Pl chevron_right

Aryan Kaushik: Open Forms is now 0.4.0 - and the GUI Builder is here

news.movim.eu / PlanetGnome • 3 months from now • 3 minutes

Open Forms is now 0.4.0 - and the GUI Builder is here

A quick recap for the newcomers

Ever been to a conference where you set up a booth or tried to collect quick feedback and experienced the joy of:

Captive portal logout
Timeouts
Flaky Wi-Fi drivers on Linux devices
Poor bandwidth or dead zones

Meme showcasing wifi fails when using forms

This is exactly what happened while setting up a booth at GUADEC. The Wi-Fi on the Linux tablet worked, we logged into the captive portal, the chip failed, Wi-Fi gone. Restart. Repeat.

Meme showing a person giving their child a book on 'Wifi drivers on linux' as something to cry about

We eventually worked around it with a phone hotspot, but that locked the phone to the booth. A one-off inconvenience? Maybe. But at any conference, summit, or community event, at least one of these happens reliably.

So I looked for a native, offline form collection tool. Nothing existed without a web dependency. So I built one.

Open Forms is a native GNOME app that collects form inputs locally, stores responses in CSV, works completely offline, and never touches an external service. Your data stays on your device. Full stop.

Open Forms pages

What's new in 0.4.0 - the GUI Form Builder

The original version shipped with one acknowledged limitation: you had to write JSON configs by hand to define your forms.

Now, I know what you're thinking. "Writing JSON to set up a form? That's totally normal and not at all a terrible first impression for non-technical users." And you'd be completely wrong, to me it was normal and then my sis had this to say "who even thought JSON for such a basic thing is a good idea, who'd even write one" which was true. I knew it and hence it was always on the roadmap to fix, which 0.4.0 finally fixes.

Open Forms now ships a full visual form builder.

Design a form entirely from the UI - add fields, set labels, reorder things, tweak options, and hit Save. That's it. The builder writes a standard JSON config to disk, same schema as always, so nothing downstream changes.

It also works as an editor. Open an existing config, click Edit, and the whole form loads up ready to tweak. Save goes back to the original file. No more JSON editing required.

Open forms builder page

Libadwaita is genuinely great

The builder needed to work well on both a regular desktop and a Linux phone without me maintaining two separate layouts or sprinkling breakpoints everywhere. Libadwaita just... handles that.

The result is that Open Forms feels native on GNOME and equally at home on a Linux phone, and I genuinely didn't have to think hard about either. That's the kind of toolkit win that's hard to overstate when you're building something solo over weekends.

The JSON schema is unchanged

If you already have configs, they work exactly as before. The builder is purely additive, it reads and writes the same format. If you like editing JSON directly, nothing stops you. I'm not going to judge, but my sister might.

Also thanks to Felipe and all others who gave great ideas about increasing maintainability. JSON might become a technical debt in future, and I appreciate the insights about the same. Let's see how it goes.

Install

Snap Store

snap install open-forms

Flatpak / Build from source

See the GitHub repository for build instructions. There is also a Flatpak release available .

What's next

A11y improvements
Maybe and just maybe an optional sync feature
Hosting on Flathub - if you've been through that process and have advice, please reach out

Open Forms is still a small, focused project doing one thing. If you've ever dealt with Wi-Fi pain while collecting data at an event, give it a try. Bug reports, feature requests, and feedback are all very welcome.

And if you find it useful - a star on GitHub goes a long way for a solo project. 🙂

Open Forms on GitHub

Pl chevron_right

Allan Day: GNOME Foundation Update, 2026-03-20

news.movim.eu / PlanetGnome • 15:42 • 4 minutes

Hello and welcome to another update on what’s been happening at the GNOME Foundation. It’s been two weeks since my last update, and there’s been plenty going on, so let’s dive straight in.

GNOME 50!

My update wouldn’t be complete without mentioning this week’s GNOME 50 release . It looks like an amazing release with lots of great improvements! Many thanks to everyone who contributed and made it such a success.

