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LWN.net Weekly Edition for September 20, 2007Geographic display and input using MarbleAt first glance, the KDE Marble project might look like a competitor to other 3D mapping applications, like Google Earth or NASA's World Wind, but it has a very different focus. It has a similar globe view and the navigation is familiar, but, unlike the others, it does not rely upon enormous data sets accessed via the internet; it is, instead, self-contained and fairly lightweight. The intent is to provide a framework for other applications to use so they can incorporate geographic information, while the Marble application is a demonstration and testbed for those ideas. ![[marble globe view]](/images/marble/marbleglobe_sm.png)
The project wants to see Marble used by many different applications, both for input of geographic information and for presenting it. The project lives under the KDE Education Project as one of the applications for Marble is for geographic learning. Many other applications could use a standard framework for displaying maps of various sorts, from games, using their own, possibly fictional maps, to GPS and other visualization tools. Marble does not rely on OpenGL or any hardware support for 3D, in order to reduce complexity and dependencies, which will serve it well when porting it to embedded devices. The dataset that comes with the program weighs in around 9M and provides reasonable, worldwide, detail. The interface is meant to work like other geographic tools to provide a "geo-widget" that behaves the way users expect, removing one barrier to its acceptance. The project recently released its 0.4 version, which was easily installed on Fedora 7 using yum. When starting it for the first time, it goes through a setup process, lasting for 30 seconds or so (depending on hardware, of course), but after that, startup is very quick. It opens with a spherical projection view of the earth along the prime meridian allowing users to grab and rotate the earth in various directions. The navigation is simple, with zoom and pan buttons in addition to the "grab and pull" style. One can also pan the view by moving the mouse to the edges of the display and clicking once the pointer has changed to an arrow indicating a direction. Left-clicking on the map will give the coordinates of the location, whereas right-clicking brings up a menu allowing a few operations to be performed. While not horribly painful, moving around is a bit jerky, tracking noticeably slower than the mouse pointer moves. ![[marble satellite view]](/images/marble/marblesat_sm.png)
The default theme is the atlas view, which looks much like the name implies, with colors and relief shading to represent elevation and ocean depth. Other themes available include a satellite view, using NASA Blue Marble data providing 500 meter per pixel resolution, as well as an "earth at night" view showing populated areas by the amount of light they give off. The information overlaid on the map contains political boundaries, cities keyed by population, lakes and rivers, notable mountains, and a latitude/longitude grid, each of which can be disabled as desired. Many of the map features can be clicked to bring up information about the location, both from the program data and Wikipedia. The main right-click option is a distance tool, which measures the distance between the two (or more) points. Marble also handles standard GPS .gpx data files, along with support for Google Earth's KML format. Overall, this release provides a limited subset of the capabilities eventually envisioned for the tool. The main thrust of the 0.5 release is to fully integrate the contributions from three Google Summer of Code (GSoC) students. Improving the KML support, adding gpsd support to talk to to GPS devices, and "flat" projections were completed by the GSoC participants. They have not been fully integrated into the interface for 0.4, but will be for the next release. Longer term plans include adding support for data from OpenStreetMap, a Wikipedia-like project to map streets and roads worldwide. The project also plans to offer optional OpenGL support to enable hardware acceleration for applications and users who want it. Better resolution satellite data is another area that will be addressed by adding Landsat 15m data. Marble shows a lot of promise, the current release is stable and useful, though it lacks many features. The key to its success, as a library and framework as opposed to an application in its own right, is in defining an API that is flexible enough for most applications. If the project can get that right, there are lots of ways to use it. Once an API stabilizes, we can expect to see Marble-enabled applications, hopefully soon.
Mozilla forming new company for ThunderbirdMozilla has made its decision and will be spinning off Thunderbird into a new organization. Back in August, we covered a discussion about the future of the Thunderbird project, which was spawned by a series of postings in the blog of Mitchell Baker, CEO of Mozilla Corp. At that time, it was recognized that Thunderbird was suffering from a lack of attention, mostly because of an intense focus on Firefox. This week, Baker announced that the results of that discussion were to start a new for-profit company to nurture Thunderbird. The new company, as yet unnamed and referred to as "MailCo", will start with three million dollars in seed money from Mozilla. The intent is to use that money to hire a small team to foster email and internet communications through Thunderbird. To that end, they have hired David Ascher, currently CTO at ActiveState, as the CEO of the new company. Ascher also posted a blog entry about the new organization, providing some insights into the role of MailCo:
While it will legally be a for-profit company, its purpose will be to serve
the public benefit. This means that while part of my job is to figure out a
long-term sustainability plan for the company, It's more important for me to
make email better than to generate significant profits. If profits happen,
that's fine, but generating profits at the expense of the public benefit is
not. It will be fascinating to figure out what that means in practice.
The biggest job for Ascher and MailCo will be to determine what, exactly, Thunderbird should be. From the comments on Baker's blog and elsewhere, it is clear that there is no consensus on what an email client should and should not do. There are many constituencies; trying to please them all is likely to please none. There are lots of questions about integration of email with other internet services: instant messages, RSS feeds, VoIP, etc. There are also questions of local vs. remote message storage and web vs. host-based clients. Each has its advantages and disadvantages along with a vocal set of users. If MailCo starts moving in a particular direction, to the detriment of supporting others, they may lose some significant portion of their [PULL QUOTE: While profit may not be a requirement, some kind of potentially sustainable business model will probably have to be established. END QUOTE] user base. But a decision will have to be made in order to concentrate their efforts; it will be hard to find the right balance. While profit may not be a requirement, some kind of potentially sustainable business model will probably have to be established. It is hard to imagine that Mozilla will keep pumping money into the company, though Baker makes it clear that they will consider further investment. Thunderbird does not have the obvious 'sell eyes to Google' model that Firefox has so successfully used; it directly competes with Google and other, similar, ad-supported mail sites. For various reasons, Thunderbird has never had a large development community in the way that Firefox or other free software projects do. There is a core group of developers, presumably strong candidates to be hired on at MailCo, but in order for the project to succeed, it will need a bigger army of volunteers. There can be friction between paid developers and volunteers, especially if the volunteers feel like they aren't being heard. Growing and working with the development community will be an important part of MailCo's first year or two. Many folks point to the stagnation of the main competition, Outlook, and liken it to the situation, several years back, with Firefox and Internet Explorer. There are some similarities, but there is also one big difference: Exchange. It is relatively easy for a user to change their desktop applications, even in a controlled workplace environment, but companies are unlikely to toss out their Exchange servers anytime soon. Because Microsoft completely controls the mail client to Exchange server protocol, Thunderbird will have a hard time being a drop-in replacement, in the way that Firefox is. One possibility would be to work with Openchange or similar Exchange replacement projects to provide an end-to-end solution for the enterprise. Obviously there are some challenges ahead, for email clients in general and for Thunderbird in particular, but there is reason for optimism as well. Many did not expect Firefox to achieve the level of adoption that it has – it has made remarkable inroads against an entrenched competitor – and many of the same folks are behind the effort to give Thunderbird a push. Though it may seem like Mozilla is kicking Thunderbird out of the nest, they are actually giving it some resources so that it has a chance to fly. It certainly will not suffer under an organization devoted solely to its development.
The case of the unwelcome attributionA couple of weeks ago, LWN examined the dispute with the OpenBSD project over the copyright notices placed in (and removed from) the versions of the Atheros wireless network driver intended for eventual merging into the mainline Linux kernel. At that time, the files with the improperly removed license text had never made it anywhere near the mainline repository and an effort was being made to fix the problem. It really seemed like the whole issue should end then.So why does a perusal of the OpenBSD lists (and, often, unfortunately, linux-kernel as well) turn up gems like these?
The rights and recognition of one of our own developers (reyk@)
have been molested, and all we've done as a community is to
participate in useless flames and blog postings. Theo has thrown
himself, once again, against the spears of the Linux community and
their legal vultures in order to protect our software freedoms.
How many of us can say we've done our part to defend truly Free
Software?
-- Jason Dixon
In the case of Ryek's [sic] code, the reverse is true but instead of
admitting the mistake and making the needed corrections, FSF has
pulled out their lawyers in hopes of getting away with the
theft. All of this is being done *intentionally* in hopes that no
one will put up a fight.
-- J.C. Roberts
I am really disappointed by all this. I would have expected that
once such a patch is suggested (let alone being committed to some
public place) some senior/respected/responsible Linux person would
tell them what they are doing is wrong. Right from the start. I
now see this is not how things work around here.
-- Can E. Acar
One might well think that the whole issue is still open. In fact, much of the dispute has gone by the wayside. The files with the improperly removed copyright notices never were going to make it to the mainline. The allegations by Theo de Raadt that taking a dual-license notice at its word was illegal have been pretty well laughed off; the OpenBSD camp is no longer asserting that claim. In fact, there is really only one point of dispute left:
For this offense, the OpenBSD community continues to flame, threaten lawsuits, and more. It seems that the developers named above should simply add some original haiku to the opening comments so that their right to claim copyright to portions of the file would be indisputable. Even in the absence of bad poetry, these developers have done some small amount of work and will certainly do more to get the code ready for Linux inclusion. Threatening legal action as a way of keeping them from adding their own attribution to the file seems gratuitous. Part of what is going on here may be a simple culture clash. It seems that, in the BSD world, the adding of a copyright attribution to a file is usually done with the permission of the existing copyright holders. For a developer to just patch an attribution can come across as being a bit rude. In the Linux community, instead, developers simply add a copyright if they feel they have done enough work to justify it. It is hard to come up with cases where these attributions have gone in without merit. Eben Moglen's one public contribution to this conversation includes this paragraph:
We understand that attribution issues are critically important to
free software developers; we are accustomed to the strong feelings
that are involved in such situations. In the fifteen years I have
spent giving free legal help to developers throughout the
community, attribution disputes have been, always, the most
emotionally charged.
