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As is becoming traditional, two times a year the kernel networking community meets in a two-stage conference: an invite-only, informal, two-day plenary session called Netconf, held in Toronto this year, and a more conventional one-track conference open to the public called Netdev. This article covers the first day of the conference which consisted of around 25 Linux developers meeting under the direction of David Miller, the kernel's networking subsystem maintainer.
OpenBSD 6.1 has been released. This version adds the arm64 platform, using clang as the base system compiler. The loongson platform supports systems with Loongson 3A CPU and RS780E chipset. The armish, sparc, and zaurus platforms have been retired.
When a monolithic application is divided up into microservices, one new problem that must be solved is how to connect all those microservices to provide the old application's functionality. Linkerd, which is now officially a Cloud-Native Computing Foundation project, is a transparent proxy which solves this problem by sitting between those microservices and routing their requests. Two separate CNC/KubeCon events — a talk by Oliver Gould briefly joined by Oliver Beattie, and a salon hosted by Gould — provided a view of linkerd and what it can offer.
Pocl aims to become a performance portable open source (MIT-licensed) implementation of the OpenCL standard. Version 0.14 adds support for LLVM/Clang 4.0 and 3.9 and a new binary format that enables running OpenCL programs on hosts without online compiler support. There is also initial support for out-of-order command queue task scheduling and plenty of bug fixes.
The LWN.net Weekly Edition for April 6, 2017 is available.
Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition
Security updates have been issued by Debian (bouncycastle, dovecot, libnl, libnl3, and samba), Fedora (libtiff), Gentoo (chromium, qemu, and xorg-server), openSUSE (pidgin), Red Hat (389-ds-base and kernel), Slackware (vim), and Ubuntu (dovecot and webkit2gtk).
In the only storage-only LSFMM 2017 session that LWN was able to attend—it was scheduled opposite the one-and-only filesystem and memory management combined session—Lee Duncan explored some of the questions and problems he sees in booting from remote storage. He said that he wanted to get feedback from the assembled developers to see where solutions might lie.
The Mozilla Open Source Support (MOSS) program awards grants to projects "that contribute to our work and to the health of the Internet." Recent recipients include SecureDrop, libjpeg-turbo, LLVM, LEAP Encryption Access Project, and Tokio. There have also been MOSS supported audits of ntp, ntpsec, curl, and more. "We ran a major joint audit on two codebases, one of which is a fork of the other – ntp and ntpsec. ntp is a server implementation of the Network Time Protocol, whose codebase has been under development for 35 years. The ntpsec team forked ntp to pursue a different development methodology, and both versions are widely used. As the name implies, the ntpsec team suggest that their version is or will be more secure. Our auditors did find fewer security flaws in ntpsec than in ntp, but the results were not totally clear-cut."
In his traditional LSFMM session to "whinge about various things", Darrick Wong mostly discussed his recent work on online filesystem repair for XFS, but also strayed into some other topics. Online filesystem scrubbing for XFS was one of those, as was a new ioctl() command to determine block ownership.
Daniel Vetter discusses how to get people to review code. "The take away from these two articles seems to be that review is hard, there’s a constant lack of capable and willing reviewers, and this has been the state of review since forever. I’d like to counter pose this with our experiences in the graphics subsystem, where we’ve rolled out a well-working review process for the Intel driver, core subsystem and now the co-maintained small driver efforts with success, and not all that much pain."
In a second-day plenary session at the 2017 Linux Storage, Filesystem, and Memory-Management Summit, Fred Knight updated the attendees on what has happened in the storage standards world over the last year. While the transports (e.g. Fibre Channel, Ethernet) and the SCSI protocol have not seen a ton of changes over the last year, the NVM Express (NVMe) standards have had a lot of action.
Security updates have been issued by Arch Linux (mediawiki, python-django, and python2-django), Debian (jasper, libdatetime-timezone-perl, logback, ming, potrace, and tzdata), Fedora (curl, ghostscript, icecat, and xen), openSUSE (apparmor), and Slackware (libtiff).
Error handling during writeback is something of a mess in Linux these days, Jeff Layton said in his plenary session to open the second day of the 2017 Linux Storage, Filesystem, and Memory Management Summit. He has investigated the situation and wanted to discuss it with attendees. He also presented a proposal for a way to make things better.
The 4.11-rc6 kernel prepatch is out. "Things are looking fairly normal, so here's the regular weekly rc. It's a bit bigger than rc5, but not alarmingly so, and nothing looks particularly worrisome."
As it has evolved over the years, Android has acquired some hacks in how it handles its filesystems. Ted Ts'o would like to see those hacks eliminated, so he led a session at LSFMM 2017 to look at the problem and see what, if any, upstream-acceptable solution could be found.
Here's an extensive summary of new features in the upcoming PostgreSQL 10 release from Robert Haas. "PostgreSQL has had physical replication -- often called streaming replication -- since version 9.0, but this requires replicating the entire database, cannot tolerate writes in any form on the standby server, and is useless for replicating across versions or database systems. PostgreSQL has had logical decoding -- basically change capture -- since version 9.4, which has been embraced with enthusiasm, but it could not be used for replication without an add-on of some sort. PostgreSQL 10 adds logical replication which is very easy to configure and which works at table granularity, clearly a huge step forward. It will copy the initial data for you and then keep it up to date after that."
We are getting closer to being able to do unprivileged mounts inside containers, but there are still some pieces that do not work well in that scenario. In particular, the user IDs (and group IDs) that are embedded into filesystem images are problematic for this use case. James Bottomley led a discussion on the problem in a session at the 2017 Linux Storage, Filesystem, and Memory-Management Summit.
The mount() system call tries to do too many things, Miklos Szeredi said at the start of a filesystem-only discussion at LSFMM 2017. He has been interested in cleaning that up for a long time. So he wanted to discuss some ideas he had for a new interface to mount filesystems.
Open Build Service 2.8 has been released. "We’ve been hard at work to bring you many new features to the UI, the API and the backend. The UI has undergone several handy improvements including the filtering of the projects list based on a configurable regular expression and the ability to download a project’s gpg key and ssl certificate (also available via the API). The API has been fine-tuned to allow more control over users including locking or deleting them from projects as well as declaring users to be sub-accounts of other users. The backend now includes new features such as mulibuild - the ability to build multiple jobs from a single source package without needing to create local links. Worker tracking and management has also been enhanced along with the new obsservicedispatch service which handles sources in an asynchronous queue. Published packages can now be removed using the osc unpublish command." The reference server http://build.opensuse.org is available for all developers to build packages for the most popular distributions.
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