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LWN.net Weekly Edition for May 4, 2006Get Legal - but not too soon
The OpenOffice.org marketing team, sensing an opportunity in the latest
round of Business Software Alliance attacks on companies using "pirated"
software, has announced the
"Get Legal - Get OpenOffice.org" campaign. It
features a cute logo (seen on the right) and a web page discussing the
difficulties in remaining in compliance with proprietary software
licenses. OpenOffice.org, of course, offers a way out: switch to free
software, make no license payments, and be entirely in compliance with the
law.
The heavy-handed techniques employed by groups like the BSA have always been destined to play into the hand of free software advocates. Even companies with strict "a license for every copy" policies (and strict enforcement to back those policies up) can find themselves with unlicensed copies of software on their machines. The BSA, with its rewards for employees who turn in their companies and its police raids, can make the cost of those unlicensed copies very high. And, even if a company is able to stay in complete compliance, it bears the costs of license tracking and software audits. So OpenOffice.org is right to capitalize on this behavior; free software does, indeed, offer a way to avoid the expensive hassles which can accompany proprietary code. When LWN posted a pointer to this campaign on May 1, however, the OpenOffice.org marketing team was not amused. One participant exclaimed:
Jesus what an idiot. Makes you wonder if they're purposely trying
to wreck the campaign before it takes off.... I'm CC'ing this
message to lwn to see if someone can at least smack that poster for
us.
Your This episode raises an interesting question with regard to how free software projects deal with their user communities. The usual rule is "release early, release often"; the idea being that the opportunity to obtain input from a wider community should be taken at the earliest possible time. There is little to be gained by holding on to work which is intended to be released anyway. That ethic appears to be changing in some places, however. Companies perform free software work behind closed doors and release the result in one big pile with the obligatory press release. Releasing code earlier, it is said, is just an invitation to "bike sheds" and "stop energy," and an impediment to actually getting the work done. And marketing campaigns are, it would seem, so fragile that any visibility in the wider community threatens to "wreck" them. So work must be withheld until it is finished, ready to present itself in its final form. It is worth asking whether press releases are really the best way for free software projects to interact with the rest of the world. A press release is fine as a way of gaining the attention of the mainstream media, but there is little in our community which needs to be kept secret until the PR has been officially distributed. It is hard to imagine that the strong message behind the "Get Legal" campaign can truly be compromised if the community knows, before the press release hits the net, that such a campaign is being developed. In fact, it's even possible that people outside of the core marketing group could have useful input which could make the campaign stronger. The value in the free software process is not just in the delivery of something cool on a date picked by somebody in the marketing department - it's in the process. Without the process, all you have is another corporate product, albeit with less restrictive conditions and a nicer price tag. At times, we may all be tempted by the idea of dispensing with an open development process (and the community which goes with it) in the name of faster development or a splashier release. But going that way has its costs, and risks taking us closer to the proprietary systems that we have worked so hard to replace.
Looking forward to KDE 4Ever since the first technology preview of Qt4, and probably even before, KDE 4 has been the subject of wild speculation. The KDE Project actually discussed starting the KDE 4 branch as far back as August 2004 in a birds of a feather session. Two major releases later and the developers are finally buried deep in their libraries, overhauling and rethinking the basics of their desktop environment. By the time KDE 4.0 is released, which could be late this year or early 2007, developers will have a lot of new toys to play with.To give you an idea of what KDE 4.0 will be like it's worth looking back at KDE 2.0, which could almost have been described as a technology preview rather than a complete desktop environment. Basic building blocks for KDE first surfaced in that release, such as the KIOSlaves that enable all KDE applications to handle all kinds of data transparently, from networked machines accessed by ssh to man pages and Beagle searches. In KDE 3.0 those technologies finally matured, and through the 3.x series we have seen the developers realize their promise, creating the desktop that so many know and love today. KDE 4.0 is going to be a bit like KDE 2.0 - although far more useful and mature - in that it will first expose a lot of infrastructure even if few of the applications manage to exploit their potential. According to Aaron Seigo, the core developer of Plasma:
Users are only likely to see applications using the infrastructure in
interesting ways by KDE 4.1, and then through the rest of the 4.x series it
will mature in the same way as 3.x. Hopefully it will happen with greater
speed than KDE 2 as we aren't starting completely from scratch
everywhere and we have a bigger development team. I'd expect early
adopters and "tourists" to jump into kde 4.0. but not school or enterprise
deployments.
Of course for developers this doesn't matter, the hype is all about the technology, so even if Seigo is right and KDE 4.0 is a "first draft of a post-technical preview type of release" there will be plenty to play with. Don't say "vapourware" to a KDE developer! Phonon, Solid, Plasma, Akonodi: these are the buzzwords that give substance to the hype. Each mini-project is targeted at making developers' lives easier, which is a big part of the KDE development philosophy: give developers great tools and they'll make great applications. Phonon addresses the complexity of audio and video functionality in applications, whether they're simple games with silly beeps, instant messengers that need audio and video devices, or complex mixing studios. The API should allow developers to get on with the application and have a reliable, desktop-integrated multimedia framework do the boring work. At the moment, for example, Kaffeine can embed videos in Konqueror but it is prone to crashes because it has to make kernel-level calls on its own. With Phonon, developers can do away with such hacks and concentrate on one API if they want enhanced functionality. The other design decision was to allow developers and users to use different multimedia frameworks underneath Phonon - such as GStreamer, NMM, MAS and Xine - rather than simply integrating one into the KDE libraries. This decision, popular in Amarok, should promote more innovation amongst developers and choice for users, though it will also undoubtedly be more work than just adopting, say, GStreamer, as the GNOME developers have done. Solid takes up the challenge set by Robert Love's Project Utopia, and will try to make interaction with hot-pluggable devices and networks more, well, solid. KDE already uses DBUS and HAL to provide basic functionality that is almost equivalent to that found in GNOME, Microsoft Windows and Apple MacOSX. But integration has been hard work, and in KDE 3.5 it can only shine through KIOSlaves and other "old" technology. The main design goal of Solid is to give developers a single, consistent API so that the desktop can become more flexible and integrated, much like Love's goals with Project Utopia. It should be easy to make your application fully aware of changes in network and hardware availability. The second design goal is to avoid locking KDE into platform-specific technologies like HAL (which currently only works with Linux). Plasma will unite and rethink various components in the desktop, including kicker and its various applets, SuperKaramba widgets, the K Menu application launcher, the Run Command dialogue and the desktop space itself. Eye-candy addicts will enjoy the more beautiful design that it brings, but developers are more likely to appreciate the elegant API. Based around a few basic elements, Plasma should help the desktop become a truly functional space rather than a dumping ground for downloads and systray applets. The lofty ambition of Plasma is to completely change the way we interact with the desktop, becoming "workflow sensitive". Project-based collections, network aware widgets for collaboration, interfaces that you can zoom in on to examine details and zoom out of to gain overview and free-form layout of add-ons are all being experimented with. But of course by KDE 4.0 it's likely to change developers' mindsets more than the actual implementation of the desktop. There are many other ideas floating around, such as Akonadi, a storage layer for PIM (personal information management) applications. But, like Akonadi, many of these ideas may not appear until KDE 4.1. By October we should see a technology preview, which will give developers their first chance to get hands-on experience with which to judge the hype. In the meantime there's always SVN and KDE 2.0 to give you a sense of the excitement.
Legislative updateIt seems to be legislative season, with interesting laws popping up like the flowers in this (northern hemisphere) spring. While much of this activity is happening in the US, there is also, as we will see, activity on the international scene as well.
Network neutralityAs telecommunications companies in the U.S. slowly coalesce back into the Ma Bell we knew over twenty years ago, they are increasingly making scary noises about taking control of the Internet traffic which passes over their networks. These companies would like to shake down operators of web sites for the right to communicate with their customers - who have already paid for their network access. They would like to impede the passage of voice over IP traffic, since Internet telephony services conflict with their own offerings. In general, the idea of the net as a service by which any two applications can communicate using the protocols of their choice is under threat. In response, there have been several pushes for "network neutrality" laws which would prohibit telecom companies from discriminating between packets. These proposals have, so far, not gotten all that far in the legislative process. But they keep coming; the latest is the Markey Network Neutrality Act of 2006. The core language in this act is:
Each broadband network provider has the duty to ... not block,
impair, degrade, discriminate against, or interfere with the
ability of any person to utilize their broadband service to: (A)
access, use, send, receive, or offer lawful content,
applications, or services over broadband networks, including the
Internet; or (B) attach any device to the provider's network and
utilize such device in connection with broadband service, provided
that any such device does not physically damage, or materially
degrade other subscribers' use of, the network.
There are some exceptions, of course; for example, spam filtering and "parental control" are allowed, as long as they are optional. ISPs are also allowed to prioritize classes of service - voice, for example - as long as all traffic of that class is prioritized in the same way. Network neutrality laws have a certain appeal; they attempt to codify the way we tend to think the net has operated all of these years anyway. There is danger, however, in giving an agency like the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) the power to regulate traffic over the net. Once the FCC starts telling ISPs how to handle the packets they carry, there will inevitably be pressure from well-funded interests to tweak those regulations in their favor. The net's relatively unregulated regime has suited it well this far; we should think carefully before starting to add regulations to the net.
Broadcast flagsU.S. Senator Stevens is pushing a huge telecommunications bill for this session. It includes a number of things, including a network neutrality section - though the Stevens version simply requires the FCC to crank out occasional reports on whether neutrality regulation may be required. Buried in the depths of this bill, however, is a subsection called Digital Content Protection Act of 2006. This section, quite simply, directs the FCC to implement the broadcast flag as described in its previous attempts. The consequences of the broadcast flag have been discussed many times. It will treat anybody with a television or radio as a pirate and deprive them of their fair use rights. A mandated broadcast flag will also outlaw any radio or TV implementation in free software. Code which can be changed by end users will never live up to the robustness requirements that come along with broadcast flags. So this sort of legislation means the end of projects like MythTV - at least, in the jurisdictions where the legislation has force.
WIPOThe World Intellectual Property Organization is busily working on a treaty. There is now a draft of the new WIPO treaty in circulation; it has been put onto a fast track with an eye toward adoption in 2007. There is a fair amount of bad news in this draft. It includes a DMCA-style anti-circumvention clause which all adopting countries would have to implement; the DMCA could yet become a worldwide law. This treaty also looks to extend its 50-year (minimum) protection to "webcasting organizations" which make content available on the net. The definition of a "webcasting organization" is interesting:
"webcasting organization" means the legal entity that takes the
initiative and has the responsibility for the transmission to the
public of sounds or of images or of images and sounds or of the
representations thereof, and the assembly and scheduling of the
content of the transmission.
