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LWN.net Weekly Edition for April 23, 2009Faster updates with yum-prestoKeeping up with an active distribution like Fedora consumes a fair amount of time, but also bandwidth. Depending on the frequency that a yum update is performed, hundreds of megabytes—or even gigabytes—can be required to bring the system up to date. A recent experiment in rawhide uses deltarpms and the yum Presto plugin to significantly reduce the size of the packages that needed to be retrieved. The experiment looks to be largely successful which means that Fedora will likely make the deltarpm files available more widely as part of Fedora 11. The idea behind deltarpms is not a particularly new one, but the visibility has been raised by the recent Fedora Presto test day. The tools to build deltarpms were originally created by Michael Schröder of SUSE and have been around for a few years. Basically, the tools generate a binary difference (i.e. diff) between the new and old rpm files and create an rpm that just contains the differences (a drpm). Because package changes are typically fairly small and localized, the size difference between the new rpm and the drpm can be quite substantial. The deltarpm tools do not require that the old rpm be present on the system when installing, instead they can reconstruct the state of the old rpm from the installation itself. As long as there is a drpm corresponding to the difference between the version currently installed and the version that needs to be installed, Presto will choose the more bandwidth-efficient package to download. If the deltarpm tools are unable to reconstruct the new rpm from the installed files and drpm—due to a local configuration file change for example—Presto will fall back to downloading the full rpm of the updated package. For rawhide users, trying Presto out is quite simple:
yum install yum-presto
which will install and enable the Presto plugin. Using it to update
rawhide on April 22 would normally have required 68M, but using the
drpms available (20 of 21 packages that needed updating) reduced that
to 23M for a 66% reduction. There is a substantial pause after the
packages have been downloaded while the deltarpm tools rebuild the rpms
from drpms—in this case something on the order of one to two minutes.
For someone at the end of a low-medium bandwidth link (or someone who pays by
the the amount transferred), that tradeoff is likely to be a good one.
There are still a few infrastructure glitches on the Fedora side. Part of the reason for the test day and publicizing the new feature was to find and fix those problems before Fedora 11 ships. Because of the way the deltarpm tools work—reading both rpms into memory before doing the diff—and how the Fedora infrastructure builds rpms for all architectures in parallel, only packages smaller than 200M are currently turned into drpms. There are also questions about whether it makes sense to build source and debuginfo drpms. Those types of packages are not widely used so spending repository space and build resources on drpm versions may not be warranted. From a user perspective, though, it all works quite smoothly: install a package and get a lot of bandwidth savings. SUSE has been using drpms for some time, at least since SUSE Linux 9.3 was released in 2005. Users automatically get drpms when using the zypper tool for package updates and drpms are created for all package updates as long as the diff is smaller than the full rpm. For users that would rather get the full rpm when doing updates, drpms can be disabled in /etc/zypp/zypp.conf. Presto development is, unsurprisingly, a Fedora Hosted project with a Trac page and Git repository. It would seem that there has been some collaboration with the openSUSE folks on the drpm format and tools so that yum and zypper will interoperate. Given that both are rpm-based tools, it is good to see the two distributions working together. One could argue, as some have, that there is too much package churn in Fedora. On the other hand, Fedora users do tend to expect very recent, often bleeding-edge, packages. Since that is unlikely to change, Presto will be very welcome for folks whose bandwidth is limited in some way—those who are unconcerned, need not install it. Meanwhile, with less fanfare, SUSE users have been getting those savings for some time.
Oracle: SELECT * FROM SunDespite a steady stream of rumors, IBM did not, in the end, buy Sun Microsystems. But, on April 20, Oracle did. This acquisition could have some interesting implications for the Linux community. Your editor, while not really knowing more than anybody else, suspects that the outcome could be mostly positive. What follows, here, is some wild speculation on where this could all go.Some months ago, your editor posted a slightly tongue-in-cheek article on a serious topic: what would happen if Sun Microsystems were to undergo a change in management which rendered the company far less friendly toward free software? It now appears that there will, indeed, be a management change. One might well worry what changes we might see in the newly-acquired company's attitude; Oracle is not always seen as the friendliest company in general. But Oracle, while being very much a proprietary software company, does seem to have a supportive approach toward free software. Your editor was reasonably well impressed by the talk given by Oracle "Chief Corporate Architect" Edward Screven at the recent Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit. At some levels of the software stack, at least, Oracle seems genuinely interested in working with and growing the development community. There are a number of specific topics of interest when speculating on what could happen; your editor will visit a few of them below. MySQL. This project, of course, can be seen as being in direct competition with Oracle's flagship offering. So, unsurprisingly, a number of people have speculated that Oracle will not encourage its further growth. So, perhaps, Oracle will de-emphasize the project or "return it to the community." But that is not necessarily how things will go. One should remember that this isn't the first time Oracle has been seen to threaten MySQL through acquisition. Back in 2005, Oracle bought Innobase, the creator of the InnoDB storage engine used by MySQL. The MySQL project wisely branched away from InnoDB, but the fact of the matter is that this code is still free software, and InnoDB releases continue to happen. The sky did not fall after all. Beyond that, there is the simple matter that MySQL appears to earn money. This acquisition could well be an opportunity for Oracle to gain revenue from customers who, for whatever reason, are not interested in buying Oracle licenses. It broadens the company's database product line and might provide the opportunity to encourage some customers to move toward the more expensive, proprietary offerings. Most interesting, though, will be to see what happens with the MySQL development community. Oracle still does not have vast amounts of experience running large, community-oriented projects, but it seems to be learning. The MySQL community is not in top condition, currently; it has suffered from Sun's legendary heavy hand, leading to a fair amount of developer unhappiness. There are currently a few active forks out there, raising the possibility that control over the "real" MySQL could move out of Sun's hands altogether. Oracle could, just maybe, woo these developers back into a core MySQL project which was managed in a more community-oriented manner. If that were to happen, it would be hard to conclude that this acquisition was anything but good for MySQL. Solaris. This operating system is said, in the press release, to be one of the core justifications for the acquisition. Oracle sells a fair number of licenses for deployments on Solaris; it cannot be unhappy with the idea of gaining control over the full platform. The real question here, perhaps, is whether Oracle sees Solaris as a system with a long future ahead of it, or whether Solaris becomes a legacy platform which will be supported for some time, but which will not see a great deal of development. There have been suggestions for a while that Sun is reconsidering its licensing choices. A GPL-licensed Solaris was not entirely out of the question before the acquisition; quite possibly, those chances have improved now. A relicensed Solaris, preferably combined with some clarity on patent licensing, could make it possible for technologies like ZFS and Dtrace to move into Linux. Whether Linux would want them is a separate discussion, though. There is an alternative, of course: Oracle could decide to promote Solaris as an (incompatibly-licensed) competitor to Linux and reduce its involvement on the Linux side. Your editor, perhaps naively, sees this outcome as unlikely. Oracle has invested heavily enough in Linux to create a real impression of believing in the platform. Oracle has not invested in Solaris (which is also free software, remember) at anything close to the same level. If Oracle were to to try to push Solaris as a better alternative to Linux, it would really just be continuing Sun's strategy. Presumably there are people in Oracle smart enough to wonder why Oracle would have any more success with that approach than Sun did. Btrfs. Edward Screven claimed that Oracle was pursuing Btrfs because it likes the technology better than it likes ZFS. Ownership of ZFS could well put that claim to the test, but there does not appear to be any reason to believe that it was not sincere. The early word from Oracle is that plans for Btrfs have not changed, and that the resources put into that project will not decrease. Java. The press release states that Java "is the most important software Oracle has ever acquired." Much Oracle-based software is written in Java, so there are clear advantages in having control over that part of the software stack. Increasingly, customers can just go to Oracle and get support for most of the major components they use from a single source. That, presumably, will help make some money for Oracle. OpenOffice.org. This project looks like a bit of a strange fit in Oracle, which is not really a desktop software company. Still, Oracle may see value in keeping this project going as a way to encourage corporate desktop users away from Microsoft products. With any luck at all, Oracle will work to turn OpenOffice.org into a more community-oriented project. By making participation in OpenOffice.org so hard, Sun has spurned the offers of assistance which have come from around the community. Maybe Oracle will be a bit smarter and will realize that, by opening things up a bit, it can speed the development of OpenOffice.org without really having to invest more into the project. One can always hope. What it comes down to is that just about anything could happen. It could be that this acquisition is part of a long-term plan by Oracle to acquire just enough of the free software community to neutralize any threats it sees. Now that this hypothetical plan is coming to fruition (lacking, perhaps, just the occasionally-rumored acquisition of Red Hat), Oracle can proceed to move away from Linux, turn things proprietary, and generally prepare itself for the Final Battle. This would not be a good outcome for the Linux community, though we would, as usual, end up stronger once the dust had settled. Alternatively, Oracle may have understood that truly free software can help to turn its competitors' products into commodities while enabling Oracle to provide a solid offering around its own products. This company, which has already become one of the top Linux kernel contributors, could become the top contributor to free software projects as a whole (a title which Sun has already claimed). If Oracle sustains Sun's projects in a more community-oriented mode, we may well conclude, one year from now, that this acquisition was a good thing indeed.
