Want A More Secure Computer At The Cost Of Performance? Linux 5.8 Landing L1d Flushing

For those very concerned about CPU data sampling vulnerabilities, the Linux 5.8 kernel comes with the ability to flush the L1 data cache on each context switch. That's good for security, but will hurt the system performance with all the excess L1 cache flushing. This work stems from a proposal earlier this year to flush the L1d cache on context switches due to recent snoop assisted data sampling vulnerabilites or the cache data leaked via side channels. This work was carried out by an Amazon engineer so presumably there is some interest in offering this functionality in the AWS space.

AMD Radeon Linux Driver Sees Patches For New "Sienna Cichlid" GPU

Still digging through the 207 patches for the AMD Radeon Sienna Cichlid, but will update if seeing anything else of note. For the most part it's leveraging the existing Navi code paths but the usual churn surrounding firmware, clock-gating / power management differences, and other modifications in the usual spots for bringing up new hardware. The main code additions primarily pertain to the new DCN3 and VCN3 blocks. Given the timing of these patches, the AMD Sienna Cichlid won't be mainlined until the Linux 5.9 merge window opening in August and then releasing in stable around October. That timeframe at least does point to Sienna Cichlid likely being the "RDNA 2" graphics card launch coming later in the calendar year.

2020-06-01 | Linux Headlines

The Linux kernel packs version 5.7 with exciting additions, version 2.2 of the Foliate eBook reader is out with support for many more formats, and members of the Association of American Publishers sue the Internet Archive over their library lending practices.

Ubuntu Cinnamon Remix 20.04 LTS overview | Ubuntu, traditionally modern.

In this video, I am going to show an overview of Ubuntu Cinnamon Remix 20.04 LTS and some of the applications pre-installed.

SUSE Update Infrastructure Access Through the Data Center

In Step 2 Toward Enhanced Update Infrastructure Access the time-line for enabling access to the SUSE update infrastructure in the Public Cloud via routing through the data center was announced. As of June 1, 2020 we have started the work necessary to make this possible for all regions in AWS, Azure, and GCE. This marks the beginning of the final phase of a process that started almost 1 year ago with A New Update Infrastructure For The Public Cloud. We expect to have everything completed by no later than the end of June 2020, but will most likely be much faster. The changes from a global IP based access control mechanism to an instance based access mechanism apply to both SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server For SAP Applications (SLES For SAP) on-demand instances and any images released in the future that might access the update infrastructure.

Learn how to save money, reduce complexity with SUSE Manager [Ed: Linux has been around since the 1970s, it says. OK, whatever...]

“The first is cost,” he says. “Linux has been around since the 1970s and has come a long way in that time. In one month (April 2020), Linux installations grew from 1,3% of the total installed base to a 3%. This might not sound like a lot, but it represents massive growth. For some Linux distributions, the grow rate was better than 600%.” [...] Brink points out that switching to a Linux front-end and an effective back-end management tool could save organisations a massive chunk of their end user license costs. SUSE Manager monitors an organisation’s infrastructure and manages how they deploy services on to front-end devices from a central point.

OSI Charting a Course for 2020 and Beyond [Ed: Why does the OSI take pride in becoming a home for a Microsoft front group like ClearlyDefined?]

The key to understanding how we move forward is to first remember how we got here. OSI as we know it didn't exist until 2013. Founded in 1998, the organization was held together in its first decade through strong board leadership in Michael Tiemann (2001-2012) and Danese Cooper (2002-2011). Deb Bryant (2012-present), Karl Fogel (2011-2014), Mike Milinkovich (2012-2018), and Simon Phipps (2010-2020) helped OSI begin professionalizing, by hiring General Manager Patrick Masson (2013-present), and becoming more democratic, with the introduction of a community-elected board. Molly de Blanc (2016-2020), Allison Randal (2014-2019), and Stefano “Zack” Zacchiroli (2014-2017) fostered better ties with the free software community. Richard Fontana (2013-2019) elevated legal discussions, taking OSI’s licensing work from knowledgeable hackers to expert practitioners and defining a review process. And Pam Chestek (2019-present) has brought a new level of professionalism to the license review process. This is a reductionist and inevitably incomplete view of OSI’s history, but the point is this: OSI has come a long way, and I am forever grateful to the talented and generous individuals who collectively invested decades to get us here. Over the last seven years, OSI has: sustained its core mission, shaped policy around the globe, worked tirelessly to mitigate open washing, built an alliance of more than 125 organizations representing hundreds of thousands of people, provided a home for projects like ClearlyDefined, and rolled out programs like FLOSS Desktops for Kids and Open Source Technology Management courses with Brandeis University.

