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[$] LWN.net Weekly Edition for February 16, 2012

corbet — 2012-02-16T02:46:30+00:00

The LWN.net Weekly Edition for February 16, 2012 is available.

[$] Book review: Open Advice

jake — 2012-02-15T20:21:51+00:00

The recently released Open Advice has much to offer those who are new to free software and its communities, but there is plenty of interest to veterans as well. It is a collection of essays from an auspicious number of contributors (42) to free and open source software (FOSS) that centers around the idea of "what we wish we had known when we started". As might be guessed, the book encompasses more than that—it ranges all over the FOSS map—including recollections, war stories, philosophical musings, academic research, and good advice. Subscribers can click below for the full review from this week's edition.

[$] Linux support for ARM big.LITTLE

jake — 2012-02-15T14:39:04+00:00

ARM Ltd recently announced the big.LITTLE architecture consisting of a twist on the SMP systems that we've all gotten accustomed to. Instead of having a bunch of identical CPU cores put together in a system, the big.LITTLE architecture is effectively pushing the concept further by pulling two different SMP systems together: one being a set of "big" and fast processors, the other one consisting of "little" and power-efficient processors. Subscribers can click below for a look at supporting this architecture in Linux from guest author Nicolas Pitre.

LWN.net Weekly Edition for February 9, 2012

corbet — 2012-02-09T01:34:50+00:00

The LWN.net Weekly Edition for February 9, 2012 is available.

XBMC 11 "Eden"

jake — 2012-02-08T17:01:14+00:00

XBMC, the open source media center, has steadily grown from its humble origins as an X-Box only replacement environment into the cross-platform, de facto playback front-end for multimedia content. It merges the file-centric approach taken by traditional video players with an add-on scripting environment that handles remote web content. The project is currently finalizing its next major release, version 11.0 (codenamed Eden), which includes updates to the networking and video acceleration subsystems, broader hardware support, and numerous changes to the APIs available to add-on developers.

Click below (subscribers only) for the full review.

LWN.net Weekly Edition for February 2, 2012

corbet — 2012-02-02T01:26:00+00:00

The LWN.net Weekly Edition for February 2, 2012 is available.

A tempest in a toybox

corbet — 2012-02-01T16:26:38+00:00

The eLinux.org web site is currently promoting a project to write a replacement for Busybox under a permissive license. Normally, the writing of more free software is seen as a good thing, but, in this case, there have been complaints about the perceived motivation behind the project. What this discussion shows is that there are some divisions within our community on how our licenses should be enforced - and even what those licenses say.

LWN.net Weekly Edition for January 26, 2012

corbet — 2012-01-26T02:07:09+00:00

The LWN.net Weekly Edition for January 26, 2012 is available.

Robots rampage (in a friendly way) at SCALE 10X

jake — 2012-01-25T19:50:43+00:00

"World domination" is a less prevalent theme in Linux and open source discussions these days than it was some time ago, but it still comes up regularly in one field of study: robots. At the 2012 Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE) in Los Angeles, Willow Garage's Tully Foote described the Robot Operating System (ROS) project, an open source stack for state-of-the-art robotics. ROS is in use by industry and academic research projects, often on hardware that runs in the hundreds-of-thousands of dollars range, but it is capable of running on low end and homebrew robots, too.

Click below (subscribers only) for the full report from SCALE 10x.

XFS: the filesystem of the future?

corbet — 2012-01-20T20:01:35+00:00

Linux has a lot of filesystems, but two of them (ext4 and btrfs) tend to get most of the attention. In his 2012 linux.conf.au talk, XFS developer Dave Chinner served notice that he thinks more users should be considering XFS. His talk covered work that has been done to resolve the biggest scalability problems in XFS and where he thinks things will go in the future. If he has his way, we will see a lot more XFS around in the coming years.

LWN.net Weekly Edition for January 19, 2012

corbet — 2012-01-19T02:28:46+00:00

The LWN.net Weekly Edition for January 19, 2012 is available.

LCA: Addressing the failure of open source

corbet — 2012-01-17T22:05:11+00:00

Bruce Perens wore a suit and tie for his linux.conf.au 2012 keynote for a reason, he said: it reflects our community's need to think more about how it appears to the rest of the world. Despite our many successes, he said, we have failed to achieve the goals that our community set for itself many years ago. We have failed to engage and educate our users, and are finding ourselves pulled into an increasingly constrained world. To get out of this mess, we will have to make some changes - and expand our scope beyond software and culture.

LCA: A Samba 4 update

corbet — 2012-01-16T19:18:29+00:00

The systems administration miniconf at the 2012 linux.conf.au hosted 'a casual conversation' with a group of core Samba developers on the project's near future roadmap and the plans for Samba 4. Andrew "Tridge" Tridgell led off by saying that the last a lot of people had heard about the project's plans came from "an article in a disreputable web site." The discussion reported on there was "very exciting," in that it moved the project's point of view on the Samba 4 release from "someday" to "let's get ready for a release." Since then, things have gotten quiet, but that does not mean that nothing has been happening.

Click below (subscribers only) for the full report from LCA 2012.

LWN.net Weekly Edition for January 12, 2012

corbet — 2012-01-12T01:52:19+00:00

The LWN.net Weekly Edition for January 12, 2012 is available.

Denial of service via hash collisions

jake — 2012-01-11T20:23:34+00:00

Developers for several scripting language projects are currently scrambling to fix a newly-disclosed denial of service vulnerability caused by predictable hashing algorithms. As it happens, the term "newly disclosed" does not quite apply here, though: the problem has been known since 2003. Click below (subscribers only) for a description of this problem, its history, and its solution from this week's Security Page.

The Nook Tablet and the GPL

corbet — 2012-01-10T20:36:17+00:00

Recently, certain corners of the net have carried the claim that Barnes & Noble is refusing to release the source for the kernel shipped in its "Nook Tablet" book reader device. That, of course, would be a violation of the kernel's licensing. GPL violations are far from unheard of in the mobile electronics market, but B&N is a company with a high-enough profile to attract special attention. A look at what is going on suggests that there is less to the story than meets the eye - but it still merits a look.

Click below (subscribers only) for the full story.

LWN.net Weekly Edition for January 5, 2012

corbet — 2012-01-05T01:05:57+00:00

The LWN.net Weekly Edition for January 5, 2012 is available.

The logger meets linux-kernel

corbet — 2012-01-04T19:20:33+00:00

Toward the end of December, LWN looked at the new push to move various subsystems specific to Android kernels into the mainline. There seems to be broad agreement that merging this code makes sense, but that agreement becomes rather less clear once the discussion moves to the merging of specific subsystems. Tim Bird's request for comments on the Android "logger" mechanism shows that, even with a relatively simple piece of code, there is still a lot of room for disagreement and problems can turn out to be larger than expected.

Linux at the end of the world (our 2012 predictions)

corbet — 2012-01-03T21:56:23+00:00

Welcome to 2012. This is the first LWN Weekly Edition of the year, and that can only mean one thing: it is time for your editor to go out on a limb and make a number of predictions for the coming year that, by the end of the year, will look thoroughly clueless and misguided. Even your editor can foresee, though, that it is going to be an interesting and highly political year. Click below (subscribers only) to see what foolishness has been predicted for 2012.

LWN.net Weekly Edition for December 22, 2011

corbet — 2011-12-22T01:43:14+00:00

The LWN.net Weekly Edition for December 22, 2011 is available.