A look at the MySQL forksSun's sudden acquisition by Oracle triggered a deluge of speculation about the future of the company's free software projects: Java, OpenOffice, VirtualBox, OpenSolaris, and, most of all, MySQL. Will Oracle kill it? Spin it off? Keep its hands off? In light of this uncertainty, the discussion soon shifted to the trickier question of what branch constitutes the MySQL. The project has been forked multiple times — several even in the past year. Considering that each competitor is led by a heavyweight MySQL developer and has its own goals, how is a humble database administrator supposed to choose? Patch sets and proto-forksThe seeds of this confusion predate MySQL's acquisition by Sun, when MySQL developers began to lose patience with MySQL AB's governance of the project. Management had announced two branches, "enterprise" and "community," in 2006, but soon began to miss scheduled binary and source releases of the community branch. Worse still, community developers complained that the company was trying to hide the enterprise branch code — changing the release location between iterations. In 2007, Jeremy Cole of Proven Scaling took matters into his own hands, and set up a public mirror of the official "enterprise" releases as they appeared. Cole does not make changes to the code released by Sun, although Proven Scaling does publicly maintain its own set of patches and tools for MySQL — as do several other database consulting firms and MySQL users, including Google. PerconaOne of those consulting firms is Percona, a web-development consulting business that emphasizes its expertise in MySQL. Percona develops a pluggable storage engine for MySQL called XtraDB. XtraDB is an enhancement to the popular InnoDB engine, designed to work as a drop-in replacement. It adds the ability to scale better on multi-core hardware, use memory more efficiently, and adds more tune-ability and metrics. Percona's MySQL releases do not remove InnoDB to replace it with XtraDB, but do include patches to InnoDB. They also incorporate patches from other sources, including Proven Scaling, Google, and Open Query. Source and binary releases, as well as RPMs for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, are available for MySQL 5.0 and MySQL 5.1. Percona's patch set is documented on the company's wiki. The patches include changes that add status variables, more configuration parameters, additional I/O settings, dynamic memory allocation, and alters mutexes and locks to improve performance on SMP systems. OurDeltaOurDelta was launched in October of 2008 by former MySQL employee Arjen Lentz (now at Open Query), and describes its mission as providing "enhanced" MySQL builds for common production platforms. Its releases build on Percona's, adding additional patches (some from Google and other third-parties, some original work) and including additional storage engines. OurDelta maintains two builds, one stable and one bleeding-edge. All stable releases so far have been for MySQL 5.0, and include the full-text-search-capable Sphinx storage engine. Upcoming work for MySQL 5.1 and MySQL 6.0 will add an enhanced version of InnoDB from Innobase, PBXT, and FederatedX storage engines. OurDelta makes source code releases available as tar archives, and runs binary repositories for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and CentOS, Debian, and Ubuntu. OurDelta also documents its significant patches. In addition to the Percona patch set, OurDelta includes activity monitoring and reporting (per table, index, account, and machine), improved logging, an option to kill idle database connections, the ability to temporarily freeze InnoDB for backup purposes, and improvements to speed up failover. MariaDBMySQL founder Michael "Monty" Widenius started his own fork in February of 2009 after leaving Sun. At the time, he said his reason for departing was dissatisfaction with Sun's development and community processes for MySQL, which was not "a true open development environment" that encouraged outside participation. Widenius's fork is called MariaDB, and the only major change is that it uses the Maria storage engine, which is the focus of development. The rest of the code is regularly synchronized with MySQL releases from Sun, and is intended to be one hundred percent interoperable. The Maria storage engine is an evolution of MySQL's default MyISAM storage engine, and is designed to duplicate the features found in InnoDB, notably crash recovery and full transactional support. Maria and MariaDB are being developed against MySQL 5.1. Widenius expects the Maria engine to be a standard part of Sun's MySQL 6.0 releases, but intends to keep developing MariaDB even after MySQL 6.0 is stable. So far, the project has released source code packages and generic x86 binaries for Linux. Widenius maintains a wiki page documenting the advantages of MariaDB over Sun's unmodified MySQL, focusing on the features of the Maria storage engine. Aside from the larger goals of crash-safety and transactional support, he notes that using Maria as a storage engine should speed up complex queries. In addition, MariaDB contains speed improvements, the ability to use a pool of threads to handle queries (rather than one thread per connection), and bugfixes not accepted by Sun. DrizzleDrizzle is the most distinctive MySQL fork, perhaps better described as a complete refactoring. Drizzle is the work of Brian Aker, long a preeminent MySQL developer. He announced the project in July of 2008, saying that he disliked many of the changes made to MySQL after version 4.1, and felt that there was a large market of users that did not want them. Despite launching the fork, Aker continues to work in the MySQL group at Sun. Drizzle cuts the core of MySQL down to the bare minimum, using a microkernel-and-modules approach. The goal is to create a slimmed-down, optimized database targeting web infrastructure and cloud components. Aker said that Drizzle will question the foundations of database design, and is not intended to be SQL compliant. The FAQ emphasizes a "look forward, not back" philosophy. For example, Drizzle targets modern, multi-core hardware, modern compilers, and modern operating systems. Similarly, the development team is not interested in feature requests or in adding excised MySQL features back in. Thus far, the project had made only source code releases, and has noted that they are not yet stable for production use. ConclusionThe major Linux distributions all package Sun's "community" version of MySQL. Sun itself provides free downloads of the community edition from the web, evidently having learned a lesson from the 2007 uproar. Sun's official packages are likely to be newer, given the release cycles of most distributions, and to its credit Sun makes binary builds available for a wide variety of processor architectures and distributions, including older releases of those distributions. For most users, such a supported build is usually the best choice. The Percona and OurDelta packages represent the work of in-the-field MySQL consultants, and MariaDB is focused on the Maria engine, but only experienced database administrators are likely to be able to take advantage of the additional features they offer. Still, it is telling that so much of the work done by the forks centers around the InnoDB storage engine: the patches written by Percona and OurDelta, Percona's replacement engine XtraDB, and MariaDB's replacement engine Maria. InnoDB is GPLv2-licensed, but the copyright is owned by ... Oracle. Oracle acquired InnoDB's creator Innobase in 2005. That acquisition sparked a flurry of concern that the database giant would kill the product, take it proprietary, or somehow use it against MySQL — many of the same nightmare scenarios now speculated about the Sun purchase. It is worth noting that in the intervening years two things have occurred: Oracle has not killed or maimed InnoDB, and the open source community has preemptively created its own innovative solutions, thereby insulating open source users and customers from disaster should Oracle take a step in the wrong direction. The real question is not which fork is the MySQL, but whether the multiple patch sets and forks indicate sickness or health for MySQL as a whole. Excluding Drizzle, all of the projects were started because someone who cared a great deal about the future of MySQL saw something wrong with MySQL's development process (and for its part, Drizzle was spawned by even deeper dissatisfaction with the technical direction of MySQL). Surely that much concern on the part of the community signifies health. There is no telling which forks will prosper and which will fizzle out, but that depends to a large degree on Oracle, and how it governs the project in the future.
Security A privilege escalation flaw in udevA vulnerability in udev, the user-space tool that manages the Linux /dev tree, has left unpatched systems vulnerable to a local root privilege escalation. Exploits are already circulating on the full-disclosure mailing list, so it is rather important for users and administrators to update their systems. The problem was caused by the way udev processes the messages it receives—certain kinds of messages, which could be generated by user processes, were not considered. That oversight led to the vulnerability. The ever-expanding nature of the /dev tree, along with the rise of more dynamic hardware environments, led to the creation of udev in 2003. It replaced the devfs filesystem that was an earlier attempt to solve those problems. Unfortunately, devfs codified device naming policy into the kernel—something the kernel hackers try to avoid. By moving those decisions to user space with udev, that problem—along with a number of others—was resolved. In order for udevd (the udev daemon) to do its job, it needs a way to be informed by the kernel when devices come and go—typically because the user attached or detached some device. A standard Linux way to send messages between the kernel and user space is via a netlink socket. Netlink sockets are an inter-process communication (IPC) mechanism that is geared for kernel to user space (and vice versa) IPC. It provides the well-understood sockets API to user space programs and is a much more flexible IPC mechanism than other possible choices. One of the nice features of netlink sockets is the ability to multicast messages (i.e. a message sent to multiple recipients). Each netlink protocol type can have up to 32 multicast groups associated with it. Typically, multicast messages can only be sent and received by root, though some netlink protocol types will allow non-root processes to send and/or receive multicast messages. In fact, a recent change to the kernel allows non-root processes to receive—but not send—the udev multicast messages (which are also known as uevents). Since only root processes can send the multicast uevents, it would seem there is no hole to exploit. Unfortunately, no one considered unicast messages. Any process can send a unicast netlink message to any other process, just by addressing it to a particular pid. It is up to the recipient to decide whether to accept and process the message. Because these unicast messages fell through the cracks, udevd would happily process them—creating devices as specified by a potentially malicious user. One of the more obvious exploits would be to create world-writeable block device corresponding to the root filesystem—other, nastier exploits are likely possible as well. The fix was straightforward: enabling credentials (a header placed on each message by the kernel that includes the uid and pid of the sender) for the netlink socket, then requiring that all messages received have a uid of zero, which Kay Sievers added on April 8. Scott James Remnant added some additional checks shortly thereafter, requiring that messages received are not unicast and have been sent by the kernel. Sievers says that either patch "alone would be sufficient" to fix the problem and that doing both is, in some sense, defensive programming. The credentials check is needed for upcoming changes, he said, and Remnant's checks will take care of a theoretical concern: "a confined root process inside SELinux or AppArmor jail, which in fact is not root in the usual sense, has no privileges, but could have the uid 0". While Sievers didn't think the theory was particularly viable, checking for a sender pid of zero (as Remnant's change does) will take care of that problem as well. This vulnerability illustrates a fairly common mistake: not considering all of the ways that input can reach a program. Every input mechanism factors into the "attack surface" of a program (or system). In this case, messages that—up until very recently at least—couldn't even be seen by non-root processes, could be sent by them. It is not uncommon for developers to focus on the "normal" usage of an input mechanism and miss a lesser, but still valid, use. It is interesting to see that this vulnerability has a strange overlap with the capabilities flaw we reported on last week. In both cases, an exploit would use a device node created by mknod(), which is, itself, an uncommonly-used system call. These are the kinds of places that attackers are likely to focus their efforts. One hopes that other users of netlink sockets—routing daemons, netfilter, firewall applications, and others—have examined their code for similar problems.
