Linux Archive

Linux 3.15 released

Guest post by diegocg 2014-06-17 Linux 33 Comments

Linux kernel 3.15 has been released. This release resumes much faster in systems with hard disks, it adds support for cross-renaming two files atomically, it adds new fallocate(2) modes that allow to remove the range of a file or set it to zero, it adds a new file locking API, the memory management adapts better to working set size changes, it improves FUSE write performance, it adds support for the LZ4 algorithm in the zram memory compressor, it allows to load 64-bit kernels from 32-bit EFI firmware, it adds support for x86 AVX-512 vector instructions; it also adds new drivers; and many other small improvements. Here's the full list of changes.

Subgraph OS

Thom Holwerda 2014-06-01 Linux 9 Comments

Subgraph OS was designed from the ground-up to reduce the risks in endpoint systems so that individuals and organizations around the world can communicate, share, and collaborate without fear of surveillance or interference by sophisticated adversaries through network borne attacks.

Subgraph OS is designed to be difficult to attack. This is accomplished through system hardening and a proactive, ongoing focus on security and attack resistance. Subgraph OS also places emphasis on the integrity of installable software packages.

Strange how only a few years ago, I'd call this stuff paranoid.

Oracle continue to circumvent EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL()

Thom Holwerda 2014-05-11 Linux 29 Comments

Matthew Garrett:

So, in the face of a technical mechanism designed to enforce the author's beliefs about the copyright status of callers of this function, Oracle deliberately circumvent that technical mechanism by simply re-exporting the same function under a new name. It should be emphasised that calling an EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL() function does not inherently cause the caller to become a derivative work of the kernel - it only represents the original author's opinion of whether it would. You'd still need a court case to find out for sure. But if it turns out that the use of ktime_get() does cause a work to become derivative, Oracle would find it fairly difficult to argue that their infringement was accidental.

Aside from the obvious jab at Oracle for being an untrustworthy company, what I found interesting about this story is how legal concerns have crept all the way down to the very lowest levels of the Linux kernel.

It must be a nightmare to keep track of all this stuff and having to develop Oracle's DTrace for Linux. You can't just have fun coding away creating the best, most efficient, and most optimal code - nope, you have to code the best, most efficient legal workaround.

Tails 1.0 released

Thom Holwerda 2014-05-01 Linux 7 Comments

Tails is a live system that aims to preserve your privacy and anonymity. It helps you to use the Internet anonymously and circumvent censorship almost anywhere you go and on any computer but leaving no trace unless you ask it to explicitly.

This is what Snowden uses. Tails released version 1.0 a few days ago.

ATM operators eye Linux as alternative to Windows XP

Thom Holwerda 2014-03-23 Linux 44 Comments

Some financial services companies are looking to migrate their ATM fleets from Windows to Linux in a bid to have better control over hardware and software upgrade cycles.

Pushing them in that direction apparently is Microsoft's decision to end support for Windows XP on April 8, said David Tente, executive director, USA, of the ATM Industry Association (ATMIA).

"There is some heartburn in the industry" over Microsoft's end-of-support decision, Tente said.

Say what you want about Microsoft, but when it comes to clear and well-communicated support cycles, they belong at the very top. This is the ATMIA's own fault for not properly getting ready for the future even though XP's EOL has been known years and years in advance, and has even been extended a few times.

Guest post by diegocg 2014-01-20 Linux 6 Comments

Linux kernel 3.13 has been released. This release includes are nftables, the successor of iptables, a revamp of the block layer designed for high-performance SSDs, a power capping framework to cap power consumption in Intel RAPL devices, improved squashfs performance, AMD Radeon power management enabled by default and automatic AMD Radeon GPU switching, improved NUMA and hugepage performance , TCP Fast Open enabled by default, support for NFC payments, support for the High-availability Seamless Redundancy protocol, new drivers and many other small improvements. Here's the full list of changes.

