Archive

Red Hat, AMD Migrate VMs Across CPUs Between Different Vendors

Red Hat and AMD have just done the so-called impossible, and demonstrated VM live migration across CPU architectures. Not only that, they have demonstrated it across CPU vendors. "If you look at the video here, you will see that they did it. Live migration while streaming HD video isn't all that bad a trick mind you, but doing it between a Barcelona, Shanghai and Intel box is. 36 more of these, and we will be in great shape." Only a few months ago during VMworld, Intel and VMware claimed that this was impossible. Looking at the initial reaction, VMware is quite irked by this accomplishment by Red Hat using KVM technology and they are pointing to stability concerns. Red Hat has been a heavy contributor to KVM and acquired Qumranet, the original developers of KVM a while back.

Is Smolt the Key to Counting Linux Users?

Smolt is a opt-in hardware profiler developed by Fedora Project and now adopted by OpenSUSE and in consideration by Ubuntu as well. While originally developed for understanding commonly used hardware, InternetNews looks at the potential for Smolt to be a tool to count Linux users."Smolt could also potentially be a tool for counting the total number of users for a given platform, though that's not its ideal use case. The Linux Foundation's Ts'o noted that Smolt probably wound not be that great for counting Linux users as a whole.Fedora's Frields agreed, noting that Smolt is probably not as good for counting users as it is for counting proportional use of hardware across the user base.'We prefer to count users with other methods, which we document on our wiki openly and transparently,' Frields said."

How Linux Supports More Devices Than Any Other OS, Ever

Greg Kroah-Hartman is a longtime developer of the Linux kernel, known for his work maintaining USB drivers. O'Reilly Media recently interviewed Greg about his claim that the Linux kernel now supports more devices than any other operating system ever has, as well as why binary-only drivers are illegal, and how the kernel development process works."I went and asked every single hardware manufacturer, the big guys that ship the boxes, Dell, IBM, HP--what do you ship that isn't supported by Linux? They came back with nothing. Everything is supported by Linux. If you have a device that isn't supported by Linux that's being shipped today, let me know.".If you would like to take up Greg KH on his claim, his email address is greg AT kroah.com

A Better File System for Linux?

InternetNews talks to developers and vendors about the rise of Btrfs as a successor to Ext4. Though Ext4 adds extents, Chris Mason, Btrfs developer noted that BTRFS adds a number of other features beyond that. Among those features are items like snapshotting, online file consistency checks and the ability to perform fast incremental backups. BTRFS (pronounced better FS) is currently under development in an effort led by Oracle engineer Chris Mason. With the support of Intel, Red Hat, HP, IBM, BTRFS could become the engine that brings next generation filesystem capabilities to Linux.

A Closer Look at Red Hat’s Plymouth

Back in July we shared Red Hat's intentions to replace RHGB with Plymouth, a new graphical boot process that is able to benefit from the latest Linux graphics capabilities. Red Hat engineers had primarily designed Plymouth around a forthcoming feature we've talked about quite a bit known as kernel mode-setting, which provides end-users with a cleaner and flicker-free boot experience. In September in The State of Kernel Mode-Setting we then shared more information on Plymouth along with a brief video. Most recently we published another video of Plymouth that shows the tighter integration between the boot process and starting the GNOME Display Manager. Today though we are looking at Plymouth and its different plug-ins along with providing a few more videos.

Performance Analysis for Core 2 and K8: Part 1

Real World Technologies has posted a code level dissection of the Intel Core 2 Duo X6800 and an AMD Athlon FX-62. While rather dated, the two processors were state of the art in 2006, the article does an excellent job of detailing why the processors behave the way they do. Many publications will say, "Game X runs better on processor Z, so processor Z wins", but that does not tell the reader why. This Real World Technologies article, on the other hand, explains why. For instance, they used the game Prey to test the CPUs and found "Prey tends to favor more complex x86 instructions that likely either use 3 inputs, or have 2 output."