Brief items The voting machine industry looks at open sourceHere is a report from the Election Technology Council [PDF] giving the voting machine industry's view of open source software. It's ... interesting. "The level of accountability present within an open source product offering is weakened due to its diffuse contributor base and lack of clear liability. Public oversight is arguably just as diminished in an open source environment since the layperson is unable to read and understand software source code adequately enough to ensure total access and comprehension. If a third party is charged with this oversight function to remedy this situation, this is would be no different than any other regulatory process that institutionalizes an oversight function." (Seen on Freedom To Tinker, where Dan Wallach adds several comments of his own).
The details on loading rootkits via /dev/memFor the curious, here is the paper describing rootkit injection via /dev/mem [PDF]. As expected, there's not a whole lot that's truly new, though there are some clever techniques for getting the kernel to allocate memory for the injected code. The authors note that, indeed, the STRICT_DEVMEM configuration option will block this attack. "Until recently there was no protection inside the kernel main- line, although SELinux has limited seeks above the first megabyte of memory for a few years. Users of RHEL and other distributions have been safe for some time now."
New vulnerabilities apt: return code not checked
clamav: multiple vulnerabilities
cups: integer overflow
cups: multiple vulnerabilities
firefox: multiple vulnerabilities
git-core: privilege escalation
kernel: privilege escalation
mpg123: user-assisted execution of arbitrary code
phpMyAdmin: insufficient output sanitizing
poppler: multiple vulnerabilities
slurm-llnl: privilege escalation
udev: multiple vulnerabilities
xine-lib: integer overflow
Page editor: Jake Edge Kernel development Brief items Kernel release statusThe current 2.6 development kernel is 2.6.30-rc3, released on April 21. "The diffstat really shows lots of small one-liners and two-liners, although there are areas that are getting bigger patches (ignoring the bulky but uninteresting arm defconfig updates): some x86 updates, some block IO scheduling fixes, splice cleanups and fixes, and a number of driver changes (sound, networking, staging, usb)." The short-form changelog is in the announcement, or see the full changelog for all the details.The current stable 2.6 release remains 2.6.29.1; there have been no stable 2.6 updates since April 2. For the fans of extreme stability, though, 2.4.37.1 was released on April 19. "Most of these fixes concern minor security issues which have been backported from 2.6 (mostly local DoSes). In my opinion, only people with local users might consider upgrading, if those people still exist!"
Kernel development news Quotes of the week
The number of contributors who can write meaningful changelogs or
who can be taught to write really good changelogs is very, very
low. I'd guesstimate somewhere around 5% of all Linux
contributors. (The guesstimation is probably on the more generous
side.)
-- Ingo Molnar
No subject should ever contain the word "trivial". If it's really
trivial, you can sum it up in the subject and we'll know it's
trivial. Plus the diffstat shows it. 'trivial' is propaganda to
sneak a patch into -rc7.
-- Rusty Russell
In the past 15 years of Linux we've invested a lot of time and
effort into working around and dealing with compiler crap. We
wasted a lot of opportunities waiting years for sane compiler
features to show up. We might as well have invested that effort
into building our own compiler and could stop bothering about
externalities.
-- Ingo Molnar
In search of the perfect changelogWhen kernel developers engage in an extended discussion on the writing of changelogs for patches, one might well conclude that they have run out of useful things to do. But arguments over changelogs are not the same as spelling or grammar flames. In an environment where 10,000 or so changes are merged in every three-month development cycle, developers need all the help they can get to understand what is going into the kernel. Poorly-described patches are harder to understand, and harder to find when searching the history for something specific. So getting changelogs right helps the development process - and the kernel - as a whole.It all started innocently enough; Linus was engaging in a routine patch flaming when he encountered one of the "Impact:" tags that some developers (especially those working with Ingo Molnar's trees) have adopted in recent months:
Impact: clarify and extend confusing API
Suffice to say that he was not much impressed with it:
And what the hell is up with these bogus "Impact:" things? Who
started doing that, and why? If your single-line explanation at the
top is not good enough, and your multi-line explanation isn't clear
enough, then you should fix the OTHER parts, not add that _idiotic_
"Impact" statement.
From there, the extended conversation focused on two related topics: the value of "impact" tags and how to write better changelogs in general. On the former, the primary (but not only) proponent of these tags is Ingo Molnar, who cites several benefits from their use. Using these tags, he claims, forces developers to write smaller patches which can be adequately described in a single line. They give subsystem maintainers an easy way to assess the changes made by a set of patches and their associated risk; they also make it easier to review a patch against its declared "impact." These tags are also said to force a certain clarity of thought, making developers think through the consequences of a change. Most of these arguments leave "Impact:" detractors unmoved, though. Rather than add yet another tag to a patch, they would prefer to see developers just write better changelogs from the outset. In a properly-documented patch, the new tag is just irrelevant. Andrew Morton said:
I'm getting quite a few Impact:s now and I must say that the
Impact: line is always duplicative of the Subject:. Except in a
few cases, and that's because the Subject: sucked.
Ingo disputed that claim at length, needless to say. But he takes things further by stating that, while better changelogs would certainly be desirable, they are not a practical goal. According to Ingo, most developers are simply not capable of writing good changelogs. Language barriers and such often are part of this problem, but it goes deeper: most developers simply lack the writing skills needed to write clear and concise changelogs. This fact of life, as Ingo sees it, cannot really be changed, but most developers can, at least, be trained to write a reasonable impact tag. It is probably fair to say that most developers do not see themselves as being disabled in this way. That said, it is also fair to say that a lot of patches go into the mainline with unhelpful changelogs. That can probably be changed - to an extent at least - through pressure from maintainers and a better understanding of what makes a good changelog. In an attempt to help, your editor has proposed a brief addition to Documentation/development-process:
Writing good changelogs is a crucial but often-neglected art; it's
worth spending another moment discussing this issue. When writing
a changelog, you should bear in mind that a number of different
people will be reading your words. These include subsystem
maintainers and reviewers who need to decide whether the patch
should be included, distributors and other maintainers trying to
decide whether a patch should be backported to other kernels, bug
hunters wondering whether the patch is responsible for a problem
they are chasing, users who want to know how the kernel has
changed, and more. A good changelog conveys the needed information
to all of these people in the most direct and concise way possible.
To that end, the summary line should describe the effects of and motivation for the change as well as possible given the one-line constraint. The detailed description can then amplify on those topics and provide any needed additional information. If the patch fixes a bug, cite the commit which introduced the bug if possible. If a problem is associated with specific log or compiler output, include that output to help others searching for a solution to the same problem. If the change is meant to support other changes coming in later patch, say so. If internal APIs are changed, detail those changes and how other developers should respond. In general, the more you can put yourself into the shoes of everybody who will be reading your changelog, the better that changelog (and the kernel as a whole) will be. Other possible additions have been proposed by Ted Ts'o and Paul Gortmaker. Of course, all of these patches are based on the optimistic notion that developers will actually read the documentation. One could argue that the kernel community is rather late in getting around to this kind of discussion. That could be said to be par for the course; in the pre-BitKeeper era (i.e. up to February, 2002), there was almost no tracking of individual changes into the kernel at all. That the fine points of changelogging are being discussed a mere seven years later suggests things are going in the right direction. The level of professionalism in the kernel community has been on the rise for a long time; this process is likely to continue. Whether or not some variant on the impact tag is used in the future, one can assume that the quality of changelogs will, as a whole, be better.
