On August 18, Google had the great pleasure of revealing its latest product, OnHub, a router powered by a Linux kernel-based operating system and designed from the ground up to provide home user with a next-generation Wi-Fi network.
Promising to offer you the fastest Wi-Fi connection always, OnHub has been designed for demanding video and audio environments, so you can enjoy your favorite multimedia content at all time without interruptions wherever you are in your home.
In a morning keynote presentation at LinuxCon, Michael Miller (Vice President of Global Alliances, Marketing and Product Management for SUSE), described himself as just a guy who likes technology. He’s also a guy who reads Scientific American and who thought that by 2015 we would all be flying jet packs to work.
In his talk, titled “Open Source code: It’s in our DNA,” Miller (who was wearing a “Keep Calm and Use Linux” t-shirt) said that although jet packs don’t appear to be the next big thing, we are on the verge of major technology changes and “software-defined everything.” In order to achieve these breakthroughs, however, we need “well-run projects and stable communities.” For this, we have the Linux Foundation collaboration framework.
Miller said that the success of open source depends on our success at collaborating and that “without collaboration, you cannot innovate.”
Referencing a Scientific American article about the success of homo sapiens, Miller said that when early humans began to work together, they became genetically encoded with a predisposition to collaborate. Thus, he said, “open source is in our DNA.”
For more from Michael Miller, see his previous interview with Linux.com.
Tuesday morning’s keynote session at LinuxCon in Seattle began with Jim Zemlin (Executive Director at The Linux Foundation) announcing the 2015 recipients of Linux Training Scholarships. This year’s 14 recipients include:
RJ Murdok (age 15, United States). RJ is getting ready to start his freshman year of high school. Despite being legally blind, he’s been learning Linux for three years and submits bug reports in his spare time.
Eva Tanaskoska (age 22, Macedonia). Eva is an information security researcher at Zero Science Lab in Skopje. She is in the process of forming a CERT team at her university, where she mentors students on using Linux to perform penetration tests, forensic investigations, and incident response.
Kevin Barry (age 32, Ireland). Kevin holds a PhD in music and taught himself programming in his spare time. He hopes to become a Linux SysAdmin to move his music department to open source.
Zemlin also announced the Core Infrastructure Initiative’s Best Practices Badge Program. This is a voluntary program to demonstrate security mindset. It’s intended to engage the community to help create best practices for secure development. Feedback on the project is requested in the form of GitHub pull requests.
Next up, Zemlin introduced Bruce Schneier (CTO, Resilient Systems), who presented his talk via Google Hangouts. Schneier began the presentation, called “Attacks, Trends and Responses,” with a discussion about the recent North Korean attack on Sony. He said the attack was surprising in a couple of significant ways. First, it was not an attack on a critical infrastructure but instead on a movie company. Second, the focus of the attack was not data theft but coercion.
Schneier said, “On the Internet today, attackers have the advantage.” He maintains that we are not actually fighting a cyberwar but are increasingly seeing war-like tactics and that technology broadly spreads these techniques.
According to Schneier, attribution of attacks is key, and countries are engaged in an arms race between attributing the attacks and hiding them. Schneier said that he is seeing more attribution of attacks and that it’s in the United States’ best interests to demonstrate that they can attribute them. However, he warned that attribution based on secret evidence is not trusted.
What’s needed, Schneier said, is “fast, flexible response” to attacks. “We need to think about resilience,” he said. “It’s going to be a complicated decade.”
For more from Bruce Schneier on the topic of security and response planning, see his previous interview with Linux.com.
This week, we kick off the 8th KVM Forum in Seatttle, Washington. With the exception of 2009, KVM Forum has been held every year since 2007, and it’s about more than just KVM — the open source hypervisor that is most often used together with oVirt or the OpenStack cloud computing platform. The conference covers KVM and QEMU (which provides hardware emulation to virtual machines), but it’s also open to talks about all layers in the open source virtualization stack. In particular, this year’s talks will also cover libvirt (virtual machine lifecycle management and a lot more), oVirt (datacenter virtualization), and OpenStack.
Daily keynote presentations will provide status reports on KVM (presented by Paolo Bonzini, Senior Principal Software Engineer, Red Hat), QEMU (Alexander Graf, Upstream Maintainer, SUSE), and Libvirt (Jiri Denemark, Red Hat).
The conference starts today with a joint hackathon in collaboration with the Xen project; KVM and Xen developers have been collaborating for a long time because Xen also uses QEMU as part of their userspace stack. Some Xen developers are also invited to QEMU Summit, an invitation-only event discussing organizational tasks for the QEMU project. And, after the hackathon and QEMU Summit, Xen and KVM will have a joint evening event as well. KVM Forum’s talk sessions will then start on Wednesday morning, lasting until Friday. The schedule is available online at sched.org.
Whenever possible, similarly-themed talks are placed back-to-back in the afternoon, so that people do not have to switch rooms. For example, there will be sessions about the QEMU “block device” (storage) layer, sessions about the virtio paravirtual devices, sessions about Network Function Virtualization, and so on. A new feature this year is tutorials; we have one a new testing harness (Avocado) with support for virtualization tests and one on the Coccinelle semantic patching tool.
A tradition that we’ve upheld for a few years is to leave some space in the last day for talks related to the higher levels of the stack (above QEMU). Usually these are called the “management layers”; they store configuration for the virtual machines, start and dispatch commands to the low-level layers, and orchestrate tasks spanning multiple host machines. In contrast, KVM and QEMU are the programs that actually do the work of running a virtual machine, but they are generally stateless and have a very limited view of what happens outside a particular VM. (This is by design: isolated components can also be secured more easily). Around half of the Friday talks will cover libvirt and oVirt.
In addition to the hackathon, face-to-face interaction is stimulated by “birds of a feather” (BoF) sessions and informal hallway gatherings. BoFs start at 5:30pm, after the talks, and usually go on until people leave for dinner. Because we co-locate with other Linux Foundation conferences, the hallway track is a unique occasion to meet people.
KVM Forum wraps up on Friday, August 21st. Before everyone leaves, we will take a group photo, and a leader from each BoF will summarize the topics that were discussed. Then, it will be time to say goodbye — until KVM Forum 2016!
(Guest blog contributed by Paolo Bonzini.)
Opera developers have released the next 32 Beta upgrade for the Opera web browser, and it marks the beginning of another development cycle. Now that all the platforms have reached feature parity, we expect to see the new version land on Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X.
Opera has been rebased on Chromium a while back, and the support for Linux took almost a full year to arrive. In any case, Opera for Linux is now a citizen with equal rights and all the features…
