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.
October 10, 2018
Congress Center Basel
4058 Basel
Switzerland
From startups to the Fortune 500, Cloud Foundry is used by enterprises around the globe to automate, scale and manage cloud apps throughout their lifecycle. Cloud Foundry Summit Europe is the premier event for end users to learn the platform from those who build and use it every day. Join hundreds of developers in Basel to learn how to run apps at scale – using a platform or containers on multiple clouds.
October 1, 2018
Plaza Centre-Ville Montreal
Montreal, QC H3C 3Z7
Canada
Hyperledger Member Summit is the premier event of the year for our community, bringing all our stakeholders together face-to-face to learn and collaborate with each other, across both technical and business topics.
If your organization is not yet a Member and you are interested in learning more, please click here.
APIStrat brings together experts, leaders, and members of the community to discuss what we each see on the ground every day. This event is not just for developers and IT teams, it is also for business users, executives, and anyone who seeks to better understand how APIs are impacting the world around us.
The Linux Foundation Legal Summit is a neutral legal forum where leading attorneys from companies leveraging open source solutions can work together to focus on and discuss issues of common interest and concern.
The roots of Mesos can be traced back to 2009 when Ben Hindman was a PhD student at the University of California, Berkeley working on parallel programming. They were doing massive parallel computations on 128-core chips, trying to solve multiple problems such as making software and libraries run more efficiently on those chips. He started talking with fellow students so see if they could borrow ideas from parallel processing and multiple threads and apply them to cluster management.
“Initially, our focus was on Big Data,” said Hindman. Back then, Big Data was really hot and Hadoop was one of the hottest technologies. “We recognized that the way people were running things like Hadoop on clusters was similar to the way that people were running multiple threaded applications and parallel applications,” said Hindman.
However, it was not very efficient, so they started thinking how it could be done better through cluster management and resource management. “We looked at many different technologies at that time,” Hindman recalled.
Hindman and his colleagues, however, decided to adopt a novel approach. “We decided to create a lower level of abstraction for resource management, and run other services on top to that to do scheduling and other things,” said Hindman, “That’s essentially the essence of Mesos — to separate out the resource management part from the scheduling part.”
It worked, and Mesos has been going strong ever since.
The project was founded in 2009. In 2010 the team decided to donate the project to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). It was incubated at Apache and in 2013, it became a Top-Level Project (TLP).
There were many reasons why the Mesos community chose Apache Software Foundation, such as the permissiveness of Apache licensing, and the fact that they already had a vibrant community of other such projects.
It was also about influence. A lot of people working on Mesos were also involved with Apache, and many people were working on projects like Hadoop. At the same time, many folks from the Mesos community were working on other Big Data projects like Spark. This cross-pollination led all three projects — Hadoop, Mesos, and Spark — to become ASF projects.
It was also about commerce. Many companies were interested in Mesos, and the developers wanted it to be maintained by a neutral body instead of being a privately owned project.
A better question would be, who isn’t? Everyone from Apple to Netflix is using Mesos. However, Mesos had its share of challenges that any technology faces in its early days. “Initially, I had to convince people that there was this new technology called ‘containers’ that could be interesting as there is no need to use virtual machines,” said Hindman.
The industry has changed a great deal since then, and now every conversation around infrastructure starts with ‘containers’ — thanks to the work done by Docker. Today convincing is not needed, but even in the early days of Mesos, companies like Apple, Netflix, and PayPal saw the potential. They knew they could take advantage of containerization technologies in lieu of virtual machines. “These companies understood the value of containers before it became a phenomenon,” said Hindman.
These companies saw that they could have a bunch of containers, instead of virtual machines. All they needed was something to manage and run these containers, and they embraced Mesos. Some of the early users of Mesos included Apple, Netflix, PayPal, Yelp, OpenTable, and Groupon.
“Most of these organizations are using Mesos for just running arbitrary services,” said Hindman, “But there are many that are using it for doing interesting things with data processing, streaming data, analytics workloads and applications.”
One of the reasons these companies adopted Mesos was the clear separation between the resource management layers. Mesos offers the flexibility that companies need when dealing with containerization.
“One of the things we tried to do with Mesos was to create a layering so that people could take advantage of our layer, but also build whatever they wanted to on top,” said Hindman. “I think that’s worked really well for the big organizations like Netflix and Apple.”
However, not every company is a tech company; not every company has or should have this expertise. To help those organizations, Hindman co-founded Mesosphere to offer services and solutions around Mesos. “We ultimately decided to build DC/OS for those organizations which didn’t have the technical expertise or didn’t want to spend their time building something like that on top.”