The slow work mechanismMany years ago, your editor heard Van Jacobson state that naming an algorithm "slow start" was one of the biggest mistakes he had ever made. The name refers to the technique of ramping up transmit rates slowly until the carrying capacity of the connection is determined. But others just saw "slow" and complained that they didn't want their connections to be slow. The fact that "slow start" made the net faster was lost on them. One might wonder if David Howells's "slow work" mechanism - merged for 2.6.30 - could run into similar problems; no kernel developer wants things to run slowly. But, as with slow start, running things slowly is not the point.Slow work is a thread pool implementation - yet another thread pool, one might say. The kernel already has workqueues and the asynchronous function call infrastructure; the distributed storage (DST) module added to the -staging tree for 2.6.30 also has a thread pool hidden within it. Each of these pools is aimed at a different set of uses. Workqueues provide per-CPU threads dedicated to specific subsystems, while asynchronous function calls are optimized for specific ordering of tasks. Slow work, instead, looks like a true "batch job" facility which can be used by kernel subsystems to run tasks which are expected to take a fair amount of time in their execution. A kernel subsystem which wants to run slow work jobs must first declare its intention to the slow work code:
#include <linux/slow-work.h>
int slow_work_register_user(void);
The call to slow_work_register_user() ensures that the thread pool is set up and ready for work - no threads are created before the first user is registered. The return value will be either zero (on success) or the usual negative error code. Actual slow work jobs require the creation of two structures:
struct slow_work;
struct slow_work_ops {
int (*get_ref)(struct slow_work *work);
void (*put_ref)(struct slow_work *work);
void (*execute)(struct slow_work *work);
};
The slow_work structure is created by the caller, but is otherwise opaque. The slow_work_ops structure, created separately, is where the real work gets done. The execute() function will be called by the slow work code to get the actual job done. But first, get_ref() will be called to obtain a reference to the slow_work structure. Once the work is done, put_ref() will be called to return that reference. Slow work items can hang around for some time after they have been submitted, so reference counting is needed to ensure that they are freed at the right time. The implementation of get_ref() and put_ref() functions is not optional. In practice, kernel code using slow work will create its own structure which contains the slow_work structure and some sort of reference-counting primitive. The slow_work structure must be initialized with one of:
void slow_work_init(struct slow_work *work, const struct slow_work_ops *ops);
void vslow_work_init(struct slow_work *work, const struct slow_work_ops *ops);
The difference between the two is that vslow_work_init() identifies the job as "very slow work" which can be expected to run (or sleep) for a significant period of time. The documentation suggests that writing to a file might be "slow work," while "very slow work" might be a sequence of file lookup, creation, and mkdir() operations. The slow work code actually prioritizes "very slow work" items over the merely slow ones, but only up to the point where they use 50% (by default) of the available threads. Once the maximum number of very slow jobs is running, only "slow work" tasks will be executed. Actually getting a slow work task running is done with:
int slow_work_enqueue(struct slow_work *work);
This function queues the task for running. It will succeed unless the associated get_ref() function fails, in which case -EAGAIN will be returned. Slow work tasks can be enqueued multiple times, but no count is kept, so a task enqueued several times before it begins to execute will only run once. A task which is enqueued while it is running is indeed put back on the queue for a second execution later on. The same task is guaranteed to not run on multiple CPUs simultaneously. There is no way to remove tasks which have been queued for execution, and there is no way (built into the slow work mechanism) to wait for those tasks to complete. A "wait for completion" functionality can certainly be created by the caller if need be. The general assumption, though, seems to be that slow work items can be outstanding for an indefinite period of time. As long as tasks with a non-zero reference count exist, any resources they depend on need to remain available. There are three parameters for controlling slow work which appear under /proc/sys/kernel/slow-work: min-threads (the minimum size of the thread pool), max-threads (the maximum size), and vslow-percentage (the maximum percentage of the available threads which can be used for "very slow" tasks). The defaults allow for between two and four threads, 50% of which can run "very slow" tasks. The only user of slow work in the 2.6.30 kernel is the FS-Cache file caching subsystem. There is a clear need for thread pool functionality, though, so it would not be surprising to see other users show up in future releases. What might be more surprising (though desirable) would be a consolidation of thread pool implementations in a future development cycle.
DRBD: a distributed block deviceThe three R's of high availability are Redundancy, Redundancy and Redundancy. However, on a typical setup built with commodity hardware, it is not possible to add redundancy beyond a certain limit to increase the number of 9's after your current uptime percentage (ie 99.999%). Consider a simple example: an iSCSI server with the cluster nodes using a distributed filesystem such as GFS2 or OCFS2. Even with redundant power supplies and data channels on the iSCSI storage server, there still exists a single point of failure: the storage.The Distributed Replicated Block Device (DRBD) patch, developed by Linbit, introduces duplicated block storage over the network with synchronous data replication. If one of the storage nodes in the replicated environment fails, the system has another block device to rely on, and can safely failover. In short, it can be considered as an implementation of RAID1 mirroring using a combination of a local disk and one on a remote node, but with better integration with cluster software such as heartbeat and efficient resynchronization with the ability to exchange dirty bitmaps and data generation identifiers. DRBD currently works only on 2-node clusters, though you could use a hybrid version to expand this limit. When both nodes of the cluster are up, writes are replicated and sent to both the local disk and the other node. For efficiency reasons, reads are fetched from the local disk. The level of data coupling used depends on the protocol chosen:
DRBD classifies the cluster nodes as either "primary" or "secondary." Primary nodes can initiate modifications or writes whereas secondary nodes cannot. This means that a secondary DRBD node does not provide any access and cannot be mounted. Even read-only access is disallowed for cache coherency reasons. The secondary node is present mainly to act as the failover device in case of an error. The secondary node may become primary depending on the network configuration. Role assignment and designation is performed by the cluster management software. There are different ways in which a node may be designated as primary:
Worker ThreadsA part of the communication between nodes is handled by threads to avoid deadlocks and complex design issues. The threads used for communication are:
FailuresDRBD requires a small reserve area for metadata, to handle post failure operations (such as synchronization) efficiently. This area can be configured either on a separate device (external metadata), or within the DRBD block device (internal metadata). It holds the metadata with respect to the disk including the activity log and the dirty bitmap (described below).
Node FailuresIf a secondary node dies, it does not affect the system as a whole because writes are not initiated by the secondary node. If the failed node is primary, the data yet to be written to disk, but for which completions are not received, may get lost. To avoid this, DRBD maintains an "activity log," a reserved area on the local disk which contains information about write operations which have not completed. The data is stored in extents and is maintained in a least recently used (LRU) list. Each change of the activity log causes a meta data update (single sector write). The size of the activity log is configured by the user; it is a tradeoff between minimizing updates to the meta data and the resynchronization time after the crash of a primary node. DRBD maintains a "dirty bitmap" in case it has to run without a peer node or without a local disk. It describes the pages which have been dirtied by the local node. Writes to the on-disk dirty bitmap are minimized by the activity log. Each time an extent is evicted from the activity log, the part of the bitmap associated with it which is no longer covered by the activity log is written to disk. The dirty bitmaps are sent over the network to communicate which pages are dirty should a resynchronization become necessary. Bitmaps are compressed (using run-length encoding) before sending on the network to reduce network overhead. Since most of the of the bitmaps are sparse, it proves to be pretty effective. DRBD synchronizes data once the crashed node comes back up, or in response to data inconsistencies caused by an interruption in the link. Synchronization is performed in a linear order, by disk offset, in the same disk layout as the consistent node. The rate of synchronization can be configured by the rate parameter in the DRBD configuration file.
Disk FailuresIn case of local disk errors, the system may choose to deal with it in one of the following ways, depending on the configuration:
Data Inconsistency issuesIn the dual-primary case, both nodes may write to the same disk sector, making the data inconsistent. For writes at different offset, there is no synchronization required. To avoid inconsistency issues, data packets over the network are numbered sequentially to identify the order of writes. However, there are still some corner-case inconsistency problems the system can suffer from:
ConclusionDRBD is not the only distributed storage implementation under development. The implementation of Distributed Storage (DST) contributed by Evgeniy Polyakov and accepted in staging tree takes a different approach. DRBD is limited to 2-node active clusters, while DST can have larger numbers of nodes. DST works on client-server model, where the storage is at the server end, whereas DRBD is peer-to-peer based, and designed for high-availability as compared to distributing storage. DST, on the other hand, is designed for accumulative storage, with storage nodes which can be added as needed. DST has a pluggable module which accepts different algorithms for mapping the storage nodes into a cumulative storage. The algorithm chosen can be mirroring which would serve the same basic capability of replicated storage as DRBD. DRBD code is maintained in the git repository at git://git.drbd.org/linux-2.6-drbd.git, under the "drbd" branch. It contains the minor review comments posted on LKML incorporated after the patchset was released by Philipp Reisner. For further information, see the several PDF documents mention in the DRBD patch posting.
Patches and updates Kernel trees
Core kernel code
Development tools
Device drivers
Documentation
Filesystems and block I/O
Memory management
Networking
Architecture-specific
Virtualization and containers
Benchmarks and bugs
Miscellaneous
Page editor: Jonathan Corbet Distributions News and Editorials Debian GNU/kFreeBSD: one more step towards a universal operating systemOne of the strengths of the Linux ecosystem is freedom of choice. The Debian distribution has given its users one more freedom: to choose between the Linux and FreeBSD kernels under the hood, with the same Debian GNU user space applications whichever is chosen. The idea goes back ten years, but it is finally coming to fruition now that two new architectures, kfreebsd-i386 and kfreebsd-amd64, have been added to the unstable and experimental archives of Debian. The project was first announced in the Debian Weekly News for February 22nd, 1999: Someone proposed a Debian distribution based on FreeBSD. There was considerable debate on this topic. Most of the favorable opinions expressed were based on the argument that there should be a Debian distribution for as many open source UNIX variants as possible. This was countered with the argument that this would drastically increase the workload of the package maintainers.
Shortly thereafter a plain FreeBSD port of Debian was started, with a FreeBSD kernel and FreeBSD libc under a GNU user space. To not diverge too much from the GNU/Linux architecture, the developers of the project used GNU utilities, but they quickly found out that a lot of packages needed patches because the FreeBSD libc did not provide the same extensions as GNU libc. So after a while came the idea to port GNU libc to the FreeBSD kernel. This was done mostly by Bruno Haible in 2002, which is when the project took the shape (and name) it has now. Port maintainer Aurélien Jarno looks back at this time: At this moment, Robert Millan suggested to add a 'k' in front of FreeBSD to form GNU/kFreeBSD meaning "kernel of". It is a way to show that except a few low level userland utilities, we are using only the kernel and not the C library of FreeBSD. In the same way a GNU/Opensolaris port is in development (Nexenta), and a GNU/kOpenSolaris port has been started recently now that GNU libc has been partly ported to the OpenSolaris kernel, solving licensing issues.
