03.13.14
Posted in Kernel at 3:08 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Kernel Level
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While it’s late into the Linux 3.14 kernel development cycle, a patch that was introduced in Linux 3.13 with an aim of improving open-source graphics driver performance for TTM-based drivers is now being reverted since for some situations it instead decreased the performance.
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The first Arduino-certified product to come out of Intel’s embedded systems division, is the Galileo a sign of things to come or a white elephant?
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Red Hat is a relative late-comer to the dynamic patching party. Oracle has been in the space the longest, thanks to its 2011 acquisition of dynamic-kernel patching vendor Ksplice.
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He has worked on the Linux kernel and userland for more than 20 years, in areas including KVM, the kernel-based virtual machine, high speed networking, Linux/ia64, Linux/m68k, the system libraries (glibc) and high-end NUMA systems.
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For users of the BFS scheduler patches to the kernel, they have been updated this week for the Linux 3.13 kernel.
Con Kolivas continues maintaining his Brain Fuck Scheduler patch-set outside of the Linux kernel with no ambitions to mainline the alternative CPU scheduler. BFS 0.446 was released this week and with this release comes support for the now-stable Linux 3.13 kernel.
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Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) and Software Defined Networking (SDN) are all the rage as conventional computing platforms have taken up the challenge of network routing and management (see “What’s The Difference Between SDN and NFV”). The trend is to integrate monolithic, vertically integrated hardware like gateways and routers into a single, virtualized, hardware platform.
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On a related note, the LLVM Linux project is also seeking GSoC attention. Developers are still hard at work on making the upstream Linux kernel compatible with building under LLVM/Clang rather than just GCC. Much progress has been made in being able to build the Linux kernel with Clang but there’s still outstanding patches, etc.
Education
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The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux and collaborative development, today announced it is building a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) program with edX, the nonprofit online learning platform launched in 2012 by Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). More than 31 universities have partnered with edX and nearly two million people have accessed its courses online since it launched just 18 months ago.
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Xen/ARM
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Xen 4.4 provides stable ARM support, improved libvirt support for libxl, a new scalable event channel interface, and many other changes. I’ve already written at length before about the big improvements to Xen 4.4 within Xen 4.4 Is On Approach With Many Features and Xen 4.4 Will Be Riding High With New Features.
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Graphics Stack
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Other changes for today’s NVIDIA 334.21 Linux driver update include a NVIDIA kernel module security fix for a userspace pointer dereference, OpenGL bug-fixes, support for GPUs with VDPAU feature set E, improved application profile support, improved performance of OpenGL applications when used in conjunction with the X driver’s composition pipeline, NVIDIA Settings control panel updates, and other fixes.
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Last week we talked about Broadcom finally open-sourcing their VideoCore IV 3D Graphics Stack and it is indeed the real McCoy, but the $10,000 Quake III bounty has yet to be claimed for getting it to work on the Raspberry Pi.
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VDPAU Feature Set E is the latest revision of NVIDIA’s PureVideo hardware that’s found in the brand new Maxwell graphics processors. With the GeForce GTX 750 series support for VDPAU Feature Set E, there is support for H.264 decoding up to 4096 x 4096 and MPEG-1/MPEG-2 streams up to 4080 x 4080. These new GPUs also support enhanced error concealment when dealing with the decoding of corrupted video streams.
Benchmarks
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The ASUS Zenbook UX301LA-DH71T is a Haswell-based Intel ultrabook that I have found to be quite interesting and will be carrying out a large number of Linux tests (and Windows 8.1 vs. Linux benchmarks) from this laptop that sports Intel Iris Graphics 5100, dual SSDs, and other impressive features.
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For any Linux laptop users or those concerned about their data’s safety on production systems, I highly recommend utilizing disk encryption for safeguarding the data. However, what’s the performance impact like these days? In this article with the current development snapshot of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS on a modern Intel ultrabook we’re looking at the impact (including CPU utilization) of using an eCryptfs-based home directory encryption and LUKS-based full-disk encryption on Ubuntu Linux.