Valve joins the Linux Foundation

Thom Holwerda 2013-12-04 Linux 74 Comments

"Joining the Linux Foundation is one of many ways Valve is investing in the advancement of Linux gaming," Mike Sartain, a key member of the Linux team at Valve said. "Through these efforts we hope to contribute tools for developers building new experiences on Linux, compel hardware manufacturers to prioritize support for Linux, and ultimately deliver an elegant and open platform for Linux users."

Mark my words: Valve will do for Linux gaming what Android did for Linux mobile. Much crow will be eaten by naysayers in a few years.

Guest post by diegocg 2013-11-07 Linux 24 Comments

Linux kernel 3.12 has been released. This release includes support for offline deduplication in Btrfs, automatic GPU switching in laptops with dual GPUs, a performance boost for AMD Radeon graphics, better RAID-5 multicore performance, improved handling of out-of-memory situations, improvements to the timerless multitasking mode, separate modesetting and rendering device nodes in the graphics DRM layer, improved locking performance for virtualized guests, XFS directory recursion scalability improvements, new drivers and many small improvements. Here's the full list of changes.

Linux may have been causing USB disconnects

Thom Holwerda 2013-08-23 Linux 31 Comments

Pretty much for my entire career in Linux USB (eight years now?), we've been complaining about how USB device power management just sucks. We enable auto-suspend for a USB device driver, and find dozens of different USB devices that simply disconnect from the bus when auto-suspend is enabled.

For years, we've blamed those devices for being cheap, crappy, and broken. We talked about blacklists in the kernel, and ripped those out when they got too big. We've talked about whitelists in userspace, but not many distros have time to cultivate such lists.

It turns out it's not always the device's fault.

Fascinating bug.

Android is Linux

Thom Holwerda 2013-08-19 Linux 133 Comments

Steve Cheney:

There's more to the platform wars than mobile - Android is starting to take off in non-mobile markets in a massive way - Internet of Things, Television (Chromecast), etc. To date Linux has been the dominant OS but Android is now taking some embedded designs which would have run Linux. The effective decoupling of Android from carriers for non-mobile markets + the richness of tools and the existing developer ecosystem will likely cement Android as the definitive open source OS of the next decade. This will have pluses for Google but also unintended consequences.

A common misconception among people who don't really understand what Linux is - one that I'm seeing pop up more and more now that people are trying to paint Android in a negative light - i.e., as competition to not just iOS, but also the noble and open source Linux.

Repeat after me: Android is just as much 'Linux' as Ubuntu, Debian, Red Hat, or anything else that uses the Linux kernel. Technically, a better term would be 'Linux distribution', since Linux in and of itself is just a kernel. Wikipedia defines 'Linux distribution' quite well:

A Linux distribution (often called distro for short) is a member of the family of Unix-like operating systems built on top of the Linux kernel. Such distributions are operating systems including a large collection of software applications such as word processors, spreadsheets, media players, and database applications. These operating systems consist of the Linux kernel and, usually, a set of libraries and utilities from the GNU Project, with graphics support from the X Window System. Distributions optimized for size may not contain X and tend to use more compact alternatives to the GNU utilities, such as BusyBox, uClibc, or dietlibc.

Android is a Linux distribution, and is an addition to the Linux ecosystem - not a challenger. Painting it as such is just a sign of ignorance.

Elementary OS Luna released

Thom Holwerda 2013-08-12 Linux 25 Comments

The Elementary OS team has released their latest offering, Luna, which has been in development for a while now. Based on Ubuntu, this Linux distribution aims to develop its own minimalist applications, but it goes beyond that - it has its own desktop environment, window manager, human interface guidelines, APIs, and more. There's an article on their blog detailing the road to Luna.

They've managed to build quite some hype, so let's see if it lives up to it. Does anyone here use it?

Submitted by dylansmrjones 2013-08-02 Linux 28 Comments

From ZDnet:

Fancy running iWork on Linux? It may one day be possible courtesy of a project to get Apple OS X programs running on Linux-based operating systems.

Similar to how Wine allows Windows applications to run in Linux OS, the Darling project is trying to build a software compatibility layer to run OS X apps.

I obviously doubt the attainability of the project's goals, but this will be a fantastic coding experience for the programmers involved.