Switching to the GNU libc port has brought better compatibility with the Debian packages and, once that happened, a lot of packages were able to be built without any changes. The project got the name Debian GNU/kFreeBSD. To summarize, Debian GNU/kFreeBSD is a port that consists of a GNU user space using the GNU C library and Debian package management and system tools on top of FreeBSD's kernel. The latest Debian GNU/kFreeBSD is based on the upstream FreeBSD 7.1 kernel with a few patches. GNU and BSD: a strange marriageBut why have the developers made such a strange chimera, a combination of a BSD kernel and a GNU user space? Is this a "because we can" project? Obviously, the developers have heard this question countless times, and the wiki lists some valid reasons why a user could prefer Debian GNU/kFreeBSD to FreeBSD or Debian GNU/Linux. The "why" question breaks down into two questions. First, why would a user prefer Debian GNU/kFreeBSD to Debian GNU/Linux? First, the FreeBSD kernel has some nice and useful features, like the OpenBSD "pf" packet filter and "jails", a system-level virtualization feature. The developers also list cleaner kernel interfaces than Linux as an advantage, pointing to a single /dev implementation via devfs, as well as using OSS as the default sound system as examples. Drivers can be another advantage. For example, the FreeBSD kernel has support for Windows NDIS drivers in the mainline kernel, whereas the NDISwrapper project will not likely make it into the mainline Linux kernel. The developers add: "The FreeBSD kernel might support some hardware which Linux does not support and/or the FreeBSD kernel support might be better (fewer bugs)." But, of course, this is a double-edged sword: Linux supports a lot of devices for which FreeBSD has no drivers yet. Another interesting issue lies on the filesystem front: the Debian GNU/kFreeBSD developers say that due to licensing and patent issues, Sun's filesystem ZFS is unlikely to appear in the Linux kernel. However, now that Oracle is buying Sun, chances have improved that ZFS will get GPL-licensed. But whatever will happen, ZFS is also being ported to FreeBSD, so Debian GNU/kFreeBSD users will definitely see support for this interesting filesystem in the future. Some of the reasons the developers give are less convincing. For example, they say: "kFreeBSD offers an alternative in case Linux is branded illegal by the SCO case or other threats. In legal terms, Linux sources are like a minefield. kFreeBSD is much less vulnerable to such attacks because of its less bazaar-like development model." Your author thinks this is very unlikely to happen. The second part of the "why" question is: why would a user prefer Debian GNU/kFreeBSD to FreeBSD? This really comes down to preferences. Maybe the user likes the Debian package system more than FreeBSD ports, or prefers the GNU user space to the BSD world. The GNU versions of many commands are known to have more features. And at the non-technical level: Debian GNU/kFreeBSD follows the Debian Free Software Guidelines, whereas FreeBSD uses some non-free, binary-only drivers such as the ath driver for Atheros wireless chipsets. But all of this will most likely not convince BSD users to switch. Working with Debian GNU/kFreeBSDThis all sounds interesting, but does it work in practice? The base system is fully functional and users can install Debian GNU/kFreeBSD by using the install notes. An ISO file for an install CD is available. Currently this is a version from January 2009, but users can add a Lenny-based snapshot to /etc/apt/sources.list. The current installation CD is based on a hacked FreeBSD sysinstall, so at this moment, the installation is not straightforward for users without any FreeBSD experience. Moreover, this only works more or less correctly for standard installations. This is a temporary solution until the debian-installer is fully ported to Debian GNU/kFreeBSD. Luca Favatella, a computer engineering student at the University of Catania in Italy, will implement this as part of Google Summer of Code 2009. As part of his proposal, which has been accepted at GSOC, he will not only port debian-installer to GNU/kFreeBSD, but he will also make debian-installer less dependent on Linux: at this moment it uses many Linux-specific constructs (e.g. udev) or assumes Linux structures (e.g. setting up partitions with LVM). Most of the core packages in Debian unstable are ported to Debian GNU/kFreeBSD. Looking at all of the architecture-independent source packages, the developers have currently ported over 80% of the 7800 source packages. Of course not all of them have been tested. There is still a large amount of packages that need fixing. The developers have a list of common practices and problems found when porting to GNU/kFreeBSD. According to Jarno, a lot of porting is rather simple (but boring). For example, support for detecting GNU/kFreeBSD was added more than six years ago to autotools, but a lot of software is still using an older version. He adds: "Also a lot of software is using #ifdef __linux__ to detect if they are using a GNU libc. This is clearly wrong, and this is also one of the more repetitive changes to make." Several high-profile packages aren't ported yet. For example, OpenOffice.org is missing. But Jarno sees no fundamental problems for this port to happen: "There is no reason it would not work, but it is a huge task given the size of Openoffice.org sources. All the build dependencies are available, so it's mainly about tweaking the hundreds of autodetection scripts that do not know about GNU/kFreeBSD." Wireless networking works in Debian GNU/kFreeBSD, but there are no tools to scan for networks yet. The problem is that NetworkManager is really tightly coupled to HAL, which was not available on FreeBSD. Jarno explains: "Though it has been originally designed for being portable across operating systems, a lot of kernel-specific code had to be written." However, now that HAL has been ported to FreeBSD, it should not be a big deal to get NetworkManager working. As upstream FreeBSD is doing the porting work (as a Google Summer of Code project), Debian GNU/kFreeBSD will surely get NetworkManager support in the near future. There is a core of about 5 to 8 developers working on the Debian GNU/kFreeBSD port, but as with any open source project a lot of other people are also helping to a smaller extent. That includes package maintainers who want their package to work on the system. The project provides Debian Developer accessible machines running GNU/kFreeBSD for this purpose. Jarno estimates that about 50 people are using Debian GNU/kFreeBSD almost daily, and that a lot of people are following the development more or less closely: "We hope to see this number increasing now that it is being integrated as an official Debian architecture." With Debian GNU/kFreeBSD, the Debian project has taken one more step towards its vision as a universal operating system. It's unique to have a platform supporting two different kernels, while the user space remains largely unchanged. Of course there's also Debian GNU/Hurd, but this still has not been officially released, and the Hurd kernel itself is still relatively immature. Debian GNU/NetBSD is still in an early stage of development. The ultimate aim is Debian GNU/Any, where the user space is abstracted completely from the running kernel with glibc. When this is possible, Debian binaries would be binary compatible with any kernel supported on Debian GNU/Any through the glibc abstraction. This total decoupling of user space and kernel will give users even more choice.
Annual Distribution List updateIt's time for our annual update on the state of the LWN Distributions List. The last update was April 17, 2008. Since then we've added 54 distributions and deleted 52 distributions. Last year we had 485 active distributions and 58 in the historical section for a total of 543 distributions. Historical distributions are no longer actively developed, but some source code should be available. There are usually quite a few historical distributions in the active sections, though. Sometimes it's hard to tell. Link checking is a slow process and a low priority task. This year you should find the front part of the List, Leading through the Country-specific sections to be fairly up-to-date. The Embedded through the end of the list are moldier. So this year we see an increase in the historical distributions now at 85, compared to 460 active distributions for a total of 545 distributions currently on the list. The distributions removed in the last year are (in no particular order): Tao Linux, Cobind Desktop, BearOps, Linare Linux OS, Santa Fe Linux, SLYNUX, Underground Desktop, WinLinux, RedIce-Linux, EtLinux, Tynux, RedBlue Linux, QiLinux, Aurox Linux, Buffalo Linux, DCC Alliance, UserLinux, Arabian Linux, Eadem Enterprise Linux, FullPliant, GenieOS, MitraX, Nitix, NixOS, OEone HomeBase, Peachtree Linux, Tomahawk Desktop, Xline, College Linux, Eagle Linux, elpicx, kmLinux, Tadpole Linux, tuXlab GNU/Linux, APLINUX.com.br Mail server, Console Linux, SACIX, Chinese 2000 Linux, ThizLinux, Tom Linux, XTeamLinux, Resala Linux, Echelon Linux, PunLinux, HOLON Linux, LASER5, WOWLinux, MCNLive, Pingwinek GNU/Linux, Castle, Linux ESware, and LinEspa. Our list only includes distributions using a Linux kernel. There are no BSD or OpenSolaris based projects, even though we do cover these distributions on this page. As always, let us know if you encounter dead links or would like a project to be added to the list.
New Releases Announcing the Release Candidate for Ubuntu 9.04The release candidate for Ubuntu 9.04 has been announced. "The Ubuntu team is pleased to announce the Release Candidate for Ubuntu 9.04 Desktop and Server editions and Ubuntu Netbook Remix. Codenamed "Jaunty Jackalope", 9.04 continues Ubuntu's proud tradition of integrating the latest and greatest open source technologies into a high-quality, easy-to-use Linux distribution. We consider this release candidate to be complete, stable, and suitable for testing by any user."
Announcing the Release Candidate for Ubuntu 9.04 on ARMThe Ubuntu team has announced the Release Candidate for Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) Desktop edition for the ARM architecture. "This first, community-supported ARM release of Ubuntu targets the i.MX51 Babbage development board and is suitable for use by developers wishing to bring the same high-quality Ubuntu desktop to an even wider range of energy-efficient systems."
Announcing Sugar on a Stick Beta 1The SoaS team has announced the release of Sugar on a Stick Beta-1. "There has been impressive progress over the last few weeks; many thanks all the people who contributed their time and effort." Click below for more information.
Fedora Unity Releases F10 Re-spinsThe Fedora Unity Project has announced the release of new ISO Re-Spins of Fedora 10. These Re-Spin ISOs are based on the officially released Fedora 10 installation media and include all updates released as of April 14, 2009.
Distribution News Debian GNU/Linux Bits from the (re-elected) DPL: delegationSteve McIntyre, re-elected Debian Project Leader, looks at delegations for the coming year. "So, onto the boring stuff. I hereby formally delegate Luk to be assistant DPL this year while I'm DPL. As far as is practical, we will share all the DPL's duties and responsibilities; we will both receive leader@ mail, and we both get to see all tickets in rt.debian.org. We intend to work as a team, but I'll get to have the last say and take the blame for any mistakes we make."
