Vote for Your Favorite Linux SBC and Be Entered to Win a Free Board

By

-

June 6, 2018

Vote for your favorite open-spec, Linux- or Android-ready single board computers priced under $200.

It’s time again for LinuxGizmos’ annual reader survey of single board computers. They’ve identified 116 SBCs that fit their requirements — up from 98 boards in the June 2017 survey. Make your picks from the new list of under $200, hacker-friendly SBCs that run Linux or Android, and you could win one of 15 prizes.

Take the survey!

15 hacker SBC prizes

In the brief survey, you can select up to three boards and answer a few questions about buying criteria and intended applications. By completing the survey, you will earn a chance to be among 15 randomly selected winners who will receive free boards donated by Aaeon UP, Qualcomm and Gumstix.

The prizes this time around include five Qualcomm DragonBoard 410c development boards and five Chatterbox Raspberry Pi Expansion boards from Gumstix (Rasp Pi not included). There are also five different Aaeon UP board models including an UP, an UP Squared, and an UP Core, as well as the new UP Core Plus and AI Core module with a Myriad 2 VPU. See more details at LinuxGizmos.

More Raspberry Pi?

Last year’s results saw an overwhelming taste for Pi, with the Raspberry Pi 3 in the top spot, the Raspberry Pi Zero W in second, and the Cortex-A53 based Raspberry Pi 2 in third. Vote now for your favorites and stay tuned for the results.

Intel and AMD Reveal New Processor Designs

By

Eric Brown

-

June 6, 2018

With this week’s Computex show in Taipei and other recent events, processors are front and center in the tech news cycle. Intel made several announcements ranging from new Core processors to a cutting-edge technology for extending battery life. AMD, meanwhile, unveiled a second-gen, 32-core Threadripper CPU for high-end gaming and revealed some new Ryzen chips including some embedded friendly models.

Here’s a quick tour of major announcements from Intel and AMD, focusing on those processors of greatest interest to embedded Linux developers.

Intel’s latest 8th Gen CPUs

In April, Intel announced that mass production of its 10nm fabricated Cannon Lake generation of Core processors would be delayed until 2019, which led to more grumbling about Moore’s Law finally running its course. Yet, there were plenty of consolation prizes in Intel’s Computex showcase. Intel revealed two power-efficient, 14nm 8th Gen Core product families, as well as its first 5GHz designs.

The Whiskey Lake U-series and Amber Lake Y-series Core chips will arrive in more than 70 different laptop and 2-in-1 models starting this fall. The chips will bring “double digit performance gains” compared to 7th Gen Kaby Lake Core CPUs, said Intel. The new product families are more power efficient than the Coffee Lake chips that are now starting to arrive in products.

Both Whiskey Lake and Amber Lake will provide Intel’s higher performance gigabit WiFi ((Intel 9560 AC), which is also appearing on the new Gemini Lake Pentium Silver and Celeron SoCs, the follow-ups to the Apollo Lake generation. Gigabit WiFi is essentially Intel’s spin on 802.11ac with 2×2 MU-MIMO and 160MHz channels.

Intel’s Whiskey Lake is a continuation of the 7th and 8th Gen Skylake U-series processors, which have been popular on embedded equipment. Intel had few details, but Whiskey Lake will presumably offer the same, relatively low 15W TDPs. It’s also likely that like the Coffee Lake U-series chips it will be available in quad-core models as well as the dual-core only Kaby Lake and Skylake U-Series chips.

The Amber Lake Y-series chips will primarily target 2-in-1s. Like the dual-core Kaby Lake Y-Series chips, Amber Lake will offer 4.5W TDPs, reports PC World.

To celebrate Intel’s upcoming 50th anniversary, as well as the 40th anniversary of the first 8086 processor, Intel will launch a limited edition, 8th Gen Core i7-8086K CPU with a clock rate of 4GHz. The limited edition, 64-bit offering will be its first chip with 5GHz, single-core turbo boost speed, and the first 6-core, 12-thread processor with integrated graphics. Intel will be giving away 8,086 of the overclockable Core i7-8086K chips starting on June 7.

Intel also revealed plans to launch a new high-end Core X series with high core and thread counts by the end of the year. AnandTech predicts that this will use the Xeon-like Cascade Lake architecture. Later this year, it will announce new Core S-series models, which AnandTech projects will be octa-core Coffee Lake chips.

