Intel revealed USB4 patches to the Linux kernel mailing list on Tuesday. If approved, these patches will provide basic USB4 support to the Linux kernel. The USB Implementers Forum first announced USB4 specs in early September. Some of the new features include 40 Gbps maximum speed, some backward compatibility with Thunderbolt 3 devices and USB Type-C Port support. Here you’ll find everything we know about USB4. Phoronix initially reported on the patches. There are 22 total to help provide USB4 support. The new support code is essentially re-using the kernel’s Thunderbolt drive. (Tom’s Hardware)
CNCF’s Envoy report card shows Google, Lyft are top of contributing class
The CNCF has delivered a report card on Envoy, the open source edge and service proxy which is usually mentioned alongside the words Kubernetes or service mesh. The report comes a year after Envoy graduated from the CNCF incubation process, and the headline scores are 1,700 contributors, who have made 10,300 code commits, 5,700 pull requests and 51,000 contributions overall. (DevClass)
Kong Employs Machine Learning to Extend Services Control
At the Kong Summit 2019 conference, Kong today announced it has acquired Insomnia, an open source testing tool for application programming interfaces (APIs). In addition, it has added support for REST, Kafka Streams, gRPC, GraphQL and plugins written in Go to its service control platform. (DevOps)
IBM and Canonical work together in financial services
Mark Shuttleworth, founder and CEO of Canonical, Ubuntu Linux’s parent company, and Ross Mauri, general manager of IBM Z and LinuxONE, jointly hosted an event for senior IT financial services executives. Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols wrote that during the event the two companies told the managers about the advantages of running financial services on mainframe cloud systems based on Ubuntu Linux. Why? After all, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) runs just as well on the Z series as Ubuntu Linux. In an interview, Shuttleworth explained, “Customers want the security of the mainframe and the flexibility of Ubuntu. Some ask for Ubuntu and Z and IBM gives them that option.” (ZDNet)
Open Source in VMware Tanzu
VMware today announced that the company is moving several of its key cloud native open source projects to a new GitHub organization at: github.com/vmware-tanzu. Announced at the recent VMworld, Tanzu is a new overarching portfolio of projects, products, and services for building, running, and managing modern applications and infrastructure. Joe Beda, a Principal Engineer at VMware, wrote in a blog post, “We’ll be moving three key projects to this new GitHub organization right away: Velero, Sonobuoy, and Octant. Other key cloud native projects will be moved over time.” (Source: VMware)
A New Linux Memory Controller Promises to Save Lots of RAM
Roman Gushchin, a member of Facebook’s Linux kernel engineering team, has proposed a brand new slab memory controller for the Linux kernel. This new slab memory controller promises to provide a much-improved memory utilization between multiple memory cgroups, via sharing slab pages. (TNS)
Streamlit launches open source machine learning application development framework
Streamlit, a new machine learning startup from industry veterans, who worked at GoogleX and Zoox, launched today with a $6 million seed investment and a flexible new open source tool to make it easier for machine learning engineers to create custom applications to interact with the data in their models. (TechCrunch)
What is YAML?
Originally YAML stood for Yet Another Markup Language; it was renamed to read YAML Ain’t Markup Language to make it clear that unlike SGML and HTML that are languages for documents, it’s designed for data. Those are the same kinds of things you’d do with XML – but unlike XML or JSON, it’s designed to be a format that humans can read and write easily, which is why projects like Ansible picked it over other options. The YAML web site is easy to read – and it’s also valid YAML code.
(ITPro)
Docker is in deep trouble
Docker, the technology, is the poster child for containers. But it appears Docker, the business, is in trouble. In a leaked memo, Docker CEO Rob Bearden praised workers — despite the “uncertainty [which] brings with it significant challenges” and “persevering in spite of the lack of clarity we’ve had these past few weeks.” (ZDNet)
Leave GNOME alone: This patent troll is asking for trouble
Rothschild Patent Imaging (RPI) suing the GNOME Foundation for violating its “wireless image distribution system and method patent” (US Patent No. 9,936,086) doesn’t make much sense. But when has that ever stopped a patent troll? The GNOME application in question, Shotwell, is a personal photo manager. Its functionality, which has Rothschild all hot and bothered, is that — like all other end-user photo programs — it can import and organize pictures. For relief, Rothschild demands that either this functionality be removed or the company be awarded a “running royalty from the time of judgment going forward.” (Source: ZDNet)