Priyanka Sharma Joins CNCF as General Manager

Fedora Community Blog monthly summary: May 2020

This is the first in what I hope to make a monthly series summarizing the past month on the Community Blog. [...] In May, we published 31 posts. The site had 4,964 visits from 2,392 unique viewers. Readers wrote 13 comments. 202 visits came from Fedora Planet, while 716 came from search engines.

Red Hat Success Stories: A foundation for network automation and betting on OpenShift

You hear the expression "betting" on platforms all the time. But Bilyoner Interactive Services in Turkey is really betting on Red Hat OpenShift by deploying a live betting platform on OpenShift with Red Hat Ansible Automation. When live sports betting was legalized in Turkey, Bilyoner Interactive Services needed a supported, scalable, and highly available technology foundation to support this new service. By migrating from community open source to Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, Bilyoner used container and microservices technology to quickly create and launch its new live betting platform. As a result, the company reports a five-fold increase in traffic and close to 100% service uptime.

Kafka Monthly Digest – May 2020

In this 28th edition of the Kafka Monthly Digest, I’ll cover what happened in the Apache Kafka community in May 2020.

Free cloud native security conference hosted by IBM Developer

Security concerns remain one of the key factors in enterprises unlocking the true value of the cloud. From modernizing applications with containerized microservices, to securing data while training AI models, or building continuous, secure DevOps pipelines in a growing complex hybrid cloud, developers face myriad challenges when it comes to security in a cloud native hybrid cloud environment. IBM Developer wants security to be one less thing you have to worry about when you’re building high-performance solutions. That’s why we put together the Digital Developer Conference: Cloud Native Security on June 24, 25, and July 1. [...] Learn the skills to react with speed and confidence by using solutions on IBM Cloud and Red Hat OpenShift alongside leading open source contributions by IBM and Red Hat to Kubernetes, Istio, Open Container Initiative, Cloud Native Computing Foundation, and Apache Foundation.

Enable Sysadmin celebrates one-year anniversary with Sudoers Program

What started as an idea in early 2019 has now blossomed into a publishing platform with a growing community with more than 100 writers. As we celebrate the one-year anniversary of the Enable Sysadmin publication, we’re excited to announce a new program for our community of writers. On May 5, 2020, we officially launched the Sudoers program for the Enable Sysadmin community. The Sudoers program recognizes our most trusted and committed contributors and provides a framework for becoming an established writer on the site. The editorial team has been working closely with 10 of our writers to help establish the first group of members in the Sudoer program. To date, this group of amazing sysadmins has collectively published more than 100 articles on the Enable Sysadmin publication.

Enable Sysadmin: A year by the numbers

Software Product Inventory: what is it and how to implement it.

The concept of inventory applied to software, sometimes called catalogue, is not new. In IT/help-desk it usually refers to the software deployed in your organization. Along the history, there has been many IT Software Inventory Management tools. I first started to think about it beyond that meaning when working in deployments of Linux based desktops at scale. The popularity that Open Source and Continuous Delivering is providing this traditionally static concept a wider scope as well as more relevance. It is still immature though, so read the article with that in mind. 1.- What is Inventory in software product development? I like to think about the software inventory as the single source of truth of your software product so the main element for product development and delivery auditing purposes. Isn’t that the source code?