Note that there is no mention of the "webcasting organization" actually owning this content or having any other rights over it in any way. By virtue of "taking the initiative" and putting content up for distribution over the net, an organization can claim exclusive copyright rights over that content for 50 years. Should somebody else wish to use the webcast materials in another work, it will no longer be sufficient to obtain the rights from any relevant copyright holders; the middlemen represented by the "webcasting organizations" will also be involved. The webcasting provisions are an optional part of the WIPO treaty, though, as others have pointed out, it would be highly in-character for the U.S. to require adoption of those provisions as part of any trade treaty it signs. The DRM provisions are not optional, however, and neither are the articles giving broadcasters exclusive rights over "fixation" (i.e. recording) of their output. This legal right, combined with legally-enforced DRM, will, once again, be the end of projects like MythTV. (See writeups by Cory Doctorow and the EFF for more information on WIPO). The drive to gain control over information is relentless. As a community based on openness and sharing of information, we are threatened by those who require technical and legal controls over the sharing of information. If we want to continue to live in a world where we have the right to create, to share our creations when we so choose, and to use free systems to do so, we must pay attention to these threats. Tempting as it may be to ignore the unpleasant legislative processes happening world wide, the sad fact is that those processes will not ignore us.
Security The risks of disclosing web vulnerabilitiesOne would think that an organization would be grateful to someone who found a vulnerability in their web application and provided them with the information needed to fix it. A recent episode where a security researcher has been charged with breaching the security of an online database makes it clear that this gratitude cannot be counted upon, however. Eric McCarty found a flaw in the University of Southern California (USC) online application system that would allow a SQL injection attack to extract the contents of a database which included some 275,000 records of both current students and applicants. According to the original SecurityFocus article, the researcher discovered the flaw when using the system to apply to USC. The username and password text fields could be used to feed SQL commands to the database, allowing the entire contents to be read and/or modified. He then anonymously contacted SecurityFocus to disclose the flaw. Other than corresponding with SecurityFocus anonymously, McCarty did little, if anything, to cover his tracks; believing he was acting in good faith. SecurityFocus contacted USC; the administrators of the web site claimed that only two records could be accessed via the SQL injection. When confronted with additional records, they admitted that the entire database was vulnerable and shut down the site for ten days in order to fix it. In addition, the administrators found the entries in the logfiles corresponding to the 'attack' and provided the IP address to law enforcement. The IP address allowed the FBI to determine his identity and to execute a search warrant against him and his Gmail accounts. On his computer they evidently found seven records from the USC database and his Gmail account provided copies of the emails that he sent to SecurityFocus describing the vulnerability. The charges do not claim that he did anything with the seven records, just that he possessed them and had gotten them via 'misuse'. The affidavit filed in the case claims that McCarty caused $140,000 in damages by causing USC to shut down its system for 10 days. It is somewhat difficult to see how telling someone about a flaw in their system makes one responsible for the time it takes them to fix it. It would seem that the original programmers of the system would be the ones who are culpable here. Computer misuse statutes are typically written in such a way that any access, other than what is intended by the site owner, could be considered a crime. The intent of the 'perpetrator' rarely seems to be examined and this case is reminiscent of the conviction of a British security consultant last year. Daniel Cuthbert was concerned that he had been phished at a tsunami relief website and he did two simple tests to see if the site was for real. These tests set off alarms in an Intrusion Detection System and ultimately led to his conviction. In addition, his arrest caused him to lose his job as a security consultant. It is very difficult to see how these kinds of prosecutions will lead to a safer internet and, in fact, would seem likely to cause just the opposite. Even checking for the existence of a flaw is criminal (at least in some jurisdictions) and actually finding a flaw and disclosing it (not in a public way, but privately to the affected organization) can lead to charges in other jurisdictions. Anyone who thinks they may have spotted a potential problem area in a web application would be risking a great deal by probing it further. In addition, administrators of these sites are unlikely to even look at a flaw unless one can show them an exploit. Even then, as the first USC response shows, they may be unwilling or unable to see the implications of the flaw. The sad fact is that the best response to the discovery of a web site vulnerability may be to keep it to one's self. [Editor's note: anybody who informs LWN of a vulnerability in the LWN.net code will, assuming they have not exploited that vulnerability for their own gain, be thanked, publicly if desired.]
Brief items A new X.Org security holeThere is a vulnerability in the X.Org server; it is a buffer overflow which can enable local root access by way of an X client. If you allow access to your X server from the net as a whole, this could be a remote root vulnerability - but, presumably, nobody has done that for years. As of this writing, updates are available from Gentoo, Mandriva, and SUSE; see the LWN vulnerability entry for the current list.Note that this is not the vulnerability so loudly proclaimed recently by Coverity. That is an older bug which LWN readers knew about last March.
Firefox 1.5.0.3 releasedFirefox 1.5.0.3 is out with a fix for a JavaScript-related denial of service vulnerability. Distributor updates are beginning to arrive, or see the download page to get a copy from the source.
New vulnerabilities asterisk: several vulnerabilities
clamav: buffer overflow
libtiff: denial of service
nessus: denial of service
phpWebSite: input validation
resmgr: bypass access control rules
xine-lib: buffer overflow
xine-ui: format string vulnerabilities
X.Org: buffer overflow
Updated vulnerabilities abc2ps: buffer overflows
apache: cross-site scripting
beagle: command line injection
blender: integer overflow
bzip2: race condition and infinite loop
ktools: buffer overflow
cpio: arbitrary code execution
curl: heap-based buffer overflow
Cyrus-SASL: DIGEST-MD5 Pre-Authentication Denial of Service
dia: buffer overflows
emacs21: format string vulnerability in "movemail"
enscript: arbitrary code execution
ethereal: multiple vulnerabilities
fbida: insecure temporary file creation
fetchmail: multidrop bug
firefox: multiple vulnerabilities
Foomatic: Arbitrary command execution in foomatic-rip
freeradius: authentication bypass
gdb: multiple vulnerabilities
gdm: improper file permissions
gedit: format string vulnerability
gnupg: incorrect signature verification
grip: buffer overflow
gzip: arbitrary command execution
ipsec-tools: denial of service
kdebase: local root vulnerability
kdelibs: kate backup file permission leak
kernel: multiple vulnerabilities
kernel: multiple vulnerabilities
libgadu: memory alignment bug
libgd2: buffer overflows in PNG handling
libpam-ldap: authentication bypass
libpng: heap based buffer overflow
libxml2 - arbitrary code execution
libxml2: multiple buffer overflows
lynx: arbitrary command execution
mailman: denial of service
mozilla: multiple vulnerabilities
Mozilla Thunderbird: remote code execution and DoS
mplayer: integer overflows
MySQL: logging bypass
nbd: arbitrary code execution
ncpfs: multiple vulnerabilities
ntp: uses wrong gid
openmotif: buffer overflows
OpenSSH: double shell expansion
openvpn: arbitrary code execution
perl: setuid vulnerabilities
php: several vulnerabilities
phpbb2: multiple vulnerabilities
phpMyAdmin: multiple vulnerabilities
pound: HTTP Request Smuggling Attack
Py2Play: remote execution of arbitrary Python code
ruby1.8: denial of service
scorched3d: multiple vulnerabilities
squirrelmail: multiple vulnerabilities
sudo: vulnerability via scripts
tetex: integer overflows
texinfo: temporary file vulnerability
tin: buffer overflow
unzip: long file name buffer overflow
w3c-libwww: possible stack overflow
webcalendar: multiple vulnerabilities
xine-ui - insecure temporary file creation
xloadimage: buffer overflows
xpdf: buffer overflow
xpdf: denial of service
xpdf: integer overflows
xscreensaver: possible password exposure
xzgv: heap overflow
Page editor: Jonathan Corbet Kernel development Brief items Kernel release statusThe current stable 2.6 kernel is 2.6.16.13, released on May 2. This release contains a single patch for a denial of service problem in the SCTP code. 2.6.16.12 had been released the day before with a couple dozen important fixes.The current 2.6 prepatch is 2.6.17-rc3, released by Linus on April 26, several milliseconds after the LWN Weekly Edition was published. As expected, the changes were mostly fixes, but this prepatch also adds support for version 1.2 trusted platform modules, multiple page size support for the PA-RISC architecture, and the new vmsplice() system call (see below). See the long-format changelog for the details. The current -mm tree is 2.6.17-rc3-mm1. Recent changes to -mm include some red-black tree optimizations, a new set of page migration patches, some RAID (MD) improvements, the likely() macro profiler (see below), the long-delayed removal of devfs, and some memory hotplug work. For 2.4 users, 2.4.33-pre3 is out; it was announced by Marcelo on May 1. It contains a small number of fixes, a number of which are security-related.
Kernel development news Implementing network channelsLast January, Van Jacobson presented his network channel concept at the 2006 linux.conf.au gathering. Channels, by concentrating network processing in ways which are most friendly to SMP systems, look like a promising way to improve high-speed networking performance. There was a fair amount of excitement about the idea. Unfortunately, Mr. Jacobson appears to have since become busy with other projects, so no contributions of actual code have resulted from his work. So not much has happened on this front in the last few months - or so it seemed.David Miller recently let slip that he was working on his own channel implementation. It was not something he expected to see functioning anytime soon, however:
[D]on't expect major progress and don't expect anything beyond a
simple channel to softint packet processing on receive any time
soon.
