Contributing to Open Source Projects Is Key to Igalia’s Business

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May 31, 2017

Igalia is an open source development company offering consultancy services for desktop, mobile, and web technologies. The company’s developers contribute code for several open source projects, including GNOME, WebKit, and the Linux kernel.

The company was founded in September 2001 in A Coruña, Spain, by a group of 10 software professionals, who were inspired by Free Software and shared the goal of creating a company based on cooperation and innovation.

“Open source and Free Software are part of Igalia’s DNA,” says Xavier Castaño García, one of the company’s founding members.

Besides focusing its participation on desktop, mobile, embedded, and kernel development initiatives, Igalia also sponsors many events, including the recent Open Networking Summit, the Embedded Linux Conferences, and the upcoming Automotive Linux Summit. Here, Castaño explains more about the company’s current projects.

Linux.com: What does Igalia do?

Xavier Castaño García: Igalia is an open source consultancy specializing in the development of innovative projects and solutions. Our engineers have expertise in a wide range of technological areas, including browsers and client-side web technologies, graphics pipeline, compilers and virtual machines.

Leading the development of essential projects in the areas of web rendering and browsers, we have the most WPE, WebKit, Chromium/Blink, and Firefox expertise found in the consulting business, including many reviewers and committers with very strong presence in the communities. Igalia designs, develops, customizes and optimizes GNU/Linux-based solutions for companies across the globe. Our work and contributions are present in almost anything running on top of a Linux kernel.

Linux.com: How and why do you use Linux and open source?

Castaño: Open Source and Free Software are part of Igalia’s DNA. At Igalia, we all share the free software philosophy and believe that open source collaboration is fundamental for sprouting innovation. Since the very beginning, Igalia decided to invest in open source, in particular, in projects and communities that have been important for the company.

Igalia contributes actively to many open source projects including WebKit, Chromium, Servo, Mesa 3D, and GStreamer. Most of these projects are state-of-the-art open source technologies, and most of the big players of the industry are involved in them. Because we have committed many years of intensive contributions to these projects, we have a wide range of experience. Companies that are interested in getting involved in those projects find Igalia a great partner. We can help them use, improve, customize, optimize, and contribute back any changes to any of these projects.

Linux.com: How has participating in the Linux and open source communities changed or benefited the company?

Castaño: GNOME and WebKit open source communities have been key for Igalia. All the contributions done in GNOME ecosystem were the main reason why some of our developers contributed to integrate Epiphany with WebKit. This is one of the most important milestones in our history. Thanks to these contributions, Igalia became the independent consultancy with the most contributions to Chrome and WebKit.

Linux.com: Why did you join The Linux Foundation?

Castaño: The Linux Foundation is a reference organization in open source and business. Additionally, The Linux Foundation is nowadays a platform for boosting open source ecosystems. In parallel, Igalia is very active in associations. Hence, Igalia considered that becoming a member of The Linux Foundation would be a natural step for the company.

Furthermore, Igalia is currently sponsoring many events hosted by The Linux Foundation. For example, we sponsor Open Source Summit in North America, Japan, and Europe, the Embedded Linux Conferences, the Automotive Linux Summit, and Open Networking Summit.

Linux.com: What interesting or innovative trends in your industry are you seeing and what role do Linux and open source play?

Castaño: Linux has become the key and the core foundation in the embedded world. Most of the embedded devices deploy a Linux-based distro and open source components. In addition to this, there is also a trend in many industries of introducing HTML5 user interfaces in those devices, which means that they need to deploy an open source web engine either based on WebKit or on Chromium.

Linux.com: Is there anything else important or upcoming that you’d like to share?

Castaño: We have recently released WPE as an official port of WebKit. WPE is a new WebKit port optimized for Embedded platforms that can support a variety of display protocols like Wayland or X11. WPE serves as a base for systems and environments that mainly or completely rely on web platform technologies to build their interfaces.

WPE is now part of the Reference Design Kit (RDK) and has been accepted upstream at webkit.org as a new official port of WebKit. We expect WPE to be deployed in millions of set-top boxes by the end of Q3. As an open source project, we welcome new contributors and adopters to the project.