10 tips for maintaining a DevOps mindset for distributed teams

I am one of the agents of chaos who passionately argued the importance of removing barriers and recognizing that people are the core of a healthy DevOps mindset. Fast-forward to the COVID-19 pandemic, in which collocated teams were forced to disperse overnight into self-isolating distributed entities, relying on technology to bring us all back together in a virtual world. [...] A healthy DevOps mindset navigates through different paths of continuous improvement wherein disruption, discipline, and guardrails are the norm. What no one anticipated is the radical disruption we are all experiencing due to the pandemic, and the impact it has on our DevOps and personal mindset, our workflows, and the ceremonies of kanban and agile teams. You may recall Tuckman's theory of group development, which outlines how teams grow into productive high-performers in stages. As expected, most, if not all, agile teams that switched from collocated to remote setup will slide back from the norming and performing stages to the storming stage, as shown in Figure 1.

Git 2.27 Demotes The Recently Promoted Transport Protocol v2, Continues SHA-256 Work

Git 2.27 is out as the newest version of this widely-used distributed revision control system. Among the highlights with Git 2.27 are: - The Transport Protocol Version 2 support, which was made the default in the previous release, has been demoted. There are some "remaining rough edges" leading to the v2 protocol being demoted from the default in Git 2.27.

GitLab Releases Massive Update to CI/CD Platform

GitLab has updated its CI/CD platform with a raft of capabilities spanning everything from value stream management to cybersecurity. In addition, GitLab announced it is making generally available Gitaly Clusters, which enable DevOps teams to create a warm replica of a Git repository. In terms of core DevOps capabilities, the latest release adds the ability to customize the Value Stream Analytics module to specific workflows. GitLab is also planning to make it possible to visualize stages of a workflow.

Stripe's remote engineering hub, one year in

Last May, Stripe launched our remote engineering hub, a virtual office coequal with our physical engineering offices in San Francisco, Seattle, Dublin, and Singapore. We set out to hire 100 new remote engineers over the year—and did. They now work across every engineering group at Stripe. Over the last year, we’ve tripled the number of permanently remote engineers, up to 22% of our engineering population. We also hired more remote employees across all other teams, and tripled the number of remote Stripes across the company.

When to choose C or Python for a command-line interface

First, a Unix perspective on command-line interface design. Unix is a computer operating system and the ancestor of Linux and macOS (and many other operating systems as well). Before graphical user interfaces, the user interacted with the computer via a command-line prompt (think of today's Bash environment). The primary language for developing these programs under Unix is C, which is amazingly powerful. So it behooves us to at least understand the basics of a C program.

One thought on “Pulling Data From News Feed Telemetry”

The write-up is at a very in-depth level, and while there’s an admission that some of the steps could have been performed more easily with ready-made tools, its point is to go through all steps at a low level. So the action largely takes place in GNU Radio, in which we see the process of identifying the signal and shifting it downwards in frequency before deducing its baud rate to retrieve its contents. The story’s not over though, because we then delve into some ASCII tricks to identify the packet frames, before finally retrieving the data itself. It still doesn’t tell you what the data contains, but it’s a fascinating process getting there nonetheless. It’s easy to forget that GNU Radio has signal processing capabilities far beyond radio, but it was the subject of a fascinating Superconference talk. We even jumped on the bandwagon in the non-foolish part of our April Fool this year.

Dirk Eddelbuettel: T^4 #4: Introducing Byobu

The next video (following the announcement, and shells sessions one, two, and three) is up in the T^4 series of video lightning talks with tips, tricks, tools, and toys. This time we introduce the wonderful byobu tool which is called both a ‘text-based window manager’ and a ‘terminal multiplexer’:

Rust Remains Most Loved Language, According to Stack Overflow Survey

Stack Overflow has released the results of its 2020 Developer Survey, which was conducted back in February and taken by more than 65,000 people. Of those respondents, just over 52,000 identified themselves as professional developers. Topics covered in the survey included most loved (and dreaded) languages, technologies, and frameworks, as well as career values and employment status. According to the survey, Rust remains the most loved language – for the fifth year in a row. Python fell from the second to third this year, with TypeScript moving into the number two slot. Kotlin, Go, Julia, and Dart are next on the list of beloved languages, separated by just a few tenths of a percentage point.