with heise online , the cosee developers explained to us exactly how the Corona warning app works without Google.

Google has therefore integrated its implementation of the Contact Tracing API into the Play Services in order to be able to update this component of the operating system outside of the normal operating system updates. As it is well known, a significant proportion of all Android devices receive updates very late or not at all, so this makes sense for now. However, this means for the CoraLibre developers that they have to implement the Google / Apple API from scratch. And that’s not all. Because Play Services are also responsible for background activities for Android apps, they also had to develop their own mechanism to keep their app active in the background. This was a problem with very early contact tracing apps, such as those from TraceTogether from Singapore, which had to run in the foreground in order to work and were therefore considered to be quite ineffective in real-life situations. The cosee developers solve this with a notification in the status bar of Android, which is supposed to keep the background process for exchanging the Bluetooth data alive.

The CoraLibre project consists of two separate parts: An SDK, which represents the implementation of the Contact Tracing API, and the actual application. The application is a fork of the CWA, which modifies the code from the upstream project by SAP and Telekom so that it works with the CoraLibre SDK. The CoraLibre developers had first tried to bring their code directly upstream in the CWA project, but submitted topics were put on the back burner because the CWA developers were under time pressure. Accordingly, they now operate their own fork, whose code they want to change as little as possible. According to their own statements, they communicate corresponding modifications back to the upstream developers as early as possible. The aim of the CoraLibre project is to have an app in the end that works as exactly as possible like the official app of the federal government, only on Android devices without Play Services.

Millions of Germans are left out The app could potentially involve millions more citizens in contact tracing. Since politicians and experts repeatedly emphasize how important it is – especially now with the daily rapidly increasing positive SARS-CoV-2 tests in the population and the associated overload of the health authorities – that as many citizens as possible use mobile contact tracing to participate, that seems to be a worthwhile goal. Above all, segments of the population could be reached that have not been involved in digital contact tracing to a large extent.

So far, CoraLibre is still not ready for everyday use and is only available as a test version that has to be installed manually and should only be used on test devices. However, the developers hope to be able to publish a version of the app in Google’s Play Store in the next few weeks. The project is partially funded by public funds, including from the Hessian state government. However, the cosee employees are also very happy to receive support from other open source developers. Interested parties who have experience with Android development can participate in the development of the app on GitHub.

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Threema is now completely open source

As announced in late summer, the developers of the crypto messenger Threema have published the code of the Threema apps as open source. In addition to detailed documentation of the cryptographic process (white paper PDF) and regular security audits, the open sourcing service is intended to guarantee full transparency. As a result, it is no longer necessary to believe the developers’ statements or to trust the assessment of third parties.

The code is subject to the AGPLv3 license, and thanks to so-called reproducible builds, however, can be for the time being only under Android, verify that this corresponds to what the user has installed via Google Play Store or on the device. Thus, for example, manipulated apps can be recognized.

The Threema developers provide the source code via GitHub. The repositories for Threema for Android and Threema for iOS can be found here.

Threema currently costs 1, 49 Euro in the Google Play Store and 1, 99 Euros in the iOS App Store.

More code security with open source: One year GitHub Security Lab

As part of the Universe 2019 GitHub presented a new initiative to improve code security a year ago. GitHub Security Lab aims to help secure the open source ecosystem. The cooperation between all parties interested in secure software (developers, companies, security researchers) should be simplified and made more effective. The partners at the Security Lab include Google, Uber, Mozilla and Oracle.

Security research, community and engagement in the industry The initiative focuses on three areas: security research, building a community and getting involved in industry. At its core, GitHub Security Lab mainly consists of a team of security researchers who focus on finding vulnerabilities in open source software (OSS) before they become an exploit – i.e. before an attacker can exploit the vulnerability. GitHub states that the team already found 400 issues in the first year through variant analysis, controlled by its own code analysis engine CodeQL, targeted fuzzing and manual code review Has. Large projects such as Google Chrome, Android, the Linux kernel, Ubuntu and Java enterprise applications were also affected by this.

