AT&T licensed Unix to outside parties from the late 1970s, leading to a variety of variants. Unix is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems. Get help and post new advice here.
Automotive Linux Summit connects the developer community driving the innovation in automotive Linux together with the vendors and users providing and using the code in order to drive the future of embedded devices in the automotive arena.
Open Source Summit Japan is the leading conference in Japan connecting the open source ecosystem under one roof, providing a forum for technologists and open source industry leaders to collaborate and share information, learn about the latest in open source technologies and find out how to gain a competitive advantage by using innovative open solutions.
June 24, 2019
Shanghai Expo Centre
No. 1500 Shibo Avenue
China
KubeCon + CloudNativeCon gathers all CNCF projects under one roof. Join leading technologists from open source cloud native communities to further the advancement of cloud native computing.
May 19, 2019
Fira Barcelona: Av. Joan Carles I
08908 Barcelona Barcelona
Spain
Cephalocon Barcelona aims to bring together more than 800 technologists and adopters from across the globe to showcase Ceph’s history and its future, demonstrate real-world applications, and highlight vendor solutions. Join us in Barcelona, Spain on 19-20 May 2019 for our second international conference event.
April 30, 2019
Sheraton Puerto Rico Hotel & Casino
San Juan 00907
Puerto Rico
The Linux Storage, Filesystem & Memory Management Summit gathers the foremost development and research experts and kernel subsystem maintainers to map out and implement improvements to the Linux filesystem, storage and memory management subsystems that will find their way into the mainline kernel and Linux distributions in the next 24-48 months.
When I read Brian Benchoff’s recent claim in Hackaday that the maker board market was stalling, I had a sense that there might be some truth to it. The novelty of community-backed, open-spec SBCs has worn off, and there were few new boards in 2018 that seem destined to become Raspberry Pi killers. Yet, the more I researched open-spec Linux/Android maker SBCs for LinuxGizmos’ New Year’s edition SBC catalog, the more I realized that the sector was very much alive — just a bit quieter than before.
There were 19 new SBC entries since our June roundup of 116 SBCs (compared to 13 new products that appeared in that reader survey catalog since the January 2018 New Year’s hacker catalog roundup of 103 boards). Despite the removal from market of several older products in Q2 2018 and the dissolution of The Next Thing and its Chip board — and even after we eliminated several older boards with fading communities, such as the 86Duino and PCDuino8 — we ended up with 122 boards, six more than in June.
Benchoff’s speculation that fewer maker boards were sold in 2018 may well be correct, but I have seen no proof of it. If there has been a slowdown, Benchoff nailed the reason: poor documentation. Other drawbacks to the hacker board scene include buggy software and less frequently, hardware. In many cases, the documentation and images are fine, but by the time they arrive, your shiny new SBC is already halfway to obsolescence.
Many of the casual, Raspberry Pi home automation hobbyists who experimented with faster, but not always reliable Banana, Orange, and NanoPi’s and other more obscure bargain-basement SBCs in recent years have returned to the fold. And why not return to the very capable Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ — the SBC of the year and the winner of our June reader survey — or the smaller new RPi 3 Model A+? The RPi 3B+ is only a modest improvement over the 3B, but it is close enough to the competition in price, features, and performance to shift the comparison to software and support issues. If the Raspberry Pi Foundation had been faster to transition from ARM11 to Cortex-A SoCs, the hacker board market might be considerably smaller than it is today.
Despite the atypically buggy PoE board for the RPi 3B+, which was quickly resolved with a refund and a reboot, things tend to work more smoothly in Raspberry land. Most buyers are more interested in solid community support and no-doubt software and HAT compatibility than they are in having full schematics.
Yet, there’s a second trend that is leading us toward more diversity: The maker board movement continues to merge with the commercial SBC industry. There appears to be significant growth in small manufacturing customers using open-spec boards with a variety of special features ranging from AI to voice control to Time Sensitive Networking. These technically knowledgeable buyers need solid documentation and schematics for prototyping new products but are usually less interested in other community resources. More to the point, they are tired of the high prices charged by commercial vendors, which only make sense with huge volumes.