The Foundation plays a critical role in these releases, whether it’s providing development infrastructure, organising events where planning takes place, or providing development funding. If you are reading this and have the means, please consider signing up as a Friend of GNOME . Even small regular donations make a huge difference.

Board Meeting

The Board of Directors had its regular monthly meeting on March 9th, and we had a full agenda. Highlights from the meeting included:

The Board agreed to sign the Keep Android Open letter, as well as endorsing the United Nations Open Source Principles .
We heard reports from a number of committees, including the Executive Committee, Finance Committee, Travel Committee, and Code of Conduct Committee. Committee presentations are a new addition to the Board meeting format, with the goal of pushing more activity out to committees, with the Board providing high-level oversight and coordination.
Creation of a new bank account was authorized, which is needed as part of our ongoing finance and accounting development effort.
The main discussion topic was Flathub and what the organizational arrangements could be for it in the future. There weren’t any concrete decisions made here, but the Board indicated that it’s open to different options and sees Flathub’s success as the main priority rather than being attached to any particular organisation type or location.
The next regular Board meeting will be on April 13th.

Travel

The Travel Committee met both this week and last week, as it processed the initial batch of GUADEC sponsorship applications. As a result of this work the first set of approvals have been sent out. Documentation has also been provided for those who are applying for visas for their travel.

The membership of the current committee is quite new and it is having to figure out processes and decision-making principals as it goes, which is making its work more intensive than might normally be the case. We are starting to write up guidelines for future funding rounds, to help smooth the process.

Huge thanks to our committee members Asmit, Anisa, Julian, Maria, and Nirbeek, for taking on this important work.

Conferences

Planning and preparation for the 2026 editions of LAS and GUADEC have continued over the past fortnight. The call for papers for both events is a particular focus right now, and there are a couple of important deadlines to be aware of:

If you want to speak at LAS 2026 , the deadline for proposals is 23 March – that’s in just three days.
The GUADEC 2026 call for abstracts has been extended to 27 March , so there is one more week to submit a talk .

There are teams behind each of these calls, reviewing and selecting proposals. Many thanks to the volunteers doing this work!

We are also excited to have sponsors come forward to support GUADEC.

Accounting

The Foundation has been undertaking a program of improvements to our accounting and finance systems in recent months. Those were put on hold for the audit fieldwork that took place at the beginning of March, but now that’s done, attention has turned to the remaining work items there.

We’ve been migrating to a new payments processing platform since the beginning of the year, and setup work has continued, including configuration to make it integrate correctly with our accounting software, migrating credit cards over from our previous solution, and creating new web forms which are going to be used for reimbursement requests in future.

There are a number of significant advantages to the new system, like the accounting integration, which are already helping to reduce workloads, and I’m looking forward to having the final pieces of the new system in place.

Another major change that is currently ongoing is that we are moving from a quarterly to a monthly cadence for our accounting. This is the cycle we move on to “complete” the accounts, with all data inputted and reconciled by the end of the cycle. The move to a monthly cycle will mean that we are generating finance reports on a more frequent basis, which will allow the Board to have a closer view on the organisation’s finances.

Finally, this week we also had our regular monthly “books” call with our accountant and finance advisor. This was our usual opportunity to resolve any questions that have come up in relation to the accounts, but we also discussed progress on the improvements that we’ve been making.

Infrastructure

On the infrastructure side, the main highlight in recent weeks has been the migration from Anubis to Fastly’s Next-Gen Web Application Firewall (WAF) for protecting our infrastructure. The result of this migration will be an increased level of protection from bots, while simultaneously not interfering in peoples’ way when they’re using our infra. The Fastly product provides sophisticated detection of threats plus the ability for us to write our own fine-grained detection rules, so we can adjust firewall behaviour as we go.

Huge thanks to Fastly for providing us with sponsorship for this service – it is a major improvement for our community and would not have been possible without their help.

That’s it for this update. Thanks for reading and be on the lookout for the next update, probably in two weeks!

Pl chevron_right

This Week in GNOME: #241 Fifty!

news.movim.eu / PlanetGnome • 0:00 • 3 minutes

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from March 13 to March 20.

This week we released GNOME 50!