Going all the way to the socket is a large endeavor and will require a lot of restructuring to do it right, so expect this to take on the order of months. It turns out, however, that David was not the only person working on this idea; Kelly Daly and Rusty Russell have also put together a rudimentary channel implementation; in response to David's note, they posted their code for review. Since this version is more advanced, it has been the center of most of the discussion. The Daly/Russell patch creates a data structure called struct channel_ring. It consists of 256 pages of memory, mapped contiguously into the receiving process's address space - though the pages will not be contiguous in kernel space. As Van Jacobson described, the variables used by the producer side are located at the beginning of the ring, while variables used by the consumer are at the end; this separation helps to ensure that the cache lines representing those variables do not bounce between processors. These variables include the circular buffer indexes indicating which buffer each side will use next. There are also flags allowing the consumer to request a wakeup when buffers are added to the ring. User-space starts by creating a socket with the new PF_VJCHAN protocol type, then using mmap() to map the ring buffer. Thereafter, it can use buffers as they become available (using poll() or select(), if need be, to wait for more data). When a buffer is no longer needed, incrementing the appropriate index will free it up for new data. The driver-side interface is, so far, quite simple. A buffer can be allocated from a given ring with a call to vj_get_buffer(); once the data has been placed there by the network interface, vj_netif_rx() sends that buffer up into the protocol code. The tricky part is getting each packet into the correct buffer in the first place. Copying packets inside the kernel would defeat the purpose of this whole exercise; it is important that the network interface choose the correct buffer before DMAing the packet data into memory. As it happens, contemporary network cards can be smart enough to make that decision, if programmed properly by the driver. There are vast numbers of issues to be worked out still. David Miller takes exception to the preallocated buffers, seeing them as inflexible and hard to change; he would rather see a pointer-oriented data structure. But it is hard to see how that might work while still avoiding the overhead of mapping buffers into user space with every packet. A more difficult issue, perhaps, is netfilter. The zero-copy approach can be quite fast, but it also naturally shorts out the packet filtering done by the netfilter code. It has been suggested that, for established connections, that is an acceptable tradeoff. But Rusty has pointed out that people do use filtering on established connections, for packet counting if nothing else. As he put it: "Basically I don't think we can 'relax' our firewall implementation and retain trust." So some other sort of solution will have to be found here. Another open issue has to do with whether the channel should go all the way through to user space or not. Van Jacobson's linux.conf.au presentation included discussion of a user-space TCP implementation, taking the end-to-end principle to its logical conclusion. The reasoning behind this move is that, since the data will be processed by the application, putting the protocol code in the same place will be the fastest, most cache-friendly way to do it. But moving protocol code to user space also means duplicating much of the networking stack and adding to the complexity of the system as a whole. Leaving the protocol code in the kernel simplifies the situation, and, it is believed, can be made to yield almost all of the same performance benefits. In particular, protocol processing can happen on the same processor as the destination application (a fair amount of it is done that way now), and zero-copy networking will still be possible. It has also been pointed out that, since most of the system calls involved with network data reception (read() or recv(), for example) already imply copying the data, that copy might as well be done in kernel space. But implicit in that statement is another conclusion: if channels are to be used to their fullest potential for high-performance networking, a new set of user-space interfaces will have to be developed. The venerable socket interface was never designed for a channel-oriented environment. How such an interface might look is not entirely clear; it could be based on the current asynchronous I/O API, on kevents, or on something completely new. In summary, the networking developers are working on some major changes to how networking will be done in Linux, and there are a lot of issues which are not yet understood. The developers are groping around for ideas. So the channel implementations which are being posted now are unlikely to resemble the code which will, someday, be merged into the mainline; they are, instead, exercises intended mainly to obtain a better understanding of the real nature of the problem. But they are still a promising start to what looks to be an interesting development effort.
The Linux power management summitOn 11 April 2006, 42 attendees from 17 different companies (and 3 universities) arrived in Santa Clara, California for the 2006 Linux Power Management Summit. The Summit was organized by your author, in conjunction with the Consumer Electronics Linux Forum (CELF), which held its Embedded Linux Conference the same week, and with the OSDL Desktop Linux Working Group. Along with CELF, summit sponsors included Intel, Nokia, Google, AMD, FreeScale, and Texas Instruments. The attendees represented over a dozen open source projects, from the low-level embedded (DPM/PowerOp) to the high-level (freedesktop.org) to the broadest (Fedora, SUSE, and Ubuntu distributions). With such a diverse crowd of people, if nothing else, it promised to be an interesting week of discussions. The Summit spanned 3 days, starting with a welcome reception on Tuesday evening, 11 April and going until mid-day on Friday, 14 April. Wednesday and Thursday were filled with hour-long sessions led by an individual from a project or a company. The sessions were designed to foster discussion, though the format was left entirely up to the presenter. Most had a backing presentation of talking points, and each one succeeded in keeping the discussions flowing. Wednesday's presentations were centered around various Open Source Power Management projects. First Pavel Machek talked about Linux Suspend [PDF] (Suspend-to-Disk and Suspend-to-RAM), giving an overview of its history, its implementation, and the issues that continue to inhibit the suspend operations from "just working" in the way that people want them to. He spoke about uSwsusp, which moves the suspend functionality to userspace, allowing for less in-kernel complexity and an easier implementation of the user-friendly features found in Nigel Cunningham's Suspend2 patches; and he spoke about the main problem with getting Suspend-to-RAM to work: video drivers. Len Brown next talked about ACPI [PDF], and what that meant to power management. Len gave an overview of the generic ACPI components (the tables, the ASL compiler. the AML interpretor, and the ACPICA (Component Architecture)), and the Linux implementation (code organization, ACPI device drivers, acpid). He then dove into ACPI power states, and specifically how it represented and implemented CPU C States (idle states that vary in latency to return) and P States (performance states that vary in CPU speed). Len's session provided a good lead-in to Dominik Brodowski's session about cpufreq [PDF], which does dynamic CPU frequency scaling based on policy and intelligence about measuring and predicting the load. Dominik described the architecture of the subsystem, how decisions were made, and how they were effected via the CPU drivers. He then spoke about the desire to extend cpufreq beyond just frequency scaling (and include voltages and clocks), beyond single CPUs (to be smarter about managing multiple cores and threads), and beyond CPUs in general (to include policy and drivers for other devices with similar functionality). Todd Poynor and Matthew Locke's session about DPM and PowerOp [PDF] followed, providing a perspective on the same topic from the other end of the tunnel. DPM (Dynamic Power Management) is infrastructure to manage the "Operating Points" of a system, which are states consisting of pre-defined tuples of voltages and clocks (and therefore frequencies). To coordinate and set the voltages and clocks (which usually must be done for several devices in unison), DPM uses a low-level interface called PowerOp. DPM is practically ubiquitous in embedded Linux implementations, though it lives in an out-of-kernel patch. The next hour was split between Holger Macht -- who talked about SUSE power management -- Dave Jones, who spoke about Fedora power management, and a guest speaker who spoke about Ubuntu power management. SUSE provides an application called powersave that provides a command-line interface (which can then be wrapped by a GUI) for managing suspend states, CPU PM, and some device states (recently added). The Fedora and Ubuntu power management concerns have both centered around getting suspend/resume to work reliably for their users. Both Fedora and Ubuntu seem to use gnome-power-manager as the primary interface for managing power; this tool doesn't expose as many knobs and levers (literally and figuratively) as the powersave family of utilities do. All of the distributions now provide quite a large list of support for power management (especially suspend/resume) on various laptop models. To finish off the day, Jim Gettys and Mark Foster from the One Laptop Per Child project spoke about the design and challenges of the $100 Laptop [PDF], especially around power management. Specifically, they are looking for very efficient hardware and software solutions so that charging the battery requires minimal energy and so that the battery lasts an exceptionally long time (by today's standards). Mark presented a proposal [PDF] of a mechanism for achieving a resume-from-RAM in < 300ms. Sampsa Fabritius from Nokia started the Thursday sessions [PDF] off with a presentation of the power management framework used on the Maemo platform (which is used in the Nokia 770). Maemo is based on GNOME, but it uses a custom power configuration and management scheme, rather than one based on Utopia/HAL/DBUS. At a lower level, they have also written a "clocks" framework for articulating and controlling clock domains (of which the OMAP platform has many). Based on the previous day's discussions, Sampsa presented the question of whether or not it was possible (and prudent) to define a common solution of power configuration and management (or common set of solutions), since many platforms and interfaces are trying to accomplish similar things, sometimes with a set of similar components. A set of people from the Texas Instruments OMAP division -- Eric Thomas, Shiv Ramamurthi, and Richard Woodruff -- spoke about the OMAP platform, its goals, and the challenges faced with leveraging its power management potential. OMAP has a rich set of power management techniques, and unlike most desktop platforms, it exposes all of the low-level components (clocks, clock domains, power domains, and voltage domains) to the kernel and requires it to coordinate the scaling of each. This is currently done with a modified version of DPM, along with a custom set of scripts and control framework to set and manage the operating points of the system. Quinn Jensen from FreeScale used the next hour to speak about the MX31 platform [PDF], an ARM 11-based system-on-a-chip that is similar in nature to the OMAP. It has many power management features centered around dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (aka DVFS). Not surprisingly, they are also using a custom version of DPM and associated control infrastructure to control the hardware. Like the others, they are running into limitations of the framework, since it only deals with the lowest-level components and doesn't provide a rich(er) policy framework (like cpufreq does). Mark Gross, representing CELF, presented a summary of the CELF power management requirements [PDF], as expressed by the CELF member companies. The most important items seemed to be the refinement and inclusion of a dynamic tick/tick-less idle solution (which underscored the use of such solutions by previous presenters), and a mainstream solution for DVFS (a la DPM) that provided a robust policy management (a la cpufreq). Much of the discussion that followed was about the details of a common interface for these solutions. Jacob Shin from AMD presented next about the low-level details of AMD CPU PM [PDF], specifically how PowerNow works on multi-core K8 processors, and the changes that were necessary to the CPU hotplug and cpufreq bodies of code to support it. Thursday ended with a birthday celebration for Adam Belay, then an open discussion about the topics covered so far and the issues that were on peoples' minds. Friday began with another open discussion about what the overall architecture and framework that is needed for power management on any system. After several diagrams, doodlings and lists went up on the wall on gigantic Post-It Notes, the group broke into three smaller groups to talk about the three primary layers of power management and how they might be able to share functionality or features between different platforms and solutions.
It was a long three days, filled with many discussions about system control and management throughout the software stack, and the many interdependencies and special cases that exist on many platforms that Linux supports. Such is the nature of power management. The introductions to new topics and people, as well as the brainstorming about better and more common solutions were top-notch, and bode well for the future of efficiency in Linux. However, in the meantime, we still have a lot of work to do in the fixing category. Besides the fact that the primary embedded solution (DPM), and it's variants don't exist in a mainstream kernel, there is also this quote to consider about what we're working with today. As Andrew Morton expressed it (via email):
My main concern is stability of the existing stuff, rather than any
need for new features. Firstly machines which won't boot, especially
ones which _newly_ won't boot. Secondly machines which won't
suspend/resume properly, especially ones which used to do this. Huge
number of ACPI bug reports, and rather a lot of cpufreq ones too.
My second concern would be with overall stability and maturity and simplicity of the existing kernel APIs - it seems that lots of driver developers get it wrong in subtle ways. (Why am I still staring at those "pm_register is deprecated" warnings??) Fortunately, we now have a lot more people familiar with the types of Power Management problems, and many more upcoming events to discuss the progress as we move forward. [Author's Note: This article was written with the help of the extensive notes taken by Jeffery Osier-Mixon, a technical writer from PalmSource who we borrowed for the Summit. Thanks, Jefro.]
Briefly: patch quality, CKRM, likely(), and vmsplice()A number of issues have been discussed in recent times that, while too short for a full article, are nonetheless worthy of mention. Here's a few of them.
