Electric Cars, Open Source Summit, and Linux Server Innovation

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September 22, 2017

This article was sponsored and written by IBM.

The first electric car was produced in the late 19th century, and by 1900 more than a quarter of cars were electric. Then the internal combustion engine took over, and for a century it dominated. Now, however, electric cars are making a comeback, and both manufacturers and governments are predicting the end of the internal combustion engine.

What happened? The technology used for electric cars improved dramatically, the ecosystem of charging points expanded massively, and the need to be green and energy efficient changed public perceptions.

The first computers were large, centralized, shared systems. Then personal computers emerged, followed by the client-server era, then the servers were linked together into clusters, and most recently networked into cloud systems in order to share data and meet increasing demands for processing power.

We are now seeing a resurgence of large, centralized, shared computer systems. Why? The technology being used for these systems has changed dramatically, the ecosystem of open source and commercial software has expanded greatly, and the need to be green and energy efficient has changed public perceptions.

Additionally, security is a top concern of CIOs; big data is growing exponentially, and IT is being asked to deliver actionable insights faster than ever.

This is where large, centralized, shared computer systems can have significant advantages. Security has a smaller perimeter to protect. Data can be stored in one database, without sharding. And applications can be located on the same system as the data, avoiding latency and network delays.

Technologies for Security, Speed and Scale

Two years ago at LinuxCon in Seattle, IBM announced LinuxONE – its enterprise Linux-only server. This year at Open Source Summit in Los Angeles, we showcased where LinuxONE is being used in practice, why the technology it’s built on is market-leading, and how it is able to address the key priorities of security, speed and scale. We also announced a new version of IBM LinuxONE – Emperor II. You can find out more at www.ibm.com/linuxone.

The unique and breakthrough security technology for LinuxONE is the IBM Secure Service Container. This provides a framework for securely deploying and running software appliances. Building on the logical partitions (LPARs) of LinuxONE which provide peer isolation certified at EAL5+, the Secure Service Container also pervasively encrypts the data, validates the appliance code at boot time, and protects against the misuse of privileged user credentials by internal or external threats with the isolation of the data and applications from shell or command line access.

In the future, it is planned to integrate Docker and open-source container technologies with the IBM Secure Service Container framework to create a highly secure environment for building and deploying applications that embrace cloud native and cloud ready application development tooling and practices. A beta of this technology integration will be available for user engagement via http://ibm.biz/sscbeta.

The new IBM LinuxONE Emperor II is based on IBM Z technology and uses the industry’s fastest commercially available microprocessor, running at 5.2GHz. Combined with instruction-set optimization and capabilities such as pauseless garbage collection, this delivers industry-leading speed including 2.6x better performance for Java workloads.

Up to 170 cores and up to 32TB of memory then enable IBM LinuxONE to deliver extreme scalability, able to support up to two million Docker containers, a 17TB MongoDB database on a single system, and up to 377 billion database transactions per day.

IBM LinuxONE in practice

During the IBM keynote at Open Source Summit, we shared the story of The Plastic Bank – a social enterprise that is both reducing ocean pollution and helping to address global poverty, by providing the ability for people in developing nations to recycle plastic in exchange for digital tokens that they can use to buy goods.

The Plastic Bank needed to provide a highly secure, auditable system that could scale exponentially from Day One. They chose to work with systems integrator and managed service provider, Cognition Foundry, and IBM to run Blockchain on IBM LinuxONE. You can find out the reasons behind their choice in a blog by The Plastic Bank’s Shaun Frankson.

Like electric cars, we believe that highly secure, highly scalable and highly engineered Linux servers have the power to transform the market and change the world. To find out more, visit the IBM LinuxONE news page at www.ibm.com/linuxone/news and read the analyst reports.

Adam Jollans is currently a portfolio marketing manager in the worldwide LinuxONE marketing team, responsible for developing the marketing strategy for IBM’s LinuxONE server and its ecosystem.

