GAFAM and 'Cloud': Google, Microsoft, Amazon and GitHub

• Daniel Stenberg: Google to reimplement curl in libcrurl

  By throwing a lot of man power on it. As the primary author and developer of the libcurl API and the libcurl code, I assume that Cronet works quite differently than libcurl so there’s going to be quite a lot of wrestling of data and code flow to make this API work on that code. The libcurl API is also very versatile and is an API that has developed over a period of almost 20 years so there’s a lot of functionality, a lot of options and a lot of subtle behavior that may or may not be easy or straight forward to mimic. The initial commit imported the headers and examples from the curl 7.65.1 release.

• Microsoft, you should look away now: Google's cloud second only to AWS in dev survey [Ed: Longtime Microsoft booster Tim Anderson  on Azure being a failure after so many entryism attempts and underhanded tactics]

  Coders use Google Cloud Platform (GCP) more than Microsoft Azure, though Amazon Web Services (AWS) has a comfortable lead, according to a Developer Ecosystem survey conducted by tools vendor JetBrains. Developer usage is 67 per cent AWS versus 28 per cent GCP and 21 per cent Azure, according to the new survey. Unfortunately, the question was posed in a different way in the 2018 survey, adding on-premises into the mix, but last year Azure and GCP had equal share after AWS. The survey had 19,000 participants invited via "Twitter ads, Facebook ads, Google Adwords and JetBrains' own communication channels," the tools vendor said, though "only the responses of 6,993 respondents were included in the report." Responses were removed to reduce bias, yet it warned "some bias may be present as JetBrains users may have been more willing on average to compete the survey".

• Get your coat, you've pulled a Pull Panda: GitHub goes home with code collab specialists [Ed: Notice how Microsoft only takes GitHub in more of a proprietary software direction. That says a lot – they have plans and they’re really detrimental to FOSS]

Kernel: Linux Changes, Certifications, Graphics, PCI Express 6.0 and Bug

• PowerCap/RAPL Code To Support Icelake Desktop / X / Xeon D With Linux 5.3

  While as of Linux 5.2 the support for Intel's Icelake CPUs appear production ready with all of the bits in place from new IDs to the much enhanced "Gen 11" graphics, there are a few stragglers of items to land with the upcoming Linux 5.3 merge window though could be back-ported to current series. Fortunately, we haven't found anything major to be missing. One of the latest bits of Icelake Linux support is handling of these next-generation processors within the PowerCap / RAPL (Running Average Power Limit) driver code. In particular, the desktop/workstation Icelake parts. This is the code for reading the estimated CPU package power consumption based on hardware performance counters and the ability to artificially limit the power draw of the processor via software.

• Six Niche Linux Certifications

• AMD Navi GPU stack bares all in Linux graphics driver update

  Eight Navi GPU variants have been spotted in Linux driver code. AMD’s next-gen RDNA graphics chips are set for launch on July 7, 2019 within the RX 5700 XT and RX 5700, but the red team has plenty of silicon in store for a range of applications. Including console, laptops, desktop, and mobile phones. The GPU codenames were spotted within Linux display drivers after the additional code was submitted and signed off by two AMD employees. The code adds support for Display Core Next, or DCN2, which “is the display block for Navi10.” Each entry following adds the necessary ASIC IDs for each Navi chip in the stack, starting with Navi 10 and down to Navi 21 LITE.

• Nouveau Driver Picking Up NVIDIA TU116 GPU Support For Linux 5.3

  Building off the initial Turing mode-setting bits that were in place since Linux 5.0 and have continued stepping along to support newer variants on successive kernel releases, the Linux 5.3 kernel is slated to add support for the TU116 graphics processor.

• PCI-SIG® Announces Upcoming PCI Express® 6.0 Specification to Reach 64 GT/s

• PCI Express 6.0 Announced With 4-Times The Bandwidth Of PCIe 4.0

  With the increasing demand for bandwidth across a wide range of devices used in consumer and enterprise domains, PCI Express, the high-speed serial computer expansion bus standard has also evolved over the years. PCI Special Interest Group, a body that sets standards for PCIe, has announced PCI Express 6 that promises four times the bandwidth offered by PCIe 4.0 and twice of PCIe 5.0.

• PCI Express 6.0 Announced For Release In 2021 With 64 GT/s Transfer Rates

  While PCI Express 4.0 up to this point has only been found in a few systems like Talos' POWER9 platforms and coming soon with the new AMD graphics cards and chipsets, the PCI SIG today announced PCI Express 6.0. PCI Express 5.0 was only announced last month with 32GT/s transfer rates while already the PCI SIG announced PCI Express 6.0.

• Netflix researcher spots TCP SACK flaws in Linux and FreeBSD

• TCP SACK Panic Flaw Could Compromise Production Linux Machines

rga: Search Text In PDF, Ebooks, Office Documents, Archives And More (ripgrep Wrapper)

rga (or ripgrep-all) is a command line tool to recursively search all files in a directory for a regex pattern, that runs on Linux, macOS and Windows. It's a wrapper for ripgrep, the line-oriented recursive search program, on top of which it enables search in a multitude of file types like PDF, DOCX, ODT, EPUB, SQLite databases, movies subtitles embedded in MKV or MP4 files, archives like ZIP or GZ, and more. rga is great when you want to search for some text from a file available in a folder with many documents of various file types, even if some of them are available in archives.

Security: Updates, Containers, Compilers and More

• Security updates for Wednesday

• Containers pose security risks, but mitigation isn't tough: Lees

  Recent concerns over the security offered by containers are not unjustified, the chief technologist for Germany-based SUSE in the Asia-Pacific says, adding however that there are a lot of operational things that could be done to mitigate the risk. Peter Lees told iTWire in response to queries that the whole point of containers was to be able to get new functionality out quickly. "And in modern development that often means gluing together micro-services from many different sources, which in turn could mean that the ultimate source of those functions may not have been vetted," he said. Container security was in the limelight in April when the credentials of some 190,000 account holders at Docker Hub, the official repository for Docker container images, were exposed due to "a brief moment of unauthorised access".

• Ubuntu 19.10 To Harden Its Compiler With Stack Clash Protection & Intel CET

  In addition to discontinuing i386 support, Canonical announced another change being worked on for Ubuntu 19.10 is compiler hardening. In the name of increased security, their GCC 9 compiler for Ubuntu 19.10 will have some additional tunables enabled: -fstack-clash-protection and -fcf-protection. The stack clash protection is designed to fend off stack clash attacks by checking pages at allocation-time that instead would result in ideally just a segmentation fault.

• What Red Hat OpenShift Online and OpenShift Dedicated customers should know about June 2019 kernel network stack flaws

• Netflix Finds Bug That Creates Linux Kernel Panic

• Docker Is Porting Its Container Platform to Microsoft Windows Subsystem for Linux 2, Ubuntu 19.10 Will Drop 32-Bit Builds, Children of Morta Still Coming to Linux and Vulnerabilities Discovered in the Linux TCP System

  Security researchers over at Netflix uncovered some troubling security vulnerabilities inside the Linux (and FreeBSD) TCP subsystem, the worst of which is being called SACK. It can permit remote attackers to induce a kernel panic from within your Linux operating system. Patches are available for affected Linux distributions.