Bits from the 2nd Debian Groupware MeetingLast year the Debian Groupware Meeting was held in the LinuxHotel, Essen, Germany. Click below for a short summary what happened during the weekend.
Gentoo Linux Gentoo Council SummaryClick below for a summary of the April 9, 2009 meeting of the Gentoo Council. Topics include Migration of KEYWORDS out of ebuilds, EAPI 3 features block, and EAPI 3 updates.
SUSE Linux and openSUSE openSUSE Google Summer of Code Accepted Projects AnnouncedGoogle has announced the accepted projects for all of the Google Summer of Code organizations. The openSUSE Project has nine projects that were accepted for the Summer of Code 2009. Click below for openSUSE's list.
openSUSE Community Week Coming May 11 through May 17openSUSE Community Week has been announced. Community Week aims to show users in the openSUSE community how they can become contributors, and to help existing contributors become more effective.
Distribution Newsletters DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 299The DistroWatch Weekly for April 20, 2009 is out. "It's the Ubuntu release week (or Ubuntu "circus", as some prefer to call it), a major event in the calendar of many open source software enthusiasts. What will the distribution's 10th official release be like? And will the download servers cope with the expected heavy demand? We'll have to wait until Thursday to find out; in the meantime, read below for a quick tip on reverting to an older kernel under Ubuntu and visit Canonical's ShipIt service to order your free CDs. In the news section, Mandriva gains support for hardware database known as Smolt, Easy Peasy ponders a few ideas concerning the distro's default user interface, and Fedora's Ricky Zhou points out the importance of innovation in Red Hat's community distribution. Finally, don't miss our feature article which calls for an implementation of a centralised bug-tracking database for all open source software projects. Happy reading!"
Fedora Weekly News #172The Fedora Weekly News for the week ending April 19, 2009 is out. "This week Announcements rubs its hands with glee over the "Fedora 11" freeze. Similarly Artwork enthuses about "Fedora 11 Landing" with great Leonidas themes including a surprise for wide-screen setups. Developments gushes about "Presto and DeltaRPM Status" and SecurityWeek asks the interesting question "Who in the Linux World Would be Responsible for a Worm?". SecurityAdvisories faithfully lists updates that might just help avoid that worm. With a red face we draw your attention with an Erratum to last week's missing QualityAssurance beat. This week's QualityAssurance beat "Test Days" advertizes the upcoming minimal installation testing and reports in "Weekly meetings" that PulseAudio issues with snd-intel-hda and snd-intel8x0 are resolved. Translation reports on the availability of a bulky "Fedora 11 Installation Guide Ready for Translation". The FedoraWeeklyWebcomic joins us again and Ambassadors shares a neat list of LinuxFestNorthWest talks by Fedora folk."
The Mint Newsletter - issue 81This issue of the Mint Newsletter covers the release of Mint 6 KDE and Fluxbox Community editions, the special Google search in Mint will be tweaked - it is a major source of income and a minor source of irritation so we will do something about it and Twitter for Linux Mint (quick news).
OpenSUSE Weekly News/68The issue of the OpenSUSE Weekly News covers Call for Participations: openSUSE Summit 2009, openSUSE at LinuxFest Northwest, People of openSUSE: Jean-Daniel Dodin, Google Summer of Code Status Update, Bryen Yunashko: Accessible Appreciation: The Sequel, and more.
Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter #138The Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter for the week ending April 18, 2009 is out. "In this issue we cover: Announcing Ubuntu 9.04 RC, Announcing Ubuntu 9.04 RC for ARM, Packaging Training Session Update, Announcing Ubuntu Open Week, New Ubuntu Members, Japanese Team release party, Philippine Ubuntu Release Party, Launchpod #18, Karma: Where did mine go, Ubuntu Forums Interview: Codename, Jorge Castro: Support your LoCo economy, Sayak Banerjee: KDE Brainstorm - 30 Days, 700 ideas, Ubuntu-UK podcast: The Waking Ally, Systerm76: Ubuntu PC Maker's revenue up 61 Percent, Open-source server distro that builds on Ubuntu, Server Meeting Minutes: April 14th, and much, much more!"
Distribution meetings openSUSE Summit CFP AnnouncedThe openSUSE Project has opened the call for participation in the openSUSE Summit 2009, to be held September 17 through 20 in Nuremberg, Germany. "We're looking for contributors to openSUSE, upstream projects, and members of the openSUSE community to participate." All proposals must be submitted by May 20, 2009.
Interviews Interview with Ricky Zhou - Fedora Project (How Software is Built)How Software is Built talks with Ricky Zhou. "I'm currently a freshman at Carnegie Mellon University. I've been contributing to Fedora since about March of my junior year. I'm mostly involved with the infrastructure team, which runs the servers that run Fedora and I'm kind of the leader of the website team, which is where I started out. I also do some packaging, among other things."
Distribution reviews The five best, new things in Ubuntu Linux 9.04 (ComputerWorld)Stephen J. Vaughan-Nichols reviews Ubuntu Linux 9.04 on ComputerWorld. "1) X.Org server 1.6/GNOME 2.26. The first part gives you peppier video performance, while the second gives you a really, nice integrated desktop. Particularly nice features include the integration of the Brasero CD/DVD burner with all other Gnome applications and improvements with both audio, PulseAudio, and multiple monitors control and support."
Page editor: Rebecca Sobol Development GCC reaches the 4.4.0 releaseThe Gnu Compiler Collection (GCC) is likely the most popular compiler that runs under Linux: "The GNU Compiler Collection includes front ends for C, C++, Objective-C, Fortran, Java, and Ada, as well as libraries for these languages (libstdc++, libgcj,...)." The GCC project has announced the release of GCC version 4.4.0. "This release is a major release, containing new features (as well as many other improvements) relative to GCC 4.3.x." It also marks the first version in the GCC 4.4 release series. The changes document details the many modifications that have been made for this new branch. ![[GCC]](/images/ns/gcc.png)
Some of the broader changes in version 4.4.0 include a number of improvements to the optimizer, the following new command line switches have been added:
C language improvements include:
C++ language improvements include:
FORTRAN language improvements include:
libstdc++ Runtime Library improvements include:
Target-specific improvements include:
The GCC project continues to keep up with the changing processor landscape and new language standards as they evolve. Meanwhile, GCC progress marches on, as documented in the GCC 4.4.1 and GCC 4.5.0 status reports.
System Applications Database Software MySQL Community Server 5.1.34 has been releasedVersion 5.1.34 of MySQL Community Server has been announced. "MySQL Community Server 5.1.34, a new version of the popular Open Source Database Management System, has been released. MySQL 5.1.34 is recommended for use on production systems. MySQL 5.1.34 will be the final release of MySQL 5.1 for AIX 5.2, which will be EOL'd from 30th April 2009."
PostgreSQL Weekly NewsThe April 19, 2009 edition of the PostgreSQL Weekly News is online with the latest PostgreSQL DBMS articles and resources.
Filesystem Utilities TestDisk and PhotoRec 6.11 releasedVersion 6.11 of TestDisk and PhotoRec, utilities for recovering data from damaged disks, have been announced. "Both utilities are faster than previous versions. TestDisk 6.11 can undelete files from NTFS partition and recover deleted exFAT. Over 50 file types have been added to PhotoRec."
Interoperability Samba 3.2.11 maintenance release is availableMaintenance release 3.2.11 of Samba has been announced. "This is the latest bug fix release for Samba 3.2 and is the version recommended for all production Samba servers running this release series."
Package Management RPM 4.7.0 releasedVersion 4.7.0 of RPM has been announced. "We're pleased to announce the availability of RPM release 4.7.0. Download instructions and more detailed information are available from: http://rpm.org/wiki/Releases/4.7.0"
Printing CUPS 1.3.10 releasedVersion 1.3.10 of CUPS has been announced. "The new release fixes 3 minor security issues as well as several printing and web interface bug fixes."
Web Site Development Midgard2 9.03.0 RC2 releasedVersion 9.03.0 RC2 of the Midgard2 web framework has been announced. "In this release we provide Content Repository API bindings for the following programming languages: C, Python, PHP and Objective-C. D-Bus signals are used to inform different Midgard2 applications about things happening in the repository, enabling for example a PHP website and a Python background process to communicate with each other."
Miscellaneous Octopussy: 0.9.9.2 released (SourceForge)Version 0.9.9.2 of Octopussy has been announced. "Logs Analyzer, Alerter & Reporter with a Web Interface. * Better reports with Open Flash Chart ! * RRD taxonomy bug fixed (ID: 2659959) * Minor Bugfixes/Improvements"
skpd: A tool to dump processes to executable ELF filesThe initial release of skpd has been announced. "I just developed a tool for dump a running process, to an executable ELF file. This tool works on GNU/Linux, and has been tested on systems like U[b]untu 8.10, Gentoo, Debian lenny, Debian etch, etc. Fell free to send me bugs, comments, and patches."
Desktop Applications Audio Applications Audacious 2.0-alpha1 releasedVersion 2.0-alpha1 of the Audacious media player has been announced. "Audacious is an advanced audio player. It is free, lightweight, based on GTK2, runs on Linux and many other *nix platforms and is focused on audio quality and supporting a wide range of audio codecs. Its advanced audio playback engine is considerably more powerful than GStreamer. Audacious is a fork of Beep Media Player (BMP), which itself forked from XMMS."