50_banner.DNeFh5vr_Z2x2Q6n.webp

This new major release of GNOME is full of exciting changes, including improved parental controls, many accessibility enhancements, expanded document annotation capabilities, calendar updates, and much more! See the GNOME 50 release notes and developer notes for more information.

Readers who have been following this site will already be aware of some of the new features. If you’d like to follow the development of GNOME 51 (Fall 2026), keep an eye on this page - we’ll be posting exciting news every week!

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

gtk-rs ↗

Safe bindings to the Rust language for fundamental libraries from the GNOME stack.

Julian 🍃 reports

I’ve added a chapter about accessibility to the gtk4-rs book . While I researched the topic beforehand and tested all examples with a screenreader, I would still appreciated additional feedback from people experienced with accessibility.

Eyedropper ↗

Pick and format colors.

FineFindus reports

Eyedropper 2.2.0 is out now, bringing support for color picking without having the application open. It also now supports RGB in decimal notation and improves support for systems without a proper portal setup.

As always, you can download the latest release from Flathub .

Third Party Projects

JumpLink announces

The TypeScript type definitions generator ts-for-gir v4.0.0-beta.41 is out, and the big news is that we now have browsable API documentation for GJS TypeScript bindings, live at https://gjsify.github.io/docs/ . As a bonus, the same work also greatly improved the inline TypeScript documentation, hover docs in your editor are now much richer and more complete.

Anton Isaiev reports

RustConn is a GTK4/libadwaita connection manager for SSH, RDP, VNC, SPICE, Telnet, Serial, Kubernetes, and Zero Trust protocols. Core protocols use embedded Rust implementations - no external dependencies required.

The 0.10.x series brings 8 new features and a major platform upgrade:

New features:

MOSH protocol support with predict mode, UDP port range, and server binary path

Session recording in scriptreplay-compatible format with per-connection toggle and sensitive output sanitization

Text highlighting rules - regex-based pattern matching with customizable colors, per-connection and global

Ad-hoc broadcast - send keystrokes to multiple terminals simultaneously

Smart Folders - dynamic connection grouping by protocol, tags, or host glob pattern

Script credentials - resolve passwords from external commands with a Test button

Per-connection terminal theming - background, foreground, and cursor color overrides

CSV import/export with auto column mapping and configurable delimiter

Platform changes:

GTK-rs bindings upgraded to gtk4 0.11, libadwaita 0.9, vte4 0.10

Flatpak runtime bumped to GNOME 50 with VTE 0.80

Migrated to AdwSpinner, AdwShortcutsDialog, AdwSwitchRow, and AdwWrapBox (cfg-gated)

FreeRDP 3.24.0 bundled in Flatpak - external RDP works out of the box on Wayland

rdp file association - double-click to open and connect

Split view now works with all VTE-based protocols

0.10.2 is a follow-up with 11 bug fixes for session recording, MOSH dispatch, highlight rules wiring, picocom detection in Flatpak, sidebar overflow, and RDP error messages.

https://github.com/totoshko88/RustConn https://flathub.org/en/apps/io.github.totoshko88.RustConn

Quadrapassel ↗

Fit falling blocks together.

Will Warner reports

Quadrapassel 50.0 has been released! This release has a lot of improvements for controls and polishes the app. Here is what’s new:

Made game view and preview exactly fit the blocks

Improved game controller support

Stopped duplicate keyboard events

Replaced the libcanberra sound engine

Fixed many small bugs and stylistic issues

You can get Quadrapassel on Flathub .

Documentation

Jan-Willem says

This week Java was added to the programming languages section on developer.gnome.org and many of the code examples were translated to Java.

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

Pl chevron_right

Jussi Pakkanen: Simple sort implementations vs production quality ones

news.movim.eu / PlanetGnome • 1 day ago • 2 minutes

One of the most optimized algorithms in any standard library is sorting. It is used everywhere so it must be fast. Thousands upon thousands of developer hours have been sunk into inventing new algorithms and making sort implementations faster. Pystd has a different design philosophy where fast compilation times and readability of the implementation have higher priority than absolute performance. Perf still very much matters, it has to be fast , but not at the cost of 10x compilation time.