According to its own information, the team should also have helped in an active attack on stop an OSS supply chain. In addition, the initiative apparently recently helped to identify and remedy a critical remote vulnerability in the German COVID 19 infrastructure.

Destinations for 2021 For the coming year, the team has set itself the goal of further improving the workflow for eliminating OSS vulnerabilities and further involving the community. In addition, the research team wants to expand the spectrum and not just focus on vulnerabilities in open source code. OSS components made available via package managers are also increasingly at the center of attacks, for example through hijacking and mailware. This is where Security Lab sees an opportunity to help.

Finally, GitHub Security Lab wants to help bridge the gap between the security and developer communities. Building CodeQL queries is a first step, but the research team wants to expand its efforts, for example in the form of new educational content and support from contributions from the community and the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF). More information about GitHub Security Lab and its first anniversary can be found in the post on the GitHub blog.

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Encrypting messenger: Threema apps are now completely open-source

Threema becomes open source and thus reveals the source code. “To celebrate, we are lowering the app price by 28. December by 50%”, the Messenger writes -Provider in the announcement. Threema already had documentation of the cryptographic process, now the complete inspection and release of the code follows.

According to Threema, the code is subject to the AGPLv3 license and is therefore generally freely available to users. For the time being, however, it can only be compiled reproducibly under Android. In this way you can ensure that Threema’s Android apps actually use the published code. Apple’s guidelines didn’t make it easy to offer reproducible builds, but they are working on them. The first announcement that Threema should become Open Source was made at the end of the summer, including the announcement of the entry of the investment company Afinum.

Security instead of data collection Since the messenger is still chargeable, it must of course not be simply set up again yourself. A license check prevents new Threema IDs from being created with the self-compiled apps. If you want to use a self-built app, you have to import a backup into the app with an existing ID that was previously created with a purchased Threema app. Only thanks to paying users is it possible to ensure privacy and security of the messenger without data collection or advertising, says Threema.

Threema uses the open source NaCl library for encryption. The correct application of the encryption could already be checked by manually checking the encrypted messages. The messenger uses two ways of encryption; The end-to-end encryption between the communication participants themselves and an additional encryption between the app and the server so that it cannot be found out by tapping network packets who is communicating with whom.

Threema is also working on offering a multi-device function. Since the own security requirements made this very difficult, the development is still taking. The provider has at least already stated that they want to try to use a “mediator server” that takes over the coordination. Several keys should be derived from the user ID in order to prevent the server from knowing which ID belongs to which device.

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Linux: Experimental Wayland driver for Wine presented

Collabora developer Alexandros Frantzis introduces an experimental Wayland driver for the Windows compatibility layer Wine. For the graphical display of apps in Linux, Wine usually interacts as a client with the X server. However, Linux desktop environments increasingly rely on the Wayland protocol instead of X 11. For this reason, Wine previously had to use Xwayland as an intermediate step in order to pass content through to the Wayland compositor. The Wayland driver for Wine now presented makes this step superfluous

The Wayland driver for Wine is at an early stage. On the Collabora website, Frantzis gives an overview of the development status. Up until now, GDI and OpenGL / DirectX applications have run on one display. Users can set the windows to full screen, resize and maximize, but not minimize them. In addition to mouse inputs, keyboard inputs are also possible, but so far only in the QWERTY layout.

Well-received These first successes prompted Frantzis to present the driver on the “wine-devel” mailing list and to ask for feedback and assessments. The Wine developers initially welcomed the contribution and are now advising whether and how the driver can be integrated into the Wine code.

A short video on the Collabora Youtube channel shows some programs that already work with the Wayland driver, including Windows Explorer, Gimp, Firefox and the game “The Batttle for Wesnoth”. Frantzis announces the intention to cooperate with another open source project that works on the compatibility of Wine with the graphic API Vulkan in Wayland mode.

Interested parties can find more information in the announcement on the Collabora website. The discussion about the Wayland driver can be followed on the Wine mailing list.