CAD Wings 3D: New feature and bug fixes in wings 0.99.55 (SourceForge)Version 0.99.55 of Wings 3D has been announced. "Wings 3D is a subdivision modeller with an user interface that is easy to use for both beginners and advanced users (inspired by Nendo and Mirai from Izware). More Magnet Mask tools to further improve usability including the ability to Invert masked and unmasked areas and toggle the mask on/off. Some important bug fixes are included in this release, so upgrading is recommended."
Desktop Environments GNOME Software AnnouncementsThe following new GNOME software has been announced this week:
KDE Software AnnouncementsThe following new KDE software has been announced this week:
Xfce 4.6.1 releasedVersion 4.6.1 of Xfce, a lightweight desktop environment, has been announced. "The first bugfix-release of xfce 4.6 has been released. Thanks to all the people who have been using xfce 4.6 and took the time and effort to submit bugreports for stuff that wasn't quite working the way it is supposed to. We have been able to fix several issues during the past few weeks."
Xorg Software AnnouncementsThe following new Xorg software has been announced this week:
Multimedia Elisa Media Center 0.5.36 releasedVersion 0.5.36 of Elisa Media Center has been announced. "This release is a lightweight release, meaning it is pushed through our automatic plugin update system. Additionally a windows installer is available for download on our website. This installer fixes various crashers."
Music Applications Announcing jMax Phoenix: Call for developersA call for developers has gone out for jMax Phoenix, a visual programming environment for real-time music and multimedia. "The reports of the jMax death have been greatly exaggerated. Free software never dies, it just sleeps for some time. Almost nine years after the release of the project under a free license, and six years after the end of the developments by the institution that created it, some of the original project developers decided to revive it from its ashes: jMax Phoenix was born."
Web Browsers Firefox 3.0.9 releasedFirefox 3.0.9 is out. The release notes contain the details; as might be expected, the real reason for this release is to fix yet another pile of security problems.
Miscellaneous JavaTerminal: Version 3.0 (SourceForge)Version 3.0 of JavaTerminal has been announced. "This version is a "hard coded" TELNETBBS/ANSIBBS terminal client. Programmable extensibility has been removed and replaced by final method invocations to increase performance. The future of this project is uncertain, this may be the final version."
Languages and Tools C GCC 4.4.1 Status ReportThe April 21, 2009 edition of the GCC 4.4.0 Status Report has been published. "GCC 4.4.0 has been built and uploaded today and 4.4 branch is open under release branch rules for regression and documentation fixes leading to the 4.4.1 release; the release will be announced once time has been allowed for mirrors to pick up the files. It is likely that 4.4.1 will be released in about two months' time."
GCC 4.5.0 Status ReportThe April 21, 2009 edition of the GCC 4.5.0 Status Report has been published. "Trunk is in Stage 1. It is expected that Stage 1 will last at least four months (so ending no earlier than 27 July) and will be followed by Stage 3 (bug-fix-only mode); whether it ends on 27 July may depend on whether there remain unmerged features at that date that we wish to merge for 4.5 and that seem sufficiently close to being ready to merge to make it worth delaying the end of Stage 1."
Caml Caml Weekly NewsThe April 21, 2009 edition of the Caml Weekly News is out with new articles about the Caml language.
Python itools 0.60.0 releasedVersion 0.60.0 of itools has been announced. "itools is a Python library, it groups a number of packages into a single meta-package for easier development and deployment. The itools.vfs package has been rewritten to use gio, the virtual file system from the glib project. The web server (itools.web) now uses the glib event loop. Extracting text from office formats is in general much faster. Command line utilities have been replaced by libraries; for instance, now we use 'xlrd' instead of 'xlhtml' to extract text from Excel files."
Python-on-a-chip releases PyMite r08Release 8 of PyMite has been announced. "The Python-on-a-chip Project is pleased to announce the eighth release of PyMite. PyMite is a flyweight Python VM written from scratch to execute on 8-bit and larger microcontrollers with resources as limited as 64 KB of program memory (flash) and 4 KB of RAM. PyMite supports a subset of the Python 2.5 syntax and can execute a subset of the Python 2.5 bytecodes. PyMite can also be compiled, tested and executed on a desktop computer."
pyparsing 1.5.2 releasedVersion 1.5.2 of pyparsing, a pure-Python class library for developing recursive-descent parsers, has been announced. "Well, it has been about 6 months since the release of pyparsing 1.5.1, and there have been no new functional enhancements to pyparsing. I take this as a further sign that pyparsing is reaching a development/ maturity plateau. With the help of the pyparsing community, there are some compatibility upgrades, and few bug fixes."
Python 2.6.2 releasedVersion 2.6.2 of Python has been announced. "This is the latest production-ready version in the Python 2.6 series. Dozens of issues have been fixed since Python 2.6.1 was released back in December."
Python-URL! - weekly Python news and linksThe April 16, 2009 edition of the Python-URL! is online with a new collection of Python article links.
relatorio 0.5.1 releasedVersion 0.5.1 of relatorio has been announced, it includes some new features and bug fixes. "Relatorio is a templating library which provides a way to easily output several kinds of files (odt, ods, png, svg, ...). Support for more filetypes can be easily added by creating plugins for them. Relatorio also provides a report repository allowing you to link python objects and report together, find reports by mimetype/name/python object."
XML pyxser 0.2r releasedVersion 0.2r of pyxser has been announced, it includes a number of bug fixes. "I'm pleased to announce pyxser-0.2r, a Python-Object to XML serializer and deserializer. This package it's complet[e]ly written in C and licensed under LGPLv3."
Libraries What's coming in glibc 2.10Ulrich Drepper has posted a list of some of the changes which will appear in glibc 2.10. "The new malloc_info function therefore does not export a structure. Instead it exports the information in a self-describing data structure. Nowadays the preferred way to do this is via XML. The format can change over time (it's versioned), some fields will stay the same, other will change. No breakage. The reader just cannot assume that all the information will forever be available in the same form. There is no reader in glibc. This isn't necessary, it's easy enough to write outside glibc using one of the many XML libraries."
Announcing the port of glibc to Google Native ClientThe glibc library has been ported to Google Native Client. "Some background: Native Client (NaCl for short) is a sandboxing system for running a subset of x86 code on Linux, Windows and Mac OS X. It is proposed as a way of running native code inside web apps. Native Client is a hack to get around the lack of sandboxing facilities on these OSes. It uses x86 segmentation to constrain memory accesses, and it has a verifier for x86 code which disallows instructions that would be unsafe, such as syscalls."
Test Suites Mock 0.5.0 releasedVersion 0.5.0 of Mock has been announced. "mock provides a core mock.Mock class that is intended to reduce the need to create a host of trivial stubs throughout your test suite. After performing an action, you can make assertions about which methods / attributes were used and arguments they were called with. You can also specify return values and set specific attributes in the normal way."
Version Control GIT 1.6.2.4 releasedVersion 1.6.2.4 of the GIT distributed version control system has been announced. "This contains bunch of fixes that have already been merged to the master branch in preparation for 1.6.3."
Miscellaneous Jason: 1.3 released (SourceForge)Version 1.3 of Jason has been announced. "Jason is a fully-fledged interpreter for an extended version of AgentSpeak, a BDI agent-oriented logic programming language, and is implemented in Java. Using SACI or JADE, a multi-agent system can be distributed over a network effortlessly. This version fixes some bugs in the previous version, adds new examples, and has the following main new features: performance improvements and plan as terms."
Page editor: Forrest Cook Linux in the news Recommended Reading Meta-cycles: 2-3 year major cycles for free software? (Here Be Dragons)It is well known that Mark Shuttleworth is a proponent of six-month development cycles. However, in this blog post he considers the larger changes which cannot be done in six months. "Six-month cycles are great. Now let's talk about meta-cycles: broader release cycles for major work. I'm very interested in a cross-community conversation about this, so will sketch out some ideas and then encourage people from as many different free software communities as possible to comment here. I'll summarise those comments in a follow-up post, which will no doubt be a lot wiser and more insightful than this one :-)"
Companies Alcatel-Lucent Networking Embraces Linux, NAC (internetnews.com)internetnews.com reports that Alcatel-Lucent will switch its networking products' operating system from VxWorks to Linux. "AOS itself sits on top of an embedded operating system that Alcatel-Lucent uses on its switching gear. Currently, that operating system is VxWorks from Wind River, though that's set to change. Minka Nikolova, senior product manager at Alcatel-Lucent, told InternetNews.com that the plan is to shift from VxWorks to Linux by early next year. Nikolova argued that from a user point of view, customers won't know the difference, as the operating system underneath AOS will be transparent. That said, she did note that Linux will bring some new opportunities to AOS."
Linux Adoption Android destined for a set-top box? (LinuxDevices)LinuxDevices looks at the expansion of Android into set-top boxes. "The Android version of the Au Box is destined for an October launch by Japanese carrier KDDI, and is supported by a new Japan-based Open Embedded Software Foundation (OESF) organization, according to a story in EETimes. The Au Box STB "will allow users to take their music and video content with them on the go by connecting to a handset or portable player," says the story. EETimes also reports that JVC is considering the development of a TV set based on the open-source, Linux/Java-based Android distribution."
