mmstick

The shop has been rebased onto version 7.3.0 of the elementary appcenter. This update will fix most of the issues with pop-shop today. It improves responsiveness and fixes many possible crashes.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ndlug.org/post/66600

Today we have the one, the only, Jeremy Soller of System76 and the BDFL of RedoxOS on the show. He's had his fair share of drama with the libadwaita stuff but he's been around in the FOSS world for a long time so I was very curious to hear his take on certain things especially involving PopOS.

These updates will improve performance, bring more hardware compatibility, fix various issues, and most importantly of all, resolves some outstanding major security vulnerabilities that were recently discovered to affect all kernels from 6.1.0 through 6.4.1.

There is, however, a known regression with USB-C docks on 12th (ADL) and 13th (RPL) generation Intel laptops which causes occasional system freezes. There are some known workarounds here. USB-C to DisplayPort is not affected.

We've decided not to delay the kernel update any further because fixing the vulnerabilities are more important. In the meantime, there is an issue on Intel's DRM repository for tracking this issue: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/intel/-/issues/8421. We will quickly patch the regression the moment that we or Intel finds the cause and solution.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/2369890

We just added Alexandrite to the server, it's an alternative UI for Lemmy created by Sheodox who worked tirelessly to make the necessary changes to we could host it ourselves here. So go to https://a.lemmy.world and have a look!

He continues to update it constantly, you can follow the development on his github page or in his community. If you like what you see and want to support him, why not buy him a coffee? :)

For those who don't have Lemmy World as their home instance and want to use Alexandrite, either ask your instance admins to add it or go to https://alexandrite.app!

Driver status

To check if you have a functioning driver, run nvidia-smi in a terminal. If the driver is functioning, it will actively report the GPU(s) it found on the system, and the version of the driver loaded.

$ nvidia-smi
Tue Jul 25 22:14:24 2023       
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 535.86.05              Driver Version: 535.86.05    CUDA Version: 12.2     |

How to reinstall

If this is not working, purge and reinstall the drivers on the system.

sudo apt purge ~nnvidia
sudo apt install nvidia-driver-535
sudo reboot

System doesn't have display on boot

Follow https://support.system76.com/articles/bootloader/ and repeat above step

Freezes and suspend/resume issues

These are most typically related to power management. You can attempt to partially rule this out by disabling PCIE active state power management by disabling it in the firmware, or using the pcie_aspm=off kernel boot option. You would ideally want this on to conserve energy and reduce heat.

Use sudo kernelstub -a {{OPTION}} to add boot options, and sudo kernelstub -d {{OPTION}} to remove.

Some systems have fatal errors when the CPU migrates to a low power state, which can be limited with the processor.max_cstate or intel_idle.max_cstate kernel boot parameters. A value of processor.max_cstate=0 disables it entirely, which will similarly cause higher energy drain and heat. If it resolves the problem, incrementally raise it until the issue reoccurs.

If you're certain that the issue is caused by the NVIDIA driver, you can try out different driver options by creating a file in /etc/modprobe.d/, such as a hypothetical /etc/modprobe.d/zz-nvidia.conf.

Some of these are automatically generated by system76-power when switching between graphics modes. So if you are manually setting these, be wary that these can conflict with different modes, or the system76-power.conf will override your settings if your file's name comes alphabetically before it.

All systems should have at least this defined, unless you are using the NVIDIA dGPU only for compute.

options nvidia-drm modeset=1

For hybrid graphics laptops, it will be necessary to define these

blacklist i2c_nvidia_gpu
alias i2c_nvidia_gpu off
options nvidia NVreg_DynamicPowerManagement=0x02

However, if the hardware has issues with GC6, change DynamicPowerManagement to

options nvidia NVreg_DynamicPowerManagement=0x01

Also, systems with issues after resuming from S3 suspend may require

options nvidia NVreg_PreserveVideoMemoryAllocations=1

In an absolute worst case scenario where suspend totally broken, you can try disabling these

sudo systemctl disable --now nvidia-hibernate.service nvidia-resume.service nvidia-suspend.service

But remember to undo these changes when there are new driver updates to check and see if the new driver has resolved these issues for your system.

Bad multi-monitor performance

Open nvidia-settings and enable "Force Full Composition Pipeline" on all monitors. Disable "Sync to VBlank" and "Allow Flipping" in the OpenGL settings. Edit /etc/environment and set this to your highest supported refresh rate. If it is 144 Hz on video output DP-1, you would set:

CLUTTER_DEFAULT_FPS=144
__GL_SYNC_DISPLAY_DEVICE=DP-1
__GL_SYNC_TO_VBLANK=0

High energy consumption

Powerful graphics cards may lean more aggressively to performance than energy efficiency by default. You can monitor theoretical energy consumption by running nvidia-smi dmon in a terminal. The pwr column guesses the watts used by the GPU.

These settings will not persist across reboots.

If you want a power limit of 100 watts, you can set that with sudo nvidia-smi -pl 100. Use nvidia-smi -q -d POWER to get the min and max power limit.

On my desktop RTX 3080 graphics card, this would drop energy consumption while watching a 1080p video on YouTube from 110-125W to 99W.