People often think in terms of x versus y, but it’s not always a question of one technology versus another. Most technologies overlap in some areas, and they can also be complementary. “I don’t tend to see all these things as competition. I think some of them actually can work in complementary ways with one another,” said Hindman.
“In fact the name Mesos stands for ‘middle’; it’s kind of a middle OS,” said Hindman, “We have the notion of a container scheduler that can be run on top of something like Mesos. When Kubernetes first came out, we actually embraced it in the Mesos ecosystem and saw it as another way of running containers in DC/OS on top of Mesos.”
Mesos also resurrected a project called Marathon (a container orchestrator for Mesos and DC/OS), which they have made a first-class citizen in the Mesos ecosystem. However, Marathon does not really compare with Kubernetes. “Kubernetes does a lot more than what Marathon does, so you can’t swap them with each other,” said Hindman, “At the same time, we have done many things in Mesos that are not in Kubernetes. So, these technologies are complementary to each other.”
Instead of viewing such technologies as adversarial, they should be seen as beneficial to the industry. It’s not duplication of technologies; it’s diversity. According to Hindman, “it could be confusing for the end user in the open source space because it’s hard to know which technologies are suitable for what kind of workload, but that’s the nature of the beast called Open Source.”
That just means there are more choices, and everybody wins.
Git, the version control system originally created by Linus Torvalds, has become the standard for collaborative software development and is used by tens of millions of open source projects. To help you master this tool as well as gain essential knowledge of Linux and open source software development practices, The Linux Foundation is offering an Introduction to Open Source Development, Git, and Linux (LFD201), a new training course focused on Linux and Git.
“Open source software development practices lead to better code and faster development, which is why open source has become the dominant model for how the world’s technology infrastructure is built and operates,” said Linux Foundation General Manager, Training & Certification Clyde Seepersad. Thus, it is imperative to understand the fundamental systems and tools involved.
In this course, you will:
Gain a strong foundation of skills for working in open source development communities
Learn to work comfortably and productively in a Linux environment
Master important Linux methods and tools
You will also learn how to use Git to:
Create new repositories or clone existing ones
Commit new changes, review revision histories, and view differences from older versions
Work with different branches, merge repositories, and work with a distributed development team
This course is aimed at experienced computer users and developers who have little or no experience in a Linux environment, as well as those with some Linux experience who want to gain a good working knowledge of Git.
It provides an introduction to open source software, including an overview of methodology, licensing, and governance. It also provides details of working with Linux systems and examines an array of basic topics, including installation, desktop environments, important commands and utilities, file systems, and compiling software. The final section provides a practical introduction to Git, the source control system that allows efficient and verified software development to occur among widely distributed contributors.
The online course is accessible from anywhere in the world; it requires only a physical or virtual Linux environment — running any Linux distribution. It contains 43 hands-on lab exercises, more than 20 videos demonstrating important tasks, and quizzes to check your understanding of the material.
Take your open source journey to the next level with the essential skills offered in an Introduction to Open Source Development, Git, and Linux. The course is available now for $299. Register now.
Vote for your favorite open-spec, Linux- or Android-ready single board computers priced under $200.
It’s time again for LinuxGizmos’ annual reader survey of single board computers. They’ve identified 116 SBCs that fit their requirements — up from 98 boards in the June 2017 survey. Make your picks from the new list of under $200, hacker-friendly SBCs that run Linux or Android, and you could win one of 15 prizes.
In the brief survey, you can select up to three boards and answer a few questions about buying criteria and intended applications. By completing the survey, you will earn a chance to be among 15 randomly selected winners who will receive free boards donated by Aaeon UP, Qualcomm and Gumstix.
The prizes this time around include five Qualcomm DragonBoard 410c development boards and five Chatterbox Raspberry Pi Expansion boards from Gumstix (Rasp Pi not included). There are also five different Aaeon UP board models including an UP, an UP Squared, and an UP Core, as well as the new UP Core Plus and AI Core module with a Myriad 2 VPU. See more details at LinuxGizmos.
Last year’s results saw an overwhelming taste for Pi, with the Raspberry Pi 3 in the top spot, the Raspberry Pi Zero W in second, and the Cortex-A53 based Raspberry Pi 2 in third. Vote now for your favorites and stay tuned for the results.