Open Networking Summit, the industry’s premier open networking event, brings Enterprises, Carriers and Cloud Service providers together with the ecosystem to share learnings, highlight innovation and discuss the future of Open Source Networking. Watch the ONS keynote presentations now.

Kubeless UI Now in Alpha

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Bitnami Perspectives

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May 31, 2017

Kubeless is the Kubernetes native serverless framework that we started developing at Skippbox and that we keep on improving at Bitnami. FWIW, Kubeless is not a proprietary play for us, we aim to build a community around it, as we only care about application architecture and shifts in application platforms.

To make it easy for folks to use Kubeless, we just released the first version of our serverless plugin, so that you can deploy functions on Kubeless using the the Go serverless framework. Basically, this now works with kubeless:

Node.js 8: Big Improvements for the Debugging and Native Module Ecosystem

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Node.js

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May 31, 2017

We are excited to announce Node.js 8.0.0 today. The new improvements and features of this release create the best workflow for Node.js developers to date. Highlighted updates and features include adding Node.js API for native module developers, async_hooks, JS bindings for the inspector, zero-filling Buffers, util.promisify, and more.

Throwing confetti now that we have Node.js 8!

The Node.js 8 release, replaces version 7 in our current release line. The Node.js release line will become a Node.js Long Term Support (LTS) release in October 2017 (more details on LTS strategy here). The LTS release line is focused on stability and security and is best for those who want guaranteed stability when they upgrade and/or are using Node.js in the enterprise.

Those who need stability and have complex production environments (i.e. medium and large enterprises) should wait until Node.js 8 goes into LTS before upgrading it for production.

Now that we’ve provided this PSA, let’s dive into the interesting updates in this release.

Native Modular Ecosystem Gets a Boost

The much-awaited Node.js API (N-API) will be added as an experimental feature to this release — it will be behind a flag. This is an incredibly important technology as it will eliminate breakage that happens between major releases lines with native modules.

Although native modules (modules written in C or C++ and directly bound to the Chrome V8) are a small portion of the massive modular ecosystem, 30 percent of all modules rely indirectly on native modules. Every time Node.js has a major release update, package maintainers have to update these dependencies.

These efforts would not be possible without significant contributions from Google, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, nearFrom, NodeSource, and individual contributors. Read the full details around these efforts and this technology here.

Anyone who builds or uses native modules should test out the N-API feature.

Welcome, V8 5.8

Node.js 8 ships with V8 5.8, a significant update to the JavaScript runtime that includes major improvements in performance and developer facing APIs. V8 5.8 is guaranteed to have forwards ABI compatibility with V8 5.9 and the upcoming V8 6.0, which will help ensure stability of the Node.js native addon ecosystem. During Node.js 8’s lifetime, the Node.js Project plans to move to 5.9 and possibly 6.0.

The V8 5.8 engine also helps set up a pending transition to the new Turbofan and Ignition compiler pipeline, which leads to lower memory consumption and faster startup across Node.js applications. Although this has existed in previous versions of V8, TurboFan and Ignition will be enabled by default for the first time in V8 5.9. The new compiler pipeline represents such a significant change that the Node.js Core Technical Committee (CTC) chose to postpone the Node.js 8 release in order to better accommodate it.

Buffer Improvements

The zero-filling Buffer (num) and a new Buffer (num) are added by default. The benefit of the zero-filling Buffer helps with security and privacy to prevent information leaks. However, the downside with this buffer is that folks using it will take performance hits, but this can be avoided by migrating to buffer.allocUnsafe(). It is suggested that Node.js users only use this function, if they are aware of the risks and know how to avoid those problems.

WHATWG URL Parser is Now Stable

WHATWG URL parser goes from experimental status to fully supported in this version, allowing people to use a URL parser that is compliant to the spec and more compatible with the browser. This new URL implementation matches the URL implementation and API available in modern web browsers like Chrome, Firefox, Edge and Safari, allowing code using URLs to be shared across environments.

Performance, Security and Interface Boost in npm@5

Npm, Inc. recently announced the release of version 5.0.0 of the npm client and we are happy to include this new version within Node.js 8.

Common package management tasks such as package installation and version updates are now up to five times faster; lockfiles ensure consistent installations across development environments; and a self-healing cache with automatic error recovery protects against corrupted downloads. npm@5 also introduces SHA-512 code verification.