That is clearly what is going on here - this discussion is certainly happening on a strongly emotional level. But it must be said that the most harsh language seems to be flowing in one direction: from OpenBSD toward Linux. This was also true when the situation was reversed and an OpenBSD developer was found to have improperly relicensed some Linux code. In both cases (and in others) there is a clear sense that the OpenBSD people feel wronged by Linux. One might well wonder why this is the case. To an extent, OpenBSD developers may be following the tone set by that project's leader. They may be irritated by the licensing asymmetry: BSD-licensed code can be incorporated into a GPL-licensed project, but GPL-licensed code cannot be brought into a BSD-licensed project. Or perhaps they feel that their system has been unfairly upstaged by an inferior rival. Whatever the reason, there is a certain hostility emanating from that camp which is unpleasant to see. It would be a mistake, however, to let the public flaming obscure the fact that Linux and the BSD variants have much in common. There is certainly no shortage of Linux proponents whose "advocacy" makes our community look bad. BSD will have people like that too. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, there is a great deal of good will, information, and code which flows in both directions. We are all working toward the same ends, and there are plenty of places where we can learn from the BSD communities. This incident will pass, and hot heads will cool - before, undoubtedly, heating up again on a different topic - but, through it all, free software will just continue to get better.
Security Exploiting symlinks and tmpfiles"Insecure tmpfile creation" and "arbitrary file overwrite using symlinks" (and other similar names) are commonly seen vulnerabilities listed in the LWN daily security update. The problems are related in many ways and can be very serious, with damage ranging from corrupted files to full takeover of a vulnerable system. By and large, they are easy to avoid, so it is disheartening to see them crop up time and time again. Typically, these kinds of attacks exploit race conditions, where correct functioning depends, inappropriately, on the order of operations between two or more processes in the system. The classic example is a program that checks for the existence of a file, in a directory writable by others, before opening it, to avoid overwriting an existing file. An attacker can arrange, usually through repeated attempts, to create the file just after the existence check and before the open. The vulnerable program's author made an incorrect assumption about what else could be going on in the system, which allows the attacker's program to race with it. At first blush, it doesn't seem particularly harmful for a program to mistakenly overwrite the attacker's carefully inserted file. After all, the victimized program will probably just truncate the file before writing whatever data it had planned. This is where symbolic links (symlinks) come into play. Symlinks are just an alias for an entry in the filesystem which can be created by anyone with write access to the directory where the symlink will reside. The target of the symlink can be most any string, normally they are the path to the target of the alias, but there is no requirement that the target exist. More importantly, there is no check that the process which creates the symlink has access rights to the target. When operations are performed on a symlink, the filesystem layer follows the pointer to the actual file, checking the permissions on the inode of that file. What that means is that any random Linux user can create a symbolic link from /tmp/foo to /etc/passwd, though they will not be able to write to the former, because the permissions on the latter do not allow it. But, privileged programs, either setuid or those run as root, do have the proper permission. If they open and write to /tmp/foo, they have just corrupted the password file. Vulnerable programs aren't usually quite that simple, but they do use predictable filenames or patterns. If an attacker knows that the administrator often runs a vulnerable program or script, which writes to /tmp/fooNNNNN where NNNNN is a random number, they can run a program which continuously makes links from those filenames to some file they wish to corrupt. If their program happens to generate the right link at the right time, the corruption succeeds. Normally, a program that creates a temporary file will delete it when it is done executing, but for symlinks that just removes the link, leaving the file that was pointed to with the whatever contents were written. A setuid program provides even more opportunities for exploitation as the attacker can run it many times, under his control, while running other programs that create the symlinks. If the attacker can control, via input to the program, what gets written, the problem becomes worse still, quite possibly leading to complete compromise of the system. The scenarios for abusing this kind of hole are endless. It doesn't necessarily have to be a temporary file that gets exploited, any file that gets opened in a directory that is writable by others can potentially be symlinked elsewhere. This can lead to unexpected results for reads, or corruption of unexpected files for writes. These types of vulnerabilities can be used when a regular user login (or system user like 'apache') is compromised, by an exploit or password disclosure, to further compromise the system. Some may be difficult to exploit reliably, but the consequences are such that it may be worth the effort. As always, David Wheeler's Secure Programming for Linux and Unix HOWTO is an excellent resource for avoiding these kinds of problems. The basic idea is to avoid the race by using atomic filesystem operations or, for tmpfiles, mkstemp(). When creating files, ensure that the open() call uses O_CREAT | O_EXCL which will fail if the file already exists. Another important note is that a program should not close and reopen files that live in shared directories, instead they should be left open until the program is done with them. These kind of problems have been around for twenty years or more, but still keep cropping up, which is a good indication that many programmers aren't following secure coding practices. Whenever one is writing code that is opening files, which is, after all, a very common operation, some consideration should be given to symlink/tmpfile vulnerabilities. With some perseverance, these kinds of vulnerabilities could become a thing of the past.
New vulnerabilities cacti: denial of service
kvirc: remote arbitrary code execution
mediawiki: cross-site scripting
openoffice.org: arbitrary code execution via TIFF images
phpwiki: authentication bypass
qt: buffer overflow
quagga: denial of service
streamripper: buffer overflow
Updated vulnerabilities acroread: multiple vulnerabilities
apache2: information disclosure
apache: multiple vulnerabilities
apache: cross-site scripting
avahi: denial of service
bochs: buffer overflow
centericq: buffer overflows
clamav: denial of service
clamav: multiple vulnerabilities
cpio: arbitrary code execution
vixie-cron: privilege escalation
cscope: buffer overflows
cscope: buffer overflows
cups: denial of service
gpdf: integer overflow
dovecot: privilege escalation
dovecot: directory traversal
eggdrop: stack-based buffer overflow
elinks: code execution
elinks: arbitrary file access
evolution: format string error
evolution-data-server: malicious server arbitrary code execution
pop mail man-in-the-middle attacks
fetchmail: denial of service
file: integer overflow
firebird: buffer overflow
firefox: multiple vulnerabilities
firefox, thunderbird, seamonkey: multiple vulnerabilities
flac123: arbitrary code execution
freetype: arbitrary code execution
freetype: integer overflows
gallery2: multiple unspecified vulnerabilities
gcc: file overwrite vulnerability
gd: buffer overflow
gd: multiple vulnerabilities
gd: denial of service
gdm: denial of service
gedit: format string vulnerability
gforge: missing input sanitizing
gimp: multiple vulnerabilities
openssh: inappropriate use of trusted cookies
grip: buffer overflow
gzip: multiple vulnerabilities
HelixPlayer: arbitrary code execution
horde-kronolith: local file inclusion
id3lib: insecure tmpfile creation
ImageMagick: integer overflows
jasper: denial of service
java: multiple vulnerabilities
java-1.5.0-sun: multiple vulnerabilities
jffnms: multiple vulnerabilities
kdebase: information leak
kdebase: several vulnerabilities
kdelibs: kate backup file permission leak
kernel: denial of service
kernel: denial of service
kernel: denial of service
kernel: multiple vulnerabilities
kernel: denial of service
kernel: denial of service
kernel: denial of service
kernel: denial of service
kernel: denial of service by memory consumption
kernel: denial of service
kernel: several vulnerabilities
kernel: signal handling flaw on PPC
kernel: several vulnerabilities
kernel: denial of service
kernel: denial of service
kernel: multiple vulnerabilities
kernel: several vulnerabilities
krb5: multiple vulnerabilities
krb5: uninitialized pointers
krb5: local privilege escalation
krb5: buffer overflow, uninitialized pointer
krb5: multiple vulnerabilities
ktorrent: incorrect validation
lftp: shell command execution
libarchive: pax extension header vulnerabilities
libexif: integer overflow
libmodplug: boundary errors
libphp-phpmailer: command execution
libpng: denial of service
libpng: buffer overflow
libpng: heap based buffer overflow
libtiff: buffer overflow
libvorbis: multiple memory corruption flaws
libxml2 - arbitrary code execution
libxml2: multiple buffer overflows
lighttpd: buffer overflow
lighttpd: denial of service
lookup-el: insecure temporary file
lynx: arbitrary command execution
mapserver: multiple cross-site scripting vulnerabilities
mod_jk: proxy bypass
moin: arbitrary JavaScript execution
moodle: cross-site scripting
mplayer: buffer overflow
mydns: buffer overflows
mysql: denial of service
mysql: format string bug
MySQL: privilege violations
mysql: multiple vulnerabilities
MySQL: logging bypass
nbd: arbitrary code execution
ncompress: buffer underflow
nginx: cross site scripting
OpenOffice.org: arbitrary code execution
OpenSSH: denial of service
openssh: remote denial of service
openssl: private key attack
opera: multiple vulnerabilities
pam: privilege escalation
perl-Net-DNS: predictable id sequence
php: multiple vulnerabilities
php: several vulnerabilities
php: multiple vulnerabilities
php: buffer overflows
phpbb2: missing input sanitizing
phpbb2: multiple vulnerabilities
phpmyadmin: multiple vulnerabilities
phpPgAdmin: cross-site scripting
phpwiki: remote code execution
po4a: information leak
proftpd: authentication bypass
pulseaudio: denial of service
python: information disclosure
qemu: multiple vulnerabilities
qgit: arbitrary code execution
qt: arbitrary code execution
qt: "/../" injection
quake: buffer overflow
redhat-cluster-suite: denial of service
rsync: off-by-one errors
samba: incorrect group assignment
slocate: information disclosure
star: directory traversal vulnerability
Sun JDK/JRE: multiple vulnerabilities
sylpheed: format string vulnerability
sysstat: insecure temporary files
tar: symlink path traversal vulnerability
tcpdump: integer overflow
tcpdump: denial of service
tcp-wrappers: unauthorized access
terminal: arbitrary code execution
tetex: buffer overflow
tomcat: directory traversal
tomcat: cross-site scripting
vim: arbitrary code execution
vixie-cron: weak permissions may cause errors
vlc: several vulnerabilities
wireshark: multiple vulnerabilities
wordpress: privilege bypass
XFree86 X.org: integer overflows
xfsdump: insecure temp dir
xine-lib: arbitrary code execution
xine-lib: buffer overflow
xmms: BMP handling vulnerability
X.org: temp file vulnerability
xorg-server: local privilege escalation
xterm: local user unauthorized access
Page editor: Jake Edge Kernel development Brief items Kernel release statusThe current 2.6 prepatch is 2.6.23-rc7, released by Linus on September 19. It contains a fair number of fixes and the return of the sk98lin driver. This should be the last prepatch before the final 2.6.23 release. See the long-format changelog for the details.The current -mm release is 2.6.23-rc6-mm1. Recent changes to -mm include a patch to disable the timerfd() system call (to give time to work out what the API should actually be), randomization of the brk() system call on i386 and x86_64 systems, and lots of fixes.