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For those curious about the performance of Intel’s “Quark” x86 SoC for very low-power applications, including wearable devices, here’s some benchmarks of Debian on their Galileo development board.
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…in this article we are benchmarking the AMD Catalyst and NVIDIA binary drivers on Ubuntu Linux.
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For this article we benchmarked Ubuntu 14.04 in its current development state and compared it to the Ubuntu releases going back three years to Ubuntu 11.10.
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Posted in GNU/Linux at 1:34 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Kubuntu 14.04 LTS Beta 1 (Trusty Tahr) has been released by its developers, and comes with a long list of improvements, much more than what has been made available with the previous Alpha versions.
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Posted in News Roundup at 6:56 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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With Valve’s Source Engine originally just targeting Direct3D, when initially porting their games to Linux and OS X they relied upon a hand-made Direct3D to OpenGL translation layer. In potentially assisting other game developers, Valve Software has now opened up this graphics translation layer.
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Crytek has confirmed that CryEngine now has “full native Linux support.” A demo of the engine running on the open source OS will be presented at Game Developers Conference next week.
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Crytek has announced plans to reveal the nature of their updates to proprietary game engine CryEngine in the upcoming GDC in San Francisco. They have immediately outed that the engine now natively supports Linux.
Crytek will also use the event to show off their latest games. Visitors will get to play two new modes from online FPS Warface, Tower Raid and Capture. They will also be showing of The Collectables, a military strategy game for iOS and Android.
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Digital Tribe Games has announced that their upcoming new dungeon themed Role Playing Game, TinyKeep, is going to see the light of the day pretty soon on Linux, Mac and Windows machines. The game is now under development having reached its funding goal on Kickstarter thanks to the pledges of 807 people.
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I am sure there are a few Sega fans following us here, so this one is for you! Duck Marines is a free software remake of the ChuChu Rocket party game. Sadly I didn’t have a Sega Dreamcast for very long, so it is not a title I am too familiar with.
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The Humble Mobile Bundle is back and with it six awesome Android games. These games make the list of best games of 2013. Like every time, this humble bundle will stay on sale for 2 weeks only, so just literally pay a couple of bucks and get them.
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Valve has recently released Portal 2 on Steam for Linux and opened a GitHub entry to gather all the bugs from the community. When one of the Valve developers closed a bug related to Portal 2 recommending that the users disable a security feature, the Linux community reacted.
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Posted in News Roundup at 6:53 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Wine has been around for more than two decades and works pretty well on most Linux desktops, laptops and servers (not that there is really any good reason for running a Windows app on a Linux server). But since Wine depends on parts of the Linux operating system that are not always available in the Linux variants used to power many smartphones, tablets, smart TVs and Chromebooks, configuring Wine for them is more problematic.
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Gizmodo reports that a new open source application called Popcorn Time lets you stream torrent movies in Linux, as well as Windows and OS X. This is the first time I’ve ever heard of an application that could actually stream torrent video content, but I’m sure the movie industry isn’t going to be happy about it.
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The Wine development release 1.7.14 is now available.
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And I’m not the first to notice this. This is probably because the latest version, NEdit 5.5, was released in 2004. So I need a new programmer’s editor.
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Quite obviously, musicians and the people around them have a great need for video editing software — not only because YouTube is a popular place to listen to music, but because videos have so much promotional value. Tour diaries, talk-to-the-camera confessionals, live show videos, viral stunts, and other types of videos are all part of the gameplan for recording artists these days.
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I’ve been informed by the musl development camp that they intend to release version 1.0 of their standard C library in the next few weeks.
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Bluefish is a powerful text editor aimed towards developers with features such as syntax highlighting, indentation, support for projects, auto-completion and more. Considering Linux is saturated with various text editors and integrated development environments ranging from the simplest to the more complex and feature-rich ones, let’s see what Bluefish offers for programmers and not only.
