ONAP, CNCF Come Together on Containers

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April 3, 2018

ONAP and Kubernetes, two of the fastest growing and in demand open source projects, are coming together at Open Networking Summit this week. To ensure ONAP runs on Kubernetes in any environment, ONAP is now a part of the new Cross-Cloud CI project that integrates, tests and deploys the most popular cloud native projects.

The opening ONS keynote from Arpit Joshipura, GM Networking & Orchestration at Linux Foundation, will demonstrate and test ONAP 1.1.1 and 1.95 Kubernetes deployed across all public, private clouds and bare metal. For end users, the integration of open networking and cloud native technologies provides seamless portability of applications.

Git v2.17.0 Released

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LWN

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April 3, 2018

Version 2.17.0 of the Git source-code management system is out. It includes a long list of relatively minor tweaks. “Since Git 1.7.9, ‘git merge’ defaulted to –no-ff (i.e. even when the side branch being merged is a descendant of the current commit, create a merge commit instead of fast-forwarding) when merging a tag object. This was appropriate default for integrators who pull signed tags from their downstream contributors, but caused an unnecessary merges when used by downstream contributors…

The latest feature release Git v2.17.0 is now available at the usual places. It is comprised of 516 non-merge commits since v2.16.0, contributed by 71 people, 20 of which are new faces.

DNS Resolvers Performance Compared: CloudFlare x Google x Quad9 x OpenDNS

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Medium Blog

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April 3, 2018

A couple of months ago I did a performance comparison between some of the top free DNS Resolvers available. It was just after Quad9 had launched and I was trying to decide which one to use and recommend to families and friends. Google, OpenDNS, Quad9, .. some many options… I love options …

And things just got better. CloudFlare, one of the companies that know the most about Internet performance recently launched their own free DNS resolver. It supports DNS over TLS and DNS over HTTPS by default, which makes it even more interesting.

3 DevOps Culture Mistakes and How to Fix Them

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The Enterprisers Project

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April 3, 2018

It’s a universally accepted truth: The more changes you make to code, the larger the chance it’s going to break.

Everyone knows bugs happen, and organizations that are equipped to quickly and expertly squash them are the ones that come out ahead. Increasingly, those teams that prove to be masters of their codebase and fierce problem solvers operate in organizations that have come to embrace good DevOps practices.

Is your organization’s DevOps culture experiencing breakdowns or lack of synergy? It might be time to check for these common bugs – and deploy some proven fixes:

Linux Kernel 4.16: Networking Patches and More

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Paul Brown

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April 2, 2018

Linus Torvalds released version 4.16 of the Linux Kernel on Sunday, April 1st, nine weeks after the previous version. After the rather eventful 4.15 cycle, which included the loss of the Linux Kernel Mailing List for several days and the fallout from the Meltdown and Spectre bugs, 4.16 has been mercifully smooth.

Not all smooth, though. There was a big bump in the amount of patches in RC7 that nearly derailed Sunday’s release. However, looking into it, Torvalds noted that the abnormal number of submissions may have been due to the fact that during the RC5 and 6 cycles there had been almost no patches regarding networking. This meant there was a backlog of “2.5 weeks worth of networking stuff, and that makes rc7 look artificially bigger. That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.“ Torvalds said.

Getting back to Meltdown and Spectre, the dust kicked up by both bugs still hasn’t completely settled. Quite a few patches were included to try and ameliorate some of their effects. Both 64-bit ARM and IBM z s390 architectures get patches that mitigate possible exploits. Meanwhile, access to /dev/mem is now more restrictive and the code that keeps x86 architectures safe has been cleaned up and optimized.

In more productive news, the VirtualBox Guest driver was merged into the mainline kernel. This means that the VirtualBox VM should work better on Linux from now on. Vaguely related, Jailhouse, a partitioning Hypervisor developed by Siemens, is now also supported in the mainline kernel. Jailhouse is different to other hypervisors in that it can be loaded and configured by a normal Linux system.