Kernel development news Quotes of the week
It took me over two solid days to get this lot compiling and
booting on a few boxes. This required around ninety fixup patches
and patch droppings. There are several bugs in here which I know
of (details below) and presumably many more which I don't know of.
I have to say that this just isn't working any more.
-- Andrew Morton launches
2.6.23-rc6-mm1
Linux developers firmly guard their independence and don't often
follow our advice.
-- Richard Stallman
Yes, I realize that there's a lot of insane people out
there. However, we generally don't do kernel design decisions based
on them. But we can pat the insane users on the head and say "we
won't guarantee it works, but if you eat your prozac, and don't
bother us, go do your stupid things".
-- Linus Torvalds
Large pages, large blocks, and large problemsMost of the core virtual memory subsystem developers met for a mini-summit just before the 2007 Kernel Summit in Cambridge. They came away feeling that they had resolved a number of VM scalability problems. Subsequent discussions have made it clear that, perhaps, this conclusion was a bit premature. They may well have resolved things, but it is not clear that everybody came to the same resolution.All of the issues at hand relate to scalability in one way or another. While the virtual memory subsystem has been through a great many changes aimed at making it work well on contemporary systems, one key aspect of how it works has remained essentially unchanged since the beginning: the 4096-byte (on most architectures) page size. Over that time, the amount of memory installed on a typical system has grown by about three orders of magnitude - that's 1000 times more pages that the kernel must manage and 1000 times more page faults which must be handled. Since it does not appear that this trend will stop soon, there is a clear scalability problem which must be managed. This problem is complicated by the way that Linux tends to fragment its memory. Almost all memory allocations are done in units of a single page, with the result that system RAM tends to get scattered into large numbers of single-page chunks. The kernel's memory allocator tries to keep larger groups of pages together, but there are limits to how successful it can be. The file /proc/buddyinfo can be illustrative here; on a system which has been running and busy for a while, the number of higher-order (larger) pages, as shown in the rightmost columns, will be very small. The main response to memory fragmentation has been to avoid higher-order allocations at almost any cost. There are very few places in the kernel where allocations of multiple contiguous pages are done. This approach has worked for some time, but avoiding larger allocations does not always make the need for such allocations go away. In fact, there are many things which could benefit from larger contiguous memory areas, including:
None of these issues are a surprise; developers have seen them coming for some time. So there are a number of potential solutions waiting on the wings. What is lacking is a consensus on which solution is the best way to go. One piece of the puzzle may be Mel Gorman's fragmentation avoidance work, which has been discussed here more than once. Mel's patches seek to separate allocations which can be moved in physical memory from those which cannot. When movable allocations are grouped together, the kernel can, when necessary, create higher-order groups of pages by relocating allocations which are in the way. Some of Mel's work is in 2.6.23; more may be merged for 2.6.24. The lumpy reclaim patches, also in 2.6.23, encourage the creation of large blocks by targeting adjacent pages when memory is being reclaimed. The immediate cause for the current discussion is a new version of Christoph Lameter's large block size patches. Christoph has filled in the largest remaining gap in that patch set by implementing mmap() support. This code enables the page cache to manage chunks of file data larger than a single page which, in turn, addresses many of the I/O and filesystem issues. Christoph has given a long list of reasons why this patch should be merged, but agreement is not universal. At the top of the list of objections would appear to be the fact that the large block size patches require the availability of higher-order pages to work; there is no fallback if memory becomes sufficiently fragmented that those allocations are not available. So a system which has filesystems using larger block sizes will fall apart in the absence of large, contiguous blocks of memory - and, as we have seen, that is not an uncommon situation on Linux systems. The fragmentation avoidance patches can improve the situation quite a bit, but there is no guarantee that [PULL QUOTE: If this patch set is merged, some developers want it to include a loud warning to discourage users from actually expecting it to work. END QUOTE] fragmentation will not occur, either as a result of the wrong workload or a deliberate attack. So, if this patch set is merged, some developers want it to include a loud warning to discourage users (and distributors) from actually expecting it to work. An alternative is Nick Piggin's fsblock work. People like to complain about the buffer head layer in current kernels, but that layer has a purpose: it tracks the mapping between page cache blocks and the associated physical disk sectors. The fsblock patch replaces the buffer head code with a new implementation with the goals of better performance and cleaner abstractions. One of the things fsblock can do is support large blocks for filesystems. The current patch does not use higher-order allocations to implement this support; instead, large blocks are made virtually contiguous in the vmalloc() space through a call to vmap() - a technique used by XFS now. The advantage of using vmap() is that the filesystem code can see large, contiguous blocks without the need for physical adjacency, so fragmentation is not an issue. On the other hand, using vmap() is quite slow, the address space available for vmap() on 32-bit systems is small enough to cause problems, and using vmap() does nothing to help at the I/O level. So Nick plans to extend fsblock to implement large blocks with contiguous allocations, but with a fallback to vmap() when large allocations are not available. In theory, this approach should be be best of both worlds, giving the benefits of large blocks without unseemly explosions in the presence of fragmentation. Says Nick:
However fsblock can do everything that higher order pagecache can
do in terms of avoiding vmap and giving contiguous memory to block
devices by opportunistically allocating higher orders of pages, and
falling back to vmap if they cannot be satisfied.
From the conversation, it seems that a number of developers see fsblock as the future. But it is not something for the near future. The patch is big, intrusive, and scary, which will slow its progress (and memory management patches have a tendency to merge at a glacial pace to begin with). It lacks the opportunistic large block feature. Only the Minix filesystem has been updated to use fsblock, and that patch was rather large. Everybody (including Nick) anticipates that more complex filesystems - those with features like journaling - will present surprises and require changes of unknown size. Fsblock is not a near-term solution. One recently-posted patch from Christoph could help fill in some of the gaps. His "virtual compound page" patch allows kernel code to request a large, contiguous allocation; that request will be satisfied with physically contiguous memory if possible. If that memory is not available, virtually contiguous memory will be returned instead. Beyond providing opportunistic large block allocation for fsblock, this feature could conceivably be used in a number of places where vmalloc() is called now, resulting in better performance when memory is not overly fragmented. Meanwhile, Andrea Arcangeli has been relatively quiet for some time, but one should not forget that he is the author of much of the VM code in the kernel now. He advocates a different approach entirely:
From my part I am really convinced the only sane way to approach
the VM scalability and larger-physically contiguous pages problem
is the CONFIG_PAGE_SHIFT patch (aka large PAGE_SIZE from Hugh for
2.4).
The CONFIG_PAGE_SHIFT patch is a rework of an old idea: separate the size of a page as seen by the operating system from the hardware's notion of the page size. Hardware pages can be clustered together to create larger software pages which, in turn, become the basic unit of memory management. If all pages in the system were, say, 64KB in length, a 64KB buffer would be a single-page allocation with no fragmentation issues at all. If the system is to go to larger pages, creating them in software is about the only option. Most processors support more than one hardware page size, but the smallest of the larger page sizes tend to be too large for general use. For example, i386 processors have no page sizes between 4KB and 2MB. Clustering pages in software enables the use of more reasonable page sizes and creates the flexibility needed to optimize the page size for the expected load on the system. This approach will make large block support easy, and it will help with the I/O performance issues as well. Page clustering is not helpful for TLB pressure problems, but there is little to be done there in any sort of general way. The biggest problem, perhaps, with page clustering is that it replaces external fragmentation with internal fragmentation. A 64KB page will, when used as the page cache for a 1KB file, waste 63KB of memory. There are provisions in Andrea's patch for splitting large pages to handle this situation; Andrea claims that this splitting will not lead to the same sort of fragmentation seen on current systems, but he has not, yet, convinced the others of this fact. Conclusions from this discussion are hard to come by; at one point Mel Gorman asked: "Are we going to agree on some sort of plan or are we just going to handwave ourselves to death?" Linus has just called the whole discussion "idiotic". What may happen is that the large block size patches go in - with warnings - as a way of keeping a small subset of users happy and providing more information about the problem space. Memory management hacking requires a certain amount of black-magic handwaving in the best of times; there is no reason to believe that the waving of hands is going to slow down anytime soon this time around.