With this week’s Computex show in Taipei and other recent events, processors are front and center in the tech news cycle. Intel made several announcements ranging from new Core processors to a cutting-edge technology for extending battery life. AMD, meanwhile, unveiled a second-gen, 32-core Threadripper CPU for high-end gaming and revealed some new Ryzen chips including some embedded friendly models.
Here’s a quick tour of major announcements from Intel and AMD, focusing on those processors of greatest interest to embedded Linux developers.
In April, Intel announced that mass production of its 10nm fabricated Cannon Lake generation of Core processors would be delayed until 2019, which led to more grumbling about Moore’s Law finally running its course. Yet, there were plenty of consolation prizes in Intel’s Computex showcase. Intel revealed two power-efficient, 14nm 8th Gen Core product families, as well as its first 5GHz designs.
The Whiskey Lake U-series and Amber Lake Y-series Core chips will arrive in more than 70 different laptop and 2-in-1 models starting this fall. The chips will bring “double digit performance gains” compared to 7th Gen Kaby Lake Core CPUs, said Intel. The new product families are more power efficient than the Coffee Lake chips that are now starting to arrive in products.
Both Whiskey Lake and Amber Lake will provide Intel’s higher performance gigabit WiFi ((Intel 9560 AC), which is also appearing on the new Gemini Lake Pentium Silver and Celeron SoCs, the follow-ups to the Apollo Lake generation. Gigabit WiFi is essentially Intel’s spin on 802.11ac with 2×2 MU-MIMO and 160MHz channels.
Intel’s Whiskey Lake is a continuation of the 7th and 8th Gen Skylake U-series processors, which have been popular on embedded equipment. Intel had few details, but Whiskey Lake will presumably offer the same, relatively low 15W TDPs. It’s also likely that like the Coffee Lake U-series chips it will be available in quad-core models as well as the dual-core only Kaby Lake and Skylake U-Series chips.
The Amber Lake Y-series chips will primarily target 2-in-1s. Like the dual-core Kaby Lake Y-Series chips, Amber Lake will offer 4.5W TDPs, reports PC World.
To celebrate Intel’s upcoming 50th anniversary, as well as the 40th anniversary of the first 8086 processor, Intel will launch a limited edition, 8th Gen Core i7-8086K CPU with a clock rate of 4GHz. The limited edition, 64-bit offering will be its first chip with 5GHz, single-core turbo boost speed, and the first 6-core, 12-thread processor with integrated graphics. Intel will be giving away 8,086 of the overclockable Core i7-8086K chips starting on June 7.
Intel also revealed plans to launch a new high-end Core X series with high core and thread counts by the end of the year. AnandTech predicts that this will use the Xeon-like Cascade Lake architecture. Later this year, it will announce new Core S-series models, which AnandTech projects will be octa-core Coffee Lake chips.
Intel also said that the first of its speedy Optane SSDs — an M.2 form-factor product called the 905P — is finally available. Due later this year is an Intel XMM 800 series modem that supports Sprint’s 5G cellular technology. Intel says 5G-enabled PCs will arrive in 2019.
In other news, Intel says it will soon launch an Intel Low Power Display Technology that will provide all-day battery life on laptops. Co-developers Sharp and Innolux are using the technology for a late-2018 launch of a 1W display panel that can cut LCD power consumption in half.
At Computex, AMD unveiled a second generation Threadripper CPU with 32 cores and 64 threads. The high-end gaming processor will launch in the third quarter to go head to head with Intel’s unnamed 28-core monster. According to Engadget, the new Threadripper adopts the same 12nm Zen+ architecture used by its Ryzen chips.
AMD also said it was sampling a 7nm Vega Instinct GPU designed for graphics cards with 32GB of expensive HBM2 memory rather than GDDR5X or GDDR6. The Vega Instinct will offer 35 percent greater performance and twice the power efficiency of the current 14nm Vega GPUs. New rendering capabilities will help it compete with Nvidia’s CUDA enabled GPUs in ray tracing, says WCCFTech.
Some new Ryzen 2000-series processors recently showed up on an ASRock CPU chart that have the lowest power efficiency of the mainstream Ryzen chips. As detailed on AnandTech, the 2.8GHz, octa-core, 16-thread Ryzen 7 2700E and 3.4GHz/3.9GHz, hexa-core, 12-thread Ryzen 5 2600E each have 45W TDPs. This is higher than the 12-54W TDPs of its Ryzen Embedded V1000 SoCs, but lower than the 65W and up mainstream Ryzen chips. The new Ryzen-E models are aimed at SFF (small form factor) and fanless systems.