Intel also said that the first of its speedy Optane SSDs — an M.2 form-factor product called the 905P — is finally available. Due later this year is an Intel XMM 800 series modem that supports Sprint’s 5G cellular technology. Intel says 5G-enabled PCs will arrive in 2019.

Intel promises all day laptop battery life

In other news, Intel says it will soon launch an Intel Low Power Display Technology that will provide all-day battery life on laptops. Co-developers Sharp and Innolux are using the technology for a late-2018 launch of a 1W display panel that can cut LCD power consumption in half.

AMD keeps on ripping

At Computex, AMD unveiled a second generation Threadripper CPU with 32 cores and 64 threads. The high-end gaming processor will launch in the third quarter to go head to head with Intel’s unnamed 28-core monster. According to Engadget, the new Threadripper adopts the same 12nm Zen+ architecture used by its Ryzen chips.

AMD also said it was sampling a 7nm Vega Instinct GPU designed for graphics cards with 32GB of expensive HBM2 memory rather than GDDR5X or GDDR6. The Vega Instinct will offer 35 percent greater performance and twice the power efficiency of the current 14nm Vega GPUs. New rendering capabilities will help it compete with Nvidia’s CUDA enabled GPUs in ray tracing, says WCCFTech.

Some new Ryzen 2000-series processors recently showed up on an ASRock CPU chart that have the lowest power efficiency of the mainstream Ryzen chips. As detailed on AnandTech, the 2.8GHz, octa-core, 16-thread Ryzen 7 2700E and 3.4GHz/3.9GHz, hexa-core, 12-thread Ryzen 5 2600E each have 45W TDPs. This is higher than the 12-54W TDPs of its Ryzen Embedded V1000 SoCs, but lower than the 65W and up mainstream Ryzen chips. The new Ryzen-E models are aimed at SFF (small form factor) and fanless systems.

Join us at Open Source Summit + Embedded Linux Conference Europe in Edinburgh, UK on October 22-24, 2018, for 100+ sessions on Linux, Cloud, Containers, AI, Community, and more.

10 Open Source Security Tools You Should Know

By

Dark Reading

-

June 6, 2018

Open source tools can be the basis for solid security and intense learning. Here are 10 you should know about for your IT security toolkit.

In many ways, security starts with understanding the situation. For a couple of generations of IT security professionals, understanding their networks’ vulnerabilities starts with Nessus from Tenable. According to sectools.org, Nessus is the most popular vulnerability scanner and third most popular security program currently in use.

Nessus comes in both free and commercial versions. The current version, Nessus 7.1.0, is a commercial program, though it is free for personal home use. Version 2, which was current as of 2005, is still open source and free.

Open-Source Security: Zip Slip Critical Flaw Hits Thousands of Projects. Update Now

By

ZDNet

-

June 6, 2018

Security firm Snyk has disclosed a widespread and critical flaw in multiple archive file-extraction libraries found in thousands of open-source web application projects from HP, Amazon, Apache, Oracle, LinkedIn, Twitter and others.

As Snyk explains, some ecosystems, such as Java, don’t provide a central software library for fully unpacking archive files, leading developers to write their own code snippets to enable that functionality.

Snyk has published a list on GitHub of affected archive processing libraries for Java, .NET, Oracle, Apache, Ruby, and Go software.

Samsung’s Chromebook Plus Now Supports Linux Apps

By

The Verge

-

June 6, 2018

Google began bringing Linux app support to Chrome OS almost exactly one month ago, but it only started with a single device, the very expensive Pixelbook. Now, that’s changing: Linux support is becoming available for Samsung’s Chromebook Plus as well, as spotted by users on Reddit.

This still isn’t a widely available feature or something that most Chromebook users will want to check out. You’ll have to opt-in to the developer-only build of Chrome OS, enable things labeled as beta and experimental, and then use the Terminal to install Linux apps.

GPU Virtualization Update

By

Mark Filion

-

June 6, 2018

A few months ago, Robert Foss wrote a blog post about virtualizing GPU Access. In his post, Robert explained the architecture of the GPU virtualization stack and, how to build and run a VM with hardware acceleration. In this post, Elie looks at the major improvements which landed upstream during these pasts 3 months.

By Elie Tournier, Software Engineer at Collabora.

tl;dr:

QEMU can now use OpenGL ES acceleration.
Virglrenderer is close to be OpenGL ES 2.0 compliant.
We are still working on OpenGL ES 3.0.

