Linux Archive

"Faster than virtualization, but harder to implement, containers are a promising security technology for Linux. Watch the 2.6.24 kernel for experimental support for creating and managing containers."

"I recently read this article about how the Linux device driver project needs more work to do. I pondered this for awhile, and came to a realization. While Linux still does indeed lack drivers for some hardware, I believe that the lack of drivers is no longer the largest technological obstacle to Linux adoption. The thing Linux needs to focus mostly on now is completeness, not quantity, of hardware support." Read on.

Turbolinux has followed Novell, Linspire, and Xandros in signing a patent and technology agreement with Microsoft. "In a deal that could lead to the creation of a unique cross-platform authentication system for heterogenous networks, Tokyo-based Linux distributor Turbolinux announced this morning, Japan time, it has reached an agreement with Microsoft for a cross-licensing of the two companies' patent portfolios."

"Should Security Enhanced Linux be designated as the sole security framework for Linux? While most security specialists would agree on the high quality of SELinux, proponents are arguing this framework is the only one that should be needed for the open-source operating system kernel. In fact, it would eliminate the need for the Linux Security Module, an open platform for outsider developers to build their own security frameworks for Linux. And this idea has raised the ire of Linux keeper Linus Torvalds."

Claims made by Microsoft that Linux violates its software patent have not affected sales of Linux-based hardware, according to Michael Dell. Speaking to ZDNet.co.uk at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo in Orlando on Thursday, Dell's chief executive officer said his company has seen Linux uptake for servers increase faster than Windows server products, despite Microsoft's claims. "On the server side Linux continues to grow nicely, a bit faster than Windows," said Dell. "We're seeing a move to Linux in critical applications, and Linux migration has not slowed down."

After 3 months, Linus has released Linux 2.6.23. This version includes the new and shiny CFS process scheduler, a simpler read-ahead mechanism, the lguest 'Linux-on-Linux' paravirtualization hypervisor, XEN guest support, KVM smp guest support, variable process argument length, SLUB is now the default slab allocator, SELinux protection for exploiting null dereferences using mmap, XFS and ext4 improvements, PPP over L2TP support, the 'lumpy' reclaim algorithm, a userspace driver framework, the O_CLOEXEC file descriptor flag, splice improvements, a new fallocate() syscall, lock statistics, support for multiqueue network devices, various new drivers and many other minor features and fixes.

This is a series of five articles treating about GNU/Linux command line interface as a great way of both exploring and simply using this operating system. It covers basics features of the CLI including file management, pipes, streams, redirections, regular expressions, system variables and more.

The IBM Installation Toolkit for Linux on POWER simplifies the installation of Linux on virtualized and non-virtualized Power machines, gives you a bootable rescue DVD, and provides the software needed to fully exploit the Power platform. Learn to use the toolkit to install Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server on IBM System p and System i5 machines.

Linux users want two things for their hardware: drivers; and easy access to those drivers. The first is finally happening; and now, thanks to a Dell Linux project called DKMS (Dynamic Kernel Module Support), the other is on its way. Dell and Linux distributors have been working on DKMS for about five years now. Its purpose is to create a framework where kernel-dependent module source can reside, so that it is very easy to rebuild modules. In turn, this enables Linux distributors and driver developers to create driver drops without having to wait for new kernel releases. For users, all this makes it easier to get up-to-the-minute drivers without hand compiling device drivers.

"Slackintosh was a little-known PPC port of Slackware Linux which after some years of development was put on indefinite hiatus. Adrian Ulrich has recently restarted the project and is again providing (together with Marco Bonetti) a Slackware distribution for Apple (and non-Apple) RISC-powered hardware. We contacted him for a short interview to ask him what happened, what is his role and what is the distribution’s status."

According to this KernelTrap article, the 0.11 Linux kernel was released on December 8th, 1991. Among the 'features' advertised in that release, Linus noted that the console was now capable of producing beeps, Linux gained native mkfs, fsck and fdisk utilities, and the com ports finally had adjustable line speeds. However, if you managed to get Linux booted you were immediately dropped into a root bash shell as Linux lacked a login system. It also lacked support for SCSI devices, and support for swapping to disk meaning it required at least 4MB of RAM to be useful.

During the many threads discussing Ingo Molnar's recently merged Completely Fair Scheduler, Roman Zippel has repeatedly questioned the complexity of the new process scheduler. In a recent posting to the Linux Kernel mailing list he offered a simpler scheduler named the 'Really Fair Scheduler' saying, "as I already tried to explain previously CFS has a considerable algorithmic and computational complexity. This patch should now make it clearer, why I could so easily skip over Ingo's long explanation of all the tricks CFS uses to keep the computational overhead low - I simply don't need them."

"The development of the kernel has changed, and Linux is just getting better and better. However, with a community as large and fractured as the Linux community, it can sometimes be hard to get a big picture overview of where Linux is going: what's happening with kernel version 2.6? Will there be a version 3.0? What has Linus been up to lately? What does he get up to in his spare time? I had the opportunity to chat with the original creator of the Linux kernel, Linus Torvalds, in a number of email exchanges."

"Who's afraid of SELinux? Well, if you are, you shouldn't be! Thanks to the introduction of new GUI tools, customizing your system's protection by creating new policy modules is easier than ever. In this article, Dan Walsh gently walks you through the policy module creation process."