A generic tracing interfaceDynamic kernel tracing remains high on the wishlists presented by many Linux users. While much work has been done to create a powerful tracing capability, very little of that work has found its way into the mainline. The recent posting of one small piece of infrastructure may help to change that situation, though.The piece in question is the trace layer posted by David Wilder. Its purpose is to make it easy for a tracing application to get things set up in the kernel and allow the user to control the tracing process. To that end, it provides an internal kernel API and a set of control files in the debugfs filesystem. On the kernel side, a tracing module would set things up with a call to:
#include <linux/trace.h>
struct trace_info *trace_setup(const char *root, const char *name,
u32 buf_size, u32 buf_nr, u32 flags);
Here, root is the name of the root directory which will appear in debugfs, name is the name of the control directory within root, buf_size and buf_nr describe the size and number of relay buffers to be created, and flags controls various channel options. The TRACE_GLOBAL_CHANNEL flag says that a single set of relay channels (as opposed to per-CPU channels) should be used; TRACE_FLIGHT_CHANNEL turns on the "flight recorder" mode where relay buffer overruns result in the overwriting of old data, and TRACE_DISABLE_STATE disables control of the channel via debugfs. The return value (if all goes well) will be a pointer to a trace_info structure for the channel. This structure has a number of fields, but the one which will be of most interest outside of the trace code itself will be rchan, which is a pointer to the relay channel associated with this trace point. When actual tracing is to begin, the kernel module should make a call to:
int trace_start(struct trace_info *trace);
The return value follows the "zero or a negative error value" convention. Tracing is turned off with:
int trace_stop(struct trace_info *trace);
When the tracing module is done, it should shut down the trace with:
void trace_cleanup(struct trace_info *trace);
Note that none of these entry points have anything to do with the placement or activation of trace points or the creation of trace data. All of that must be done separately by the trace module. So a typical module will, after calling trace_start(), set up one or more kprobes or activate a static kernel marker. The probe function attached to the trace points should do something like this:
rcu_read_lock();
if (trace_running(trace)) {
/* Format trace data and output via relay */
}
rcu_read_unlock();
Additionally, if the TRACE_GLOBAL_CHANNEL flag has been set, the probe function should protect access to the relay channel with a spinlock. This protection may also be necessary in situations where an interrupt handler might be traced. In user space, the trace information will show up under /debug/root/name, where debug is the debugfs mount point, and root and name are the directory names passed to trace_setup(). The file state can be read to get the current tracing state; an application can write start or stop to this file to turn tracing on or off. The file trace0 is the relay channel where tracing data can be read; on SMP systems with per-CPU channels there will be additional files (trace1...) for additional processors. The file dropped can be read to see how many trace records (if any) have been dropped due to buffer-full conditions. All told, it is not a particularly complicated bit of code. Perhaps the most significant feature of this patch is that it is part of the infrastructure created and used by the SystemTap project. Getting this code into the mainline will make it that much easier for distributors to provide well-supported tracing facilities to their users. And that, in turn, should make users happy and give analysts one less thing to complain about.
A summary of 2.6.23 internal API changesThe final 2.6.23 kernel release is getting closer. At this point, it would be more than surprising to see any additional API changes find their way into this release, so it should be safe to summarize the changes which have been made.
As always, a cumulative record of API changes can be found in the LWN 2.6 API changes page.
Patches and updates Kernel trees
Core kernel code
Development tools
Device drivers
Documentation
Filesystems and block I/O
Memory management
Networking
Security-related
Virtualization and containers
Miscellaneous
Page editor: Jonathan Corbet Distributions News and Editorials Fedora Audio Creation SIGHans de Goede has announced the creation of a Fedora Special Interest Group (SIG) dedicated to Audio Creation. The new SIG's initial goal to bring the packages currently in Planet CCRMA into the main Fedora repository.CCRMA (pronounced "karma") is the Stanford University Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics. Planet CCRMA is a repository of software packages in RPM format. The CCRMA project was created and is still maintained by Fernando Lopez-Lezcano at Stanford. The packages in Planet CCRMA were originally developed on Red Hat Linux and later on Fedora. Its packages are available to Fedora users as a third party repository, but there are too many packages to be easily maintained by one person. As a result not all the CCRMA packages have been updated to Fedora 7, much less Fedora 8. CCRMA does have realtime kernels for FC6 and F7 based on 2.6.22.6 and Ingo's 2.6.22.1-rt9 patch, which, along with a good selection of audio applications, seems like a good start for an Audio Creation spin. Over time some of the CCRMA packages have migrated into the main Fedora repository. The Audio Creation SIG hopes to integrate more of the core Planet CCRMA packages into Fedora and to keep up-to-date any audio related packages that are currently in the Fedora repository. There are many other audio projects out there. Dave Phillips has compiled a fairly comprehensive (though somewhat out-of-date) list of Linux Audio Bundles, Distributions, and Music Collections. Many projects are distribution specific (or bundled distributions such as 64 Studio and Dyne:bolic). The AGNULA project once had a ReHMuDi branch that was Red Hat Linux based, but that died before Fedora was born. Planet CCRMA is the place for Fedora audio packages and it is a great place to start in turning Fedora into a premiere distribution for audiophiles.
New Releases Fedora 8 Test 2 releasedThe second Fedora 8 test release is out. "Test 2 is for 'beta' users. This is the time where we have more features in a 'testable' state where the more people using them and the more feedback we get the better. So please help us make Fedora 8 as good as we can!"
Fedora Electronic Lab - Livecd F8Test2Fedora Electronic Lab live CD has released an F8Test2 ISO image.
Distribution News Gentoo Council 2007 Election ResultsThe Gentoo Council decides on global issues and policies that affect multiple projects in Gentoo. The election for the 2008 Council is now complete. The winners are Mike Frysinger (vapier), Donnie Berkholz (dberkholz), Roy Marples (uberlord), Diego Pettenò (flameeyes), Luca Barbato (lu_zero), Petteri Räty (betelgeuse) and Wernfried Haas (amne). Click below to see how the votes were tabulated.
Ubuntu 7.10 beta approachingUbuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) skipped the final Tribe CD (alpha) release and is now heading toward the first beta release currently scheduled for September 27, 2007.
Ubuntu Launchpad 1.1.9 release delayedThe Launchpad 1.1.9 release, originally scheduled for September 19, has been delayed for further testing.
Distribution Newsletters Gentoo Weekly NewsletterThe Gentoo Weekly Newsletter for September 3, 2007 looks at the Emacs project, MIPS keywording, Gentoo Russian Summer Camp review, upcoming OpenExpo in Zurich and more.The Gentoo Weekly Newsletter for September 10, 2007 covers the Council voting reminder, screenshot contest winners, Synergy tips and tricks.
Ubuntu Weekly News: Issue #57The Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter for September 15, 2007 covers Dell's remastered Ubuntu 7.04 ISO, Andrea Veri becomes a MOTU, Ubuntu Finland delivers Ubuntu to Finnish parliament representatives and much more.
DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 220The DistroWatch Weekly for September 17, 2007 is out. "DistroWatch has a new Number One distribution and it's called PCLinuxOS. But how is it possible that this small, little-known project, built mostly by one enthusiastic developer, has reached the height that eludes many of the more famous and better established distributions? Keep reading to find out. In the news section: Ubuntu technical team votes for CompizFusion by default, openSUSE continues to show faith in KDE 4.0, Debian looks at new features in X.Org 7.3 and 7.4, Ulteo launches new beta releases, and Linux Mint develops a new update tool - mintUpdate. Finally, don't miss our featured article that introduces MACH BOOT, a Linux live CD that boots into a graphical desktop in as little as 10 seconds!"
Newsletters and articles of interest Fedora Interview SeriesJonathan Roberts has started a series of interviews with Fedora developers to get some Fedora 8 feature previews. This week Jonathan talks with Bastien Nocera about Bluetooth support.
Xen Cluster Management With Ganeti On Debian Etch (HowtoForge)HowtoForge has a tutorial on using Ganeti on a Debian Etch system. "Ganeti is a cluster virtualization management system based on Xen. In this tutorial I will explain how to create one virtual Xen machine (called an instance) on a cluster of two physical nodes, and how to manage and failover this instance between the two physical nodes."