Resources Running Linux Under Windows (LinuxLinks)LinuxLinks takes a look at applications which let users run Linux and Windows at the same time on a single Windows machine. "Virtualization is the current boom in the software field. Each virtual machine has its own share of CPU, memory, network interfaces etc which is isolated from other virtual machines. This article selects the best no-charge virtualization software." (Thanks to Steve Emms)
Reviews Burning the Ships: A Review (Linux Journal)Linux Journal has a review of the book Burning the Ships: Intellectual Property and the Transformation of Microsoft by David Kline. "In a world where distinctions between open source and proprietary software are becoming increasingly irrelevant, what role can IP [Intellectual Property] play in facilitating greater collaboration with the industry for the benefit of business and customers alike? (167) While this quote appears near the end of Marshall Phelps and David Klines new book Burning the Ships: Intellectual Property and the Transformation of Microsoft, it does sum up nicely the thread that weaves through the book, a case study of how Microsoft reinvented itself and began leveraging its Intellectual Property for good (collaboration) instead of evil (punishment). Putting aside the rah rah Microsoft tone of the book for a moment, it is a good case study of how a company can leverage its IP successfully."
OLPC XO 1.5 Laptop gets a new VIA processor (The H)The H takes a look at the XO 1.5 laptop from the One Laptop Per Child project. "The current OLPC, the XO-1, uses an x86 Geode chip from Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). The XO-1.5 is based on the design of the XO-1, but will use a new VIA C7-M processor with clock ranges from 400MHz to 1GHz. The OLPC Tech Team's goal with the re-design is to match the XO-1 power consumption. The refreshed model will use the new VIA VX855 chipset that includes the memory interface, 3D graphics engine, USB, SDIO and video decoder on a single chip. The memory in the XO-1.5 has been increased to 1 GB of RAM and 4GB of flash storage, with an option for 8 GB."
rBuilder Aims Cloud Computing Tool At Enterprise (InformationWeek)InformationWeek covers the release of rBuilder v5. "RBuilder combines an application with an optimized version of its operating system and converts them into a set of virtual files. RBuilder has been used as a free online tool at the rPath site to build many Amazon Machine Images, the virtual file formats that run in Amazon's EC2 cloud, which uses the Xen open source hypervisor."
Real-Time Messaging Middleware Integrated with Secure Linux (Embedded.com)Embedded.com takes a look at Real-Time Innovations' RTI Data Distribution Service, real-time messaging middleware with Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux). "According to Karl MacMillan, director of Core Technology at Tresys, this combination provides real-time and high-performance distributed applications with the ability to securely distribute data by combining RTI's high-performance network communications with the extremely flexible Mandatory Access Control (MAC) facilities of SELinux."
Miscellaneous Health Check: openSUSE - Then and nowThe H looks at the health of the openSUSE distribution. "Through all these vicissitudes the openSUSE community has continued to produce a high class Linux distribution, which continues to receive plaudits, and appears to support a thriving and enthusiastic community, with busy forums and its own weekly news bulletin, which is widely read. The traditions of SuSE continue against the tide."
Page editor: Forrest Cook Announcements Non-Commercial announcements Changes to the GNOME System Administration TeamThe GNOME Foundation has announced the creation of a formal system administration team with a paid part-time sysadmin. "In order to continue our current community plans and hire a system administrator, we'd like to raise $50,000 through Friends of GNOME. Thanks to our generous community members we have already received over $5,000 this year. In addition, Google has put in $5,000 and Canonical has offered to match the next $10,000. So we are 40% of the way there already!"
What the Oracle Acquisition of Sun Means for Linux (LinuxFoundation)The Linux Foundation's Jim Zemlin discusses Oracle's purchase of Sun Microsystems. "Its no surprise that the executive director of the Linux Foundation would see good news for Linux in the unexpected announcement this morning of Oracles acquisition of Sun Microsystems, but I do feel it necessary to shed some light on how it may or may not affect Linux. - Oracle is strategically aligned with Linux: Oracle is a Linux distributor, and all its products are developed and run on Linux. As Edward Screven, chief architect of Oracle, said in a keynote at our Collaboration Summit two weeks ago, entering the Linux market was the right choice for Oracle. They are also a major user: Oracles entire enterprise runs on Linux, and they are major contributors to the Linux kernel among other Linux projects."
SFLC: A Wake-Up Call for GPLv3 MigrationThe Software Freedom Law Center's Bradley Kuhn uses the TomTom case to advocate for greater adoption of GPLv3. "Were Linux under GPLv3 (but not GPLv2), these terms, particularly those in the second paragraph, would clearly and unequivocally prohibit TomTom from entering into any arrangement with Microsoft that doesn't grant a license to any Microsoft patent that reads on Linux. Indeed, even what has been publicly said about this agreement seems to indicate strongly that this deal would violate GPLv3. While the Novell/Microsoft deal was grandfathered in (via the date above), this new agreement is not. Yet, the most frustrating aspect of the press coverage of this deal is that few have taken the opportunity to advocate for GPLv3 adoption by more projects. I hope now that we're a few weeks out from the coverage, project leaders will begin again to consider adding this additional patent protection for their users and redistributors."
Commercial announcements Linux Integration Components for Windows Server 2008 Hyper-VMicrosoft has announced Linux Integration Components for Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V. "When installed in a supported Linux virtual machine running on Hyper-V, the Linux Integration Components provide. Driver support for synthetic devices: The Linux integration components include support for both the synthetic network controller and synthetic storage controller that have been developed specifically for Hyper-V. These components take advantage of the new high-speed bus, VMBus, which was developed for Hyper-V."
Danger with NVIDIA drivers 180.29LWN does not normally carry announcements for proprietary driver releases, but... the NVIDIA driver 180.51 release is worthy of note. It fixes a problem with the 180.29 release (packaged by RPMFusion, at least) which can brick certain Fujitsu notebook systems. Anybody running the older drivers should probably upgrade, just to be sure.
Oracle buying SunHere's the press release: Oracle will be buying Sun Microsystems. "The Sun Solaris operating system is the leading platform for the Oracle database, Oracle's largest business, and has been for a long time. With the acquisition of Sun, Oracle can optimize the Oracle database for some of the unique, high-end features of Solaris. Oracle is as committed as ever to Linux and other open platforms and will continue to support and enhance our strong industry partnerships." (Thanks to Emmanuel Seyman).
New Books Gray Hat Python--New from No Starch PressNo Starch Press has published the book Gray Hat Python by Justin Seitz.
Intel(r) G45 Programmer's Reference ManualThe Intel(r) G45 Programmer's Reference Manual is available for download. "We are pleased to announce that the Intel(r) G45 Express Chipset [Graphics and Memory Controller Hub-GMCH] Programmer's Reference Manual (PRM) is now publicly available!"
Resources Red Hat's open source activity mapRed Hat has posted a JavaScript-heavy map claiming to show the relative level of open source activity in 75 countries. It seems that France is ranked #1 overall. There are links to various PDF files describing how the rankings were derived; suffice to say, it's not a simple algorithm.
Calls for Presentations IMF 2009 - 2nd Call for PapersThe second call for papers has gone out for IMF 2009. "5th International Conference on IT Security Incident Management & IT Forensics September 15th - 17th, 2009 Stuttgart, Germany" Submissions are due by June 1.
Linux Plumbers Conference 2009 Call For ProposalsThe call for proposals for the 2009 Linux Plumbers Conference (September 23 to 25, Portland) has gone out. "The perfect Plumbers topic would feature a real problem whose solution requires the relevant community members to get together face to face, preferably producing a solution during the conference itself." Submissions are due by June 15.
openSUSE Summit 2009 Call for ParticipationA call for participation has gone out for the openSUSE Summit 2009. "The openSUSE Project is opening the call for participation in the openSUSE Summit 2009, to be held September 17 through 20 in Nuremberg, Germany. We're looking for contributors to openSUSE, upstream projects, and members of the openSUSE community to participate. The summit will be an opportunity to bring the openSUSE contributor community together to share ideas, experience, hack, and help guide the direction of the project."
Upcoming Events LinuxCon keynote speaker announcementThe keynote speakers have been announced for LinuxCon. "The conference takes place September 21 - 23, 2009 in Portland, Oregon at the Marriott Downtown Waterfront, and is co-located with the Linux Plumbers Conference. The LinuxCon keynotes represent both community and industry in keeping with the audience." Confirmed keynote speakers include Joe "Zonker" Brockmeier, Bdale Garbee, Mark Shuttleworth and Bob Sutor.
Linux Vacation / Eastern Europe 2009: registration startedRegistration is open for the Linux Vacation / Eastern Europe 2009. "The 5th International conference of developers and users of free / open source software "Linux Vacation / Eastern Europe" (LVEE 2009) will take place on July 02-05 near Grodno (Belarus). The event combines both communication and rest of the enthusiasts of free software, including GNU/Linux platform, but not limited to it. LVEE 2009 is organized by Minsk Linux Users Group with support of the open source community active members from Grodno and Brest."
NLUUG spring conference time schedule onlineThe schedule for the NLUUG spring conference is online. "The keynote at the conference will be given by Ted Ts'o, famous ext4 hacker and CTO at Linux Foundation. Other subjects at the conference will be ZFS, LogFS, DRBD, LVM, desktop search and many more. The complete program and registration form can be found at: http://www.nluug.nl/events/vj09/index.html"
OpenSource World schedule announcedThe OpenSource World Conference schedule has been announced, registration is open. The event takes place in San Francisco, CA on August 12-13, 2009.
X Developers' Conference 2009The X Developers' Conference 2009 has been announced. "The 2009 X Developers' Conference will be held at Portland State University (PSU) in Portland, Oregon, from Monday September 28 through Wednesday September 30. PSU is within walking distance of Portland's downtown area and a wide variety of dining, lodging, and public transportation options. The conference is scheduled to follow directly after Linux Plumbers Conference 2009 so that people attending both LPC and XDC can do that with a single trip."
Events: April 30, 2009 to June 29, 2009The 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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