a low latency kernel (whatever that means. I’ll get there to figure it out eventually)

It’s a kernel with real-time process scheduling enabled by default.

In normal kernels a process can theoretically block all other processes from running for up to several seconds, which is obviously bad for time sensitive things like audio recordings or controlling a CNC-machine for example.

In real-time scheduling all processes are guaranteed time slices in more regular intervals. This is good for time sensitive things like audio recording, but since there is some scheduling overhead it’s bad for single resource intensive processes or process trees like video games.

You can read more about the difference between a real time and low latency kernel here: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UbuntuStudio/RealTimeKernel

To those who missed the small disclaimer in the post, 1.0 is not properly released yet. RC4 is out, actual 1.0 release should be “sometime [this] week” (barring new bugs and regressions). See: https://blog.freecad.org/2024/11/14/freecad-1-0-release-candidate-4-is-out/

Edit: Release is out now: https://blog.freecad.org/2024/11/19/freecad-version-1-0-released/

can’t see how this can possibly be a good thing, you know it will mean funding with conditions.

Well, the things they are funding will get funded? How is that a bad thing?!

The conditions range from very broad, like “fix bugs” (curl), over somewhat specific like “improve cross-platform compatibility and the Linux RNG” (Wireguard), to very specific like “create a test-suite and drive development on the Fediverse account migration functionality” (ActivityPub).

You can see more for yourself at https://www.sovereign.tech/tech

All of these seem to be rather tame conditions that are just there to ensure the funds get used in the way they were intended to be used. And I don’t really see how that gives the STF any sort of direct control over these projects, while it gives those projects resources to achieve more than they might have otherwise. There are no long-term funding models that would enable implicit control over these projects.

android auto

First I heard of this, but since it seems to be just some software that runs on the hardware of car manufacturers it seems rather unlikely. But very theoretically possible, if the car manufacturer was using default process scheduling in a CPU constrained machine and now switches to real-time scheduling in an update. But that was possible for years before this news, the code has just been mainlined to the default kernel now. If the car manufacturer cared about that they would probably have done it already with a patched kernel.