Many of the new boards we’ve seen since June are aimed at relatively niche applications rather than trying to beat the Pi at world domination. There are new router boards such as the Banana Pi BPI-R2, as well as an increasing number of extended temperature SBCs such as the Firefly-PX3-SE. We’ve seen industrial focused newcomers such as the HummingBoard CBi (CAN bus interface) and novel sandwich-style module/carrier board combos like the Khadas Edge. Seeed has introduced a ReSpeaker v2.0 model aimed at far-field voice control applications.
The trend toward Power-over-Ethernet (PoE) continues with products like the Renegade Elite. (The RPi 3B+ may now have a PoE option, but it’s hobbled by a Gigabit Ethernet port that is limited to 300Mbps.)
We’re seeing more SBCs with built-in cellular modems or mini-PCIe and M.2 slots capable of supporting them. FriendlyElec has jumped on this trend this year with 2G, 3G, and 4G themed NanoPi IOT models.
The still fledgling x86 hacker board arena continues to grow with the Intel Gemini Lake based Odroid-H2 board, which appears to be the most powerful hacker SBC in history. The Odroid-H2 is the first hacker board to feature an Atom processor from a recently released Atom/Celeron product family.
Another new Intel-based board — Aaeon’s Apollo Lake based Up Core Plus — is one of several new entries since June designed for machine learning and neural network processing. These AI contenders include the Allwinner V5 based Lindenis V5 and Bitmain Sophon BM1880, which uses a novel TPU-enhanced Arm SoC of Bitmain’s own design. Khadas is selling a version of the Khadas Edge with the AI-enhanced Rockchip RK3399Pro SoC.
Among more mainstream boards, we saw a continuing shift from Allwinner SoCs to the high-end, hexa-core Rockchip RK3399. In early 2018 we saw a lot of RK3399 entries in the $110 to $150 range, but newer models are more affordable.
The new Khadas Edge, Renegade Elite, and 96Boards form-factor Rock960 all start at about $100, and others have been cheaper. FriendlyElec introduced a $65 (2GB) and up NanoPi-M4 and followed up with a compact, $45 NanoPi Neo4. The Neo4 is an impressive feat despite the limitation of only 1GB of RAM, which isn’t enough for the RK3399. Also in this range is Pine64’s $60 (2GB) and up RockPro64, which shipped earlier this year.
No single Raspberry Pi killer emerged in 2018. Yet, the collective group of RK3399 vendors appear to be acting as a counterpoint in the Pi. The RK3399 is fast and offers x86 like technologies such as PCIe, SATA, and HDMI 2.0, and it has better Linux mainline support than the still-improving Allwinner SoCs.
So what can we expect in 2019’s board market? The Raspberry Pi Foundation has already said there will be no major new Pi models in 2019, so as we await 2020’s Raspberry Pi 4, there will be room for other boards to shine. If there’s a major recession, we will likely see fewer SBC introductions. Otherwise, however, the growth in niche applications will probably block consolidation for the time being.
With TI’s new quad-core Cortex-A53 Sitara AM65x, it might be time for a BeagleBone reboot, and we should see more NXP i.MX8M boards such as TechNexion’s new sandwich-style PICO-PI-IMX8M spin on the Wand-Pi-8M. In the x86 world, meanwhile, a community-backed SBC based on the AMD Ryzen Embedded V1000 chip may arrive, although it may not clear our $200 limit.
So far, no RISC-V based SBCs have slid under our $200 limit, but one is likely to arrive in 2019. We could even see a low-cost Google Fuchsia hacker board. Meanwhile, you can check out the new Linux supported C-SKY ISA for as little as $6 with the new C-SKY board.
Overall, we’ll see a growing focus on 5G and edge analytics. In 2019 we are likely to see at least one 5G-ready board, and many more high-end edge IoT boards with NPUs, VPUs, and smartened up GPUs. So get ready to start talking TOPS and deep learning frameworks.
Sounds like fun. Let’s go.
January 8, 2019
Nokia Offices
Route de Villejust
91620 Nozay
France
The ONAP and OPNFV developer communities will be coming together for an ONAP DDF + ONAP Plugfest January 8-11, 2019 at the Nokia facility in Nozay, France. The ONAP community will be working toward the Dublin release while the OPNFV community will be focused on testing the Gambia release.
Now that the various challenges and successes of 2018 are behind us, let’s look back at some of the year’s highlights and see what’s in store for 2019 here on Linux.com.
