If you can charge it outside of the controller than this opens up the possibility to have multiple batteries which you can swap between. I don’t think that is the case going by the article, however.

Maybe Navidrome’s jukebox mode, although I suspect it’s a slightly different idea (and it was a bit buggy last time I tried it).

Many don’t run into dir structure issues because they have already organised their libraries with beets or an equivalent. I don’t personally have any issues with playing albums either. Some of the issues you are talking about seem to be client side, are you only testing the web interfaces?

Dsub2000 and Tempo are active FOSS alternatives.

There’s some cheap 2.5gbps managed switches on AliExpress if you’re willing to import. I think that speed for switches is still kind of uncommon so you have relatively few offerings in Western countries.

I just overuse parantheses instead, as you noted. You know you’re rambling when you have several layers of them, like I’m writing a conversation in Lisp.

Having a web UI is useful even if you’re not using the extra tools. Not mandatory of course, but nice.

US only I suspect, and likely to be gutted by the Trump administration.

I’m not really an expert, but I’ll try and answer your questions one by one.

Don’t VMs have a virtual GPU with a driver for that GPU in the guest that, I imagine, forwards the graphics instructions and routines to the driver on the host?

Yes, this is what VirGL (OGL) and Venus (Vulkan) do. The latter works pretty well because Vulkan is more low level and better represents the underlying hardware so there is less of a performance overhead. However, this does mean you need to translate all APIs one by one, not just OGL and Vulkan, but also hardware decoding and encoding of videos, and compute, so it’s a fair amount of work.

Native contexts, in contrast, are basically the “real” host driver used in the guest, and they essentially pass through everything 1:1 to the host driver where the actual work is carried out. They aren’t really like virtualisation extensions as the hardware doesn’t need to support it AFAICT, just the drivers on both the host and the guest. There’s a presentation and slides on native contexts vs virgl/venus which may be helpful.

Where in that does Magma come in? My guess is that magma sits in the guest as the graphics driver and on the host before Mesa, but I know little about virtualisation outside of containers.

To be honest, I don’t fully understand the details either, but your interpretation seems more or less correct. From looking at the diagram on the MR it seems that it’s a layer between the userspace graphics driver and the native context (virtgpu) layer on the guest side, which in turn communicates with another Magma layer on the host, and finally passes data to the host GPU driver, which may be Mesa but could also be other drivers as long as they implement Magma.

The broader idea is to abstract implementation details, so applications and userspace drivers don’t need to know the native context implementation details (other than interfacing with Magma). And the native context layer doesn’t need to know which host gpu driver is being used, it just needs to interface with Magma.

The other points have been answered, so I’ll try and give a surface view of Magma. It’s basically an abstraction layer for virtual GPU drivers used in VMs. Currently, you need specific implementations to handle all of the pathways between different types of VM guests and hosts, which gets complicated fast, and duplicates a lot of work. The idea is the Magma abstracts this away, and so host and guest GPU drivers only need to interface with Magma. Which means you can swap out different host OSes/GPU drivers and different guest OSes and GPU drivers, and as long as they interface with Magma, they should “just work”.

Of course, whether it will work out that way in practice remains to be seen. I think Google is using it internally but it’s not in Mesa yet, so it may not even roll out widely. You can follow the MR if you want more detail or to see its progress.

If you’re wondering why Google is implementing this it appears to be for Fuschia and Android, and compatibility between those two and with desktop Linux, with Windows support also supported as an additional value add. Chromebooks in particular should benefit from this, since ChromeOS is being retired I believe.

And as an aside, unlike some of the traditional GPU implementations you’d find in VMs, these are or will be pretty much just the normal graphics driver that you’d use on the host. They are generally called “native contexts” and have been implemented for AMD and Intel at the least, but only on non-Windows systems for now. These implementations alone, once they are widely supported, should result in near native GPU performance in VMs, without having to use GPU passthrough (I.e. passing through a physical GPU to the VM guest). So even without Magma there’s some promising stuff happening, albeit mainly on the Linux host -> Linux guest pathway.

mpv supports Dolby vision (along with the Jellyfin clients that depend on it), but if you mean with streaming services, that’s unlikely to happen due to DRM.