Microservice Architecture Takes a Whole New Approach to Infrastructure

By

TechGenix

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September 22, 2017

With microservice architecture where it is today, the gap between the good, the bad, and the ugly, is now enormous in terms of being able to deliver high-quality software with speed and efficiency. In fact, the difference is so huge now that it was demonstrated by Bob Wise, CTO of Samsung’s cloud native computing team in a talk that showed high-performance organizations have 200 times more frequent deployments, 24 times faster recovery from failure, three times lower change failure rate and 2,555 times shorter lead times than low-performance organizations. That’s a huge difference, to say the least, and if your organization is on the lower end of that spectrum, the time to panic was yesterday.

Why Should You Speak at Tech Conferences? Or At Least Attend Them Regularly (Part 1)

By

Dev.to

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September 22, 2017

Now I talk regularly at local meetups and I went as a speaker to few big conferences. Given that I am no expert in public speaking, my heart beat rises and occasionally words scramble as I am on the stage. But still, I will give you some reasons, why you should speak at conferences or at least attend them.

One of the influencers from Microsoft tweeted that attending conferences will show you the path to what to learn next. He is right, because honestly people can’t remember everything from all the talks (at least in my case). Usually there will be around 6 to 8 talks in a day at any given conference, So when you are presented with that much information on different topics in a single day, you won’t learn much as your brain will be overwhelmed with information.

Open Source Summit in Los Angeles: Day 1 in 5 Minutes

By

Amber Ankerholz

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September 21, 2017

Open Source Summit North America in Los Angeles was packed with keynotes, technical sessions, and special presentations, including a conversation with Linux creator Linus Torvalds. In case you couldn’t make it, CodePop.com’s Gregg Pollack has put together some short videos recapping highlights of the event.

Here’s Day 1 in 5 minutes!

You can see more at Open SourceCraft on YouTube.

And, you can watch the full-length keynotes from Open Source Summit North America at LinuxFoundation.org.

Introducing The Linux Foundation’s Open Source Networking Days

By

The Linux Foundation

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September 21, 2017

OSN Days are a fantastic opportunity for network developers and users to learn how ONAP, OPNFV, OpenDaylight and other open source initiatives are changing NFV/SDN orchestration and networking solutions. Stops on the tour include: Paris, Milan, Stockholm, London, Tel Aviv, and Japan. Register today for an upcoming OSN Day in your region.

The day-long events will start with a plenary session where attendees will hear from site hosts and The Linux Foundation speakers on the state of the industry and the collaboration and touch points between projects that make up the open source networking stack. Presenters will also explore how business opportunities like 5G and IoT are enabled by network transformation. In the afternoon, events may feature technical sessions, tutorials, demonstrations, and workshops that empower attendees to participate, contribute, and deepen their knowledge of open source networking.

Kubernetes is Transforming Operations in the Enterprise

By

The Linux Foundation

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September 21, 2017

At many organizations, managing containerized applications at scale is the order of the day (or soon will be). And few open source projects are having the impact in this arena that Kubernetes is.

Above all, Kubernetes is ushering in “operations transformation” and helping organizations make the transition to cloud-native computing, says Craig McLuckie co-founder and CEO of Heptio and a co-founder of Kubernetes at Google, in a recent free webinar, ‘Getting to Know Kubernetes.’ Kubernetes was created at Google, which donated the open source project to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

As was historically true for the very first Local-Area Networks and Linux alike, McLuckie noted that small groups of upstart staffers at many organizations are driving operational change by adopting Kubernetes.

Advanced lm-sensors Tips and Tricks on Linux

By

Carla Schroder

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September 21, 2017

I’ve been using the lm-sensors tool ever since CPUs became hot enough to melt themselves. It monitors CPU temperature, fan speeds, and motherboard voltages. In this two-part series, I’ll explain some advanced uses of lm-sensors, and look at some of the best graphical interfaces to use with it.

