Episode 004

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Intro:

Tony Bemus and Mat Enders

Kernel News: Mat

Kernel development

Kernel release status
The 3.2 merge window is still open, so there is no development kernel prepatch as 11/3.

Stable updates:
No stable updates have been released in the last week. The 2.6.32.47 and 2.6.33.20 updates are in the review process as of 11/02; they are due on or after November 4. Both are significant updates with over 100 fixes. 2.6.33.20 is expected to be the last update for 2.6.33 (for real this time); realtime users are encouraged to move to 3.0, which will be supported as a long-term release.

Linus released the 3.1 kernel and opened the 3.2 merge window on October 24 while attending the 2011 Kernel Summit.

As of this 11/03, nearly 8200 non-merge changesets have been pulled into the mainline tree. A number of significant trees have yet to be pulled. This looks like it could be the busiest development cycle ever.

Industrial I/O Subsystem
The industrial I/O subsystem has been in the staging tree for a fairly lengthly time. This is a framework for drivers of sensors that measure data in quantities like voltages, temperatures, acceleration, deceleration ambient light, wind speed, and others. For some time now there has been disagreement about how sensors like these fit into the kernel; IIO, should provide an answer.
The core IIO code reflects the fact that it sat out of tree for an extended period of time. Lately there has been a concerted effort to bring the staging tree up to snuff, with quantifiable results. The core set of IIO patches, according to maintainer Jonathan Cameron, is now ready to move from staging into the mainline tree.
There are basicly two kinds of IIO sensors simple low bandwidth and complex high bandwidth. The first move is for the first kind of sensors and should live entirely in sysfs, at /sys/bus/iio/devices.
The initial plan is to move the core interface into the mainline tree, with the simpler cleaner drivers to follow. As of 11/03 the IIO code has not been pulled into 3.2, it could however happen at anytime.

Some of the most significant user-visible changes merged for 3.2:
Proportional rate reduction, is now a part of the TCP stack, which is an algorithm for faster recovery after transient network problems.
Persistent alias names support for disk devices has been added to the block layer.
The extended verification module subsystem was merged, which uses the trusted platform module to protect a system against offline modifications to files.
The CFS bandwidth controller was merged, wich allows an administrator to set maximum CPU usage for groups of processes.
The s390 architecture now has kernel crash dump support.

Distro News:

Distrowatch.com

• 11-05 Elastix 2.2
• 11-05 Chakra GNU/Linux 2011.11
• 11-03 OLPC OS 11.3.0
• 11-03 GParted LiveCD 0.10.0-3
• 11-03 IPFire 2.11
• 11-02 Scientific Linux 5.7 “Live” – installable live CD, live DVD and mini live CD images based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.7
• 11-02 SystemRescueCd 2.4.0 – specialist live CD containing a large collection of open-source utilities
• 11-02 Kwort Linux 3.2 – CRUX-based desktop distribution (with Openbox) designed for intermediate and advanced Linux users
• 11-02 ArchBang Linux 2011.11 – ightweight distribution with Openbox, based on Arch Linux
• 11-02 ALT Linux 6.0.0 “Centaurus” – a Russian general-purpose distribution for desktops and servers
• 11-01 AV Linux 5.0.2 – Debian-based distribution featuring a large collection of audio and video production software
• 11-01 Alpine Linux 2.3.0 – a security-oriented, lightweight Linux distribution based on uClibc and BusyBox
• 11-01 OpenBSD 5.0

Distro of the Week:

1. Mint
2. Ubuntu
3. Fedora
4. openSUSE
5. Debian

Other Distro News:

Tech News:

New $89 BeagleBoard -BeagleBone- runs full Linux OS

This open-source hardware from BeagleBoard runs on a 720MHz Cortex-A8 processor. The credit-card sized motherboard based on an ARM processor could be used for robotics, gaming and medical devices.
The BeagleBone runs a full version of Linux and a full-featured web server, BeagleBoard said in a statement. That the board uses a Texas Instruments’ $5 Sitara AM335x ARM Cortex-A8 processor, that can deliver upto 720MHz of performance. TI announced this processor on Monday 10/31.
Jim McGregor, chief technology strategist at In-Stat, said that it is mostly for embedded systems running specific applications, and could also be used in audio-visual systems and projectors. It is not really intended for use in smartphones, tablets or PCs.
The Smart Pill Box is a device developed around the board, it sounds an alarm at a specific time to remind Alzheimer’s patients to take their medicine.
BeagleBoard states that the BeagleBone specs are 3.4 inches by 2.1 inches (8.6 centimeters by 5.3 centimeters). With Gigabit Ethernet, 3D graphics, USB 2.0 and microSD controllers.
This is exciting news for the Open-Source hardware peple I think this board has great potential in the embedded device market.