Page editor: Rebecca Sobol Development Google Summer of Code 2007 ConclusionThis is the sixth and final piece in LWN's series of Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2007 articles. The first five articles covered the program launch, Ubuntu's projects, the OpenMRS organization, the student who tackled Direct3D 10 support for Wine, and Mozilla's projects. When LWN contacted Leslie Hawthorn, Google's Open Source Program Coordinator, back in April, Google had just announced the names of the 905 students who they would be sponsoring to work for established open source projects for the summer of 2007. For the program's third year, Google was experimenting with some administrative changes intended primarily to ease the student payment process (each student is given $4500, over three installments) and help them bond with their mentoring developers and organizations. The program ended on August 31st with the deadline for final student and mentor evaluations, and the participants seem to have had another generally successful year. Again, we look to Leslie Hawthorn for more information about the effects of those changes, the outcome of the final evaluations, the GSoC 2008, and some of the individual students and projects that LWN hasn't had a chance to cover yet this summer. LWN: Google made several changes to the Summer of Code from the previous year, such as a new payment mechanism and alterations in the program timeline to give students and mentors more bonding time. Can you evaluate the impact that these changes have had on the program? Will you revert any of these changes for next year's program, or are all of them here to stay? Hawthorn: Overall we've gotten good feedback that adding the community bonding period was helpful. A few students mentioned it gave them some no-pressure time to just idle in IRC and learn about how the project worked. Another few commented that the time gave them the opportunity to read up on the latest research in their project area. I'm hoping that the extra time means more projects end up with long-term contributors. Our new payments system also meant that we were able to get 89% of our students paid within five days (and usually 48 hours), rather than weeks. That's a great improvement, but we can always do better.
LWN: From what I understand, students were asked to evaluate their mentors, as well as it going the other way round. What percentage of them received passing evaluations? What did you learn from those evaluations? Hawthorn: We didn't ask students whether their mentors passed or failed, but I think that's not a bad idea. Most students were very pleased with their interactions with their mentors. I even had one student who failed ping me to let me know that he thought his mentor did a good job, but that the project just wasn't right for him. LWN: What trends can you identify in the evaluation data? How have the evaluation success rates changed over the three years that the Google Summer of Code has been operating? Hawthorn: Both students and mentors noted that they wish they had more time to devote to the project. That's a common complaint I hear from most open source developers, though. A few newer organizations had lower success rates than we'd like, but that's somewhat to be expected. Students who had previous open source experience were more likely to pass, but other than that there are no clear trends that stick out in my mind at this time. [The success rates over the years] have remained pretty consistent. LWN: Are there any particular students, mentors, or organizations which you think deserve special attention? Hawthorn: I think all of the projects are special, but a few do leap out at me as particularly noteworthy: I'm a big fan of the OpenMRS project, but you've already profiled them in a previous article. Creative Commons had some interesting projects this year, like the work of Jason Kivlighn, mentored by Jon Phillips. Jason worked on indexing embedded license claims, which resulted in many improvements to Liblicense, a C library that produces licensing information based on the specifications of calling libraries and programs. In addition to generating text for specific licenses, Liblicense allows an application to enumerate which licenses are currently available and provide descriptive text for each license, and for license features. Another cool project was the work done by Andrew Morton, mentored by Angie Byron. Andrew worked on creating a project quality metrics system for Drupal modules, helping Drupal developers choose which modules would be most effective for them to use when creating Drupal sites. As there are *many* modules contributed to Drupal, Andrew's work has made developers' lives much easier. LWN: Thank you very much for your time. With about 733 successful projects, it is impossible to discuss every student's work. Over the past five months, LWN has reported on those GSoC projects that we hoped would be most interesting to our readership, but there have certainly been many qualified projects that slipped through the cracks. We'll try to bring justice to a few of them here: AbiSource: Philippe Milot's OpenXML Importer, mentored by Kamran Khan. Milot developed a plugin for AbiWord that imports documents in Microsoft's OpenXML format. According to the last update made on Milot's project wiki, the plugin is capable of importing text with some associated formatting, though advanced features such as styles had not yet been implemented. Debian: Ian Haken's Automated Upgrade Testing Using QEMU, mentored by Lars Ivar Wirzenius Haken built VLOSUTS (Virtual Live Operating System Upgrade Test Suite), software which will help Debian developers make sure that their latest package set will not cause errors for upgrading users. VLOSUTS builds a custom image of a Debian installation with a user-defined set of packages, runs the installation in virtualization software (Zen, KVM, and Qemu are supported), attempts to upgrade a specified list of packages from a particular repository, and then reports any errors. It is interesting to note that the Qemu backend may make it possible to test several architectures at once. As of the most recent post on Haken's blog, the project was "just out of alpha" and is available to build as a package. Debian: Cameron Dale's BitTorrent Proxy for Debian Archive, mentored by Anthony Towns Dale created DebTorrent, software that should significantly decrease the bandwidth required to host a mirror of a Debian repository. DebTorrent harnesses a modified version of BitTorrent, altered to meet the demands of software repositories, which contain far more files, often of far smaller size and updated more frequently than the protocol is usually applied to. Dale's most recent status report indicates that the software is in working order. It appears that CPU usage is moderate while downloading packages with DebTorrent, though memory usage needs immediate attention. FreeBSD: Ivan Voras's Graphical installer for FreeBSD, mentored by Murray Stokely Voras's finstall modular and extensible LiveCD installer is meant to be an eventual replacement for the six-year old sysinstall installer. The new installer is meant to be usable by the release of FreeBSD 7.0, but will likely not be the default and will only support the i386 and amd64 architectures. Voras has released an alpha version of finstall (screenshots are, of course, available) which is only usable on an unparitioned system. Gnome: Raphael Nunes da Motta's Voice recognition applet to control desktop, mentored by Nickolay Shmyrev Da Motta's Gnome-Voice-Control, only at version 0.2, is already an impressive usability tool, with the potential to be a phenomenally fun toy and time saver. Look to da Motta's blog for video demonstations of using the tool to run programs and manipulate windows and menus. The software uses a CMU Spinx speech recognition backend and is currently only available for English. KDE: Rivo Laks' Icon cache for KDE, mentored by Aaron Seigo Laks' KIconCache substantially reduces disk seeking and access upon KDE application startup by caching icons in memory. The results are excellent: about 10% faster desktop startup and about 25% faster startup time for applications, using Dolphin as a reference. He also developed KPixmapCache to cache image data for individual applications. His code has already been merged into kdelibs and will be released as part of KDE 4.0. KDE: Urs Wolfer's KRDC UI Redesign and overall revamp, mentored by Bradley John Hards Wolfer's work has received a lot of attention in the KDE community, where improvement of the KDE Remote Desktop Connection (KRDC) tool for VNC and RDP has been long awaited. All indications are that Wolfer has lived up to the expectations, including the complete rewrite of the VNC code, the new interface with tabbing, and a preliminary Windows build. The new KRDC has already been integrated into the KDE 4 trunk and is available as part of KDE 4 beta 2. Wolfer has indicated that he will continue to work on KRDC, suggesting possible NX support for KDE 4.1. NetBSD: Jachym Holecek's Hardware monitoring and HAL port, mentored by Quentin Garnier Holecek is bringing long overdue hardware event notification support to NetBSD via a port of the Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL). It's a difficult project, involving some kernel modification, but it should have tremendous ease-of-use implications for NetBSD users, making transparent hardware management possible in KDE and Gnome. According to the last update posted to Holecek's project page, the port now successfully builds with some features disabled. Neuros: Leif Johnson's Apple iPod integration for Neuros OSD, mentored by Thomas Bruno Johnson sought to add a potentially killer feature to Neuros' latest gadget, the Linux-based Open Source Device (OSD) media center. His project would allow the OSD, as a USB-host device, to sync music and videos with an Apple iPod. It is difficult to find information on the status of his project, but it looks as though he was successful in creating a framework for hotplugging USB devices and implementing audio-read support for the iPod back in early August. OpenOffice.org: Shane Mathews' OpenGL rendered Impress transitions, mentored by Thorsten Behrens Mathews' work should satisfy eye candy-hungry users of OpenOffice.org's Impress slideshow application. He has released five stylish 3D slide transitions rendered with OpenGL and a platform for making more. Look to Mathews' blog for screenshots and more information about the project. LWN was also interested in learning about how the GSoC might look next year. In all previous years, the program has received substantial administrative changes, growth in participation and diversity, and budget increases. While it may be logical to assume that the GSoC 2008 will be no exception, Hawthorn could only remark, "We don't have anything to announce right now about possible future instances of the Google Summer of Code program..." Despite the fact that Google is unwilling to discuss the next GSoC, or even confirm that it will exist, feel free to attempt your own predictions based on the growth demonstrated in figures from the past summers. The following data was gathered with the help of Chris Ulbrich of Google's Global Communications and Public Affair division: Google Summer of Code 2007
Google Summer of Code 2006
Google Summer of Code 2005
System Applications Database Software PostgreSQL 8.2.5, 8.1.10 announcedVersions 8.2.5 and 8.1.10 of the PostgreSQL DBMS have been announced. "The PostgreSQL Global Development Group has released the minor update versions updating all current and recent versions of PostgreSQL, including 8.2, 8.1, 8.0, 7.4 and 7.3. The primary fix in these versions is updating PostgreSQL for the upcoming New Zealand time zone change; users in that country are urged to update their database servers immediately. Other users are encouraged to update their installations at their earliest convenience. Additional fixes contained in this release include minor security fixes for dblink and pgstattuple, a potential index-corruption issue with vacuum, fixes for GIN indexing, and logging improvements."
PostgreSQL Weekly NewsThe September 16, 2007 edition of the PostgreSQL Weekly News is online with the latest PostgreSQL DBMS articles and resources.
Device Drivers Initial ATI Radeon R500/R600 driver releasedGraphics developers at Novell have announced the availability of an initial driver for AMD/ATI Radeon R500- and R600-based graphics adapters. It is described as an alpha-quality driver with basic mode setting capability. "Next steps are adding support for more hardware, RandR 1.2 support, video overlay support and 2D acceleration." Some more information is available in this announcement by Egbert Eich. (Thanks to Paul Sladen).