Install and Run

Install lm-sensors, then run it with no options to see what it does:

$ sensors
coretemp-isa-0000
Adapter: ISA adapter
Physical id 0:  +37.0°C  (high = +80.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
Core 0:         +35.0°C  (high = +80.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
Core 1:         +37.0°C  (high = +80.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
Core 2:         +34.0°C  (high = +80.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
Core 3:         +36.0°C  (high = +80.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)

This is on an Ubuntu PC. My openSUSE Leap system installs it with a working configuration, but Ubuntu needs some additional tweaking. Run sensors-detect to set it up to detect even more stuff. The safe method is to accept all of the defaults by pressing the return key to answer every question:

$ sudo sensors-detect
# sensors-detect revision 6284 (2015-05-31 14:00:33 +0200)
# Board: ASRock H97M Pro4
# Kernel: 4.4.0-96-generic x86_64
# Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-4770K CPU @ 3.50GHz (6/60/3)

This program will help you determine which kernel modules you need
to load to use lm_sensors most effectively. It is generally safe
and recommended to accept the default answers to all questions,
unless you know what you're doing.

Some south bridges, CPUs or memory controllers contain embedded sensors.
Do you want to scan for them? This is totally safe. (YES/no): 

[...]

When it finishes scanning, it will ask you if you want it to modify /etc/modules:

To load everything that is needed, add this to /etc/modules:
#----cut here----
# Chip drivers
coretemp
nct6775
#----cut here----
If you have some drivers built into your kernel, the list above will
contain too many modules. Skip the appropriate ones!

Do you want to add these lines automatically to /etc/modules? (yes/NO)

Before you answer, look in your kernel configuration file to see if the drivers are built-in, or are loadable modules. If they are built-in then don’t modify /etc/modules. If they are modules, then modify /etc/modules. This is what loadable modules look like in my /boot/config-4.4.0-96-generic file:

CONFIG_SENSORS_CORETEMP=m
CONFIG_SENSORS_NCT6775=m

If they are built-in to the kernel (statically-compiled, if you prefer the nerdy term) then they look like this:

CONFIG_SENSORS_CORETEMP=y
CONFIG_SENSORS_NCT6775=y

If they are loadable modules, go ahead and modify /etc/modules, and then manually load the modules, substituting your own module names of course:

$ sudo modprobe nct6775 coretemp

Use lsmod to verify they are loaded:

$ lsmod|grep "nct6775|coretemp"
nct6775                57344  0
hwmon_vid              16384  1 nct6775
coretemp               16384  0

Any modules listed in /etc/modules will load at boot. Now let’s see what sensors shows us:

$ sensors
coretemp-isa-0000
Adapter: ISA adapter
Physical id 0:  +37.0°C  (high = +80.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
Core 0:         +35.0°C  (high = +80.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
Core 1:         +37.0°C  (high = +80.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
Core 2:         +34.0°C  (high = +80.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
Core 3:         +36.0°C  (high = +80.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)

nct6776-isa-0290
Adapter: ISA adapter
Vcore:          +0.90 V  (min =  +0.00 V, max =  +1.74 V)
in1:            +1.82 V  (min =  +0.00 V, max =  +0.00 V)  ALARM
AVCC:           +3.39 V  (min =  +0.00 V, max =  +0.00 V)  ALARM
+3.3V:          +3.38 V  (min =  +0.00 V, max =  +0.00 V)  ALARM
in4:            +0.95 V  (min =  +0.00 V, max =  +0.00 V)  ALARM
in5:            +1.69 V  (min =  +0.00 V, max =  +0.00 V)  ALARM
in6:            +0.78 V  (min =  +0.00 V, max =  +0.00 V)  ALARM
3VSB:           +3.42 V  (min =  +0.00 V, max =  +0.00 V)  ALARM
Vbat:           +3.28 V  (min =  +0.00 V, max =  +0.00 V)  ALARM
fan1:             0 RPM  (min =    0 RPM)
fan2:          1004 RPM  (min =    0 RPM)
fan3:             0 RPM  (min =    0 RPM)
fan4:             0 RPM  (min =    0 RPM)
fan5:             0 RPM  (min =    0 RPM)
SYSTIN:         +29.0°C  (high =  +0.0°C, hyst =  +0.0°C)  ALARM  sensor = thermistor
CPUTIN:         +42.5°C  (high = +80.0°C, hyst = +75.0°C)  sensor = thermistor
AUXTIN:         +47.0°C  (high = +80.0°C, hyst = +75.0°C)  sensor = thermistor
PECI Agent 0:   +37.0°C  (high = +80.0°C, hyst = +75.0°C)
                         (crit = +100.0°C)
PCH_CHIP_TEMP:   +0.0°C  
PCH_CPU_TEMP:    +0.0°C  
PCH_MCH_TEMP:    +0.0°C  
intrusion0:    ALARM
intrusion1:    ALARM
beep_enable:   disabled