This leads to the natural question of how much slower such an implementation would be compared to a production quality one. Could it even be faster? (Spoilers: no) The only way to find out is to run performance benchmarks on actual code.

To keep things simple there is only one test set, sorting 10'000'000 consecutive 64 bit integers that have been shuffled to a random order which is the same for all algorithms. This is not an exhaustive test by any means but you have to start somewhere. All tests used GCC 15.2 using -O2 optimization. Pystd code was not thoroughly hand optimized, I only fixed (some of the) obvious hotspots.

Stable sort

Pystd uses mergesort for stable sorting. The way the C++ standard specifies stable sort means that most implementations probably use it as well. I did not dive in the code to find out. Pystd's merge sort implementation consists of ~220 lines of code. It can be read on this page .

Stdlibc++ can do the sort in 0.9 seconds whereas Pystd takes .94 seconds. Getting to within 5% with such a simple implementation is actually quite astonishing. Even when considering all the usual caveats where it might completely fall over with a different input data distribution and all that.

Regular sort

Both stdlibc++ and Pystd use introsort . Pystd's implementation has ~150 lines of code but it also uses heapsort, which has a further 100 lines of code). Code for introsort is here, and heapsort is here .

Stdlibc++ gets the sort done in 0.76 seconds whereas Pystd takes 0.82 seconds. This makes it approximately 8% slower. It's not great, but getting within 10% with a few evening's work is still a pretty good result. Especially since, and I'm speculating here, std::sort has seen a lot more optimization work than std::stable_sort because it is used more.

For heavy duty number crunching this would be way too slow. But for moderate data set sizes the performance difference might be insignificant for many use cases.

Note that all of these are faster (note: did not measure) than libc's qsort because it requires an indirect function call on every comparison i.e. the comparison method can not be inlined.

Where does the time go?

Valgrind will tell you that quite easily.

This picture shows quite clearly why big O notation can be misleading. Both quicksort (the inner loop of introsort) and heapsort have "the same" average time complexity but every call to heapsort takes approximately 4.5 times as long.

Pl chevron_right

Jakub Steiner: Friday Sketches (part 2)

news.movim.eu / PlanetGnome • 1 day ago

Two years have passed since I last shared my Friday app icon sketches, but the sketching itself hasn't stopped.

For me, it's the best way to figure out the right metaphors before we move to final pixels. These sketches are just one part of the GNOME Design Team's wider effort to keep our icons consistent and meaningful—it is an endeavor that’s been going on for years.

If you design a GNOME app following the GNOME Design Guidelines , feel free to request an icon to be made for you. If you are serious and apply for inclusion in GNOME Circle , you are way more likely to get a designer's attention.

Previously

Pl chevron_right

Colin Walters: LLMs and core software: human driven

news.movim.eu / PlanetGnome • 2 days ago • 5 minutes

It’s clear LLMs are one of the biggest changes in technology ever. The rate of progress is astounding: recently due to a configuration mistake I accidentally used Claude Sonnet 3.5 (released ~2 years ago) instead of Opus 4.6 for a task and looked at the output and thought “what is this garbage”?

But daily now: Opus 4.6 is able to generate reasonable PoC level Rust code for complex tasks for me. It’s not perfect – it’s a combination of exhausting and exhilarating to find the 10% absolutely bonkers/broken code that still makes it past subagents.

So yes I use LLMs every day, but I will be clear: if I could push a button to “un-invent” them I absolutely would because I think the long term issues in larger society (not being able to trust any media, and many of the things from Dario’s recent blog etc.) will outweigh the benefits.

But since we can’t un-invent them: here’s my opinion on how they should be used. As a baseline, I agree with a lot from this doc from Oxide about LLMs . What I want to talk about is especially around some of the norms/tools that I see as important for LLM use, following principles similar to those.

On framing: there’s “core” software vs “bespoke”. An entirely new capability of course is for e.g. a nontechnical restaurant owner to use an LLM to generate (“vibe code”) a website (excepting hopefully online orderings and payments!). I’m not overly concerned about this.