Development processThe 2.6.17-rc2-mm1 release included, along with the usual huge pile of patches, a complaint from Andrew Morton:
It took six hours work to get this release building and linking in
just a basic fashion on eight-odd architectures. It's getting out
of control....
Could patch submitters _please_ be a lot more careful about getting the Kconfig correct, testing various Kconfig combinations (yes sometimes people will want to disable your lovely new feature) and just generally think about these things a bit harder? It isn't rocket science. Andrew, it seems, is getting too many submissions which lack basic testing. Occasionally things simply don't compile. More often, patches create problems when their particular configuration options are disabled, or for architectures not tested by the original developer. Andrew ends up fixing those problems, and that takes a fair amount of his time. The bigger issue is elsewhere, however:
My main reason for the big whine is that this defect rate indicates
that people just aren't being sufficiently careful in their work.
If so many silly trivial things are slipping through, then what
does this tell us about the big things, ie: runtime bugs?
There has been some discussion of how the situation could be improved. Ideas include better automated kernel build farms which would allow any developer to get wider build testing and a checklist to be gone over before patches are sent for review. But what is really needed is for developers to simply take a little more care in the preparation of their patches.
CKRM rebrandedThe CKRM resource management patches have been received unenthusiatically by the development community in the past. To many, CKRM looks like a large body of complex code, with hooks distributed throughout the kernel, providing functionality which is of interest to relatively few users. So the CKRM proposals have not gotten very far, and the development team has been quiet recently. What the developers have been doing, however, is reworking the CKRM patches in an attempt to make them more palatable. The result is now known as Resource Groups, and it is, once again, being pushed for inclusion into the kernel. The Resource Group code has been put on a diet, with many features removed and others shoved out to user space. Duplicated code has been taken out, and a major effort has been made to use kernel library primitives wherever possible. Andrew Morton had a reasonable positive reaction to the new code submission, saying "...the overall code quality is probably the best I've seen for an initial submission of this magnitude." He was more worried about a proposed memory controller, however, which looks to duplicate much of the memory management subsystem. There have not been a whole lot of comments from elsewhere in the community, however.
Not so unlikely after allThe kernel provides a couple of macros, called likely() and unlikely(), which are intended to provide hints to the compiler regarding which way a test in an if statement might go. The processor can then use that hint, at run time, to direct its branch prediction and speculative execution optimizations. These macros are used fairly heavily throughout the kernel to reflect what the programmer thinks will happen. A well-known fact of life is that programmers can have a very hard time guessing which parts of their code will actually consume the most processor time. It turns out that they aren't always very good at choosing the likely branches in their code either. To drive this point home, Daniel Walker has put together a patch which does a run-time profile of likely() and unlikely() declarations. With the resulting output, it is possible to see which of those declarations are, in reality, incorrect and slowing down the kernel. Using this output, Hua Zhong and others have been writing patches to fix the worst offenders; some of them have already found their way into the mainline. In at least one case, the results have made it clear to the developers that things are not working as they were expected to, and other fixes are in the works. One unlikely() which remains unfixed, however, is in kfree(). Passing a NULL pointer to kfree() is entirely legal, and there has been a long series of janitorial patches removing tests which checked pointers for NULL before freeing them. kfree() itself is coded with a hint that a NULL pointer is unlikely, but it turns out that, in real life, over half of the calls to kfree() pass NULL pointers. There is resistance to changing the hint, however; the preference seems to be to fix the (assumed) small number of high-bandwidth callers which are at the root of the problem.
vmsplice()Last week, your editor astutely caught the last-minute merging of the vmsplice() system call into 2.6.17-rc3. Rather less astutely, however, your editor missed the fact that the prototype for vmsplice() had changed since it was posted on the linux-kernel mailing list. The current prototype for vmsplice() is:
long vmsplice(int fd, const struct iovec *iov,
unsigned long nr_segs, unsigned int flags);
The use of the iovec structure allows vmsplice() to be used for scatter/gather operations. Since then, vmsplice() has picked up a new flag: SPLICE_F_GIFT. If that flag is set, the calling process is offering the pages to the kernel as a "gift." If conditions allow, the kernel can simply remove the page from the process's address space and dump it into, for example, the page cache. With this flag, an application can generate data in memory, then send it on to its destination without copying in the kernel.
Patches and updates Kernel trees
Core kernel code
Development tools
Device drivers
Documentation
Filesystems and block I/O
Janitorial
Memory management
Networking
Architecture-specific
Security-related
Virtualization and containers
Miscellaneous
Page editor: Jonathan Corbet Distributions News and Editorials Gentoo's growing painsA post to the Gentoo-devel mailing entitled Gentoo: State of the Union and the discussion that followed show that Gentoo is having some growing pains. It's not the first or the only sign, but the thread covers most of the major signs.Gentoo now has more than 300 developers and over ten thousand packages in portage, a size that rivals Debian, and it got there in a fairly short period of time. Some growing pains are a natural consequence of that growth. Topics in this discussion include the ease (or lack thereof) of becoming a Gentoo developer, the usefulness of GLEPs (Gentoo Linux Enhancement Proposals), separating a development tree from a stable tree, voting, source management control systems and more. How easy should it be to become a developer? Anyone should be able to jump in and contribute, but that doesn't mean they should be granted commit access right away. Granting commit access too easily creates problems, usually due to the errors of inexperienced people. If the process is easy enough, it's only a matter of time before someone with malicious intent starts mucking with the tree. Currently Gentoo requires prospective developers to take a quiz. There is generally some mentoring that to help the person get ready for the quiz. Once a person passes the quiz they should know enough about how Gentoo works to avoid commit errors. The malicious are not likely to work that hard and the mentor has a good chance of weeding them out before they get that far in any case. The process does get bogged down when there are not enough mentors. Not every developer makes a good mentor. Even those who are good mentors may have personality conflicts with some people. This problem is not unique to Gentoo. Overall, it seems that becoming a Gentoo developer is easy enough to attract a steady stream of new people, but commit access is restrictive enough to prevent major problems. GLEPs may be proposed by users or developers. They get written up the GLEP editors and posted to the development list for discussion. During the discussion the GLEP is revised. Some die during the recursive iterations, some go on to a vote. If the GLEP only affects a single team it will be voted on by that team. GLEPs with broader implications are voted on by the Gentoo Council. Even if the GLEP passes, it may not be implemented. This is not ideal, but at least the trail of dead GLEPs provide insight to bad ideas and keep them from being proposed over and over and over again. Gentoo still has much to work out. The project has the advantage of seeing what works (and what doesn't) in the Debian project. They have the opportunity of making all new mistakes as the project deals with its growth and popularity. From an editorial standpoint it can be fun to watch.
New Releases Ark Linux Live 2006.1-pre1Ark Linux has released the first live CD version of its upcoming 2006.1 KDE-centric distribution.
OpenBSD 3.9 releasedOpenBSD 3.9 is out. The (long) list of changes includes support for a great deal of new hardware and a number of new features, especially in the networking area. Click below for the full announcement.
PC-BSD 1.0 releasedPC-BSD software has announced the release of PC-BSD 1.0 for x86 based processors. "This first "non-beta" release of PC-BSD ushers in a new era of stability and simplicity for desktop operating systems based on UNIX. Powered by the latest FreeBSD 6.0 and integrated with KDE 3.5.2, PC-BSD provides a solid server base, while being user-friendly enough to run as a primary desktop system."
SUSE Linux 10.1 RC3 and factory treeThe third release candidate of SUSE Linux 10.1 has been announced. "During the RC phase, we only provide delta ISOs of the media and update the factory tree as well."The openSUSE project and SGI are providing a SUSE Linux Factory tree for IPF / Itanium hardware architecture. "The Factory distribution is an always up to date version of the SUSE Linux development distribution, which is used as base for SUSE Linux Enterprise products."
Ubuntu/Kubuntu/Edubuntu/Xubuntu 6.06 LTS Beta 2 releasedUbuntu, Kubuntu and Edubuntu has a joint announcement (click below) for the beta 2 release of 6.06 LTS. "This release corrects some serious flaws in the installer present on the Desktop CD in the first Beta release. Although the text-mode install CD also forms part of this release, it has not been modified since Beta 1." Xubuntu has also announced it's beta 2 release.
White Box Enterprise Linux 4 Respin 1 now availableWhite Box Enterprise Linux 4 Respin 1 is now available via both BitTorrent and ftp/http. As with the original release, both i386 and x86_64 platforms are supported. This release catches up all errata through April 28.
Distribution News Debian: bits from the release teamIt's about 7 months until the Etch release. "Which architectures will be released with Etch has not yet been finalized, but of course as we are getting nearer to release, changes are less likely. There is one change to last status: Arm now qualifies as a release architecture again. Congratulations to the arm porter team for that. We will re-evaluate the architectures twice again before release of Etch, this is about middle of June and about end of July when we start to freeze."
Debian's BTS gains a remote bug tracking featurePierre Habouzit covers his new bug tracking tool. "This tool lists every BTS bug that is forwarded to a remote Bug Tracker. If it knows how to get a Status and possibly a Resolution (if the Status is a closing Status)..."
Fedora and Google's Summer of CodeThe Fedora Project has announced that it will participate in Google Summer of Code. The wiki page contains some project ideas.
Ubuntu Freeze remindersUbuntu and siblings are about a month away from the 6.06 LTS Final. Click below to see a description of the various freeze states that are currently in effect.
Ubuntu Developer SummitCanonical has announced that the next Ubuntu Developer Summit will take place from 18 - 24 June outside Paris, France. "The primary focus of this event will be for the distro team and others to gather together to concentrate on spec writing and technical planning for Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft)." Click below for the announcement. Additional details are available in this post.
Ubuntu localThe Ubuntu Bangladeshi Local Community Team (Ubuntu-BD LoCo Team) has been formed. "The team's main aim is to create a solid platform for all Bangladeshi Ubuntu users, where they can teach and learn by helping each other, share ideas and experiences, and most importantly promote the use of Ubuntu to home users, offices, and educational institutions."The ubuntu-utah mailing list has been announced. "This list will be used primarily by the Ubuntu-Utah LoCo Team for announcements, discussion and local technical support."
Distribution Newsletters Debian Weekly NewsThe Debian Weekly News for May 2, 2006 covers the return of web content for past Debian Conferences, removing cruft from unstable, help needed for PowerPC port, relicensing of Debian web pages, /usr/doc transition finished, and several other topics.