A feast of information! Much of which is not useful because devices do not exist or are not connected, like most of the fan sensors. On Ubuntu I disabled these in /etc/sensors3.conf with the ignore directive:

ignore fan1
ignore fan3
ignore fan4
ignore fan5

Now when I run sensors the output does not include those (Figure 1). You should be able to put your customizations in files in /etc/sensors.d, but this doesn’t work on my Ubuntu machine.

Learn how to use lm-sensors to monitor CPU temperature, fan speeds, and motherboard voltages.

What do Those Things Mean?

CPUTIN is CPU temperature index, AUXTIN is auxiliary temperature index, and SYSTIN is system temperature index. These are all sensors on the motherboard. AUXTIN is the power supply temperature sensor, and SYSTIN measures motherboard temperature. Core temperature is different from CPUTIN as it reads from a sensor on your CPU.

HYST is short for hysteresis. This is the value that you want an alarm to turn off. For example, if your alarm temperature is 80C, set your HYST value to stop the alarm when the temperature falls to 75C.

Get the Specs

The basic lm-sensors monitoring of CPU temperatures may be enough for you. However, you can finely-tweak lm-sensors for greater accuracy, change labels, and run it as a daemon. You need the spec sheet for your motherboard (which will also help make sense of your lm-sensors output). Find your exact motherboard model and version by running $ sudo dmidecode -t 2. The kernel driver documentation is also useful. For example, this is the kernel spec for my nct6775 driver.

Come back next week and we’ll learn even cooler advanced uses of lm-sensors.

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

The Eye-Opening Power of Cultural Difference

By

OpenSource.com

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September 21, 2017

Inclusivity is the quality of an open organization that allows and encourages people to join the organization and feel a connection to it. Practices aimed at enhancing inclusivity are typically those that welcome new participants to the organization and create an environment that makes them want to stay.

When we talk about inclusivity, we should clarify something: Being “inclusive” is not the same as being “diverse.” Diversity is a product of inclusivity; you need to create an inclusive community in order to become a diverse one, not the other way around. The degree to which your open organization is inclusive determines how it adapts to, responds to, and embraces diversity in order to improve itself. Interestingly enough, the best way to know which organizational changes will make your group more inclusive is to interact with the people you want to join your community.

The Four Layers of Programming Skills

By

Dev.to

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September 21, 2017

When learning how to code for the first time, there’s a common misconception that learning how to code is primarily about learning the syntax of a programming language. That is, learning how the special symbols, keywords, and characters must be written in the right order for the language to run without errors.

However, focusing only on knowledge of syntax is a bit like practicing to write a novel by only studying grammar and spelling. Grammar and spelling are needed to write a novel, but there are many other layers of skills that are needed in order to write an original, creative novel.

Similarly, to be developer and write original, creative code we need other layers of skills in addition to syntax. Here is one way to organize these skills into what I call the four layers of programming skills:

Syntax skills

This is the layer that is most often focused on in the early learning phase. Syntax skills essentially means how to read and write a programming language using the rules for how different characters must be used for the code to actually work.

Kubernetes Gains Momentum as Big-Name Vendors Flock to Cloud Native Computing Foundation

By

TechCrunch

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September 21, 2017

Like a train gaining speed as it leaves the station, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation is quickly gathering momentum, attracting some of the biggest names in tech. In the last month and a half alone AWS, Oracle, Microsoft, VMware and Pivotal have all joined.

It’s not every day you see this group of companies agree on anything, but as Kubernetes has developed into an essential industry tool, each of these companies sees it as a necessity to join the CNCF and support its mission. This is partly driven by customer demand and partly by the desire to simply have a say in how Kubernetes and other related cloud-native technologies are developed.

For those of you who might not be familiar with this organization, it is the part of the Linux Foundation that houses Kubernetes, the open source project originally developed at Google.