Other stuff to look forward to in Linux kernel 4.16

The AMD GPU DC display code has been improved so as to incorporate better multi-display support. This means that the highest display rate will be used when synchronizing several monitors. The new code also mitigates underflow/corruption problems which manifest as flickering ghosts when elements are moved on the desktop.
Operations for in-kernel filesystems will probably become faster thanks to a patch that optimizes the update of inode data and metadata. In some cases, the speed registered in read bandwidth increased to more than 200 percent.
There have been updates to the open source Risc V ISA, which was merged in 4.15. However, there are no device drivers yet.
Some new devices that are now supported in the mainline kernel include the Orange Pi R1, NVIDIA’s Tegra TX2, and the second generation “One by Wacom” tablets.

As usual, you can find out more by checking out the writeups at Kernel Newbies and Phoronix.

Learn more about Linux through the free “Introduction to Linux” course from The Linux Foundation and edX.

Perspectives on Investing in Open Source Startups

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The Linux Foundation

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April 2, 2018

Interest in evaluating and investing in open source startups is on the rise again after a dip in the past couple of years, according to speakers at a panel discussion on investment startups in the open source world.

The discussion took place at The Linux Foundation’s recent Open Source Leadership Summit (OSLS). In terms of investment activity in the open source startup space, “there is good appetite for the acquirers as well as the public markets, depending on the value proposition that these companies … have to offer,’’ said Rashmi Gopinath, a partner with Microsoft Ventures, the corporate venturing arm for Microsoft. She noted that Microsoft acquired Deis in 2017, an open source startup specializing in the Kubernetes container orchestration platform.

How Brigade Shares Data Between Containers

By

TechnoSophos

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April 2, 2018

Brigade provides a way to script multiple containers to perform a task. With Brigade, you can build things like CI systems, ETL pipelines, and distributed batch processors. One of the critical capabilities of Brigade is its ability to share data between containers. This article describes the two main ways of sharing data.

Brigade’s Purpose

In a previous article in this series, I explained why we created Brigade. I described Brigade as an event-based scripting environment for Kubernetes. A second way of looking at Brigade is as a serverless platform for scripting containers.

Both descriptions share a central feature: Brigade is about linking multiple containers together to create powerful processing pipelines.

Linux on Raspberry Pi: SUSE Support Turns $35 Board into Enterprise IoT Platform

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ZDNet

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April 2, 2018

SUSE has released a SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 SP3 (SLES) for the popular Raspberry Pi, which comes with full commercial support for enterprise customers.

The release upgrades an unsupported version of SLES SP2 Raspberry Pi image released at 2016 SUSECON, which offered enterprises an alternative to Raspbian OS with an OS that uses the SUSE Linux Enterprise kernel for Arm.

According to SUSE, companies have been using SLES for Arm on Raspberry Pi for monitoring older industrial equipment such as robotic screwdrivers and sending alerts when they malfunction.

Removing the Storage Bottleneck for AI

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The Next Platform

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April 2, 2018

If the history of high performance computing has taught us anything, it is that we cannot focus too much on compute at the expense of storage and networking. Having all of the compute in the world doesn’t mean diddlysquat if the storage can’t get data to the compute elements – whatever they might be – in a timely fashion with good sustained performance.

Many organizations that have invested in GPU accelerated servers are finding this out the hard way when their performance comes up short when they get down to do work training their neural networks,…

The problem is that the datasets that are needed for storing the largely unstructured data that feeds into neural networks to let them do their statistical magic is growing at an exponential rate, and so is the computational requirement to chew on that data.

Bring Your Own Linux to Windows with New Open Source Tool

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ArsTechnica

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April 2, 2018

After starting with Ubuntu, Microsoft has added a number of Linux distributions to its Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) Linux runtime environment. A Windows machine can simultaneously offer an Ubuntu, SUSE, Debian, and Kali “personality,” providing users with a choice of the different distributions’ preferences and package management.

But if your distribution isn’t yet available or if you want a Linux installation that’s customized just the way you like it, there’s now an answer: Microsoft has an open source tool for building your own Linux package. The tool is aimed at two groups: distribution owners (so they can produce a bundle to ship through the Microsoft Store) and developers (so they can create custom distributions and sideload them onto their development systems).