For each component of the stack, I will explain the added modifications and our plan for the future.

Virglrenderer

At Collabora, we have been working as part of the upstream community to add new features and improve the code base.

Most of our work consisted in adding more caps to support OpenGL ES 3.0 on OpenGL ES and to find some workarounds for the missing OpenGL ES features. For example, OpenGL ES does not support 1D texture so we have to use a 2D texture with one of the component set to 0.5.

On my system, KabyLake with Mesa 18.0, I obtained the following results:

Android OpenGL ES 2.0 CTS on OpenGL backend: 4 failures
Android OpenGL ES 2.0 CTS on OpenGL ES backend: 4 failures
Android OpenGL ES 3.0 CTS on OpenGL backend: 40 failures
Android OpenGL ES 3.0 CTS on OpenGL ES backend: ~2400 failures

The OpenGL ES 2.0 CTS failures seems to be driver related. The tests fail on my system but pass on r600.

The difference between OpenGL ES 3.0 results might seem scary but a single fix should take care of it. These failures are due to the fact that we don’t support reading back results from integer (as opposed to floating-point) rendering, so all the tests for integer formats fall.

QEMU

Status

We can, since 4867e47, create an OpenGL ES context. Thanks to this, we can now run QEMU on a system that only supports OpenGL ES.

Running QEMU on an OpenGL ES backend.

If you want to try it out, you can follow the guide from Robert’s blog. The only difference is the command line to run the WM, you just need to replace -sdl,gl=on by -sdl,gl=es.

So it will become:

qemu-system-x86_64 
    -enable-kvm -M q35 -smp 2 -m 4G 
    -hda ubuntu.qcow2 
    -net nic,model=virtio 
    -net user,hostfwd=tcp::2222-:22 
    -vga virtio 
    -display sdl,gl=es

Others flags are also available:
-sdl,gl=core Force to create an OpenGL context.
-sdl,gl=on Try to create an OpenGL context and if it fails, we fallback and try to create an OpenGL ES context.
-sdl,gl=off Disable the hw acceleration.

Continue reading on Collabora’s blog.

Community-Created Apps Help Ease Kubernetes Administration

By

Sam Dean

-

June 5, 2018

It didn’t take long at all for Kubernetes to become a star in the open source arena, emerging as the standard way to containerize applications at scale. Kubernetes is ushering in “operations transformation” and helping organizations make the transition to cloud-native computing, said Craig McLuckie, co-founder and CEO of Heptio and a co-founder of Kubernetes at Google, in a recent free webinar.

However, Kubernetes, which was created at Google and donated to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, is known to be complex and can create many maintenance and deployment challenges. To address that, new classes of community-created complementary and helper applications are helping to tame Kubernetes.

At the Helm

The Helm project is a case in point. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation recently voted to accept Helm as an incubation-level hosted project. Helm is a package manager that provides an easy way to find, share, and use software built for Kubernetes. It removes complexity from configuration and deployment, and enables greater developer productivity.

“Helm addresses a common user need of deploying applications to Kubernetes by making their configurations reusable,” said Brian Grant, Principal Engineer at Google, and Kubernetes SIG Architecture co-chair and Steering Committee member. “Both the Helm and Kubernetes projects have grown substantially. As Kubernetes shifts its focus to its own core in order to better manage this growth, CNCF is a great home for Helm to continue making it easier for developers and operators to streamline Kubernetes deployments.”

According to a recent Kubernetes Application Survey, 64 percent of the application developers, application operators, and ecosystem tool developers who answered the survey reported using Helm to manage apps on Kubernetes.

Ease of management

But Helm is hardly the only open tool helping to ease the burden of managing Kubernetes. Microsoft has open sourced Draft, a tool that streamlines application development and deployment into any Kubernetes cluster. “Using two simple commands, developers can now begin hacking on container-based applications without requiring Docker or even installing Kubernetes themselves,” notes Gabe Monroy, PM Lead for Containers at Microsoft. “You can customize Draft to streamline the development of any application or service that can run on Kubernetes.” See this process in action here.

Are you aware that your iOS or Android smartphone can play a role in demystifying and operating Kubernetes? Cabin lets Kubernetes administrators leverage a dashboard from their phones. It drives many of the processes and features that you’ll find in the complete Kubernetes dashboard, ranging from reading pod logs to working with web-based apps that Kubernetes hosts, to accessing Helm charts.