ARM Enters Into An Intel Stronghold

ARM a longtime dominator of the smartphones and tablets market, is breaking into a longtime Intel stronghold, server hardware.
Hewlett-Packard announced, Project Moonshot, a plan for the next generation of highly energy-efficient servers for data centers. The first generation of these servers are going to use a chip based on an ARM processor built by the three year old Texas startup Caldexa named the EnergyCore ECX-1000.
HP however did say that the next generation of these servers are going to feature Intel’s Atom processors. But it’s still a big win for ARM and its singular focus on energy efficiency.
Energy is usually the largest recurring expense for Super-Size data centers, like Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Facebook use to power their online services. Compared to the Intel Atom N570 processor at 8.5W, the new EnergyCore comes in at 1.5W, which comes down to a negligible 5W per server node. That is almost a tenth of the power that a conventional x86 chip node would use. For perspective, the lowest-power high-performance server chips out there, such as the Intel Xeon, come in at 45W.
HP already has developed, Redstone, a rack mounted prototype using 288 of the new Caldexa chips. Barry Evans, CEO and co-founder of Caldexa, claims that this server wil generate the output of approximately 700 conventional servers. Also Karl Freund, vice president of Caldexa for marketing said, that these systems can produce about two-thirds to two-fifths of what an Intel Xeon 5620 quad-core can produce, depending on the application being run. HP has also signed up AMD, Red Hat, and Canonical.
HP customers are going to be able to test out the new Moonstone servers in labs around the world. With the first one opening in Houston, Texas.

The New 10k Raspberry Pi Units Hit Market In December

From the front page of www.raspberrypi.org:
An article on 11/02’s www.geek.com suggested a couple of things – first, that we’re already producing units, and secondly, that we’re limiting sales to programmers only at first. Both of these appear to be the result of some horrible miscommunication (blame Eben; he’s very tired). To allay the obvious fears that some of you seem to have, if what’s currently happening in my inbox and on Twitter is anything to go by, I’ll copy and paste the clarification email Eben sent them here:

Just seen the article. Might be worth the clarification that we have 10k *parts kits* on order, not 10k devices. It wouldn’t make sense to order 10k manufactured devices before we know if the design is good (thereby obviating the point of a phased launch).

It’s fair to say that we expect most of the people who *choose* to buy early units will be programmers (the same people who buy Arduinos and Beagleboards).

In our minds “the first 10k will go to developers” is shorthand for “the first 10k won’t go into schools”.

In short, those first units will emphatically not be sold to programmers only. If you want one, and you click on the buy button in time, you can have one; they’re being sold on a first-come, first-served basis, whoever you are, and whether or not you are a programmer. We’ll be announcing here on the website, on Twitter and on the mailing list when we are ready to take orders, which should be some time in December. After that, it’s down to how fast you can click your mouse!

They then have two edits to clarify their clarification.

That was a paraphrase and greatly edited version of their statement please visit their website for the entire statement.

I originally read the geek dot com article and got very excited about these boards even though I am not a programmer. When I headed over to the Raspberry Pi site I found this. It is still exciting news and opens the door to many more people than developers.

WordPress blogs hijacked
Anti-virus firm Avast reports that criminals are exploiting a critical hole in the TimThumb WordPress add-on to deploy malicious code on a large scale.
— We are running WordPress as our CMS and I have check our theme “Morning Coffee”. Our theme is not one of the affected themes.

Samba gets Microsoft code contribution
Microsoft developer contributed a GPL licensed patch to the Samba project. The patch, which was part of a proof of concept for extended protection for NTLM and presented by Stephen A. Zarko of Microsoft’s Open Source Technology Center…

UEFI Secure Boot Continued … White paper published by Red Hat and Canonical
UEFI Secure Boot Impact on Linux

More Talk:

The Stallman Dialogues

Tony’s Projects: XBMCbuntu – Fast Boot, Internet content, Local and network Content!

Mat’s Projects:

Outtro Music:
cchits.net

Complicated Man – by Lejo Harmeson & Essence
Licensed: cc-by-nc-sa

This content is published under the Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.