Fedora Weekly News Issue 44The Fedora Weekly News for May 1, 2006 looks at the Fedora Package Announcement List Split, Fedora and Google's Summer of Code, vFUDCon: virtual FUDCon, Fedora Education: Development Focus, Linuxfest Northwest 2006, LinuxWorld Toronto 2006 Update, Building an updated Fedora Core 5 DVD, FC5 in Linux Magazine and more.
Gentoo Weekly NewsletterThe Gentoo Weekly Newsletter for the week of May 1, 2006 looks at Gentoo's participation in Google Summer of Code, a new Howto on backtraces, ebuild improvements and user feedback, and other topics.
DistroWatch WeeklyThe DistroWatch Weekly for May 1, 2006 is out. "This issue focuses on Linspire, or more precisely Freespire, a new distribution built with the same user-friendly aspects as its commercial partner, but without the price tag; besides revisiting the Freespire press release, we also bring you an interview with Kevin Carmony, the company's CEO. The news section then informs about all the recent BSD releases, brings news from the Slackware current changelog, and provides updates on the development of Kubuntu. Robert Storey is back with his "tips and tricks" column, advising on how to use GRUB with the XFS file system. Finally, it's our pleasure to announce that the April 2006 donation of US$260 goes to the Doxygen project."
Package updates Fedora updatesUpdates for Fedora Core 5: system-config-date (bug fix), pygtk2 (update to 2.8.6), libstdc++so7 (fixes linking libstdc++so7 with libtool on ppc), gnome-user-share (update to 0.10), gnome-vfs2 (fix typo in 2.14.1 update), gnome-games (update extra data to 2.14.0), rhythmbox (update to 0.9.4.1), gnbd-kernel (update to 2.6.16-1.2096_FC5), cman-kernel (update to 2.6.16-1.2096_FC5), dlm-kernel (update to 2.6.16-1.2096_FC5), GFS-kernel (update to 2.6.16-1.2096_FC5), tetex (bug fixes), libstdc++so7 (fixes linking libstdc++so7 with libtool on ppc).Updates for Fedora Core 4: system-config-date (bug fix)
Mandriva updateMandriva has updated the module-init-tools packages to fix a CUPS-related bug.
Slackware updatesThe Slackware-current change log is full of patches, upgrades and fixes, on the road to Slackware 11.0.
Newsletters and articles of interest OpenBSD 3.9: Blob-Busters Interviewed (O'ReillyNet)OpenBSD 3.9 is out, and Federico Biancuzzi has interviewed the team. "Freedom, openness, security -- these principles lead OpenBSD development. The song for this release, Blob!, and the new artworks that promote them. This release, like every OpenBSD release, contains OpenBSD and its source code. It runs on a wide variety of hardware. It contains many new features and improvements. OpenBSD attempts to convince vendors to release documentation and often reverse-engineers around the need for blobs. OpenBSD remains blob-free. Anyone can look at it, assess it, and improve it. If it breaks, it can be fixed."
The Perfect Setup - CentOS 4.3 (64-bit) (HowtoForge)HowtoForge sets up a server using CentOS 4.3. "This is a detailed description how to set up a CentOS 4.3 based server that offers all services needed by ISPs and hosters (web server (SSL-capable), mail server (with SMTP-AUTH and TLS!), DNS server, FTP server, MySQL server, POP3/IMAP, Quota, Firewall, etc.). This tutorial is written for the 64-bit version of CentOS 4.3, but should apply to the 32-bit version with very little modifications as well."
Distribution reviews My desktop OS: Kubuntu Breezy (NewsForge)This NewsForge article looks at Kubuntu on the desktop. "I'm an open source developer and a freelance writer, and I rely on my laptop. I've been using Linux for eight years, and I'm pretty comfortable with the command line. I don't shy from compiling a kernel, or rewriting init scripts to get things working properly. I'm a little weary though from the bad old days of having to fight with Linux to get my computer to work properly. I'm developing a growing appreciation for distributions that "just work." I need a stable Linux that allows me to easily install the latest versions of software and that has good support for power management on a laptop. With that in mind I installed Kubuntu Breezy, and Kubuntu blew me away."
Xubuntu 6.06 Beta Review (Gnuman.com)Gnuman.com reviews Xubuntu 6.06 beta. "XFCE is a nice feature for those who have an older system and can't afford or just want to try something new. This system has quite a few nifty programs and ran quite smoothly. It was quite easy to setup user accounts when you ran the installation program and gave you the option of adding one user or many users at the same time."
Page editor: Rebecca Sobol Development Xen and the new processorsVirtualization addresses the problem of making more efficient use of available computer resources. This is done by providing an abstraction layer which maps real resources to virtual resources. Virtualization solutions have existed for more than forty years. For example, the IBM VM/370 project from the early sixties used virtualization to expose a virtual System/370 machine to the user. There are a wealth of virtualization technologies for the Linux platform: QEMU, BOCHS, OpenVZ, coLinux, Xen, and a lot more. In this article we will focus on Xen and the Virtualization Extensions found in new processors.On x86 processors, when running in protected mode, there are four privilege levels. The operating system kernel executes in privilege level 0 (also called "supervisor mode") while applications execute in privilege level 3. Privilege levels 1 and 2 are not used. When the processor detects a privilege level violation, it generates a general-protection violation. When using virtual machine extensions, there are two classes of software: VMM (Virtual Machine Monitor), also known as "hypervisor", and Guests, which are virtual machines. VMM acts as a host and has a full access to the hardware. Each Guest virtual machine operates independently of the others. In the Xen project, running on x86 processors, the guest operating systems run in privilege level 1. The guest operating system code has been modified to support virtualization. There is no need to modify applications and they run in privilege level 3 as in the usual case. Naturally, many will prefer a situation where the guest operating system code does not need to be modified. As a result, hardware manufacturers like Intel and AMD have begun to develop processors with built-in virtualization extensions. With these processors, the guest operating system code stays unmodified. Intel has developed the VT-x technology for x86 processor. This technology provides hardware virtualization extensions. There are some VT-x processors already available in the market. For more details on Intel Virtualization Specification for the IA32 see this document [PDF]. With Intel's VT-x, the VMM runs in "VMX root operation mode" while the guests (which are unmodified OSes) run in "VMX non-root operation mode". While running in this mode, the guests are more restricted; some instructions, like RDMSR, WRMSR and CPUID, will cause a "VM exit" to the VMM. VM exit is a transition from non-root operation to root operation. Some instructions and exceptions will cause a "VM exit" when the configured conditions are met. Xen handles the VM exit in a manner that is specific to to the particular exception. To implement this hardware virtualization, Intel added a new structure called VMCS (Virtual Machine Control Structure), which handles much of the virtualization management functionality. This structure contains the exit reason in the case of a VM exit. Also, 10 new instruction opcodes were added in VT-x. These new opcodes manage the VT-x virtualization behavior. For example, the VMXON instruction starts VMX operation, the VMREAD instruction reads specified field from the VMCS and the VMWRITE instruction writes specified field to the VMCS. When a processor operates in "VMX root operation mode" its behavior is much like when it operates in normal operating mode. However, in normal operating mode these ten new opcodes are not available. Intel recently published its VT-d (Intel(r) Virtualization Technology for Directed I/O). VT-d enables I/O devices to be directly assigned to virtual machines. It also defines DMA remapping logic that can be configured for an individual device. There is also a cache called an IOTLB which improves performance. for more details see Intel's documentation [PDF]. In AMD's SVM ("Secure Virtual Machine), there is something quite similar, but the terminology is a bit different: We have Host Mode and Guest Mode. The VMM runs in Host Mode and the guests run in Guest Mode. In Guest Mode, some instructions cause VM EXIT, which is handled in a manner that is specific to the way Guest Mode is entered. AMD added a new structure called the VMCB (Virtual Machine Control Block) which handles much of the virtualization management functionality. The VMCB includes an exit reason field which is read when a VM EXIT occurs. AMD added eight new instruction opcodes to support SVM. For example, the VMRUN instruction starts the operation of a guest OS, the VMLOAD instruction loads the processor state from the VMCB and the VMSAVE instruction saves the processor state to the VMCB. For more details see the AMD64 Architecture Programmer's Manual [PDF]: Vol 2 System Programming, chapter 15,"Secure Virtual Machine". AMD is supposed to release its first processors with virtualization support in June, 2006. AMD has published its I/O virtualization technology specification (IOMMU); AMD CPUs with this IOMMU support should be available in 2007. The AMD IOMMU technology intercepts devices access to memory. It finds out to which guest a particular device is assigned, and decides whether access is permitted and the actual address is available in system memory (page protection and address translation). You can think of AMD IOMMU as providing two facilities for AMD processors: The Graphics Aperture Remapping Table (GART) and the Device Exclusion Vector (DEV). In the AMD IOMMU there is optional support for IOTLBs. For more details see: AMD I/O virtualization technology (IOMMU) specification Rev 1.00 [PDF]. Starting at the end of January 2006, the Xen unstable repository has offered support for both Intel and AMD processors with virtualization extensions. Since there is much in common between AMD and Intel, a common API which is termed HVM (Hardware Virtual Machine) was developed. For example, HVM defines a table called hvm_function_table, which is a structure containing functions that are common to both Intel VT-x and AMD SVM. These methods are implemented differently in the VT-x and AMD SVM trees. Another example of a common method for VT-x and SVM is the domain builder method, xc_hvm_build(). (domain is a guest). With Xen running on non-virtualized processors, there is a device model which is based on backend/frontend virtual drivers (also called "split drivers"). The backend is in domain 0, while the frontend is in the unprivileged domains. They communicate via an interdomain event channel and a shared memory area which is allocated from grant tables. Only domain 0 has access to the hardware through the unmodified Linux drivers. When running on VT-x or SVM, we cannot use this IO model, because the guests run unmodified Linux kernels. So Both VT-x and SVM use the emulated device subsystem of QEMU for their I/O. QEMU runs in Xen as a userspace process. Using QEMU has a performance cost, so, in the future, it is possible that QEMU will be replaced by a better performing solution. It is however, important to understand that an IOMMU layer, even one which is built according to the new AMD or Intel specs, cannot in itself be a replacement for QEMU, because the same device may need to be shared between multiple domains. As was mentioned above, there are many common things between Intel VT-x and AMD SVM (like usage of QEMU and the common API which HVM abstracts). However, there are some differences; for example:
Thanks to Mat Petersson from AMD for reviewing this article.
System Applications Database Software MySQL 5.0.21 has been releasedVersion 5.0.21 of the MySQL database is available. "This is a bugfix release for the current production release family. This MySQL 5.0.21 release includes the patches for recently reported security vulnerabilites in the MySQL client-server protocol."
PostgreSQL Weekly NewsThe April 30, 2006 edition of the PostgreSQL Weekly News is online with the latest PostgreSQL database articles and resources.