“Since npm first shipped with Node.js in 2011, our mission has been to reduce friction for Node.js developers and help people build amazing things. Using Node.js 8 with npm@5 will make modular software development dramatically faster and easier — it’s the largest performance improvement ever,” said Isaac Z. Schlueter, CEO of npm, Inc. “We’re proud of our commitment to the Node.js community, and collaboration to bring innovative products to market. I’m excited to see what comes next.”

Insights to the Tooling Ecosystem and Debugging

This release line will provide deep insight via the new tracing and async tracking features. The experimental ‘async_hooks’ module (formerly ‘async_wrap’) received a major update in Node.js 8. This diagnostics API allows developers to monitor the operation of the Node.js event loop, tracking asynchronous request and handles through their complete lifecycle and enabling better diagnostic tools and other utilities.

These additions, along with the removal of the legacy debugger (which is replaced by the newer CLI debugger that landed in v7) make it easier to debug and track changes within Node.js, allowing commercial and open source tooling vendors to pinpoint performance degradation in Node.js applications.

Another experimental feature added to this release includes JS bindings for the inspector. The new inspector core module enables developers to leverage the debug protocol used by the Chrome inspector in order to inspect currently running JavaScript code.

Improved Support for Promises

Node.js includes a new util.promisify() API that allows developers to wrap callback APIs to return Promises with little overhead, using a standard API.

For all of our major updates, please go to our technical blog and read more here.

This article originally appeared on Node.js blog.

Inclusion Done Right: Hiring

By

The New Stack

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May 31, 2017

This is Part Three of a three-part series on Inclusion Done Right. Part One talked about the experience of employees, from engineers to CEOs, of working at a company where inclusion is part of the culture. Part Two discussed the specific actions the companies take to create a feeling of inclusion. This part will discuss the hiring process, and how to hire not just for diversity, but for inclusion.

Aubrey Blanche, Atlassian global head of diversity and inclusion at Atlassian defines the distinction between the two. “Diversity is getting an invite to the party, inclusion is being glad to be there.”

ARM’s New Processors Are Designed to Power the Machine-Learning Machines

By

The Verge

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May 31, 2017

On the eve of Computex, Taiwan’s big showpiece event where PC makers roll out the latest and best implementations of Intel CPUs, mobile rival ARM is announcing its own big news with the unveiling of a new generation of ARM CPUs and GPUs. Official today, the ARM Cortex-A75 is the new flagship-tier mobile processor design, with a claimed 22 percent improvement in performance over the incumbent A73. It’s joined by the new Cortex-A55, which has the highest power efficiency of any mid-range CPU ARM’s ever designed, and the Mali-G72 graphics processor, which also comes with a 25 percent improvement in efficiency relative to its predecessor G71.

The efficiency improvements are evolutionary and predictable, but the revolutionary aspects of this new lineup relate to artificial intelligence: this is the first set of processing components designed specifically to tackle the challenges of onboard AI and machine learning. Plus, last year’s updates to improve performance in the power-hugry tasks of augmented and virtual reality are being extended and elaborated.

What Are the Differences in Web Hosting and Linux Web Hosting?

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May 31, 2017

Web hosting is very popular these days. There are some differences between web hosting and Linux web hosting. There are two kinds of operating systems. Web hosting allows a company and an organization to post their websites on the internet. A reliable web host offers essential services that are needed to view the website.

Linux web hosting is a famous web hosting service providers. It offers ease to use and very cost-effective for the clients. It contains its own specifications. Both the forms have differences and similarities in the way of operation.

By knowing the web hosting and how to do you can boost up the profit of your business web hosting is easy for a user. Learning about the Search engine Optimization is basic for the marketing purpose. It will assist to enhance the traffic to your website. But the basic question is that what are search engines searching for? What should be your strategy for building your website? An expert web host always uses techniques to please customers and visitors, other search engines, Bing and Google.

Are you searching for the premier web hosting services provider? Linux web hosting is the right choice for expert web hosting services. The fundamental objective is to provide excellence in these services. An expert web hosting organization is admired due to its organized system. A user can enjoy a wonderful services related to the search engine optimization by availing variety of deals and web hosting service including domain analysis, audit of your website, Anchor Text Variation including exact match keywords, naked URL and branded keywords.