To further restrict energy consumption, an upper limit for graphics and memory clocks can be set. Use nvidia-smi -q -d CLOCK to get the maximum clocks. Then set a desired range for graphics clocks with sudo nvidia-smi -lgc {{MIN}},{{MAX}}, and a desired range for memory clocks with sudo nvidia-smi -lmc {{MIN}},{{MAX}}. Note that the NVIDIA driver may not honor the exact values you define.

By forcing minimum clocks as below, that same YouTube video drops it to 46W despite no perceivable difference.

sudo nvidia-smi -lgc 0,210
sudo nvidia-smi -lmc 0,405

I found a workaround

Do share what solutions you've found for your hardware, and the graphics model that was affected. For laptops, it would be useful for us and others to share the DMI IDs of the affected system. DMI IDs can be be helpful for those searching the web for issues with their laptop, and can also be used by system76-power to automatically apply known workarounds for known-affected systems.

You can run this script in a terminal to print DMI info:

for dmi_file in /sys/devices/virtual/dmi/id/*_{name,version}; do
    echo $dmi_file; echo -n '  '; cat $dmi_file
done

Pipewire natively supports a filter to create a 7.1 virtual surround sound device that will work with any headphones or earphones. It's not well documented, so I decided to write a step-by-step guide for enabling it in Pop!

How it Works

Sound is distorted by your head and shoulders relative to your ears in slightly different ways based on the direction the sound is coming from. The distortion, which is known as HRIR (head-related impulse response), is how our brains are able to interpret sound spatially, despite ours ears only being capable of receiving stereo audio.

Pipewire is able to achieve a convincing 7.1 surround sound effect either by using either a SOFA (spatially oriented acoustic data) spatializer, or a HRTF (head-related transfer function) convolver to interpolate a replicated 7.1 HRIR input onto a 7.1 surround input, mimicking the natural process by which we hear sound spatially.

A replicated 7.1 HRIR input is created by placing microphones in the ears of an artificial dummy, and measuring the differences in sound it experienced while listening to a 7.1 surround sound system. Which is why we perceive surround sound in headphones.

SOFA takes this technology to the next level with a more advanced algorithm that can process many additional forms of data inputs to improve the surround sound effect.

Option 1: SOFA Spatializer

Step 1: Copy the following 7.1 SOFA spatializer filter-chain config locally. This creates a virtual output sink with 7.1 surround sound channels.

mkdir -p ~/.config/pipewire/filter-chain.conf.d/
curl -o ~/.config/pipewire/filter-chain.conf.d/spatializer.conf \
    https://gist.githubusercontent.com/mmstick/039422a63c73a09e998d08608abaee43/raw/9c4dfef5a447fe25a47e3492e518e134e57ee9d4/7.1-spatializer.conf

Step 2: Download a SOFA DTF for the filter to utilize as its input.

sudo mkdir -p /usr/share/pipewire/sofa/
sudo curl -o /usr/share/pipewire/sofa/dtf.sofa \
    https://sofacoustics.org/data/database_sofa_0.6/ari/dtf%20b_nh724.sofa

Then go to Step 4 below

Option 2: HRIR Convolver

Step 1: Copy the 7.1 filter-chain config locally. This creates a virtual output sink with 7.1 surround sound channels.

mkdir -p ~/.config/pipewire/filter-chain.conf.d/
cp /usr/share/pipewire/filter-chain/sink-virtual-surround-7.1-hesuvi.conf \
    ~/.config/pipewire/filter-chain.conf.d/virtual-surround.conf

Step 2: Download a 7.1 HRIR wav file from the HRTF Database, such as Atmos or CMSS-3D. Then move it into your local pipewire configuration.

mkdir -p ~/.config/pipewire/hrir/
mv ~/Downloads/atmos.wav ~/.config/pipewire/hrir/atmos.wav

Step 3: Edit the copied virtual-surround config to use this wav file.

sed -i "s#hrir_hesuvi/hrir.wav#${HOME}/.config/pipewire/hrir/atmos.wav#g" \
    ~/.config/pipewire/filter-chain.conf.d/virtual-surround.conf

Start the filter and test it

Step 4: Start pipewire with the filter-chain config. The virtual surround device will now exist as long as this is running in the background.

pipewire -c filter-chain.conf

Step 5: Select the virtual surround sink output device and try it out.

• https://www2.iis.fraunhofer.de/AAC/7.1auditionOutLeader_v2_rtb.mp4
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClpEj1ayNSs

Side Effects

There's a slight audio latency increase from using virtual surround sound, depending on how fast the CPU is. It is a simple process though so the performance cost is slight.

Stereo audio sources should have the same sound before and after. Surround sound content will sound as they were intended to be heard, and it could help with dialogue in some movies being difficult to hear. Especially if you are able to configure the volume of the center speaker channel where dialogue is usually played.

Help

Any help with finding a way to automate this when plugging in headphones would be great.

The display preview in cosmic-setting's wallpaper settings page will now show how the wallpaper will look like with the scaling mode selected. There's currently "Fit to Screen", "Stretch", and "Zoom".

Fit to Screen

Stretch

Zoom

Screenshots of the new widget and wallpaper settings page are in the post on Fosstodon.