Embedded Systems BusyBox 1.7.1 releasedStable version 1.7.1 of BusyBox, a collection of command line tools for embedded systems, has been released. "This is a bugfix-only release, with fixes to cp, runsv, tar, busybox --install and build system."
Filesystem Utilities Clonezilla 1.0.5-4 (testing) and 1.0.5-4-nk-1 (experimental) (SourceForge)Two new versions of Clonezilla have been announced. "Clonezilla is a partition or disk clone software similar to Ghost. It saves and restores only used blocks in hard drive. By using clonezilla, you can clone a 5 GB system to 40 clients in about 10 minutes. Clonezilla 1.0.5-4 (testing) and 1.0.5-4-nk-1 (experimental) released. Now the version number is synced. The same version means same programs except the newer kernel and ntfs-3g are used in "-nk" files."
LDAP Software An OpenLDAP Update (O'ReillyNet)Marty Heyman covers the state of OpenLDAP on O'Reilly. "OpenLDAP is the de facto Open Source reference implementation of the Internet standard Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP, see RFC 4510). This standard is now in Version 3 and was recently republished to clarify some points. Ever since various experimenters began developing bridges between internet applications and pre-internet X.500 directories, they have relied on a reference implementation to validate their approaches and verify the standard would be robust and complete."
Mail Software MailStripper 1.4.1 releasedVersion 1.4.1 of MailStripper, an SMTP spam filter with anti-virus capability, has been announced. "Just when you thought it would never happen... we at Eridani are finally able to announce the release of MailStripper 1.4.1!" This version features numerous bug fixes and improved spam filtering.
Networking Tools OpenNMS 1.3.7 released (SourceForge)Version 1.3.7 of OpenNMS, a Java/XML-based distributed network and systems management platform, has been announced. "This is probably the strongest OpenNMS release in years. Numerous performance improvements have been made as well as some cool new features."
Vuurmuur 0.5.73 releasedVersion 0.5.73 of Vuurmuur, a firewall manager built on top of iptables, has been announced. "I'm now pleased to announce Vuurmuur version 0.5.73. This release both adds a number of new features and fixes a lot of bugs. To start with the latter, many bugs in the log and connection management were fixed. Also, Vuurmuur can handle systems with nf_conntrack much better. There were lots of smaller fixes all over the program."
Printing Common UNIX Printing System 1.3.1 announcedVersion 1.3.1 of CUPS, the Common UNIX Printing System, has been announced. "CUPS 1.3.1 is now available for download from www.cups.org and fixes some build, localization, binary PostScript, and Kerberos issues."
Security ClamTk 3.03 released (SourceForge)Version 3.03 of ClamTk has been announced. "ClamTk is a GUI front-end for Clam Antivirus using gtk2-perl. It is designed to be an easy-to-use, lightweight, point-and-click desktop virus scanner for Linux. This release introduces a right-click "save-as" feature. This is useful for when opening downloads (from Firefox, for example) with ClamTk to scan them first: one can then save it from the usual temp (/tmp) directory as desired."
Desktop Applications Audio Applications 10th Issue of the Amarok Newsletter is Out (KDE.News)KDE.News has announced a new edition of the Amarok newsletter. "After a long summer break, the Amarok newsletter is back. In the 10th issue we take a look into Amarok 2 development, talk about some interesting user interface changes & new features and instruct you how to Rok with your Bluetooth-enabled mobile phone."
FLAC 1.2.1 releasedVersion 1.2.1 of FLAC, the Free Lossless Audio Codec, has been announced "New in this release is support for all RIFF/AIFF metadata, including Broadcast Wave Format (BWF). There are many other small improvements and bug fixes". See the changelog for more information.
nova_filters 0.2 announcedVersion 0.2 of nova_filters has been announced. "hi all, a quick update for the ladspa filters broken out of nova".
Business Applications Adaptive Planning version 4.0 announced (SourceForge)Version 4.0 of Adaptive Planning has been announced "Adaptive Planning, the leading provider of collaborative business performance management (BPM) solutions, today announced Adaptive Planning 4.0, the latest release of its award-winning software solution. Featuring a revolutionary Report Builder module and new Cell Explorer functionality, Adaptive Planning 4.0 introduces new leading-edge capabilities that put powerful yet intuitive web-based reporting and analysis in the hands of business users throughout a company. With this new release, Adaptive Planning continues to deliver unprecedented value through affordable, easy-to-use, and quick-to-deploy budgeting, forecasting, and reporting solutions."
Collaboration Software Chandler preview 0.7.0.1 releasedPreview release 0.7.0.1 of Chandler has been announced. "Chandler Project is an open source, standards-based personal information manager built around small group collaboration and a core set of information management workflows modeled on Inbox usage patterns and David Allen's GTD methodology. You can manage and share calendars, tasks, messages, notes and other information with the Chandler Desktop application and/or with the Chandler Hub web application. The Preview releases are public-beta quality applications ready for daily use. The Chandler team hopes to use feedback from these releases to build great 1.0 releases."
Desktop Environments GNOME 2.20 releasedThe GNOME 2.20 release is out. "Released on schedule, to the day, it is the culmination of six months effort by GNOME contributors around the world: hackers, documentors, usability and accessibility specialists, translators, maintainers, sysadmins, companies, artists, users and testers. Due to their hard work, we have another great release to be proud of - thanks very much to every contributor!" See the about GNOME 2.20 page for more information.
GARNOME 2.20.0 announcedVersion 2.20.0 of GARNOME, the bleeding-edge GNOME distribution, is out. "This release incorporates the GNOME 2.20.0 Desktop and Developer Platform, fine-tuned with love by the GARNOME Team. It includes updates and fixes after the GNOME 2.20.0 freeze, together with a host of third-party GNOME packages, Bindings and the Mono(tm) Platform -- this release is the first of a new stable GNOME branch and ships with the latest and greatest releases."
GNOME Software AnnouncementsThe following new GNOME software has been announced this week:
KDE Software AnnouncementsThe following new KDE software has been announced this week:
Xorg Software AnnouncementsThe following new Xorg software has been announced this week:
Electronics XCircuit 3.4.27 releasedStable version 3.4.27 of XCircuit an electronic schematic drawing application, has been announced, it features a number of bug fixes. This is the first stable release in over a year.
Games Using the launchpad for more transparent development (WorldForge)The WorldForge game project has announced the use of Canonical's Launchpad. "During the last couple of weeks weve been using the Launchpad service for development. The Launchpad is a rich bug and feature tracker developed by Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu. It also providers other features useful for developers, such as translations and general answers to common questions about the application. Personally I think one of its main strengths is its easy to use interface. Its a simple procedure to submit bug reports or feature requests."
GUI Packages pyFltk 1.1.2 releasedVersion 1.1.2 of pyFltk, the Python bindings for FLTK, has been announced. "This is a maintenance release of pyFltk. Changes include various bug fixes, improved documentation, a new interactive mode, support for Python objects in callbacks and the resolution of several compilation issues."
Interoperability Wine 0.9.45 announcedVersion 0.9.45 of Wine has been announced. Changes include: Many improvements to the crypto dlls (should make iTunes work), The usual assortment of Direct3D improvements, A number of fixes to sound support, Many more WordPad features and Lots of bug fixes.
Mail Clients Claws Mail 3.0.1 announcedVersion 3.0.1 of Claws Mail has been announced, this is mainly a bug fixing release. "Claws Mail is a GTK+ based, user-friendly, lightweight, and fast email client."
Medical Applications CK-ERP 0.24.1 released (LinuxMedNews)Version 0.24.1 of CK-ERP, an Open Source ERP / CRM / MRP solution, has been announced. "New features include, a connector for LegalCase and updated connectors for ClearHealth, OpenEMR and osCommerce, facilities to convert sales order topurchase order and/or material/service requisition so as to procure therequired material/service after a sale is concluded, addition of a sample lawoffice chart of accounts and a sample medical practice chart of accounts,addition of Australian GST tax rate and updating of Canadian GST tax rate,addition of narrow/wide display option for the various case handling screens,addition of customer, vendor, employee contact lists, and, addition of German translation for the Quotation module."
News Readers Liferea 1.4.2 announced (SourceForge)Stable version 1.42 of Liferea has been announced. "Liferea (Linux Feed Reader) is a GTK desktop news aggregator for online news feeds and weblogs. The project focus is on simplicity and easy installation. This is a bugfix release fixing broken functionality and crashes."
PDA Software Running KDE 3.5 on the Nokia N770 and N800 Tablets (KDE.News)KDE.News mentions a new article about running KDE on the Nokia 770 and 800 tablets. "At Ars Technica, my colleague Ryan Paul has posted about KDE 3.5.6 now being able to run on the Nokia 770 and 800 tablets. If you want to get it up and running, check out the original forum post by "penguinbait" over at Internet Table Talk which gives the complete steps required in greater detail. The main drawback for these systems compared to full computers is the total memory available (64MB or 128MB), fortunately KDE runs quite nicely on these low memory systems nonetheless."
Web Browsers Firefox 2.0.0.7 releasedFirefox 2.0.0.7 is out. This release contains a fix for a "critical" security bug involving QuickTime files. It appears to be a Windows-only vulnerability. "Other command-line options remain, however, and QuickTime Media-link files could still be used to annoy users with popup windows and dialogs until this issue is fixed in QuickTime."