Advanced MySQL Replication Techniques (O'Reilly)Giuseppe Maxia discusses database replication issues on O'Reilly. "You may know about the MySQL Cluster, which is a complex architecture to achieve high availability and performance. One of the advantages of MySQL Cluster is that each node is a peer to the others, whereas in a normal replicating system you have a master and many slaves, and applications must be careful to write only to the master."
LDAP Software LAT 1.1.1 announcedVersion 1.1.1 of LAT, the LDAP Administration Tool, is out. "This release is the 2nd of the 1.1.x development cycle which will eventually become v1.2. If you need a stable release stick with the 1.0 branch."
Libraries XCB preview release is availableThe 0.9 preview version of XCB, the planned replacement for Xlib, is out. XCB includes xcb-proto 0.9, libxcb 0.9, xcb-util 0.1 and xcb-demo 0.9. "The XCB library provides an interface to the X Window System protocol, slated to replace the current Xlib interface."
Web Site Development Apache 2.2.2 releasedVersion 2.2.2 of the Apache HTTP server is out. "This release has been through extensive testing, including live at some of the world's busiest sites, and is now considered stable. This means that modules and applications developed for Apache 2.2.2 will be both source- and binary-compatible with future 2.2.x releases. This release builds on and extends the Apache 2.0 API. Modules written for Apache 2.0 will need to be recompiled in order to run with Apache 2.2, but no substantial reworking should be necessary." See the new features document for more information.
Midgard 1.8 alpha 2 releasedVersion 1.8 alpha 2 of Midgard, a web Content Management System, is out. "The Midgard Project has released the second alpha release version for the upcoming 1.8 stable branch of the Midgard Open Source Content Management System. Midgard's 1.8 branch focus on improved stability for Midgard2 technology preview features introduced in 1.7 branch. This release is adressed for Midgard developers and users who already use configured Midgard development environments."
Desktop Applications Audio Applications Ardour 0.99.3 releasedVersion 0.99.3 of Ardour, a multi-track audio editor, has been announced. "Continuing in the tradition of releasing stability fixes for the gtk1-based Ardour, here is 0.99.3."
Desktop Environments GNOME 2.15.1 Development Release (GnomeDesktop)GnomeDesktop has announced the release of the GNOME 2.15.1 development release. "Welcome to the new GNOME development cycle! Please fasten your seat belt: you're going to see a lot of exciting new changes!, new features!, new bugfixes!, new translations!, new documentations!. Lots of modules have great plans for 2.16 and if you're willing to help, there's a lot of areas where you'll be heartily welcomed!"
GARNOME 2.15.1 announcedVersion 2.15.1 of GARNOME, the bleeding-edge GNOME distribution, is out. "This release includes all of GNOME 2.15.1 plus a whole bunch of updates that were released after the GNOME freeze date. This release is for anyone who wants to get his hands dirty on the development branch, or who'd like to get a peek at future features. If you want to help spot issues in GARNOME, (or, better yet, fix 'em ;-) this release is for you as well."
GNOME Software AnnouncementsThe following new GNOME software has been announced this week:
KDE Software AnnouncementsThe following new KDE software has been announced this week:
Electronics pyspice.py 0.1 announcedThe initial 0.1 release of pyspice has been announced. "pyspice.py is a SPICE pre-processor written in Python, inspired by the Perl SPICE pre-processor spicepp by John Sheahan."
Games Getting the castle into the system (WorldForge)A new castle has been added to the WorldForge virtual world project. "It has taken a lot of mangling, bug fixing, and even some new features, but I have finally got xrenmilays excellent keep model into the system. Here is a view in sear of the keep placed in a quiet valley in Moraf, just to the east of the pig sty."
GUI Packages PyQt 4.0 beta 1 releasedVersion 4.0 beta 1 of PyQt, a set of Qt bindings for Python, is out. "PyQt v4 is implemented as a set of 8 extension modules containing approximately 400 classes and 6,000 functions and methods."
Interoperability Wine Weekly NewsletterThe April 28, 2006 edition of the Wine Weekly Newsletter has been published. Topics include: News: Ulrich Czekalla, CrossOver Review, WineConf 2006, SambaXP & Wine, Summer of Code Kickoff, SoC: DIB Engine, SoC: Early Usage of DLLs, SoC: SafeDisc, SoC: Java Runtime Environment, SoC: finish wcmd, SoC: Better Valgrind Support and Font and Edit Control Issue.
Multimedia Phonon: Multimedia in KDE 4 (KDE.News)KDE.News covers the new Phonon project. "After many months of work on the new Multimedia API for KDE 4 it is time to finally announce Phonon. Phonon will provide a task oriented API for multimedia, making it easy for KDE applications to use media playback and capture functionality (and more) resulting in application developers being free to concentrate on the user interface aspects. The number of possibilities to integrate multimedia into the desktop experience make Phonon especially interesting."
Music Applications flabc 0.2.0 announcedVersion 0.2.0 of flabc, a musical notation editor that was programmed with FLTK, has been announced. "flabc is a kind of IDE for writing files in the abc music notation and includes playback and postscript score generation. It can be used as a frontend to different abc processing programs like abctab2ps and abc2midi."
Gneutronica 0.30 releasedVersion 0.30 of Gneutronica is available. "Gneutronica is a MIDI drum machine for Linux with a Gnome/GTK user interface which provides a means to easily create and play back drum tracks to MIDI devices (and to softsynths via snd_virmidi)."
Simple Sysexxer 0.1 announcedVersion 0.1 of Simple Sysexxer has been announced. "Simple Sysexxer is a GUI sysex tool comparable to Sysexxer, but it's based on Qt4 (no KDE dependency) and ALSA only (no OSS dependency)." Sysex is the MIDI system exclusive message format that is used for storing MIDI device configurations.
Office Suites OpenOffice.org NewsletterThe April 30, 2006 edition of the OpenOffice.org Newsletter is out with new OO.o office suite articles and events.
Science Stellarium 0.8.0 released (SourceForge)Version 0.8.0 of Stellarium, a desktop planetarium, is available with many new capabilities. "Stellarium, a desktop planetarium for your computer, reaches version 0.8.0. It is the result of 7 months of active development of the developers team."
Web Browsers Places Disabled on Firefox 2 Development Branch (MozillaZine)MozillaZine notes that the Places feature will be disabled in Firefox 2. "Places, the new bookmarks/history user interface, has been disabled on the Gecko 1.8 branch. As mentioned earlier, Firefox 2 will be shipped from this branch. The new mozStorage APIs, which use the sqlite database engine, will remain enabled and available to extension authors."
Miscellaneous CastPodder 5.0 announcedVersion 5.0 of CastPodder is available. "CastPodder is a media aggregator that automatically downloads podcasts to your computer or portable device, leaving you 'one click away' from the latest media feeds. It is based on the iPodder idea of Adam Curry. PyBMP is needed. "
Languages and Tools C Portability and Pitfalls of C-Types (developerWorks)IBM developerWorks looks at using types in C. "Effectively use the C type system, with help from Peter Seebach, as he covers Hungarian notation (the good kind and the bad kind), using typedef, portability issues, and major pitfalls."
Java The Mustang Meets the Rhino: Scripting in Java 6 (O'ReillyNet)John Ferguson Smart discusses scripting under Java SE 6. "Among Java SE 6's key features is the ability to mix scripting languages into Java code, thanks to the implementation of the JSR-223 spec. In this article, John Ferguson Smart takes a look at the spec and what it means for Java, and shows how to use Java 6's integrated Rhino implementation to call JavaScript from Java...and vice versa."
Lisp SBCL 0.9.12 releasedVersion 0.9.12 of Steel Bank Common Lisp has been released. "This version provides new command line options, functions for sending data through UDP sockets, improvements to the Win32/x86 and Solaris/x86 ports, better documentation facilities, and more."
PHP PHP 5.1.3 ReleasedVersion 5.1.3 of PHP has been announced. "This release combines small number of feature enhancements with a significant amount of bug fixes and resolves a number of security issues. All PHP users are encouraged to upgrade to this release as soon as possible."
Python Python 2.5 alpha 2 is availableRelease 2.5 alpha 2 of Python has been announced. "This is an *alpha* release of Python 2.5. As such, it is not suitable for a production environment. It is being released to solicit feedback and hopefully discover bugs, as well as allowing you to determine how changes in 2.5 might impact you."
Urwid 0.9.4 releasedVersion 0.9.4 of Urwid, a console UI library for Python, is out. "This release adds mouse event handling to the standard widgets and example programs. Also, the files used to generate the reference and tutorial documentation are now included in the tarball."
Dr. Dobb's Python-URL!The May 1, 2006 edition of Dr. Dobb's Python-URL! is online with a new collection of Python article links.
Tcl/Tk Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL!The May 2, 2006 edition of Dr. Dobb's Tcl-URL! is online with new Tcl/Tk articles and resources.
XML Microformats in Context (O'Reilly)Uche Ogbuji looks at microformats on the O'Reilly XML.com site. "Uche Ogbuji takes a careful look at microformats and concludes that while, in practice, they suffer from serious non-trivial problems, the basic idea offers an interesting basis upon which to build interesting data formats, particularly in conjunction with complementary technologies."
IDEs eric3 3.9.0 releasedVersion 3.9.0 of eric3, a Python and Ruby IDE, has been announced "This version includes support for Qt4 and PyQt4. It will be the last major release in the eric3 line of development. From now on the development effort will concentrate on eric4, the PyQt4 variant of the IDE."
Page editor: Forrest Cook Linux in the news Recommended Reading Patently Unaware (BTN)Bank Technology News has an article on the patent mess from the banking industry's point of view. It is interesting mostly as an indication of how awareness of the problem is spreading. "According to patent office commissioner John Doll, almost 30 percent of the 384,000 patent applications filed in 2005 were near duplicates of patent applications examined the year before. That underscores another problem outlined in Lemley's report: squeaky wheels get what they want. Incessant appeals and numerous continuation applications will tend to wear down examiners who tire of the same application arriving on their desk. Continuation applications, although a minority of total patents issued each year, wind up being the subject of 52 percent of patent litigation."
FSF supports average users with high-priority list (NewsForge)NewsForge takes a look at the Free Software Foundation's high-priority project list. "The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is frequently considered an organization for developers rather than end users, but Peter Brown, executive director of the FSF, would disagree. "We don't just want freedom for software developers," Brown said in a telephone call interview last month. "We want freedom for all." One of the ways that the FSF promotes this goal is with its high-priority project list."