Whereas “core” software is what organizations/businesses provide/maintain for others. I work for a company (Red Hat) that produces a lot of this. I am sure no one would want to run for real an operating system, cluster filesystem, web browser, monitoring system etc. that was primarily “vibe coded”.

And while I respect people and groups that are trying to entirely ban LLM use, I don’t think that’s viable for at least my space.

Hence the subject of this blog is my perspective on how LLMs should be used for “core” software: not vibe coding, but using LLMs responsibly and intelligently – and always under human control and review.

Agents should amplify and be controlled by humans

I think most of the industry would agree we can’t give responsibility to LLMs. That means they must be overseen by humans. If they’re overseen by a human, then I think they should be amplifying what that human thinks/does as a baseline – intersected with the constraints of the task of course.

On “amplification”: Everyone using a LLM to generate content should inject their own system prompt (e.g. AGENTS.md ) or equivalent. Here’s mine – notice I turn off all the emoji etc. and try hard to tune down bulleted lists because that’s not my style. This is a truly baseline thing to do.

Now most LLM generated content targeted for core software is still going to need review, but just ensuring that the baseline matches what the human does helps ensure alignment.

Pull request reviews

Let’s focus on a very classic problem: pull request reviews. Many projects have wired up a flow such that when a PR comes in, it gets reviewed by a model automatically. Many projects and tools pitch this. We use one on some of my projects.

But I want to get away from this because in my experience these reviews are a combination of:

Extremely insightful and correct things (there’s some amazing fine-tuning and tool use that must have happened to find some issues pointed out by some of these)
Annoying nitpicks that no one cares about (not handling spaces in a filename in a shell script used for tests)
Broken stuff like getting confused by things that happened after its training cutoff (e.g. Gemini especially seems to get confused by referencing the current date, and also is unaware of newer Rust features, etc)

In practice, we just want the first of course.

How I think it should work:

A pull request comes in
It gets auto-assigned to a human on the team for review
A human contributing to that project is running their own agents (wherever: could be local or in the cloud) using their own configuration (but of course still honoring the project’s default development setup and the project’s AGENTS.md etc)
A new containerized/sandboxed agent may be spawned automatically, or perhaps the human needs to click a button to do so – or perhaps the human sees the PR come in and thinks “this one needs a deeper review, didn’t we hit a perf issue with the database before?” and adds that to a prompt for the agent.
The agent prepares a draft review that only the human can see.
The human reviews/edits the draft PR review, and has the opportunity to remove confabulations, add their own content etc. And to send the agent back to look more closely at some code (i.e. this part can be a loop)
When the human is happy they click the “submit review” button.
Goal: it is 100% clear what parts are LLM generated vs human generated for the reader.

I wrote this agent skill to try to make this work well, and if you search you can see it in action in a few places, though I haven’t truly tried to scale this up.

I think the above matches the vision of LLMs amplifying humans.

Code Generation

There’s no doubt that LLMs can be amazing code generators, and I use them every day for that. But for any “core” software I work on, I absolutely review all of the output – not just superficially, and changes to core algorithms very closely.

At least in my experience the reality is still there’s that percentage of the time when the agent decided to reimplement base64 encoding for no reason, or disable the tests claiming “the environment didn’t support it” etc.

And to me it’s still a baseline for “core” software to require another human review to merge (per above!) with their own customized LLM assisting them (ideally a different model, etc).

FOSS vs closed

Of course, my position here is biased a bit by working on FOSS – I still very much believe in that, and working in a FOSS context can be quite different than working in a “closed environment” where a company/organization may reasonably want to (and be able to) apply uniform rules across a codebase.

While for sure LLMs allow organizations to create their own Linux kernel filesystems or bespoke Kubernetes forks or virtual machine runtime or whatever – it’s not clear to me that it is a good idea for most to do so. I think shared (FOSS) infrastructure that is productized by various companies, provided as a service and maintained by human experts in that problem domain still makes sense. And how we develop that matters a lot.

