Category Archive

How are the Linux vendors addressing the recently-exposed Intel processor flaw? I asked Red Hat and got some solid answers. What is the nature of the problem? Discovered some time ago, but only just yesterday brought into public view, the CPU flaw allows an attacker to bypass restrictions to gain access to privileged memory (which should be inaccessible) — possibly … Read More

Linux kernel maintainers Greg Kroah-Hartman and Ben Hutchings have released new versions of the Linux 4.14, 4.9, 4.4, 3.16, 3.18, and 3.12 LTS (Long Term Support) kernel series that apparently patch one of the two critical security flaws affecting most modern processors. The Linux 4.14.11, 4.9.74, 4.4.109, 3.16.52, 3.18.91, and 3.2.97 kernels are now available to download from the kernel.org website, and users … Read More

The Linux Foundation works through our projects, training and certification programs, events and more to bring people of all backgrounds into open source. We meet a lot of people, but find the drive and enthusiasm of some of our youngest community members to be especially infectious. In the past couple of months, we’ve invited 13-year-old algorithmist and cognitive developer Tanmay Bakshi, … Read More

Containers are all the rage, and with good reason. As discussed previously, containers allow you to quickly and easily deploy new services and applications onto your network, without requiring too much in the way of added system resources. Containers are more cost-effective than using dedicated hardware or virtual machines, and they’re easier to update and reuse. Best of all, containers love … Read More

In October 2017, the Linux kernel team agreed to extend the next version of Linux’s Long Term Support (LTS) from two years to six years, Linux 4.14. This helps Android, embedded Linux, and Linux Internet of Things (IoT) developers. But this move did not mean all future Linux LTS versions will have a six-year lifespan. As Konstantin Ryabitsev, The Linux Foundation‘s director of IT … Read More

Kubernetes has become the cloud container orchestration program. Red Hat jumped on the Kubernetes bandwagon early in 2015. Today, Red Hat is all in, with the release of the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 3.7. This latest version of Red Hat’s enterprise-grade Kubernetes container application platform is meant for building and managing containers from the data center to the public cloud. When Red Hat says … Read More

In the early days of open source, one of the primary goals of the open source community was educating people about the benefits of open source and why they should use it. Today, open source is ubiquitous. Almost everyone is using it. That has created a unique challenge around educating new users about the open source development model and ensuring … Read More

Fifteen people from 13 different countries have received Linux Foundation Training Scholarships(LiFT) in the category of Linux Newbies. This year, 27 people received scholarships across all categories — the most ever awarded by the Foundation. Now in its seventh year, the program awards training scholarships to current and aspiring IT professionals worldwide who may not otherwise have the means for specialized training. The Foundation … Read More

Bank executives today who want to stay abreast of new technologies are compelled to wade through a swamp of buzzwords, none buzzier than “blockchain.” Such is the proliferation of projects—public, permissionless blockchains such as Ethereum’s, which anyone can use, alongside private, “permissioned” blockchains such as R3’s Corda—and competing schools of thought, each with its loud partisans competing for mindshare at … Read More

Mark Shuttleworth’s all-snap Ubuntu system dream is soon becoming a reality as the Ubuntu developers are currently discussing a strategy to bring Snaps by default in the upcoming release, Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. Snap, the universal Linux binary format from Canonical, allows us to run the most recent versions of apps on day one. The developers of the Ubuntu MATE official Ubuntu flavor pioneered … Read More

Containers are all the rage in IT — with good reason. Containers are lightweight, standalone packages that contain everything needed to run an application (code, libraries, runtime, system settings, and dependencies). Each container is deployed with its own CPU, memory, block I/O, and network resources, all without having to depend upon an individual kernel and operating system. And that is … Read More

Everyone and their uncle has decided to use Kubernetes for cloud container management. Even Kubernetes’ former rivals, Docker Swarm and Mesosphere, have thrown in the towel. Mesosphere came over in early October and Docker added Kubernetes support later the same month. There was only question: Would all these Kubernetes implementations work together? Thanks to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation(CNCF), the answer is yes. CNCF, which is Kubernetes’ parent … Read More

The developers of the Deepin Linux operating system announced today the availability of the first beta release of Deepin 15.5, the next maintenance update to the stable series. Continuing to provide the Linux community with one of the most beautiful, safe, reliable, and easy to use computer operating system, Deepin 15.5 entered beta today with a bunch of new security … Read More

Linux rules supercomputing. This day has been coming since 1998, when Linux first appeared on the TOP500 Supercomputer list. Today it finally happened: All 500 of the world’s fastest supercomputers are running Linux. The last two non-Linux systems, a pair of Chinese IBM POWER computers running AIX, dropped off the November 2017 TOP500 Supercomputer list. Overall, China now leads the supercomputing race with 202 … Read More

In the public cloud world, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure may be the most commonly known providers. Mark Collier, chief operating officer of the OpenStack Foundation, however, is getting the message out that OpenStack is a growing player in the public cloud market too. Collier delivered his message about the current state of OpenStack public cloud … Read More