Security Bug in Xen May Have Exposed Amazon, Other Cloud Services

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October 1, 2014

The Xen Project has published a security advisory that could affect millions of virtualized servers running in Amazon’s cloud and other public hosting services. A flaw in the Xen hypervisor could allow a malicious fully virtualized server to read data about other virtualized systems running on the same physical hardware or the hypervisor hosting the virtual machine. The malicious system could also potentially crash the server hosting the virtual machines. A patch, which was privately disclosed last week under embargo, has been issued to correct the issue.

Xen is used by a number of public and private cloud providers to support infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offerings such as Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud, RackSpace, and some configurations of the OpenStack cloud provisioning environment. The flaw, discovered by Jan Beulich at SUSE, affects servers configured to support hardware-assisted virtualization (HVM) mode virtualization. HVM lets operating systems use hardware extensions that give them faster access to the physical server’s hardware, and it uses software emulation of other Intel platform hardware to allow those operating systems to run without modification. Windows virtual machines running on Xen require HVM support.

[$] How Implementation Details Become ABI: A Case Study

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LWN

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October 1, 2014

One of the final changes that went into the mainline kernel repository before the 3.17-rc7 release was this fix from Mikhail Efremov. It affects some low-level code within the virtual filesystem layer that manages name changes in the dentry structure — the structure that handles the mapping between file names and in-kernel inode structures. How that change came to be necessary makes a good lesson in how unintended behaviors can become part of the kernel’s ABI over time.

SMPlayer 14.9 Review – One of the Best Movie Players for Linux

By

Chris7mas

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October 1, 2014

SMPlayer is a powerful video player for Linux and Windows, based on MPlayer, with countless features and options. Together with VLC, I believe there is no match for it when it comes to movie players.

In this article I will overview the main things that make SMPlayer stand out of the crowd, putting it on the top of the video playback applications list. SMPlayer is written in Qt 4.8 and uses MPlayer2 for video playback. Personally I have only words of praise for this player, which is why I decided to write this review. So let’s proceed and see what the most important features of SMPlayer are.

SMPlayer 14.9 Review – One of the Best Movie Players for Linux

Mir 0.8 Works On Less ABI Breakage, Touchspots, Responsiveness

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Phoronix

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October 1, 2014

While Ubuntu 14.10 on the desktop isn’t using Mir by default, Mir 0.8.0 is being prepared for release by Canonical and it has a number of interesting changes…

Borderlands 2 Released For Linux With A Sale

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GamingOnLinux

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October 1, 2014

The day has landed folks. Borderlands 2 is now officially available for Linux and it brings us some excellent FPS action.

Courtesy of our friends at Aspyr Media the new port may have a few rough edges (what new port doesn’t?), but it’s a really great game to have on our platform. The game is also on sale, so there’s never been a better time to pickup a copy, or if you already owned it be sure to grab some DLC to show your support.

NVIDIA Issues Updated 340.46 Long-Lived Driver Release

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Phoronix

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October 1, 2014

NVIDIA on Tuesday released an updated Linux x86/x86_64/ARM graphics driver in their 340.xx long-lived branch…

The Shellshock FAQ: Here’s What You Need to Know

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ZDNet

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October 1, 2014

Am I vulnerable? How serious are the attacks? The answers to these and many other Shellshock questions are here for you.

Read more at Enterprise Open Source Toolkit

Open Source Goes Corporate at Samsung

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OpenSource.com

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October 1, 2014

The list of major corporations getting involved with open source communities is persistently growing, a trend evidenced by the rapidly expanding financial backing of open source foundations like the Linux Foundation. Samsung is one of these companies through its Open Source Group which was established in February of 2013. It’s part of an effort to bridge the gap between the company and the open source communities it relies on and to promote the use and development of open source technology within many sectors of the company.

Arduino to Sell 3D Printer—$800 in Kit Form or $1,000 Pre-Assembled

By

ArsTechnica

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September 30, 2014

Arduino

Arduino, maker of the open source hardware platform of the same name, is teaming up with a startup called Sharebot to sell a 3D printer for about $1,000.

Announced today, Materia 101 will be demonstrated at the Maker Faire in Rome this weekend. An on-sale date has not been revealed.

“The printer will be available only on the Arduino Store both as a kit and pre-assembled,” the announcement said. “Official pricing of the device will be disclosed at a later date but the kit will sell for less than 600 EUR/800 USD, while the pre-assembled version will be available for less than 700 EUR/1000 USD.”

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Intel, Cisco, HP, Others Form NFV Consortium

By

eWeek

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September 30, 2014

The OPNFV will be a project at the Linux Foundation to create an open-source reference platform for NFV.