Pl chevron_right

Alberto Ruiz: Booting with Rust: Chapter 3

news.movim.eu / PlanetGnome • 2 days ago • 5 minutes

In Chapter 1 I gave the context for this project and in Chapter 2 I showed the bare minimum: an ELF that Open Firmware loads, a firmware service call, and an infinite loop.

That was July 2024. Since then, the project has gone from that infinite loop to a bootloader that actually boots Linux kernels. This post covers the journey.

The filesystem problem

The Boot Loader Specification expects BLS snippets in a FAT filesystem under loaders/entries/ . So the bootloader needs to parse partition tables, mount FAT, traverse directories, and read files. All #![no_std] , all big-endian PowerPC.

I tried writing my own minimal FAT32 implementation, then integrating simple-fatfs and fatfs . None worked well in a freestanding big-endian environment.

Hadris

The breakthrough was hadris , a no_std Rust crate supporting FAT12/16/32 and ISO9660. It needed some work to get going on PowerPC though. I submitted fixes upstream for:

thiserror pulling in std : default features were not disabled, preventing no_std builds.
Endianness bug : the FAT table code read cluster entries as native-endian u32 . On x86 that’s invisible; on big-endian PowerPC it produced garbage cluster chains.
Performance : every cluster lookup hit the firmware’s block I/O separately. I implemented a 4MiB readahead cache for the FAT table, made the window size parametric at build time, and improved read_to_vec() to coalesce contiguous fragments into a single I/O. This made kernel loading practical.

All patches were merged upstream.

Disk I/O

Hadris expects Read + Seek traits. I wrote a PROMDisk adapter that forwards to OF’s read and seek client calls, and a Partition wrapper that restricts I/O to a byte range. The filesystem code has no idea it’s talking to Open Firmware.

Partition tables: GPT, MBR, and CHRP

PowerVM with modern disks uses GPT (via the gpt-parser crate): a PReP partition for the bootloader and an ESP for kernels and BLS entries.

Installation media uses MBR. I wrote a small mbr-parser subcrate using explicit-endian types so little-endian LBA fields decode correctly on big-endian hosts. It recognizes FAT32, FAT16, EFI ESP, and CHRP (type 0x96 ) partitions.

The CHRP type is what CD/DVD boot uses on PowerPC. For ISO9660 I integrated hadris-iso with the same Read + Seek pattern.

Boot strategy? Try GPT first, fall back to MBR, then try raw ISO9660 on the whole device (CD-ROM). This covers disk, USB, and optical media.

The firmware allocator wall

This cost me a lot of time.

Open Firmware provides claim and release for memory allocation. My initial approach was to implement Rust’s GlobalAlloc by calling claim for every allocation. This worked fine until I started doing real work: parsing partitions, mounting filesystems, building vectors, sorting strings. The allocation count went through the roof and the firmware started crashing.

It turns out SLOF has a limited number of tracked allocations. Once you exhaust that internal table, claim either fails or silently corrupts state. There is no documented limit; you discover it when things break.

The fix was to claim a single large region at startup (1/4 of physical RAM, clamped to 16-512 MB) and implement a free-list allocator on top of it with block splitting and coalescing. Getting this right was painful: the allocator handles arbitrary alignment, coalesces adjacent free blocks, and does all this without itself allocating. Early versions had coalescing bugs that caused crashes which were extremely hard to debug – no debugger, no backtrace, just writing strings to the OF console on a 32-bit big-endian target.

And the kernel boots!

March 7, 2026. The commit message says it all: “And the kernel boots!”

The sequence:

BLS discovery : walk loaders/entries/*.conf , parse into BLSEntry structs, filter by architecture ( ppc64le ), sort by version using rpmvercmp .
ELF loading : parse the kernel ELF, iterate PT_LOAD segments, claim a contiguous region, copy segments to their virtual address offsets, zero BSS.
Initrd : claim memory, load the initramfs.
Bootargs : set /chosen/bootargs via setprop .
Jump : inline assembly trampoline – r3=initrd address, r4=initrd size, r5=OF client interface, branch to kernel:

core::arch::asm!(
    "mr 7, 3",   // save of_client
    "mr 0, 4",   // r0 = kernel_entry
    "mr 3, 5",   // r3 = initrd_addr
    "mr 4, 6",   // r4 = initrd_size
    "mr 5, 7",   // r5 = of_client
    "mtctr 0",
    "bctr",
    in("r3") of_client,
    in("r4") kernel_entry,
    in("r5") initrd_addr as usize,
    in("r6") initrd_size as usize,
    options(nostack, noreturn)
)