Guest post by snydeq 2013-07-16 Linux 18 Comments

Serdar Yegalulp offers a long view of the current evolution of Linux, one that sees the open source OS firmly entrenched as a cornerstone of IT, evolving in almost every direction at once - including most demonstrably toward the mobile and embedded markets. "If Linux acceptance and development are peaking, where does Linux go from up? Because Linux is such a mutable phenomenon and appears in so many incarnations, there may not be any single answer to that question. More important, perhaps, is how Linux - the perennial upstart - will embrace the challenges of being a mature and, in many areas, market-leading project. Here's a look at the future of Linux: as raw material, as the product of community and corporate contributions, and as the target of any number of challenges to its ethos, technical prowess, and growth."

Linux 3.11 renamed to ‘Linux for Workgroups’

Thom Holwerda 2013-07-15 Linux 16 Comments

"Substantially improved support for the power management features of modern Radeon graphics cores is among the major new additions of the now available first release candidate of Linux 3.11. For this release, Linus Torvalds changed the code name from 'Unicycling Gorilla' to 'Linux for Workgroups' and modified the logo that some systems display when booting: it now depicts a Tux holding a flag with a symbol that is reminiscent of the logo of Windows for Workgroups 3.11, which was released in 1993." Just awesome. Nothing else.

Guest post by Nth_Man 2013-07-01 Linux 42 Comments

"This release adds support for bcache, which allows to use SSD devices to cache data from other block devices; a Btrfs format improvement that makes the tree dedicated to store extent information 30-35% smaller; support for XFS metadata checksums and self-describing metadata, timer free multitasking for applications running alone in a CPU, SysV IPC and rwlock scalability improvements, the TCP Tail loss probe algorithm that reduces tail latency of short transactions, KVM virtualization support in the MIPS architecture, many new drivers and small improvements."

Linux filesystem hierarchy

Thom Holwerda 2013-06-26 Linux 37 Comments

"This document outlines the set of requirements and guidelines for file and directory placement under the Linux operating system according to those of the FSSTND v2.3 final (January 29, 2004) and also its actual implementation on an arbitrary system. It is meant to be accessible to all members of the Linux community, be distribution independent and is intended to discuss the impact of the FSSTND and how it has managed to increase the efficiency of support interoperability of applications, system administration tools, development tools, and scripts as well as greater uniformity of documentation for these systems."

One Man’s Exploration of Linux Distros

jackson 2013-06-25 Linux 14 Comments

The Linuxed - Exploring Linux Distros website has over 170 reviews of distros and common Linux programs by Arindam Sen. What makes it special is that Mr. Sen puts his experiences together in useful charts, such as this one that compares RAM usage for twenty different GUI versions, or this one that compares CPU and RAM usage for 20 KDE distros (page down to see the chart). While the site says it's merely "A non-techie's view of the Linux world," many techies will find it useful as well.

What Users Want — Selecting a System for Their Needs

Guest post by Howard Fosdick 2013-06-24 Linux 104 Comments

I volunteer as tech support for a small organization. For years we relied on Ubuntu on our desktops, but the users didn't like it when Ubuntu switched to the Unity interface. This article tells about our search for a replacement and why we decided on Xfce running atop Linux Mint.

Wayland Live CD that starts directly to Wayland

Thom Holwerda 2013-05-26 Linux 59 Comments

"Today I pushed out a new ISO of my Wayland Live CD project, which is named for my favorite celebrity. For this new Wayland CD, I wrote a new login manager with Bash and Zenity and Expect (and Script) that fully runs on a Wayland server (weston). Now X is no longer involved in the boot process, and X does not start, (unless you use an X application with xwayland), because I replaced LightDM with the new loginmanager."

NixOS

Thom Holwerda 2013-05-18 Linux 7 Comments

"In NixOS, the entire operating system - the kernel, applications, system packages, configuration files, and so on - is built by the Nix package manager from a description in a purely functional build language. The fact that it's purely functional essentially means that building a new configuration cannot overwrite previous configurations. Most of the other features follow from this." Interesting approach. A Linux distribution, sure, but with some very refreshing ideas about system configuration.