On the same server, it is wonderful option for making a bunch of sites that offers more than 1 IP. With the help of a reliable Linux web hosting users can easily get C Class IP address for their website. It is the best way for forming SEO friendly websites. By buying web hosting plan users can easily get free domain.

Features of Webhosting
•   Safe Harbor Certified.
•   SEO friendly Website design.
•   Link building.
•   On-site optimization.
•   On-page optimization.
•   Money back guarantee.
•   SEO friendly content writing services.
•   100% uptime guarantee.
•   Emails accounts, FTP accounts, unlimited sub domains.
•   Control panel that is easy to use, flexible.

A proficient Linux webhosting service carefully chooses the keywords that are relevant for on-page optimization. It offers excellent on page and off page optimization to make noticeable for search engine algorithm. In off-page optimization it offers predominately to backlinks.

Plans and Pricing
For introducing variety of plans and packages in affordable rates the company is incredible. A huge circle of business users can avail these facilities very easily. Online marketing is a collaborative effort that we offer in our services. It can be done successfully with the help of the eligible team. The exclusive plans make your website demanding and offer high ranking.

How does it help in increasing website ranking?
By availing Linux webhosting services users can enjoy websites that works vigorously. It is one of excellent packages that facilitate the users by boosting up traffic towards the website. Here, users can avail special introductory packages for new clients.
•   Offers free security suite.
•   Delivers free online store.
•   Intended with free drop and drag builder.
•   Integrated with domain registration.
•   Offers an easy and quick access.
•   Requires no special experience.
•   30-day money back guarantee.
•   Offers email addresses and unlimited disk space.
•   Free Marketing credits and search engines.

This Linux hosting contains all the specific tools to design a functional site entirely. It delivers the opportunity to run the websites in an innovative way. Scalable and innovative hosting packages are enough to increase your business. It is perfect for the users because it offers plenty of mobile friendly templates and simple drag and drop tools. It offers cloud hosting, Word Press hosting, dedicated hosting and VPS hosting as well.

Users can upgrade their plans any time for meeting their needs for more IP addresses, bandwidth and disk space. By availing Linux hosting service users can get wide range of unique C Class. It ensures supreme uptime, security and performance. Due to technical specifications including Green webhosting, application hosting, award winning support, email, programming, data base and cPanel Control Panel it is right option for you.

Building Blocks of Containers

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The Linux Foundation

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May 30, 2017

This article series previews the new Containers Fundamentals training course from The Linux Foundation, which is designed for those who are new to container technologies. In previous excerpts, we talked about what containers are and what they’re not and explained a little of their history. In this last post of the series, we will look at the building blocks for containers, specifically, namespaces, control groups, and UnionFS.

Namespace is a feature of the Linux kernel, which isolates and virtualizes system resources for a process, so that each process gets its own resource, like its own IP address, hostname, etc. System resources that can be virtualized are: mount [mnt], process ID [PID], network [net], Interprocess Communication [IPC], hostnames [UTS], and users [User IDs].

Using the namespace feature of the Linux kernel, we can isolate one process from another. The container is nothing but a process for the kernel, so we isolate each container using different namespaces.

Another important feature that enables containerization is control groups. With control groups, we can limit, account, and isolate the resource users like CPU, memory, disk, network, etc. And, with UnionFS, we can transparently overlay two or more directories and implement a layered approach for containers.

You can get more details in the sample course video below, presented by Neependra Khare (@neependra), Founder and Principal Consultant at CloudYuga, Docker Captain, and author of the Docker Cookbook.

Want to learn more? Access all the free sample chapter videos now!

The Companies That Support Linux and Open Source: Atomic Rules

By

Libby Clark

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May 30, 2017

Atomic Rules has been providing Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) design services and interconnection network solutions since 2008. In April, they joined The Linux Foundation to further their commitment to open source and to support and participate in the DPDK project, which provides a programming framework that enables faster development of high-speed data packet networking applications.

Additionally, Atomic Rules recently released Arkville, a DPDK-aware tool that provides a high-throughput connection, or conduit, between FPGA hardware and GPP (general purpose processor) software. According to the company, Arkville was designed with the specific goal of accelerating and empowering DPDK.

