Linux 5.6 Seeing Random Changes, New “Insecure” Option With GRND_INSECURE

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January 8, 2020

The recent work by longtime kernel developer Andy Lutomirski on improving Linux’s random APIs and introducing a new “GRND_INSECURE” option is now queued into the random dev queue ahead of the Linux 5.6 cycle.

These changes to the random number generation add a new GRND_INSECURE flag for getentropy() and removes the blocking pool (though /dev/random can still block after the system has booted). These changes provide for some code cleanups and GRND_INSECURE allows returning potentially “insecure” random data.

[Source: Phoronix]

11 top open-source API testing tools

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Swapnil Bhartiya

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January 8, 2020

How do you find the right open-source API testing tool for your needs? While most vendors are talking up the benefits of AI- and UI-based testing tools in general, AI- and machine learning-based applications that help with API testing have arrived. Before you begin API testing, however, make sure you understand test automation basics and know how to avoid the most common test automation mistakes.

[Source: TechBeacon]

The open source licence debate: dead project walking & incentive models

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Swapnil Bhartiya

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January 8, 2020

If you don’t accept the options offered by the community contribution model of development, then you risk becoming a Proprietary 2.0 behemoth… or so the T-shirt slogan might go. But the issue of how open source software is licenced is still the stuff of some debate.

Chief operating officer (COO) for GitHub is Erica Brescia. Brescia has pointed out that the industry is witnessing rising levels of tension between open source projects (and open source development shops) and those commercially motivated organizations that are building services on top of open source, such as cloud vendors with their database services. So how do we move forward with open source?

[Source: ComputerWeekly.com]

flexiWAN Open Source SD-WAN Platform Hits GA

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Swapnil Bhartiya

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January 8, 2020

flexiWAN launched the first stable release of its open-source SD-WAN platform, which is available through one of the company’s hardware partners: Advantech, Lanner, and Silicom.

“This release is a major milestone for flexiWAN and our community as it is the world’s first production-ready open and community-driven SD-WAN solution,” said Amir Zmora, CEO and co-founder of flexiWAN, in a statement. “Our innovation and openness doesn’t stop at the technical level. By offering our services as a freemium business model, along with publicly sharing our pricing and source code with the community, we strive to lead the industry to more openness.”

[Source: SDxCentral]

With friends like AWS, who needs an open source business?

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Swapnil Bhartiya

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January 7, 2020

In response to the article, Andi Gutmans, vice-president of analytics and ElastiCache at AWS, wrote a blog post claiming that customers have repeatedly asked AWS to offer managed services for Elasticsearch and other popular open source projects.

“A number of maintainers of open source projects build commercial companies around the open source project,” he said. Open source licensing aims to encourage innovation by enabling contributors to build new functionality as a branch of the core open source code. The project maintainer can then choose to incorporate this contribution into the core code.

[Source: ComputerWeekly.com]

SUSE and Karunya Institute of Technology and Sciences collaborate to enhance cloud and open source learning

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Swapnil Bhartiya

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January 7, 2020

The SUSE Academic Program, the education arm of SUSE, and Karunya Institute of Technology and Sciences (KITS), have signed an MoU to collaborate in providing Linux and open source learning and skills to students. The program aims to provide aspiring professionals with essential technical expertise and help them leverage opportunities in the cloud job market via “SUSE Certified Administrator (SCA) in Enterprise Linux” certification.

SUSE will support the program with all course materials for cloud-related technologies such as DevOps, cloud application development, cloud administration, and enterprise Linux.

[Source: CRN]

Diversity: Why open source needs to work on it in 2020

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Swapnil Bhartiya

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January 7, 2020

Sometimes the answer to a problem is hiding in plain sight. Take, for example, the problem of diversity in tech and, specifically, in open source software. If we look at US Bureau of Labor data, 21.2% of professional developers are female. According to a 2017 GitHub open source survey, however, 95% of respondents were male and just 3% were female (1% identified as non-binary). It turns out that 68% of the female respondents are “very interested” in contributing to open source, but are significantly less likely to do so than men (45% vs. 61%).

[Source: Tech Republic]

Dell Unveils 2020 XPS 13 Linux Laptop with Fingerprint Reader, Ubuntu 18.04 LTS

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Swapnil Bhartiya

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January 7, 2020

Dell kicked off 2020 by announcing the 10th generation XPS 13 Developer Edition laptop with Ubuntu Linux preloaded, fingerprint-reader support, up to 32GB of RAM, and 10th Gen Intel Core CPUs.

World, please meet the Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition laptop, which continues Dell’s Project Sputnik and its Linux portfolio by offering customers the latest and greatest XPS 13 laptop powered by 10th Gen Intel Core 10nm mobile processors and up to 32GB of RAM.

[Source: Softpedia]

Linux in 2020: 27.8 million lines of code in the kernel, 1.3 million in systemd

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Swapnil Bhartiya

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January 7, 2020

The Linux kernel has around 27.8 million lines of code in its Git repository, up from 26.1 million a year ago, while systemd now has nearly 1.3 million lines of code, according to GitHub stats analysed by Michael Larabel at Phoronix.

There were nearly 75,000 code commits to the kernel during 2019 which is actually slightly down on 2018 (80,000 commits), and the lowest number since 2013. The top contributors by email domain were Intel and Red Hat (Google’s general gmail.com aside) and the top contributing individuals were Linus Torvalds, with 3.19 per cent of the commits, followed by David Miller (Red Hat) and Chris Wilson (Intel). There were 4,189 different contributors overall.

[Source: The Register]

Tips for implementing an open source storage solution

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Swapnil Bhartiya

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January 6, 2020

Open source storage is a solution that solves vertical and pain point challenges. There are many scenarios where it is not necessary. Organisations might just want to hold onto the data they have. In this instance, an S3 bucket or Blobstore API will cover them.

But, implementing an open source storage solution makes sense for targeted use cases. Lustre is a good example if your organisation needs to do some aggressive high performance computing. “For those sorts of workloads, Lustre is extremely mature,” said Stephen Manley, chief technologist at Druva. “It’s extremely well integrated into the ecosystem.”

[Source: Information Age]