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Open CL: Portable Computing Language 1.6 supports LLVM / Clang 11

The open source implementation of OpenCL PoCL (Portable Computing Language) is now available for download in version 1.6. The new release of the OpenCL implementation designed for CPUs and accelerators with LLVM backend works with LLVM / Clang 11. While only LLVM 10 is officially supported, developers should also be able to work with variants down to LLVM 6.0.

More power for CUDA The project, originally started under the name Portable OpenCL, covers the entire range of functions of OpenCL 1.2 from, as well as individual parts of OpenCL 2.0. Other new features in PoCL 1.6 include higher performance when used with Nvidia’s CUDA, improved support for OpenCL debugging and expanded options for packaging PoCL binaries. According to the PoCL development team, the optimizations that have been incorporated show performance increases in the CUDA backend, particularly in benchmarks that include local storage (e.g. FFT and GEMM). In many cases PoCL is now on par with Nvidia’s proprietary OpenCL driver.

Developers now have greater flexibility when packing and distributing PoCL binaries. While the build computer and the host machine had to have the same driver support when building the binary files, PoCL 1.6 now checks at runtime whether the devices that match the compiled drivers are available. Therefore, with the package manager Conda, PoCL binary packages with CUDA support for Linux-x 86 _ 64 and Linux-ppc 64 le.

The release notes provide a complete overview of all new features in PoCL 1.6 and more details on the improvements.

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Digital clock test: Detect dementia with neural networks

Erlangen researchers have employed artificial neural networks with clock tests in order to teach them how to evaluate them independently. On this basis, they want to bring out open source software that will make it easier for neurological specialists to diagnose dementia.

The 1993 the clock test published by the psychiatrist Kenneth Shulman, the test subjects should enter the times of the day in a circle printed on a piece of paper and the hands that should represent a given time. It is supposed to help diagnose spatial disorientation and dementia.

Researchers at the Chair for Pattern Recognition at the Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) have created artificial neural networks with 2500 fed such tests. The tests come from the specialist in neurology and psychiatry Prof. Dr. med. Markus Weih, who collected them for four years in his practice from 1315 patients. The data was digitized and entered into the neural networks. These should meanwhile be able to correctly assign in more than 96 percent of the cases whether it is a pathological finding; In over 98 percent, the assigned disease level is correct, according to an article in the specialist magazine Nature .

Second opinion via app The attending medical professional awards the Tests usually scores, similar to school grades between one and six. One point means a perfect solution, at three the clock is already faulty, maybe only one pointer is drawn, but the visual-spatial representation is still ok. As the number of points increases, the drawn clocks become more and more unclear: the spaces between the digits are uneven, the order is incorrect, only a few digits are entered, they are outside the circle, are just scribbles. From three points onwards, medical professionals assume a relevant cognitive disorder, often in the context of dementia.

In Erlangen, images of computed tomography and magnetic resonance tomography and X-ray images are otherwise fed into the artificial networks in order to make them useful for the To be able to use diagnostics. In contrast, the watch tests were drawings, explains Prof. Andreas Maier from the Chair of Pattern Recognition. Medical professionals should also be able to use the watch test in the future, with the help of a special app that is still to come on the market, they could take pictures of tests and get an evaluation immediately. Anyone who is unsure about the assessment of a test receives a kind of second opinion.

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The RPC framework gRPC Kotlin reaches version 1.0

In order to be able to better use the advantages of the Java alternative Kotlin such as expressiveness, security and support for writing asynchronous code with coroutines for its internal gRPC infrastructure especially for Android and cloud development, Google implemented the implementation gRPC Kotlin built – and released as open source in April 2020. Now the RPC framework has reached the first major version and is being launched with revised documentation, numerous bug fixes and expanded platform support.

Version 1.0 of gRPC Kotlin not only benefits from Kotlin’s coroutines for reactive input / output when creating data transmission objects and the services surrounding them, but also uses the Flow API to process streams with reactive input / output. In order to optimize the generated code for Android clients in particular, gRPC Kotlin uses the lite mode of gRPC Java: It enables Protobuf compilers to generate smaller, more powerful classes. The artifact grpc-kotlin-stub-lite depends on the associated grpc-protobuf-lite from. The generated Kotlin stub client can be used in the same way as on the JVM.

