Industry News

Say Hi to Subutai

I learned about Subutai from Philip Sheldrake of the Digital Life Collective (and much else) and thought it deserved attention here at Linux Journal, so I offered this space for that. Alex Karasulu did most of the writing, but it was a team effort with help from Jon 'maddog' Hall, Philip Sheldrake and Steve Taylor.—Doc Searls

Getting Sticky with It

Although they might not be so good for credit cards or floppy disks, magnets are one of those things that always have fascinated me. For the past few years, I've wanted to get a set of the round Zen Magnets to play with—they're sort of like an extra science-y version of LEGOs. Unfortunately, before I was able to purchase any, the US government banned their sale!

From vs. to + for Microsoft and Linux

In November 2016, Microsoft became a platinum member of the Linux Foundation, the primary sponsor of top-drawer Linux talent (including Linus), as well as a leading organizer of Linux conferences and source of Linux news.

Senet IoT Foundry

Startup companies and even large enterprises may not be able to harness the full range of skills required to deliver vertically complete IoT solutions to their customers.

Updates from LinuxCon and ContainerCon, Toronto, August 2016

The Future of Linux: Continuing to Inspire Innovation and Openness The first 25 years of Linux has transformed the world, not just computing, and the next 25 years will continue to see more growth in the Open Source movement, The Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin said during the opening keynote of LinuxCon/ContainerCon in Toronto on Monday, August 22, 2016.

diff -u: What's New in Kernel Development

When you run a program as setuid, it runs with all the permissions of that user. And if the program spawns new processes, they inherit the same permissions. Not so with filesystem capabilities. When you run a program with a set of capabilities, the processes it spawns do not have those capabilities by default; they must be given explicitly.

diff -u: What's New in Kernel Development

One ongoing question kernel developers face is the best way to delete data so no one else can recover it. Typically there are simple tools to undelete files that are deleted accidentally, although some filesystems make this easier than others.

diff -u: What's New in Kernel Development

Recently there was some discussion about ways to ease the tired backs of kernel maintainers. Apparently the merge windows are times of great labor, and some folks wanted to alert contributors to some preferable code submission habits.

diff -u: What's New in Kernel Development

Nicolas Dichtel and Thierry Herbelot pointed out that the directories in the /proc filesystem used a linked list to identify their files. But, this would be slow when /proc directories started having lots of files, which, for example, might happen when the system needed lots of network sockets.

HPC Cluster Grant Accepting Applications!

Silicon Mechanics, Inc. has announced the open submission period for its 4th annual Research Cluster Grant Program.  This competitive grant will award two complete high performance compute clusters to two institutions of higher education and research. The competition is open to all US and Canadian qualified post-secondary institutions, university-affiliated research institutions, non-profit research institutions, and researchers at federal labs with university affiliations.

diff -u: What's New in Kernel Development

David Drysdale wanted to add Capsicum security features to Linux after he noticed that FreeBSD already had Capsicum support. Capsicum defines fine-grained security privileges, not unlike filesystem capabilities. But as David discovered, Capsicum also has some controversy surrounding it.

Linux Graphics News

Two quarters ago we saw that Glamor and XWayland were poised for making strong progress. Half a year later, we see these technologies have permitted vast progress by the X and Wayland communities.

SUSE, MariaDB and IBM team up to tame Big Data

SUSE and MariaDB (the company formerly known as SkySQL!) officially teamed up today, joining forces with IBM Power Systems, in a partnership that promises to expand the Linux application ecosystem. According to sources at SUSE, customers will now be able to run a wider variety of applications on Power8, increasing both flexibility and choice while working within existing IT infrastructure.

diff -u: What's New in Kernel Development

Sometimes a new piece of code turns out to be more useful than its author suspected. Alejandra Morales recently came out with the Cryogenic Project as part of his Master's thesis, supervised by Christian Grothoff. The idea was to reduce energy consumption by scheduling input/output operations in batches.

Linux Security Threats on the Rise

Every year, heck...every month, Linux is adopted by more companies and organizations as an important if not primary component of their enterprise platform. And the more serious the hardware platform, the more likely it is to be running Linux. 60% of servers, 70% of Web servers and 95% of all supercomputers are Linux-based!