Languages and Tools Caml Caml Weekly NewsThe September 18, 2007 edition of the Caml Weekly News is out with new Caml language articles.
Erlang An Introduction to Erlang (O'ReillyNet)Gregory Brown introduces Erlang on O'Reilly. "These days, the functional languages are all the rage. You see more and more hackers from the traditionally vanilla languages trying out things like Haskell or Scheme or OCaml. Breaking away from an imperative tradition forces us to think in a different way, which is always a good thing. Recently, I've heard a lot about Erlang, especially from curious members of the Ruby community. This article is the result of my quick dive into the language, and will hopefully serve as a starting point for anyone else who's been hearing the buzz, but hasn't taken the plunge yet."
Java Schemaless Java-XML Data Binding with VTD-XML (XML.com)Jimmy Zhang discusses Java-XML data binding on O'Reilly's XML.com. "This article introduces a new Java-XML data binding technique based entirely on VTD-XML and XPath. The new approach differs from traditional Java-XML data binding tools in that it doesn't mandate schema, takes advantage of XML's inherent loose encoding, and avoids needless object creation, resulting in much greater efficiency."
Python Python-URL! - weekly Python news and linksThe September 17, 2007 edition of the Python-URL! is online with a new collection of Python article links.
Tcl/Tk Tcllib 1.10 released (SourceForge)Version 1.10 of Tcllib has been announced. "tcllib is a Tcl-only library of standard routines for Tcl (no compiling required). This release is a minor version change which fixes numerous bugs and provides enhancements as well. This release is a minor version change which fixes numerous bugs and provides enhancements as well, to existing modules, and via newly added modules."
Tcl-URL! - weekly Tcl news and linksThe September 13, 2007 edition of the Tcl-URL! is online with new Tcl/Tk articles and resources.
Tcl-URL! - weekly Tcl news and linksThe September 19, 2007 edition of the Tcl-URL! is online with new Tcl/Tk articles and resources.
Page editor: Forrest Cook Linux in the news Recommended Reading Report: Attacks on ISP Nets Intensifying (Dark Reading)Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks are growing more frequent and more potent according to a survey covered by Dark Reading. "Nearly 60 percent of the ISPs in the survey said less than 10 attacks on their infrastructure per month actually affect their customers, and nearly 20 percent say anywhere from 10- to 100 of attacks do. Arbor expects that number to increase as more ISPs offer managed DDOS mitigation services, where ISPs more actively track attacks that affect their customers rather than relying on them to report problems."
13 reasons why Linux won't make it to a desktop near you (DesktopLinux.com)DesktopLinux.com has published a guest column by Australian technology marketing consultant Kim Brebach on the spread of Linux to the average user's desktop. "Linux is a beautiful woman of enormous intelligence. Linux is a precocious child with very bad manners. Linux is a teenager who needs patience and understanding. Linux is a sullen geek who refuses to speak to ordinary people. All these statements are true and explain why the messages Linux sends to the market tend to be as incoherent as the utterances of George Bush or Phillip Ruddock."
Trade Shows and Conferences Windows Developers meet in Berlin (KDE.News)KDE.News covers the recent KDE on Windows meeting. "On Friday evening, the participants were welcomed by the Berlin Trolls and introduced to the office. After a nice meal at a local restaurant, the group evaluated the main working areas of the participants and created a meeting roadmap. Saturday started with discussions about Ralf Habacker's installer, the autobuild system by Patrick Spendrin and Holger Schröder's emerge scripts. The KDE installer will be used by users to install KDE components and application on their computers."
Linux World China 2007 and Software Freedom Day preview (ZDNet)Peter Junge covers Linux World China 2007 on ZDNet Asia. "First of all, on the sponsors' list was a big surprise: Microsoft. I asked myself what could be their intention? But that's a difficult question to answer, and looking at their booth in the exhibition hall did not help much. Their exhibits hardly had any relation to Linux, not even to open source in general, only showing a selection of well-known business software such as SQL Server. It seems like they wanted to reach customers wherever they could get them, obviously ignoring the purpose of the event."
The SCO Problem Media coverage since the August 10th SCO ruling (Groklaw)Groklaw presents a collection of links to recent media articles on the SCO case. "Part of what Groklaw is doing is making an historical record of the SCO litigation. Since the August 10th ruling by Judge Dale Kimball that found that Novell did not transfer the Unix and UnixWare copyrights to Santa Cruz Operation in the 1995 Asset Purchase Agreement, there has been a flurry of media coverage. For the record, then, I thought it might be useful to collect it all in one place and just for interest's sake put it in a table along with the stock price on the day the coverage appeared. Some of it is very good. Some of it is quite funny. My favorite is the headline, "Linux Users Uneasy at Ruling." Was that between the dancing and the whoops?"
SCO Group files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy (Reuters)Reuters has a brief article stating that the SCO Group has filed for bankruptcy protection. It's a chapter 11 filing, meaning they want to reorganize and keep going. Update: here's the company's press release announcing the filing.
[SCO] Bankruptcy Hearing on Tuesday (Lamlaw)For those of us who are not deeply familiar with how U.S. bankruptcy law works, this Lamlaw article on the upcoming SCO bankruptcy hearing will make interesting reading. "Now is the time for IBM, Novell, Red Hat and anyone else who wants to speak up to petition the court to deny SCO motions to continue as normal and instead appoint a trustee that they can agree with rather than the current SCO management. In other words, IBM, Novell, Red Hat or all of them can petition the bankruptcy court to throw current SCO management out on their ear. Or, at least appoint a trustee in bankruptcy that will not eat the chickens."
Companies iPod Linux lock-out defeated (PC Pro)PC Pro reports on Apple's recent attempt to lock out iPod users who don't run iTunes. An SHA1 hash was added to the files stored on the device and if it didn't match, no songs were listed. The folks at ipodsminusitunes figured out the information needed to calculate the hash in just a few days. "'Let's all hope that (if they haven't already from the iPhone unlocking) Apple learn that fighting against us is pointless,' Will, the ipodminusitunes blogger, writes. 'It's a waste of their time if the open-source crowd is going to get past it in just a weekend.'"
Dell produces customized Ubuntu Linux for customers (DesktopLinux)DesktopLinux reports that Dell is making remastered Ubuntu 7.04 CD and DVD ISOs available for download. "According to John Hull, Linux OS engineering manager for Dell, based in Round Rock, Texas, these images are intended to "help with installing the OS on the Inspiron 1420 and 530. This media includes the drivers and fixes necessary to get the OS up and running with supported hardware on those systems." In addition, the ISO images will work with the Dell Inspiron E1505n."
Ubuntu comes knocking on Oracle's door (vnunet)vnunet reports on Canonical's courting of Oracle. "Canonical has stated that its Ubuntu Server needs increased support from independent software vendors and system builders. "The acid test for Ubuntu Server is Oracle," Canonical chief executive Mark Shuttleworth told vnunet.com in an interview at the VMworld 2007 conference in San Francisco. Ubuntu is best known for its desktop Linux distribution which Dell ships on its consumer Linux desktop PCs, but the group is seeing increasing interest in its server version that was launched in 2005. Certification for third-party applications such as Oracle's database is considered critical for the continued growth of Canonical's support services."
Legal Microsoft Loses European Appeal (Wired)Microsoft has lost its appeal of the European Union antitrust verdict, as this Wired article describes. They have two months to decide whether to appeal the decision, which requires them to pay a $613 million dollar fine, stop bundling windows media player, and open up their server protocols to others. The Free Software Foundation Europe has a press release hailing the decision as a boon for Samba. "The EU Court of First Instance ruled against Microsoft Corp. on both major parts of the case, saying the European Commission was correct in concluding that the company was guilty of monopoly abuse in trying to use its power over desktop computers to muscle into server software."
Resources Loop-based Music Composition With Linux, Pt. 1 (Linux Journal)Dave Phillips looks at Linux audio applications that include powerful tools for loop manipulation. "Loop-based music composition is the practice of sequencing audio samples to create the various parts of a musical work. A sample may contain only a single event such as a bass note or cymbal crash or it may contain a measured pattern of events such as a drum beat, a guitar chord progression, or even an entire piece of music. The former type is sometimes referred to as a "one-shot" sample, while a longer sampled pattern is often simply called a loop."
Miscellaneous Maynor Releases Apple Wireless Bug Code (Dark Reading)More than a year after the 'demonstration' at Black Hat 2006, David Maynor has released proof-of-concept code for an attack exploiting the vulnerability. Dark Reading covers the release. "David Maynor, CTO of Errata Security -- who with researcher Jon Ellch, a.k.a. johnnycache, faced a firestorm of criticism from Mac enthusiasts and some researchers for their demo last year -- today published a formal paper for the online researcher journal Uninformed in which he releases proof-of-concept code showing how the bug could be exploited. Maynor also explains in detail how he inadvertently found the heap buffer overflow bug in the OS X Atheros wireless device driver while fuzzing other wireless notebook machines."
Inspiration: Pass It On (O'ReillyNet)Gabrielle Roth writes this Women in Technology article. "What I do know is that women will not stay involved when they are deliberately shoved aside, like a story I heard recently about a woman being approached at a conference booth and asked "Is there a guy around who can answer my question?" (My response to that would be "Why? Do you need a guy to tell you you're a jackass?" which I acknowledge is not conducive to continuing the dialogue.) Here's how to fix this, taken directly from my own experience at OSCON 2007: one of the guys at the booth asked me if I was answering my fair share of questions, and when I said, "Not really," we came up with the solution that the men at the booth would turn over certain questions to me and then walk away, leaving the questioner with no choice but to talk to me. This also required a bit of effort on my part to get over my shyness in social situations, but it worked fabulously."