Trade Shows and Conferences Desktop Linux Summit finale (NewsForge)NewsForge reports from the last day of the Desktop Linux Summit. "Linspire CEO Kevin Carmony commented during the Q&A following [Rob] Enderle's talk that he agreed with 90% of what Enderle said. His only quibble was that he thought Linux could do the same things for OEMs that Microsoft does. That's when it really hit me -- these guys really don't get it."
Experts: What Linux is doing wrong on the desktop (ComputerPartner)ComputerPartner covers the Linux Desktop Summit, and draws conclusions about Linux adoption by businesses. "CIOs, for ease of management, generally prefer that employees all use the same operating system. The rule of thumb Enderle subscribes to is that support costs increase by the square of the number of platforms. So if a company runs two operating systems, support costs increase by 4 times. If a company runs Windows, Mac and Linux, support costs increase 9 times. But whenever CIOs openly try to consolidate operating systems, they run into pockets of resistance from diehards who say "nasty things and threaten to quit." Faced with that, most CIOs will simply try to limit the growth of Mac and Linux desktop systems "to maintain some respect and decorum, as well as keep their own jobs.""
Laid back at Linuxfest Northwest (NewsForge)Bruce Byfield covers Linuxfest Northwest. "The event featured a crowded exhibition room, a raffle, and a salmon barbecue in the courtyard put on by culinary students from the technical college. However, the major attraction was the multi-track programming. Even with some cancellations, more than 45 presentations were offered over four 75 minute slots."
Wine, desktops, and standards at LinuxWorld Toronto (NewsForge)NewsForge covers LinuxWorld Conference & Expo, Toronto. "The final day of the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo Toronto was a busy one. Novell Canada CTO Ross Chevalier delivered a keynote address on why this year is the year of corporate Linux desktop adoption -- as opposed to all those previous years that were -- the Free Standards Group executive director Jim Zemlin explained the importance of the Linux Standard Base, and developer Ulrich Czekalla gave an excellent presentation on the state of Wine."
MySQL Announces MySQL Forge and Support for Ubuntu (NewsForge)NewsForge covers MySQL announcements at the MySQL Users Conference 2006. "MySQL AB, developer of the world's most popular open source database, today introduced MySQL Forge, a new Web site and community directory designed to encourage and support active MySQL-related open source development. Located at http://forge.mysql.com/ MySQL Forge is a central online resource for all MySQL users and developers to communicate, collaborate and share MySQL code and applications. MySQL also announced new support for Ubuntu, a version of the Linux operating system that is gaining popularity among open source developers."
Linux at Work U.K. government and IBM test a secure Linux (News.com)News.com reports that the U.K. Cabinet Office and IBM are working together on a secure open-source environment for public and private sector organizations. "The Central Sponsor for Information Assurance (CSIA) said this week that the initiative had been launched to assure public and private sectors that Linux could provide security in a complex environment. The design is based on Security Enhanced Linux (SELinux) and IBM Websphere, a mandatory access control (MAC) application, which gives "need to know" access to security."
UK Cabinet Office partners for Security Enhanced Linux (SC Magazine)SC Magazine reports that the UK Cabinet Office is working with IBM and others on a mandatory access control (MAC) environment based on Security Enhanced Linux and IBM WebSphere. "The government set out its vision for efficient, customer-centric public services in November 2005 in the document, "Transformational Government: Enabled by Technology." Given that many of these services would need to be delivered through complex information-supply chains, spanning central government, the wider public sector and private and voluntary sector organisations, the challenge lies in how it can be done securely."
Legal Microsoft: "Our software patents preclude (FSFE) interoperability"The Free Software Foundation Europe follows the situation involving Microsoft and the European Court. "Throughout the last two days in European Court, Microsoft tried to explain to the European Court and Commission its "Blue Bubble Theorem" about Active Directory Services (ADS) being surrounded by a Blue Bubble within which interoperability was impossible. Carlo Piana, Free Software Foundation Europe's lawyer on the case explains: "The interventions made perfectly clear that the Blue Bubble only existed in the lawyers' pleadings. Meanwhile, Microsoft left no doubt as to the legal nature of that Bubble: a conglomerate of 46 patents that it claims it holds on ADS, whose main effect is to prevent interoperability and, eventually, competition.""
VoIP products could face export crackdown (ZDNet)ZDNet looks at the effects of encryption technology export regulations on Voice over IP technology. "During a meeting convened by the U.S. Commerce Department on Wednesday, industry members of a federal technical committee expressed concern that export regulations never intended to cover VoIP may complicate selling enterprise-grade network gear abroad. At issue is an awkwardly worded definition buried deep in section 740 of the export control regulations. It restricts the export of products that can support "concurrent encrypted data tunnels or channels exceeding 250" connections at once."
Interviews Interview with FSFE's President Georg Greve (Groklaw)Groklaw talks with Georg Greve, president of the Free Software Foundation Europe. "Sean Daly of Groklaw, who is also a member of the FSFE, interviewed Free Software Foundation Europe President Georg Greve at the end of day four of the hearings before the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg regarding Microsoft. Here is the interview as Ogg and here it is as MP3. He also provides a transcript. Greve explains some of the issues that have been raised during the hearings, such as interoperability, Microsoft's just-revealed patent claims, the documentation problem, and why reverse engineering is a game of perpetual catch-up, and gives his impression of how the hearings had been going to that point."
Resources Building Your Own Teleconference System with Asterisk and Gizmo (O'Reillynet)Here's an O'Reillynet article with a lot of information on setting up Asterisk. "Teleconferencing is a good surrogate for public gatherings. With it, you can host classes, lectures, meetings, and casual chats. Most people have used dial-in 'meet me' teleconferencing services where users call a toll-free number, enter an access code, and then are dropped into a party line. Here, I'll describe how to build your own conference bridge using inexpensive off-the-shelf hardware paired with free Internet telephony software."
Convert any video file to DVD with open source tools (Linux.com)Manolis Tzanidakis shows how to use Linux tools to create DVDs in a Linux.com article. "You've just downloaded the new episode of your favorite video podcast, and you'd like to watch it on your big-screen TV. Unfortunately, the video is encoded in XviD or QuickTime format, which your DVD player doesn't support. Don't worry -- here's how you can convert any video file to DVD using dvdauthor and MPlayer."
Controlling your locale with environment variables (Linux.com)Linux.com takes a look at the locale environment variables. "People all over the world use Linux in dozens of languages. Since Linux's source code is free and open, speakers of minority languages can add support for their languages themselves, even though a large corporation might not consider them a worthwhile market. If you use more than one language, or a language other than English, you should know about Linux's use of locales to support different languages. Indeed, understanding locales can be useful even if you only use English."
Handheld Linux software index launches (LinuxDevices)LinuxDevices covers the launch of the Handheld Linux Software Index. "The Index was announced in the OpenEmbedded discussion forums by Handheld-Linux.com founder Nikolaus Schaller. Schaller says the new index was patterned after the popular but neglected Zaurus Software Index. However, the applications listings have been updated after "lots of work," he says. Additionally, quite a few new features were added to make the index more useful and maintainable."
Syncing Websites to Your Palm for Offline Reading (HowtoForge)HowtoForge has published a tutorial on syncing a web site to a palm device for offline reading. "The websites are stored in Plucker format. You will need to install the Plucker viewer for palm which can be found at the Plucker website. The software you will use to grab the websites and convert them into Plucker format is called Sunrise. To transfer the Plucker files to a Palm you will need pilot-link."
Manipulating PDFs with the PDF Toolkit (Linux.com)Scott Nesbitt explores the PDF Toolkit (pdftk) in a Linux.com article. "Creating and reading PDF files in Linux is easy, but manipulating existing PDF files is a little trickier. Countless applications enable you to fiddle with PDFs, but it's hard to find a single application that does everything. The PDF Toolkit (pdftk) claims to be that all-in-one solution. It's the closest thing to Adobe Acrobat that I've found for Linux. Developer Sid Steward describes pdftk as the PDF equivalent of an "electronic staple remover, hole punch, binder, secret decoder ring, and X-ray glasses." That's a lot of functionality for a 4MB application, but the software delivers."
My sysadmin toolbox (NewsForge)In this edition of the toolbox, Kevin Millman looks at Nagios, CoWiki, Cacti, GNU RCS, apt-cacher, SSL Expire, the blq Realtime Blackhole List (RBL) checker, winbind and more. "We often have situations where the only differences between two machines are the hostname and IP address. It's pointless to go through the building, patching and tweaking to get each box built from scratch. Instead we boot with a good boot CD (Debian From Scratch works well because it supports pretty much everything we use), create the partitions on the new box, mount them, and RSYNC the source machine over."
Yellow Dog Linux Installs Neatly on an iPod (Linux Journal)Dave Taylor installs Yellow Dog Linux on an iPod. "I had a spare Apple iPod, a first-generation 5GB device that worked via the Firewire interface rather than the more modern USB connection, and I was assured by the folks at Yellow Dog that I could squeeze YDL into as small as 1GB. I have plenty of space on a 5GB device. Of course, I already had a gig of music and audio books I wanted to preserve, so the first test was to see if I could repartition the device to grab 3GB for Linux and keep 2GB for audio and iPod content. The perfect stealth Linux device, right?"
Reviews Managing Disk Space with LVM (O'ReillyNet)O'ReillyNet looks at LVM. "The Linux Logical Volume Manager (LVM) is a mechanism for virtualizing disks. It can create "virtual" disk partitions out of one or more physical hard drives, allowing you to grow, shrink, or move those partitions from drive to drive as your needs change. It also allows you to create larger partitions than you could achieve with a single drive."
First look at Vim 7 (Linux.com)Linux.com takes a look at the upcoming release of Vim 7. "To test Vim, I compiled the 7.0f beta release on Ubuntu Breezy and used it for my day-to-day work for several days. I had been using Vim 6.3, so moving to Vim 7.0 wasn't too drastic. I was relieved to find that I didn't run into any show-stopper bugs or instability while I was working with Vim. It hasn't eaten any files, and none of the new features exhibit major bugs."
Xtra Fine Computing Environment: xfce4.4 beta 1 (Tux Machines)TuxMachines.org takes xfce4.4 beta1 for a test drive. "For those who don't know about xfce4, it's a wonderful graphical interface that I think of as falling somewhere in-between Fluxbox and KDE in ease-of-use and functionality. Many aspects of your xfce4 desktop can be configured by graphical tools with menus, drop down boxes, icons and all. However, many aspects are hard coded and aren't adjustable even through configuration files. But it's getting there and we can see a major step forward with xfce4.4." (Thanks to Kevin Fenzi)
Miscellaneous Apache Now the Leader in SSL Servers (Netcraft)Netcraft has announced that Apache just passed Microsoft's Internet Information Server as the most popular server for SSL sites. "Version 1 of Apache did not include SSL support: in the 1990s, US export controls, and the patent on the RSA algorithm in the US, meant that cryptographic support for open source projects had to be developed outside of the US, and were distributed separately. Several independent projects provided SSL support for Apache, including Apache-SSL and mod_ssl; but commercial spin-offs, like Stronghold by c2net (later bought by Red Hat), were more popular at that time. Now that mod_ssl is included as standard in version 2, Apache has become more popular for hosting secure websites." This announcement contrasts the Netcraft April 2006 Web Server Survey, covered on LWN, in which the statistics were skewed toward IIS by inactive domain parking activities.