Announcing the Fedora Sugar Spin

OLPC Project uses a derivative of Fedora as the operating system for it's XO laptops. One of the unique features of these laptops, is an environment called Sugar developed as a collaboration between Red Hat and other developers and now being maintained by Sugarlabs, an independent non-profit organization. The Fedora Project has released a new spin, a live CD with the Sugar environment by default and a number of additional activities including sugar-browse based on XULRunner and sugar-write based on Abiword. Furthermore, the Fedora liveusb-creator software has been updated to include support for this spin. For people developing the Sugar environment or those curious about it but don't have an OLPC system, this live cd can be a handy way to dive in.

Battle of the Thumb Drive Linux Systems

Lifehacker reviews some of the popular Linux distributions that have provided tools to make Live USB keys, a easy task. These include Damn Small Linux, Fedora with it's cross platform liveusb-creator , Puppy Linux and Xubuntu. All systems were tested with UNetbootin except for Fedora which was run using it's own liveusb-creator. For every distribution, the minimum requirements, image size, boot time, features, things that need improvement and which users it is recommended for, is listed.

Open Source Essential to Secure E-Voting

The mounting irregularities of closed-source proprietary e-voting systems clearly show the need for a new approach to securing elections in the U.S. -- one centered on the use of open source technologies, writes Paul Venezia. 'It's time for us to make good on the promise of open elections and open our e-voting systems as well,' Venezia writes, outlining the technical blueprint for a cheap, secure, open source e-voting system. The call for open voting systems has grown louder as of late, with several projects, such as Pvote and the Open Voting Consortium, demonstrating how the voting booth could benefit from open source code. Such systems are already securing elections in Australia and Brazil.

Fedora 10 – A Detailed Discussion on 13 Prime Features

A Fedora user takes a brief look at what he considers 13 of the prime features in the upcoming Fedora 10 release on end of November. "Fedora has many a projects finished or in the queue for Fedora 10. It is a mammoth and obviously unimportant to take all of them out here. So I have sorted some to best of your interests. If you are a developer, then don't worry. You have your goodie too."

Linux’s Next Victim

ServerWatch writes about the slow but sure death of UNIX by the onslaught of Linux and customers moving from older proprietary UNIX systems to commercially supported open source enterprise Linux distributions."Linux does have one killer feature that is driving the switch: lower cost. Many companies are discovering Linux to be extremely attractive from a cost perspective. Take the experience of Sabre, a travel company that replaced Solaris with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) running on x86 machines, resulting in lowering costs 90 percent (with a three-fold speed gain to boot). These potential cost savings, which include hardware maintenance costs savings, are not to sniffed at."

Quick Look at KDE 4.2-svn

PolishLinux site takes a look at KDE 4.2 based on the latest subversion branch and concludes: "As it can be seen, the KDE4 development is running at full throttle. KDE4.2 will include much enhanced functionality and versatility than KDE 4.1, but still a lot of work has to be done in many areas, especially when it comes to the stability of the applications." Hopefully some of the long standing stability and maturity issues with KDE 4.x branch are resolved before the GA release.

Linux Ecosystem Worth $25 Billion

The Linux Foundation is set to release a report on Wednesday estimating that the Linux ecosystem is now worth $25 billion. Despite the large number, Internetnews seems to think that the number is low compared to IDG's predicted estimate of $49 billion by year 2011. We just have to wait and see, for more details.

Ext4 Completes Development Phase

While Ext4 was originally merged in 2.6.19, it was marked as a development filesystem. It has been a long time coming but as planned, Ext4dev has been renamed to Ext4 in 2.6.28 to indicate its level of maturity and paving the way for production level deployments. Ext4 filesystem developer Ted Tso also endorsed Btrfs as a multi-vendor, next generation filesystem and along with the interest from Andrew Morton, Btrfs is planned to be merged before 2.6.29 is released. It will follow a similar development process to Ext4 and be initially marked as development only.

OLPC Releases Fedora 9-Based Linux Distro for the XO

OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) project originally based on Fedora 7 has done a revamp of its core system to Fedora 9 and added a number of new interesting features and many bug fixes. These include updates on applications on the XO laptop called activities such as home view and journal, new control panel for common system settings, a update system, better backup integration and many others.