Join us at Open Source Summit + Embedded Linux Conference Europe in Edinburgh, UK on October 22-24, 2018, for 100+ sessions on Linux, Cloud, Containers, AI, Community, and more.
It didn’t take long at all for Kubernetes to become a star in the open source arena, emerging as the standard way to containerize applications at scale. Kubernetes is ushering in “operations transformation” and helping organizations make the transition to cloud-native computing, said Craig McLuckie, co-founder and CEO of Heptio and a co-founder of Kubernetes at Google, in a recent free webinar.
However, Kubernetes, which was created at Google and donated to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, is known to be complex and can create many maintenance and deployment challenges. To address that, new classes of community-created complementary and helper applications are helping to tame Kubernetes.
The Helm project is a case in point. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation recently voted to accept Helm as an incubation-level hosted project. Helm is a package manager that provides an easy way to find, share, and use software built for Kubernetes. It removes complexity from configuration and deployment, and enables greater developer productivity.
“Helm addresses a common user need of deploying applications to Kubernetes by making their configurations reusable,” said Brian Grant, Principal Engineer at Google, and Kubernetes SIG Architecture co-chair and Steering Committee member. “Both the Helm and Kubernetes projects have grown substantially. As Kubernetes shifts its focus to its own core in order to better manage this growth, CNCF is a great home for Helm to continue making it easier for developers and operators to streamline Kubernetes deployments.”
According to a recent Kubernetes Application Survey, 64 percent of the application developers, application operators, and ecosystem tool developers who answered the survey reported using Helm to manage apps on Kubernetes.
But Helm is hardly the only open tool helping to ease the burden of managing Kubernetes. Microsoft has open sourced Draft, a tool that streamlines application development and deployment into any Kubernetes cluster. “Using two simple commands, developers can now begin hacking on container-based applications without requiring Docker or even installing Kubernetes themselves,” notes Gabe Monroy, PM Lead for Containers at Microsoft. “You can customize Draft to streamline the development of any application or service that can run on Kubernetes.” See this process in action here.
Are you aware that your iOS or Android smartphone can play a role in demystifying and operating Kubernetes? Cabin lets Kubernetes administrators leverage a dashboard from their phones. It drives many of the processes and features that you’ll find in the complete Kubernetes dashboard, ranging from reading pod logs to working with web-based apps that Kubernetes hosts, to accessing Helm charts.
Red Hat, too, has been helping users streamline their Kubernetes implementations. Through its acquisition of San Francisco-based startup Codenvy, Red Hat is giving developers options for building out cloud-based integrated development environments, including working with Kubernetes and containers. Codenvy is built on the open source project Eclipse Che, which offers a cloud-based Integrated Developer Environment (IDE) and development environment. The OpenShift.io cloud-based container development service from Red Hat already integrates Codenvy’s Eclipse Che implementation.
Dashboards are proven as good tools for simplifying administration of many kinds of processes, and although Kubernetes has a basic dashboard, efficient community-created dashboards are emerging. Kube-ops-view is a popular one. It gives you optics across multiple Kubernetes clusters, with graphical representations across the board that allow you to monitor memory and CPU usage, and more.
Writing and maintaining application definitions is one of the more complex aspects of running Kubernetes, and Kedge is a popular open tool that offers a simplified approach. With Kedge, you can supply a Kubernetes definition in simple form and Kedge expands into a full and correct application definition. It basically lets you work with shortcuts.
The move toward containers shifts many types of dependencies pertaining to applications, and it shifts how applications are created. Kubernetes has proven to be an essential orchestration tool as these changes take place, and it is good to see open tools that can help streamline Kubernetes itself and make developing applications easier.
To learn more about Kubernetes, check out the sample course materialsfor Kubernetes Fundamentals (LFS258), an online, self-paced course developed by The Linux Foundation Training that gives a high-level overview of what Kubernetes is and the challenges it solves. Download a free sample chapter now.
Want the best of all Chromebooks? Then get Google’s Pixelbook.
Now, I’ve liked Chromebooks since the experimental Cr-48rolled out in late 2010. And, when Google released its first high-end Chromebook, 2013’s Pixel, I was sold. I slowly but surely put away my Linux-powered Lenovo ThinkPads and started replacing them with Google’s high-end Chromebooks. Why? Because they’re better than any other laptop out there.
Besides, as my tech buddy Mike Elgan points out, today’s high-end Chromebooks “run more apps without dual- or multi-booting than any other computing platform. Chromebooks can run apps from Android, Linux, and Windows concurrently in the same session.”
Read more at ZDNet