Computing power: containing and managing future power requirements (IT-Director)Bob McDowall discusses computer power consumption issues on IT-Director.com. "Short-term efforts are focussed on energy saving with computer installations. At a simple housekeeping level, for example switching off computers overnight and at weekends, results in energy and cost savings of 70-80%. Equally, switching off your monitor when at lunch, or during periods of absence, can halve the energy consumption." For a broader look at the advantages of power reduction efforts, see Amory Lovins' paper The Negawatt Revolution.
Page editor: Forrest Cook Announcements Non-Commercial announcements Devicescape releases Wi-Fi technology to open source communityDevicescape Software has announced its continued support to the open source community with the contribution of its previously proprietary Advanced Datapath Driver to the Linux 2.6 kernel. Devicescape's Advanced Datapath Driver delivers native Wi-Fi support in the Linux kernel. See LWN coverage of The 2006 Wireless Networking Summit from the April 10th kernel page for more on Devicescape's contributions to the Linux kernel.
Haskell Communities and Activities Report CFPA call for contributions has gone out for the May, 2006 edition of the Haskell Communities and Activities Report. Submissions are due by May 12.
Google's Summer of Code Opens with KDE (KDE.News)KDE.News covers the KDE projects that are part of this year's Google's Summer of Code. "Google's Summer of Code has opened for student applications, and KDE is again seeking students to mentor over the holidays. Our ideas page lists some of the projects you could work on, or you are encouraged to come up with your own. Last year we had 24 students working on KDE projects, one of the highest numbers of any project and gained important projects like Okular."
Summer of Code '06 Student Applications (Samba)The Samba project has announced the opening of applications for the 2006 Summer of Code project. "Samba is proud to be involved again as a mentor organization, so if you're a student and have some time on your hands this summer, consider signing up."
Google Summer of Code Started (GnomeDesktop)GnomeDesktop.org has an announcement for the Google Summer of Code. "If you are interested you can find some proposals on the GNOME SoC wiki page, but you are also free to come up with your own ideas. There are also GNOME related projects available through many other organisations like Abisource, Beagle, Mono, Inkscape, OpenOffice.org, Eclipse, Gimp, handhelds.org, Mozilla, OpenSolaris, Xiph.org, BBC and more."
UN's FAO Selects MySQL as its Open Source DB StandardMySQL AB has announced the selection of MySQL as the open source server-side database standard by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. ""One of the key requirements for our technical information systems is that they must be very easily available and accessible by the member countries as well as easy to set-up and maintain," said Kurt Vertucci, Senior Officer, IT Governance for FAO. "We cannot dictate to countries what their infrastructure should be. Therefore, in addition to requiring very flexible licensing, these systems need to be portable and based on open standards." After evaluating PostgreSQL and MySQL as possible alternatives, FAO selected MySQL as its open source database standard."
Samba and FSFE: "Microsoft - obstacle to innovation in the digital society!"The Free Software Foundation Europe has sent out a press release concerning the recent Microsoft case in the European Court. ""Businesses and public authorities have to pay prices that are kept high by Microsoft's refusal to share interoperability information with its competitors, as is common practice in the industry," explains Andrew Tridgell, president and founder of the Samba Team in his presentation on behalf of Free Software Foundation Europe in European Court today. Yesterday, Microsoft stated that it had spent 35 thousand person-hours on documenting that kind of information - and essentially failed. Tridgell continues "Microsoft keeps claiming that it was asked to show its source code to competitors, which is absurd. We are exclusively interested in industry-standard interoperability information, such as Interface Definition Language (IDL) files commonly used for these kind of protocols."
OpenDocument is an ISO standardThe ODF Alliance has send out a press release "congratulating" the International Organization for Standardization for its approval of the OpenDocument format as a recognized standard. "Approval of the OpenDocument Format by ISO marks an important milestone in the effort to help governments solve the very real problem of finding a better way to preserve, access and control their documents now and in the future," said Marino Marcich, Executive Director of the ODF Alliance. "There's no doubt that this broad vote of support will serve as a springboard for adoption and use of ODF around the world."
Commercial announcements Coverity catches X Window Security HoleCoverity, Inc. has announced that as a result of their contract with US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the biggest X Window System security vulnerability of the last six years was identified and fixed. "According to Daniel Stone, a release manager for the X.Org Foundation, the vulnerability was one of the most significant vulnerabilities discovered in recent memory, "something that we find once every three to six years and is very close to Xs worst case scenarios in terms of security.""
Cybersource Turns 15Open Source Solutions Company Cybersource celebrates 15 years of service. "One of the world's oldest open source companies, Cybersource, reached a milestone this week - 15 years in business. In that time, Cybersource has established an international reputation for technology expertise and vision, as the two founding technologies which it focused its business on, the TCP/IP-based Internet and open source software, become ascendant or dominant globally."
NASA Goddard Selects Linux Networx SupercomputersLinux Networx has announced the selection of one of their systems by the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. "The new system is designed to dramatically increase throughput for applications ranging from studying weather and climate variability to simulating astrophysical phenomena. The system will supplement the NCCS architecture with improved price/performance and is designed to scale to as many as 40 trillion floating-point operations per second (TFLOPS) in its full configuration."
QLogic to Support Next-Generation Red Hat Enterprise LinuxQLogic has announced plans to support Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. "QLogic® Corp., the leader in Fibre Channel host bus adapters (HBAs), stackable switches and blade server switches, today announced its commitment to support the upcoming release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and the virtualization technologies included in it. QLogic virtualization support will provide Red Hat customers with a means for deploying and managing reliable storage area networks (SANs) in virtual server environments."
FAA saves $15 million by migrating to Red Hat Enterprise LinuxRed Hat has sent out a press release regarding a deployment of Red Hat Enterprise Linux by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration. "Red Hat, the world's leading provider of open source to the enterprise, today announced that the U.S. Department of Transportation's Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) saved the federal government more than $15 million in datacenter operating and upgrading costs by migrating to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The FAA executed a major systems migration to Red Hat Enterprise Linux in one-third of the original scheduled time and with 30 percent more operational efficiency than the previous system. In addition, by switching to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the FAA realized 50 percent savings and spent less than $10 million on a project initially estimated at $25 million."
TuxMobil Site Now Lists More than 5,000 Linux Laptop Installation ReportsTuxMobil has announced that its knowledge base of user-submitted guides on mobile computing issues, now lists more than 5,000 Linux laptop installation guides. "TuxMobil works a lot like Linux. The site grows with user submissions, which are then available to all subsequent users. Members of the Linux community from all over the world have provided help documents in different languages and covering a variety of topics. These documents address an assortment of issues and are helpful for beginners as well as for experts."
New Books Linux Annoyances for Geeks - O'Reilly's Latest ReleaseO'Reilly has published the book Linux Annoyances for Geeks by Michael Jang.
Configuring SonicWALL Firewalls--latest from SyngressSyngress has published the book Configuring SonicWALL Firewalls by Chris Lathem and Benjamin Fortenberry.
Prentice Hall Announces "User Mode Linux"Prentice Hall has published the book User Mode Linux by Jeff Dike.
Resources Podcasting Legal Guide (creative commons)creative commons has published a new Podcasting Legal Guide. "The purpose of this Guide is to provide you with a general roadmap of some of the legal issues specific to podcasting. EFF has produced a very practical and helpful guide for issues related to blogging generally. This Guide is not intended to duplicate efforts by EFF, and in many cases refers you to that guide for where crossover issues are addressed. Our goal is to complement EFF's Bloggers FAQ and address some of the standalone issues that are of primary relevance to podcasters, as opposed to bloggers."
Linux Gazette #126The May 2006 edition of Linux Gazette is out. Articles this month include Preventing DDoS attacks, Away Mission -- SDWest 2006, From Assembler to COBOL with the Aid of Open Source, Plotting time series data with Gnuplot, Digging More Secure Tunnels with IPsec, and more.
Contests and Awards CL quiz announcedThe CL Quiz site has been announced. "CL Quiz is a Common Lisp programming challenge site along the lines of "Perl quiz of the week" or "Ruby Quiz". Each week a new quiz is posted to a mailing list, and users can send their solutions."
EFF announces Pioneer AwardsThe Electronic Frontier Foundation has announced the winners of its Pioneer Awards. "Washington, DC - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) will honor craigslist and its leaders, Craig Newmark and Jim Buckmaster; Gigi Sohn of Public Knowledge; and Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia at its 15th annual Pioneer Awards ceremony. The presentation is at 7pm on Wednesday, May 3 at the International Spy Museum in Washington, DC, in conjunction with the Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conference (CFP). This year's award winners all represent vital, community-building organizations dedicated to spreading knowledge in or about our digital world."
Firefox Flicks Ad Contest Winners Announced (MozillaZine)MozillaZine has announced the winners of the Firefox Flicks Ad Contest. "Daredevil, by Pete Macomber, won the Grand Prize. Other winners include Wheee! by Jeff Gill, Fox Fever by Andrew N. Green, This is Hot by Danny Robashkin and Give Me the Soap by Chris Wedding."
Upcoming Events The 2006 DC PHP ConferenceThe 2006 DC PHP Conference will take place at the L'Enfant Plaza Hotel in Washington, D.C. on October 18-20, 2006.
Events: May 4 - June 29, 2006
Web sites European eHealth News Portal (LinuxMedNews)LinuxMedNews mentions the new eHealthNews.eu site. "eHealth News is announcing: 'Welcome on the First European eHealth News Portal designed and developed for reflecting and promoting European eHealth solutions and initiatives! Our main goal is delivering online eHealth news and information services for interested in collaboration European eHealth Research and Industry Healthcare IT communities.'"
Audio and Video programs GUADEC site presentation video (GnomeDesktop)GnomeDesktop.org has announced a video presentation on Vilanova i La Geltru, Spain. "Fluendo is hosting a presentation video of Vilanova i La Geltru, the home of this years GUADEC conference. The video gives you a quick overview of Vilanova and what kind of town it is. The video is available on the Fluendo Streaming platform."
Page editor: Forrest Cook
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