It also works without a JVM The Lite mode also allows the use of GraalVM Native Image, so that developers can create applications that compiled from Ahead-of-time (AOT) without a JVM native images run out. This enables smaller applications to be built that require less memory and are therefore also suitable for environments with limited resources. An example project shows how a native client application can be created with an only 14 MByte executable that, according to Google, starts in a split second, Kontakt records to the server, makes a request and processes the response.

The gRPC (google / general-purpose Remote Procedure Call) developed by Google is an open source framework for calling up functions in distributed computer systems and is primarily used by developers for communication between microservices. It uses the HTTP / 2 protocol for bidirectional streaming and protocol buffers as Interface Definition Language (IDL) or as the underlying message exchange format.

gRPC is primarily aimed at web and Android applications, but works in principle cross-platform and is available for a number of programming languages - including Java, C ++, Go, Python and Ruby. The gRPC released as Open Source by Google 2015 has since proven itself as an “incubating project” at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).

Google sees the advantages of gRPC Kotlin not only on the client side, but also uses the RPC Framework also for backend services. With gRPC Kotlin, these applications should be particularly easy to package and make available in containerized form wherever Docker containers or JVM apps can be run – for example in Kubernetes clusters. However, Google is also targeting its own serverless computing service called Cloud Run, which was officially launched a year ago and promises a fully managed infrastructure for application operations.

Further information on version 1.0 of gRPC Kotlin can be found in the blog post about the publication of the major release as well as on the GitHub pages of the project.

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heise offer: iX 1/2021: Data Science and Machine Learning with Python

The cover story of the new iX 1 / 2021 explores the question of why Python has become the language of choice for data science and machine learning . We show how easy it is to analyze and visualize data with Jupyter notebooks, and how the machine learning framework PyTorch supports developers in creating ML applications.

The second focus of the issue is dedicated to the secure use of the public cloud. The articles describe best practices for secure cloud operation and provide an overview of compliance tools that provide an overview of the state of security in all environments including the cloud.

Further topics in iX 1 / 2021 are modern open source tools for configuration management, like AI for more security provides as well as instructions on how the hardware of IoT devices can be hardened against attacks. In the traditional iX New Year’s puzzle, you can win a WiFi 6 access point, a Powerline WiFi set and a NAS, among other things.

The January – iX is now available in well-stocked magazine and train station bookshops or in the Heise shop:

Buy PDF or printed booklet in the heise shop find kiosk iX 1 / 2021: content (odi)

Ray tracing in the Vulkan low-level API: SDK and graphics driver available

After a six-month test phase, the Khronos Group consortium has published a first final ray tracing implementation for the Vulkan graphics API. Corresponding graphics effects run on both GeForce and Radeon graphics cards and use the ray tracing cores of modern GPUs (RTX 2000 / 3000, RX 6000). On older models the whole thing works via compute shaders, but in principle with significantly lower frame rates.

Vulkan version 1.2. 162 contains seven raytracing extensions, including VK_KHR_acceleration_structure , VK_KHR_ray_tracing_pipeline and VK_KHR_ray_query . The current Software Development Kit (SDK) provides developers with tools for integrating and testing ray tracing graphics effects in 3D games.

AMD and Nvidia provide suitable drivers: Vulkan ray tracing works with AMD graphics cards from the Radeon software adrenalin 20. 11. 3 and with Nvidia GPUs from the GeForce 460. 89 respectively the Linux version 460. 27. 04. AMD’s Linux driver has not yet received a corresponding update.

Simple DirectX – 12 – Porting With the help of the open source HLSL compiler DXC, the porting of Microsoft’s Windows API DirectX 12 with integrated DirectX Raytracing (DXR) to Vulkan turn out to be very simple. In addition, porting layers such as Proton can display DXR graphic effects with Vulkan.