In this interview, Shep Siegel, founder of Atomic Rules, provides more information about the company’s products and services.

Linux.com: What does Atomic Rules do?

Shep Siegel: Atomic Rules have been providing FPGA design services since 2008. We’re experts in reconfigurable computing with FPGAs and provide our clients with effective solutions to problems involving interconnection networks and reconfigurable computing. Our practice employs scalable, rule-based methods to tackle complex concurrency among heterogeneous processors.

In 2014, we began augmenting services with IP Core products. Our first product was a UDP Offload Engine operating at 10, 25, 40, 50, 100 or 400 GbE. Today, we are launching a new product named Arkville, which is a DPDK-aware FPGA/GPP data mover that helps offload server cycles to FPGA gates. It is this new product that made it important for us to be part of the Linux Foundation.

How and why do you use Linux and open source?

Siegel: Linux and open source democratize the development process through API, ABI, and Interface standardization. We love the idea of common, open interfaces where everyone can then compete on quality of implementation.

Why did you join The Linux Foundation and the DPDK project?

Siegel: The Linux Foundation amplifies the openness and legitimacy of over a decade of DPDK development. By becoming a Linux Foundation member, our contributions will help the community flourish.

What interesting or innovative trends in your industry are you witnessing and what role do Linux and open source play in them?

Siegel: Linux and open source have catalyzed architectural innovation in the form of heterogeneous compute and communication. The frontiers once dividing the main families of processing devices available to systems architects (FPGA, DSP, GPP, etc.) are getting easier to cross, thanks to an expanding ecosystem of communication bridges allowing data movement from one type of processor to another more easily, at faster line rate, and with less latency.

How is your company participating in that innovation?

Siegel: By introducing Arkville, Atomic Rules is enabling Linux DPDK applications that seek acceleration in a software-first fashion to offload server cycles to FPGA gates. This allows project managers to bring their product to market faster and focus on differentiating their product by not having to re-invent a GPP/FPGA packet mover.

How has participating in the Linux and open source communities changed your company?

Siegel: It has reinforced one of our guiding aphorisms, “Interface before Implementation”!

Is there anything else important or upcoming that you’d like to share?

Siegel: Our Arkville launch brings five man-years of DPDK-first, software-first passion to market. If Linux kernel bypass matters to you, and if you are looking for a solution to offload server cycles to FPGA gates, please give it a look and tell us what you think!

Learn more about Linux Foundation corporate membership and see a full list of members at https://www.linuxfoundation.org/members/join.

The Companies That Support Linux and Open Source: VMware

The Companies That Support Linux and Open Source: Hart

One Standard to Rule Them All: A Common Language for the Cloud’s Identity Management Crisis

By

The New Stack

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May 30, 2017

The industry has had more than two decades to sort out interoperability problems between most on-premise systems. But that is, unfortunately, not the case for cloud-based systems.

Yet, a solution exists for IAM’s identity crisis: SCIM (System for Cross-Domain Identity Management), an open standard and REST API that defines schema and protocol so that enterprises can now manage identities in a consistent and uniform way. Despite this, widespread adoption of SCIM by SaaS and IAM vendors has yet to occur, with many preferring to stick with the familiar and build their custom APIs — forcing the average enterprise to manage identities in their cloud applications with time-consuming custom coding.

In this article, I’ll discuss why the industry needs to discard the DIY mindset, embrace open standards, and the importance of interoperability and collaboration in the digital economy.

Feature Branching vs. Feature Flags: What’s the Right Tool for the Job?

By

DevOps .com

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May 30, 2017

A dev team’s branch management strategy can have a significant impact on the rate at which it can release high-quality software. In this article we’ll explore the pros and cons of several different approaches for enabling multiple concurrent streams of dev work in the same codebase. We’ll see that two major factors—the cost of merge conflicts and the ability to release streams of work independently—are often in tension, but that Feature Flags provide a way to resolve that tension.

Merge Conflicts

New products start off as a small codebase, usually only being worked on by a handful of developers. This situation doesn’t call for much formal process. However, even when a team consists of just two devs, it’s still preferable to avoid working on the same files at the same time to avoid merge conflicts.