2018 saw amazing growth for open source generally and for The Linux Foundation specifically, with huge tech acquisitions and widespread industry adoption stemming from more than 20 years of steady open source development and innovation.
At The Linux Foundation, this growth was reflected in the formation of many new projects, such as:
It was also reflected in record-breaking events, such as the sold-out KubeCon + CloudNativeCon; in the unprecedented number of new members joining The Linux Foundation last year; and in training milestones, such as surpassing the one million mark for the number of people enrolled in Linux Foundation training and certification courses on edX.
This interest in learning and training was seen on Linux.com as well, where tutorials were consistently the most popular articles on the website. For 2019, our goal is to feed that interest with articles that educate and inform and that provide a firm foundation from which to explore the array of tools, projects, and opportunities within the open source ecosystem. You can look forward to previews of the best Linux distributions, in-depth command-line tutorials, information on LF training courses, ebooks, and webinars, highlights from industry-leading events, and much more.
I recently read an essay by Melinda Gates in which she said that rather than making a list of resolutions, she picks a word for the year and uses to that word to inform her goals and shape her actions.
When pressed to choose a word for 2019, I choose strength. In doing so, I think about the various projects, teams, and individuals I work with and how we are more effective when we collaborate, learn from, and advocate for one another. I think about advances in terms of inclusion and acceptance and how diversity and civility can strengthen our community. I think about the opportunities we have to improve open source practices, expand them into new areas, and apply them to create solutions to new and existing problems.
Open source is a powerful catalyst; its strength lies in the bonds formed through open development and shared knowledge which combine to make a stronger and more resilient whole. Let’s carry that strength into 2019 and become stronger together.
To assess the state of adoption of machine learning (ML) and AI, we recently conducted a survey that garnered more than 11,000 respondents. As I pointed out in previous posts, we learned many companies are still in the early stages of deploying machine learning:
Companies cite “lack of data” and “lack of skilled people” as the main factors holding back adoption. In many instances, “lack of data” is literally the state of affairs: companies have yet to collect and store the data needed to train the ML models they desire. The “skills gap” is real and persistent.
Read more at O’Reilly
Linus Torvalds unleashed kernel 4.20, dubbed Shy Crocodile, on the world this past Sunday. There was speculation whether Torvalds would make the jump from 4.19 to 5.0, as he did when he skipped 3.20 and went with 4.0 instead. In the end, he stuck with 4.20, and 5.0 will probably be the number of the next kernel after this one.
Apart from all that, probably the largest will-he-won’t-he debate revolved around STIBP. STIBP stands for Single Thread Indirect Branch Predictors, and that mouthful is a preventive measure against the Spectre/Meltdown bugs. When STIBP was tried out during the 4.19 cycle, developers ended up removing it because it was found to have a negative impact on system performance, slowing down execution of some processes up to 50%. The matter was the subject of a long discussion on the Linux Kernel mailing list, with some developers like Andi Kleen arguing that the patch should be reverted entirely. Torvalds, however, pointed out there was a mid-way solution: “[W]e default to something that doesn’t kill performance. Warn once about it, and let the crazy people say «I’d rather take a 50% performance hit than worry about a theoretical issue»“.
After much work, STIBP is back in 4.20, but with performance improvements and allowing processes to choose whether they need to use it or not, because, as it turns out, many don’t.
On what should be a lighter note, but will probably spark outrage anyway (because reasons), Jarkko Sakkinen has taken on himself the thankless job of writing a patch that will cleanse the source code comments of swear words. Instead of just nuking them, the patch changes f-bombs for “hugs”. Hence, expressions become “Get the hug out!”, which implies you have your own personal cache of hugs and you are required to extract and spend one; and “Hug off!”, which must be some kind of endurance event.
Before anybody gets all hot under the collar, it is worth noting that, (a) Sakkinen’s solution is hilarious; and (b) no more reasons should be necessary, but here’s one anyway: such colorful language probably shouldn’t be in code that is easily readable by everyone and that is deployed all over the world to millions of people and businesses. Better reserve cussing for audiences which are more appreciative of the genre, namely Twitter followers and such.
As always, you can find more information about Linux 4.20 by going to the source announcement on the Linux Kernel mailing list, checking out the in-depth articles at Phoronix and by reading the Kernel Newbies report.
