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Linux 5.13 Yanks A NVIDIA NVLink Driver For Lack Of Open-Source User

The VFIO changes for the Linux 5.13 kernel aren't particularly exciting this cycle but one of the changes does raise some eyebrows with the VFIO NVIDIA NVLink2 driver being removed. This driver is being removed as it shouldn't have been even added in the first place for lack of an open-source client/user exercising it. The vfio_pci_nvlink2 driver is being stripped out of the Linux 5.13 kernel. This VFIO NVLink2 driver is used for supporting this NVIDIA interconnect standard on POWER9 systems using Volta-based NVIDIA V100 GPUs.

Distro Digest #1 - Ubuntu 21.04, Fedora 34, elementary OS 6 Beta and more...

Here's a brief overview of what some of the Linux distro world has been up to lately...skip to the timestamp of the project you're most interested in!

Report from the virtual ISO C++ meetings in 2020 (core language)

C++ standardization was dramatically different in 2020 from earlier years. The business of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) committee all took place virtually, much like everything else during this pandemic. This article summarizes the C++ standardization proposals before the Core and Evolution Working Groups last year.

Use multiple compilers to build better projects - Red Hat Developer

For a multitude of reasons, developers usually compile the project they are working on with only one compiler. On Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8, the system compiler for C and C++ is GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) 8, and newer versions are available through the GCC toolset. However, there are several reasons why you might also build your project with Clang. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 offers the LLVM toolset, which contains Clang. In this article, we’ll take a look at why one might use more than one compiler. We’ll focus on a system where GCC is currently the default compiler and consider Clang as the main alternative.

Patrick Cloke: A new maintainer for django-allauth-2fa

I’m excited to announce the django-allauth-2fa project has a new maintainer! It can now be found under the valohai organization on GitHub, who have already contributed quite a bit to the package.

The quest for faster Python: Pyston returns to open source, Facebook releases Cinder, or should devs just use PyPy?

Facebook has released Cinder, used internally in Instagram to improve Python performance, while another faster Python, called Pyston, has released version 2.2 and made the project open source (again). Python is the world's second most popular programming language (after JavaScript) according to some surveys; but it is by no means the fastest. A glance at benchmarks tells us that Python 3 computation is often many times slower than compiled languages like C and Go, or JIT (Just-in-Time) compiled languages like Java and JavaScript. One reason is that the official implementation of Python, called CPython, is an interpreted, dynamic language, and its creator Guido Van Rossum has resisted optimising it for performance, saying in 2014 that "Python is about having the simplest, dumbest compiler imaginable, and the official runtime semantics actively discourage cleverness in the compiler like parallelizing loops or turning recursion into loops."

Security updates for Friday

Security updates have been issued by Debian (mediawiki and unbound1.9), Fedora (djvulibre and samba), Mageia (ceph, messagelib, and pagure), openSUSE (alpine and exim), Oracle (kernel and postgresql), Scientific Linux (postgresql), and Ubuntu (thunderbird and unbound).

Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 174 released

The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope version 174. This version includes the following changes:

[ Chris Lamb ]
* Check that we are parsing an actual Debian .buildinfo file, not just
  a file with that extension.
  (Closes: #987994, reproducible-builds/diffoscope#254)
* Support signed .buildinfo files again -- file(1) reports them as
  "PGP signed message".

[ Mattia Rizzolo ]
* Make the testsuite pass with file(1) version 5.40.
* Embed some short test fixtures in the test code itself.
* Fix recognition of compressed .xz files with file(1) 5.40.

Ansible emphasizes inclusive language in new release

During this development cycle, the Ansible project has made significant progress in its goals to make the community and code more welcoming and inclusive. With the release of Ansible Core 2.11, harmful terminology in the Ansible codebase is deprecated and it comes with new replacement terms. These changes will follow our standard deprecation cycle to give users time to adapt.

Cost efficient disaster recovery in hybrid cloud environments

As more and more organizations move from on-premise datacenters to private, public, and hybrid clouds, it is important to understand that high availability is not the same as disaster recovery (DR). DR planning is needed to recover systems when natural or human-induced disasters hit the primary datacenter/region. Recent public cloud outages suggest that we must have a DR plan in place, even with the high availability provided by the public cloud providers. DR planning should be part of the initial application design discussions, allowing the deployment architecture to accommodate for unforeseen events.

This is the future...

This new Linux is the future... Rocky Linux

Cockpit Project: Testing all the pixels

The Cockpit integration tests can now contain “pixel tests”. Such a test will take a screenshot with the browser and compare it with a reference. The idea is that we can catch visual regressions much easier this way than if we would hunt for them in a purely manual fashion. Preparing a repository for pixel tests A pixel test will take a screenshot of part of the Cockpit UI and compare it with a reference. Thus, these reference images are important and play the biggest role. A large part of dealing with pixel tests will consequently consist of maintaining the reference images. At the same time, we don’t want to clog up our main source repository with them. While the number and size of the reference images at any one point in time should not pose a problem, we will over time accumulate a history of them that we are afraid would dominate the source repository. Thus, the reference images are not stored in the source repository. Instead, we store them in an external repository that is linked into the source repository as a submodule. That external repository doesn’t keep any history and can be aggressively pruned. Developers are mostly isolated from this via the new test/common/pixel-tests tool. But if you are familiar with git submodules, there should be no suprises for you here.

Fedora Magazine: Contribute to Fedora Kernel 5.12 Test Week

The kernel team is working on final integration for kernel 5.12. This version was recently released and will arrive soon in Fedora. As a result, the Fedora kernel and QA teams have organized a test week from Sunday, May 09, 2021 through Sunday, May 16, 2021. Refer to the wiki page for links to the test images you’ll need to participate. Read below for details.