today's leftovers

• 22.04 LTS now available for $1299 and up

  The Dell XPS 13 Plus Developer Edition is an unusual looking thin and light laptop that ships with Ubuntu Linux pre-installed rather than Windows. When the notebook first went on sale in April it shipped with Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, but now Dell is shipping the laptop with Ubuntu 22.04 LTS instead.

• Linux Around The World: Belgium - LinuxLinks

  We cover events and user groups that are running in Belgium. This article forms part of our Linux Around The World series.

• The software defined programmable logic controller: An introduction to Red Hat’s predictable latency / realtime capabilities

  The software-defined industrial control system is a huge opportunity for open source technologies. Moving away from bespoke specialized hardware (like PLC devices) to standard hardware with software only is a trend that crosses industries, extending now into the industrial and manufacturing world. This type of shift for industrial organizations is similar to telcos moving to network function virtualisation (NFV) and open radio access networks (ORAN).

Videos: GNU And Linux, Linux Action News, and More

• GNU And Linux Are Forever Linked By History - Invidious

  It never fails. Any time that I mention GNU/Linux on any of my videos, some wise guy has to chime in with "Stop calling it GNU/Linux...you can have Linux without GNU." Why do these people feel the need to state something that is obvious?

• More NVIDIA OPEN SOURCE, Cutefish is ALIVE, and Duck Duck Go fixes tracking: Linux + opensource news - Invidious

• Linux Action News 253 [Ed: Too much sucking up to Microsoft, but then again consider who owns this site]

  GitHub steps in it this week, Microsoft’s Linux distribution now runs on bare metal, FFmpeg gets IPFS support, and the odd thing going on with the kernel.

Kernel: New Mesa RC, KVM Update, and Security Posturing From NSA-Connected Companies

• [ANNOUNCE] mesa 22.2.0-rc2

  Hi list,
  
  It's that time again, mesa 22.2-rc2 is now avilaable. We've had lots of
  changes here, including a bug in my release script setting the version
  to 22.2.0 (oops)! Per normal, Mike is leading the pack with zink
  changes, but we've got fixes all over the tree here.
  
  See you again next week, same bat time, same bat channel,
  Dylan
  

• Direct host system calls from KVM [LWN.net]

  As a general rule, virtualization mechanisms are designed to provide strong isolation between a host and the guest systems that it runs. The guests are not trusted, and their ability to access or influence anything outside of their virtual machines must be tightly controlled. So a patch series allowing guests to execute arbitrary system calls in the host context might be expected to be the cause of significantly elevated eyebrows across the net. Andrei Vagin has posted such a series with the expected results. The use case for Vagin's work is gVisor, a container-management platform with a focus on security. Like a full virtualization system, gVisor runs containers within a virtual machine (using KVM), but the purpose is not to fully isolate those containers from the system. Instead, KVM is used to provide address-space isolation for processes within containers, but the resulting virtual machines do not run a normal operating-system kernel. Instead, they run a special gVisor kernel that handles system calls made by the contained processes, making security decisions as it goes. That kernel works in an interesting way; it maps itself into each virtual machine's address space to match its layout on the host, then switches between the two as needed. The function to go to the virtual-machine side is called, perhaps inevitably, bluepill(). The execution environment is essentially the same on either side, with the same memory layout, but the guest side is constrained by the boundaries placed on the virtual machine.

• Google wants to make Linux kernel flaws harder to exploit [Ed: ZDNet's Microsoft booster says "Google wants to make Linux kernel flaws harder to exploit", but it was actually Google that put NSA back-doored ciphers inside the Linux kernel. Selective amnesia?]