Red Hat, too, has been helping users streamline their Kubernetes implementations. Through its acquisition of San Francisco-based startup Codenvy, Red Hat is giving developers options for building out cloud-based integrated development environments, including working with Kubernetes and containers. Codenvy is built on the open source project Eclipse Che, which offers a cloud-based Integrated Developer Environment (IDE) and development environment. The OpenShift.io cloud-based container development service from Red Hat already integrates Codenvy’s Eclipse Che implementation.

Dashboards are proven as good tools for simplifying administration of many kinds of processes, and although Kubernetes has a basic dashboard, efficient community-created dashboards are emerging. Kube-ops-view is a popular one. It gives you optics across multiple Kubernetes clusters, with graphical representations across the board that allow you to monitor memory and CPU usage, and more.

Writing and maintaining application definitions is one of the more complex aspects of running Kubernetes, and Kedge is a popular open tool that offers a simplified approach. With Kedge, you can supply a Kubernetes definition in simple form and Kedge expands into a full and correct application definition. It basically lets you work with shortcuts.

The move toward containers shifts many types of dependencies pertaining to applications, and it shifts how applications are created. Kubernetes has proven to be an essential orchestration tool as these changes take place, and it is good to see open tools that can help streamline Kubernetes itself and make developing applications easier.

To learn more about Kubernetes, check out the sample course materials for Kubernetes Fundamentals (LFS258), an online, self-paced course developed by The Linux Foundation Training that gives a high-level overview of what Kubernetes is and the challenges it solves. Download a free sample chapter now.

Shedding Old Architectures and Compilers in the Kernel

By

LWN

-

June 5, 2018

The kernel development process tends to be focused on addition: each new release supports more drivers, more features, and often new processor architectures. As a result, almost every kernel release has been larger than its predecessor. But occasionally even the kernel needs to slim down a bit. Upcoming kernel releases are likely to see the removal of support for a number of unloved architectures and, in an unrelated move, the removal of support for some older compilers.

Architectures

The Meta architecture was added to the 3.9 kernel as “metag” in 2013; it is a 32-bit architecture developed by Imagination Technologies. Unfortunately, at about the same time as the code was merged, Imagination Technologies bought MIPS Technologies and shifted its attention to the MIPS architecture. Since then, the kernel’s support for Meta has languished, and it can only be built with the GCC 4.2.4 release, which is unsupported. On February 21, James Hogan, the developer who originally added the Meta port to the kernel, proposed that it be removed, calling it “essentially dead with no users.”

The very next day, Arnd Bergmann, working entirely independently, also proposed removing Meta. Bergmann, however, as is his way, took a rather wider view of things: he proposed that the removal of five architectures should be seriously considered.

You Don’t Know Bash: An Introduction to Bash Arrays

By

OpenSource.com

-

June 5, 2018

Although software engineers regularly use the command line for many aspects of development, arrays are likely one of the more obscure features of the command line (although not as obscure as the regex operator =~). But obscurity and questionable syntax aside, Bash arrays can be very powerful.

Wait, but why?

Writing about Bash is challenging because it’s remarkably easy for an article to devolve into a manual that focuses on syntax oddities. Rest assured, however, the intent of this article is to avoid having you RTFM.

A real (actually useful) example

To that end, let’s consider a real-world scenario and how Bash can help: You are leading a new effort at your company to evaluate and optimize the runtime of your internal data pipeline. As a first step, you want to do a parameter sweep to evaluate how well the pipeline makes use of threads. For the sake of simplicity, we’ll treat the pipeline as a compiled C++ black box where the only parameter we can tweak is the number of threads reserved for data processing: ./pipeline --threads 4.

All Things Enterprise Cloud Native at Red Hat

By

The New Stack

-

June 5, 2018

At KubeCon + CloudNativeCon in Copenhagen in early May, we caught up with Red Hat‘s Brandon Philips, to discuss the state of CoreOS and containers as a whole. Philips was previously with CoreOS, which was acquired by Red Hat back in January, and the pairing has focused a good amount of Linux thought leadership on the Kubernetes project. In Copenhagen, he and Diane Mueller, director of community development at Red Hat, sat down to talk about what it’s been like merging the CoreOS and Red Hat teams.

The CoreOS team, and Red Hat overall has been working closely with the CNCFto expand the capabilities of Kubernetes for enterprise users. One big part of this effort has been the Kubernetes Operators Project, said Philips.