Linux Archive

Linux 2.6.32 has been released. New features include virtualization memory de-duplicacion, a rewrite of the writeback code which provides noticeable performance speedups, many important Btrfs improvements and speedups, ATI R600/R700 3D and KMS support and other graphic improvements, a CFQ low latency mode, tracing improvements including a "perf timechart" tool that tries to be a better bootchart, soft limits in the memory controller, support for the S+Core architecture, support for Intel Moorestown and many other improvements and new drivers. You can also read the full changelog.

"The Moblin project steering committee today announces the project release of Moblin v2.1 for Intel Atom processor-based netbooks and nettops. This project release includes the broadest feature additions, customer requested improvements, and overall polish to date. With this community release you will see significant feature additions and improvements including enhanced browser functionality and plug-in support, UI enhancements, support for 3G data connections, Bluetooth device management, input method support for localized languages, integrated application installer for the Moblin Garage, performance and stability improvements, and additional overall help and documentation."

Part 1 introduces the components and concepts you'll need to tune your system for power efficiency. Part 2 compares the five in-kernel governors: performance, powersave, userspace, ondemand, and conservative. Part 3 show you what results you can achieve by power tuning your system.

At the last Real-Time Linux Workshop held on September in Dresden, there has been a lot of discussion about the possibility of enhancing real-time capabilities of Linux by adding a new scheduling class to the Linux kernel. According to most kernel developers, this new scheduling class should be based on the Earliest Deadline First real-time algorithm. The first draft of the scheduling class has been called "SCHED_EDF" and it has been proposed and discussed on the Linux Kernel Mailing List just before the workshop. Recently, a second version of the scheduling class (called "SCHED_DEADLINE", to meet the request of some kernel developers) has been proposed. Moreover, the code has been moved to a public git repository on Gitorius. More details are available here.

Mind your manners, now. We're not saying that they do in general. There's just a good chap who has come up with a list in two parts of varied Linux distributions that he deems use-worthy. He also gives a short description about them and a link to their project websites. Some are the obvious Ubuntu, Gentoo, and other major players, but others you may or may not have heard of and may find useful. Enjoy reading part one from May of this year and part two that was published just recently in October. What are some of the perhaps more obscure Linux distributions that you've found useful and noteworthy?

"One of the downsides of working in security is that we seldom get to do cool things. The desktop engineers, VM engineers, even kernel engineers get to show off cool stuff. But security guys usually only ever get to show how we broke something, if that. Sometimes all we can do is say 'trust us, it's working'. But I think I have something cool to show off which I'm calling sandbox -X."