One gotcha: do NOT close stdout/stdin before jumping. On some firmware, closing them corrupts /chosen and the kernel hits a machine check. We also skip calling exit or release – the kernel gets its memory map from the device tree and avoids claimed regions naturally.

The boot menu

I implemented a GRUB-style interactive menu:

Countdown : boots the default after 5 seconds unless interrupted.
Arrow/PgUp/PgDn/Home/End navigation .
ESC : type an entry number directly.
e : edit the kernel command line with cursor navigation and word jumping (Ctrl+arrows).

This runs on the OF console with ANSI escape sequences. Terminal size comes from OF’s Forth interpret service ( #columns / #lines ), with serial forced to 80×24 because SLOF reports nonsensical values.

Secure boot (initial, untested)

IBM POWER has its own secure boot: the ibm,secure-boot device tree property (0=disabled, 1=audit, 2=enforce, 3=enforce+OS). The Linux kernel uses an appended signature format – PKCS#7 signed data appended to the kernel file, same format GRUB2 uses on IEEE 1275.

I wrote an appended-sig crate that parses the appended signature layout, extracts an RSA key from a DER X.509 certificate (compiled in via include_bytes! ), and verifies the signature (SHA-256/SHA-512) using the RustCrypto crates, all no_std .

The unit tests pass, including an end-to-end sign-and-verify test. But I have not tested this on real firmware yet. It needs a PowerVM LPAR with secure boot enforced and properly signed kernels, which QEMU/SLOF cannot emulate. High on my list.

The ieee1275-rs crate

The crate has grown well beyond Chapter 2. It now provides: claim / release , the custom heap allocator, device tree access ( finddevice , getprop , instance-to-package ), block I/O, console I/O with read_stdin , a Forth interpret interface, milliseconds for timing, and a GlobalAlloc implementation so Vec and String just work.

Published on crates.io at github.com/rust-osdev/ieee1275-rs .

What’s next

I would like to test the Secure Boot feature on an end to end setup but I have not gotten around to request access to a PowerVM PAR. Beyond that I want to refine the menu. Another idea would be to perhaps support the equivalent of the Unified Kernel Image using ELF. Who knows, if anybody finds this interesting let me know!

The source is at the powerpc-bootloader repository . Contributions welcome, especially from anyone with POWER hardware access.

Pl chevron_right

Jakub Steiner: GNOME 50 Wallpapers

news.movim.eu / PlanetGnome • 2 days ago • 1 minute

GNOME 50 just got released! To celebrate, I thought it’d be fun to look into the background ( ding ) of the newest additions to the collection.

While the general aesthetic remains consistent, you might be surprised to see the default shifting from the long-standing triangular theme to hexagons .

Well, maybe not that surprised if you’ve been following the gnome-backgrounds repo closely during the development cycle. We saw a rounded hexagon design surface back in 2024, but it was pulled after being deemed a bit too "flat" despite various lighting and color iterations. We’ve actually seen other hex designs pop up in 2020 and 2022, but they never quite got the ultimate spot as the default. Until now.

Beyond the geometry shift of the default, the Symbolics wallpaper has also received its latest makeover. Truth be told, it hasn’t historically been a fan favorite. I rarely see it in the wild in "show off your desktop" threads. Let's see if this new incarnation does any better.

Similarly, the glass chip wallpaper has undergone a bit of a makeover as well. I'll also mention a… let's say less original design that caters to the dark theme folks out there. While every wallpaper in GNOME features a light and dark variant, Tubes comes with a dark and darker variant. I hope to see more of those "where did you get that wallpaper?" on reddit in 2026.