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I love Docker, it’s a fantastic concept, and so far the execution and progress of the project has been flawless. I also love FreeBSD; FreeBSD is a clean and powerful system with advanced features like Dtrace, ZFS, and Jails. Combine the two and it sounds better than chocolate and peanut butter. With the recent version 0.9 release, Docker announced the infrastructure support to glue the two together, along with KVM, OpenVZ, Solaris Zones, and nearly any other environment for application isolation through an execution driver API.
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Posted in News Roundup at 6:52 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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When a program needs a place to store files temporarily on a Linux server, a RAM file system keeps disk storage free for other tasks.
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Posted in News Roundup at 6:31 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Android
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While working on Replicant, a fully free/libre version of Android, we discovered that the proprietary program running on the applications processor in charge of handling the communication protocol with the modem actually implements a back-door that lets the modem perform remote file I/O operations on the file system.
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Privacy
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Last month, National Football League special investigator Ted Wells delivered a shocking report about Miami Dolphins player Richie Incognito’s bullying tactics aimed at teammate Jonathan Martin. At the heart of the report: More than 1,000 text messages, many of them outrageously explicit, that Incognito and Martin swapped between October 2012 and November 2013.
NSA’s Latest Scandal
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The latest batch of top-secret intelligence documents from the hoard collected by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden detail the massive increase in the agency’s use of its Tailored Access Operations (TAO) hacking unit – including a system dubbed TURBINE that can spam out millions of pieces of sophisticated malware at a time.
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While U.S. law enforcement agencies have long tried to stamp out networks of compromised computers used by cyber criminals, the National Security Agency has been hijacking the so-called botnets as a resource for spying.
The NSA has “co-opted” more than 140,000 computers since August 2007 for the purpose of injecting them with spying software, according to a slide leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and published by The Intercept news website on Wednesday.
US Congress
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The top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee said yesterday that he favors ending the National Security Agency’s widespread collection of U.S. citizens’ phone data, making him the first of the four leaders of the congressional intelligence panels to do so.
European Parliament
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THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT is miffed about data snarfing by the US National Security Agency (NSA) and has threatened the country with an end to the Safe Harbor agreement.
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The European Parliament voted yesterday (12 March) to adopt a resolution condemning spying by the US National Security Agency (NSA) on EU citizens.
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The European Parliament’s consent to the EU-US trade deal “could be endangered” if blanket mass surveillance by the US National Security Agency (NSA) does not stop, MEPs have warned.
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Google
Drones
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His report on targeted killing, discussed on Tuesday, is partly an effort to spur the United States and other countries to bring drone killing under the auspices of international law. The report sets forth key questions raised by targeted and semi-targeted killing, and encourages the international community to grapple with them.
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We cannot “kill” terrorism with a drone.
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John F. Kennedy once said he wanted to “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds.” He reached that conclusion after CIA officials, including Director Allen Dulles, had misled him on many of the planning details of the disastrous April 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion.
With the revelations that the CIA has been aggressively obstructing the work of the Senate Intelligence Committee, even to the point of spying on Senate staff conducting a long overdo review of its “detention and interrogation” program, we see the CIA has not changed its ways.
The Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, called the committee’s current battle with the CIA “a defining moment for the oversight role of our intelligence committee . . . and whether we can be thwarted by those we oversee.”
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Sana’a, March 13: A US drone strike killed three suspected Al Qaeda militants in Yemen’s Al Jawf province on Wednesday, Yemeni officials said.
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Earlier this month, I spoke at a panel in Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) in Richmond. During the talk, I showed a photo of a young Yemeni boy in the province of Mareb (which was hit by five drone strikes this month), demonstrating how he ducked in his school as soon as he heard the sound of a plane. He was not sure whether it was a drone or a fighter jet, but he has become used to ducking this way ever since his village was hit and his friend hit with a shrapnel.
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Ukraine
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International law is suddenly very popular in Washington. President Obama responded to Russian military intervention in the Crimea by accusing Russia of a “breach of international law.” Secretary of State John Kerry followed up by declaring that Russia is “in direct, overt violation of international law.”
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Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and a group of senators are slated to travel to Ukraine on Thursday to show support for the new interim government there.
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