Nvidia has on 15. December 2020 released the patch 1.4.0 for “Quake 2 RTX”, which the Raytracing implementation from Vulkan’s own extension VK_NV_ray_tracing updated to Khronos’ final version. As a result, the first-person shooter now also runs on AMD graphics cards, but so far not particularly fast: A GeForce RTX 3090 achieves about twice as high frame rates as a Radeon RX 6900. Mind you, “Quake 2 RTX” has not yet been optimized for AMD’s hardware ray tracing; rather, Nvidia may have tailored the game to its own architectures.

Quake 2 RTX (vanilla presets) AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT MSI GeForce RTX 3000 Gaming X Trio 515 p 269, 7 fps 515, 9 fps 1440 p 89, 2 fps 176, 5 fps 2160 p 52, 8 fps 106, 6 fps measured under Windows 10 (20 H2), Ryzen 9 5900 X, 32 GByte DDR4 – 3600 – RAM (mma)

Development environment: Eclipse 2020-12 with numerous extensions

The open source desktop IDE Eclipse is in version 2020 – 12 published. It is available in expandable IDE packages for different purposes and programming languages. A Java installation is not a mandatory requirement, at least not when using the Eclipse installer or when installing one of the popular IDE packages for Java, for Enterprise Java, for C / C ++, for Web and JavaScript, as well as for Rust. The new “Eclipse IDE for Embedded C / C ++ Developers” for writing C / C ++ code especially for ARM and RISC-V processors also contains the Java runtime environment required to run it.

The 14 IDE packages are available for Windows, Linux and macOS ready. In Linux, Eclipse now supports in addition to x 64 – also 64 – bit ARM processors. This means that the IDE can be run natively on a Raspberry Pi 3 or 4, for example, without the x 86 emulator. The new Eclipse version contains adjustments and corrections for macOS 11 aka Big Sur. Apple’s own new ARM processor M1 is not yet supported natively.

Java 15 built-in Support for Java 15, which had to be installed in the previous Eclipse version, is now permanently installed. Code coverage, for recording test coverage, now works with Java 15. Text blocks, multi-line strings that were still a preview feature in Java 14 are now final and can be use productively. The two preview features “Pattern Matching for instanceof” and “Records” remained in comparison to Java 14 same or syntactically unchanged. Only the “Sealed Classes” are new. They only allow certain classes to inherit from them, which can be useful with interfaces. In Eclipse, text blocks can be created using keyboard shortcuts and records can be created using a dialog. If a class that extends a sealed class is missing “sealed”, “non-sealed” or “final”, this can be done using a quick fix ( Ctrl + 1 ) correct.

Clean up Java code Code completion behaves different in two ways. On the one hand, existing items are overwritten by default. To prevent this, the Ctrl key must be pressed instead of the other way around. On the other hand, the IDE inserts the most suitable one as a parameter instead of the parameter name. In Eclipse 2020 – 12 there are 15 new functions for cleaning up Java source code, all of which the AutoRefactor plug-in. Cleanup functions can be applied manually to projects, packages or files or can be executed automatically as save actions when a file is saved. The new functions delete unnecessary or duplicated code, use new language features, adhere to a given style or optimize the code with regard to speed and memory consumption.

In the look of the operating system A new user interface called “System” has been added to the existing light and dark modes. The system theme takes on the colors and appearance of the operating system. It can be activated in the settings in General | Appearance . The Eclipse team has also revised the light mode in macOS: toolbars, status bar and backgrounds now shine in white instead of gray.

RIP – Farewell to Dani During the development of the release Eclipse 2020 – 12 Daniel Megert, Eclipse developer from the very beginning, passed away unexpectedly. Even before Eclipse 2001 became open source, he was active in the original team of Object Technology International in Zurich, Switzerland. Daniel Megert most recently headed the Eclipse Platform and Java Development Tools (JDT) projects.

Upgrade or Download More details and the respective innovations of the Eclipse projects involved in the issue are on the website for 2020 – 12 Find release. The new Eclipse IDE packages can be installed via the Eclipse Installer or downloaded as a ZIP file. Updating an existing Eclipse IDE can be done via Help | Initiate Check for Updates (for older versions, the “Latest Eclipse Release” update site must be activated).

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