Pl chevron_right

Emmanuele Bassi: Let’s talk about Moonforge

news.movim.eu / PlanetGnome • 3 days ago • 4 minutes

Last week, Igalia finally announced Moonforge , a project we’ve been working on for basically all of 2025. It’s been quite the rollercoaster, and the announcement hit various news outlets, so I guess now is as good a time as any to talk a bit about what Moonforge is, its goal, and its constraints.

Of course, as soon as somebody announces a new Linux-based OS , folks immediately think it’s a new general purpose Linux distribution, as that’s the square shaped hole where everything OS -related ends up. So, first things first, let’s get a couple of things out of the way about Moonforge :

Moonforge is not a general purpose Linux distribution
Moonforge is not an embedded Linux distribution

What is Moonforge

Moonforge is a set of feature-based, well-maintained layers for Yocto , that allows you to assemble your own OS for embedded devices, or single-application environments, with specific emphasys on immutable, read-only root file system OS images that are easy to deploy and update, through tight integration with CI / CD pipelines.

Why?

Creating a whole new OS image out of whole cloth is not as hard as it used to be; on the desktop (and devices where you control the hardware), you can reasonably get away with using existing Linux distributions, filing off the serial numbers, and removing any extant packaging mechanism; or you can rely on the containerised tech stack , and boot into it.

When it comes to embedded platforms, on the other hand, you’re still very much working on bespoke, artisanal, locally sourced, organic operating systems. A good number of device manufacturers coalesced their BSPs around the Yocto Project and OpenEmbedded , which simplifies adaptations, but you’re still supposed to build the thing mostly as a one off.

While Yocto has improved leaps and bounds over the past 15 years, putting together an OS image, especially when it comes to bundling features while keeping the overall size of the base image down, is still an exercise in artisanal knowledge.

A little detour: Poky

Twenty years ago, I moved to London to work for this little consultancy called OpenedHand. One of the projects that OpenedHand was working on was taking OpenEmbedded and providing a good set of defaults and layers, in order to create a “reference distribution” that would help people getting started with their own project. That reference was called Poky .

We had a beaver mascot before it was cool

These days, Poky exists as part of the Yocto Project, and it’s still the reference distribution for it, but since it’s part of Yocto, it has to abide to the basic constraint of the project: you still need to set up your OS using shell scripts and copy-pasting layers and recipes inside your own repository. The Yocto project is working on a setup tool to simplify those steps, but there are alternatives…

Another little detour: Kas

One alternative is kas , a tool that allows you to generate the local.conf configuration file used by bitbake through various YAML fragments exported by each layer you’re interested in, as well as additional fragments that can be used to set up customised environments.

Another feature of kas is that it can spin up the build environment inside a container, which simplifies enourmously its set up time. It avoids unadvertedly contaminating the build, and it makes it very easy to run the build on CI / CD pipelines that already rely on containers.

What Moonforge provides

Moonforge lets you create a new OS in minutes, selecting a series of features you care about from various available layers .

Each layer provides a single feature, like:

support for a specific architecture or device ( QEMU x86_64, RaspberryPi)
containerisation (through Docker or Podman)
A/B updates (through RAUC , systemd-sysupdate, and more)
graphical session, using Weston
a WPE environment

Every layer comes with its own kas fragment, which describes what the layer needs to add to the project configuration in order to function.

Since every layer is isolated, we can reason about their dependencies and interactions, and we can combine them into a final, custom product.

Through various tools, including kas, we can set up a Moonforge project that generates and validates OS images as the result of a CI / CD pipeline on platforms like GitLab, GitHub, and BitBucket; OS updates are also generated as part of that pipeline, just as comprehensive CVE reports and Software Bill of Materials ( SBOM ) through custom Yocto recipes.

More importantly, Moonforge can act both as a reference when it comes to hardware enablement and support for BSPs; and as a reference when building applications that need to interact with specific features coming from a board.

While this is the beginning of the project, it’s already fairly usable; we are planning a lot more in this space, so keep an eye out on the repository .

Trying Moonforge out

If you want to check out Moonforge, I will point you in the direction of its tutorials , as well as the meta-derivative repository, which should give you a good overview on how Moonforge works, and how you can use it.