From Princess to Goddess: Female Success in IT (O'ReillyNet)Molly Holzschlag writes this article from O'Reilly's Women in Technology series. "Ridiculous as it may sound, my experiences as an emotional, sometimes hysterical, highly paid, and astonishingly well-liked female in IT are perhaps somewhat unique. Now, don't get me wrong, I've met my fair share of gender (and other) bias, but I am certain that strong, authentic voices that steer clear of power plays and agenda-wars can actually skyrocket a woman's career rather than harm it. It's common knowledge that the IT workforce has been male-dominated for most of its life. However, this is clearly beginning to change as more women start careers in some aspect of either computer science or in the larger, more integrated world of the Web."
Thanking our own heaven on OneWebDay (Linux Journal)Doc Searls celebrates OneWebDay. "Today (22 September) is OneWebDay, a project I'm proud to have been a part of since Susan Crawford thought it up many months before the first one last year. OneWebDay is meant as a day on which we celebrate the Web and what it does for each of us. So I want to celebrate what the Web does, and continues to do, for me as a journalist."
Page editor: Forrest Cook Announcements Non-Commercial announcements Patrick McHardy elected head of Netfilter CoreteamThe Netfilter Coreteam has elected Patrick McHardy as its head, following the resignation of Harald Welte. (Thanks to Gerd).
Samba: A triumph for freedom of choice and competitionThe Free Software Foundation Europe notes Microsoft's loss of a European Union antitrust case. "'Microsoft can consider itself above the law no longer,' says Georg Greve, president of the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE). 'Through tactics that successfully derailed antitrust processes in other parts of the world, including the United States, Microsoft has managed to postpone this day for almost a decade. But thanks to the perseverance and excellent work of the European Commission, these tactics have now failed in Europe,' Greve continues."
Commercial announcements ActiveState announces Komodo 4.2 updatesActiveState has announced version 4.2 of the Komodo IDE advanced web development toolkit. "Komodo IDE helps free developers to focus on advanced web development. This release incorporates more useful features like auto-update, necessary features like bug fixes, and nice-to-have features like soft characters, plus improved functionality for dynamic languages. Key additions to this release are auto updates and soft characters. Auto updates means users don't need to check for the latest features or reinstall Komodo to get the latest version. Soft characters is a new feature for automatic insertion of closing brackets, braces and parentheses."
Atmel and TimeSys announce free Linux board support package for AT91SAM9Atmel and TimeSys have announced a collaborative microprocessor board support package. "Atmel(R) Corporation and TimeSys(R) announced today a free Linux(R) Board Support Package (BSP) for Atmel's ARM9-based AT91SAM9 Microcontrollers. Supporting the entire range of SAM9 products, this BSP includes Atmel's Linux kernel and drivers, BusyBox utilities for basic commands and features, and a Linux host/cross toolchain capable of re-building the Linux kernel and the basic packages included in the BSP. Together with a full documentation set and support services, this offering provides a ready-to-use package to validate Linux with Atmel microcontrollers."
IBM's Lotus SymphonyHere is IBM's press release announcing the availability of Lotus Symphony. This version of Symphony appears to be reworked version of StarOffice distributed in a binary-only format; it is available for Windows, SLED 10, RHEL 5, and "RedHat5." Registration is required to download the software.
Commercial paid support options available for FreespireLinspire, Inc. has announced the availability of commercial paid support offerings for Freespire users. "Following the launch of Freespire 2.0 last month, these competitively priced paid support options are now available at http://support.freespire.org and offer commercial support services for Freespire users around the globe."
Angolan Government chooses Mandriva to develop information societyMandriva has signed a broad technical cooperation agreement by the Angolan government. "Mandriva and CNTI have signed an agreement by which Mandriva will bring its knowledge and experience to Angola, providing technology solutions, training and consulting services. Mandriva will be training the first core team of open source specialists, it will help CNTI do the first open source deployments and it will provide technology and products and ensure their maintenance."
Mozilla launching "MailCo"According to Mitchell Baker's weblog, the Mozilla Corporation is launching "MailCo" (a real name will be chosen later) as a separate effort to develop Thunderbird. David Ascher will be leading the new organization. "Mozilla will provide an initial $3 million dollars in seed funding to launch MailCo. This is expected to be spent mostly on building a small team of people who are passionate about email and Internet communications. As MailCo develops it and the Mozilla Foundation will evaluate what's the best model for long-term sustainability. Mozilla may well invest additional funds; we also hope that there are other paths for sustainability."
Novell boosts Linux virtualization with VMware supportNovell, Inc. has announced improvements to the performance of SUSE Linux under VMware. "Novell today announced significant enhancements in the performance of SUSE(R) Linux Enterprise Server when the Linux operating system is running as a virtual machine guest in a VMware environment. To deliver this improved performance, Novell modified the SUSE Linux Enterprise kernel to support the VMware Virtual Machine Interface (VMI), a communication mechanism between the guest operating system and hypervisor that simplifies the task of virtualization and makes Linux a more efficient guest operating system when running in VMware environments."
Novell Identity Manager selected by New York City TransitNovell, Inc. has announced the use of Novell identity and security management solutions by New York City Transit. "North America's largest transportation agency, New York City Transit, has turned to Novell for improved security and management of its identity infrastructure and network access. With the world's largest fleet of subway cars and public buses, NYC Transit transports more than 7 million people each day. NYC Transit is using Novell(R) identity and security management solutions to centralize and automate its identity infrastructure for 49,000 staff members across 500 locations, ensuring timely and secure employee access to network resources."
Seiko Instruments offering printer drivers for Smart Label PrintersSeiko Instruments has announced Linux compatible drivers for their Smart Label Printers. "Seiko Instruments USA, the pioneer of the one-label-at-a-time "smart" printer, is now offering a printer driver compatible with the Linux Operating System for its Smart Label Printers (SLPs). The new driver works with any Linux OS that uses the Common UNIX Printing System (CUPS) - allowing the Linux community to have an easy-to-use, convenient printer on their desktop, for jobs where they need single labels."
Legal Announcements Positions open at OLPCThe One Laptop Per Child project has several open positions, including support engineer, security software engineer, documentation lead, school server architect, localization expert, and a few other software engineering positions. See the OLPC jobs page for details.
New Books Linux System Programming--New from O'Reilly MediaO'Reilly has published the book Linux System Programming by Robert Love.
PostgreSQL Reference Manual - Volumes 1, 2, 3Printed copies of the PostgreSQL Reference Manual are available for purchase, $1 from each sale will be donated to the PostgreSQL project. "The manual has been printed in 3 volumes, running to 1300 pages in total. The volumes cover the SQL language, the PostgreSQL client/server programming interfaces, and server administration. Each volume is in a compact paperback format (6"x9")."
Resources FSFE NewsletterThe September 13, 2007 edition of the FSFE Newsletter is online with the latest Free Software Foundation Europe news. Topics include: FSFE engages with irregularities in the ISO voting process, FTF informal legal network now covers sixteen European countries, Two days of Free Software in Chile, The Fellowship site now supports multiple languages, First distributed Fellowship meeting, FSFE German Team at FrOSCon, Fellows of the Rhein/Ruhr area holding monthly talks, Building the Fellowship in Kaiserslautern, Heidelberg, Darmstadt and Karlsruhe, FSFE supports demonstration "liberty instead of fear", September 22nd, Speeches about SELF, Open Standards and Free Software in Argentina and Free Software and Free Documentation licence consultations.
LWN Comment FeaturesJason Smith has written two Greasemonkey scripts to do interesting things with the LWN comments. Click below for details.
Surveys Zero Install survey 2007A 30 question survey is being conducted on Zero Install. "Zero Install (as I'm sure you know) is a fully open source, decentralised installation system, currently included in the Debian, Ubuntu and Fedora distribution repositories (under the package name "zeroinstall-injector")."
Calls for Presentations Call for Papers: FLOSS+Art deadline extended 2007The call for papers deadline for FLOSS+Art has been extended to November 1. "Thanks to all the persons and groups who have replied to the call so far! Due to a growing demand for extra time, we have decided to extend the deadline. Please note that this new deadline will *not* be extended."
NDSS 2008 call for papersA call for papers has gone out for the Network and Distributed Systems Security (NDSS) conference. The event takes place on February 10-13, 2008 in San Diego, CA, submissions are due by September 21.
Upcoming Events IRC meeting to discuss AGPLv3 and GPLv3 on September 27The Free Software Foundation has announced an online meeting on software licenses. "On September 27, at 20:00 US Eastern Time (September 28 00:00 GMT), the FSF Compliance Lab will hold a public meeting to discuss development of version 3 of the GNU Affero General Public License[1] (GNU AGPLv3) and answer general questions about GNU licenses. Please join FSF licensing compliance engineer Brett Smith to learn more about new GNU licenses."
Linux Plumbers Conference 2008 announcedA developers-only conference for Linux "plumbing" has been announced for next September in Portland, Oregon. The conference is meant to cover low-level Linux issues, especially those that span different parts of the greater Linux OS; this is not just a kernel conference. It will be held September 17-19, 2008 at Portland State University.
Events: September 27, 2007 to November 26, 2007The following event listing is taken from the LWN.net Calendar.
If your event does not appear here, please tell us about it.
Page editor: Forrest Cook
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