Another LISA 2018 presentation... but this one about one of our favorite topics... Sysadmins!

This is from USENIX LISA 2018... just appeared minutes ago.  Enjoy!

I haven't done much reading on it so I haven't formed an opinion yet... about what I think about IBM buying Red Hat.  Will it be good for IBM.  Definitely.  Will it be good for Red Hat?  I hope so.  IBM is well known for investing in Linux and FOSS technologies.

Anyone remember the various commercials they've run over the years?  I remember one specific one from... I don't recall the year... but yeah, it is dated now.  It shows a pre-teen boy.  Years have passed.  If they were to update the commercial, who should play that character?  The commercial ends with "The Future is Open".  Let's hope it still is.

Question:  If IBM had bought Canonical instead of Red Hat, how would you feel knowing Ubuntu was going to be the Linux distro deployed for the vast majority of IBM's customers including those in the cloud?  Kind of clarifies it now doesn't it?

UPDATE: Here's the Red Hat CEO's blog post on the subject:
A monumental day for open source and Red Hat

I haven't watched this yet but will ASAP.  Who doesn't want to see what Linus has to say?  This video is from the 2018 North American Open Source Summit.  Enjoy!

We have had a few discussions about the RISC-V development (at the BozemanLUG meetings).  Some Fedora folks have gotten Linux working on some of the RISC-V development boards.  There appear to be several layers to the overall design from the low-end moving up.  Can RISC-V ever become a viable, mainstream alternative?  Time will tell... but at the very least, seeing such developments gives me some hope.  Here's a somewhat mainstream "youtuber" talking about RISC-V and given the number of views so far, maybe the word / information will break through.

Let me just say that I don't really know much of anything about systemd and as such, I'm not even sure I care. I know that people either like systemd or really, really, hate systemd and that there is a very slim slice of global users that don't care one way or the other. I also know that literally everything in life can be turned into a punchline joke if you link it to systemd. You don't even have to understand the specifics of the joke, you just know that if systemd is part of the punch line that you are supposed to laugh. Now after all that, here is the real reason for this post.

I was listening to episode 262 of the Linux Unplugged podcast in which there is a discussion of Benno Rice's BSDCan 2018 keynote called "The Tragedy of systemd."  First, the discussion was really, really good and certainly thought provoking. I would highly recommend listening to the discussion.  It was interesting enough that I had to go and actually find the keynote presentation and watch it in it's entirety.  Remember what I said at the start of this post, I don't really know anything about systemd nor do I know if I even care.  And yet I am willing to say it was a very good presentation.

What I think really made this a good presentation was that Benno discusses the type of impact our public systemd stances can have on a project and on a community (think Linux) as a whole.  So I would like to encourage all of you to listen to episode 262 of Linux Unplugged podcast and watch Benno Rice's BSDCan 2018 keynote.  Who knows?  Even if you don't change your opinion of systemd, you might just change how you publicly use your opinion of systemd.

Here's a presentation video from the very recent OpenStack Summit Vancouver 2018.   The topic repeats what Dan Walsh was saying a couple of years ago.  Again, this is talking about application containers using traditional kernel features like namespaces and cgroups... because as we all know, in the Linux kernel, containers are NOT a REAL thing.

Just to be clear, OpenVZ... which is a mature out-of-tree patch for system containers that has been around and maintained for well over 13 years... does contain... but the hype is all around application containers like Docker and its work-alikes.

Two companies have been working on two separate projects to contain containers by running them within very light-weight KVM virtual machines.  A while ago those projects merged to become Kata Containers and they also had a we-released-1.0 presentation at the conference.  Their tagline is, "The speed of containers, the security of VMs".  It is still focused on application containers and perhaps not-so-oddly are implemented as an additional runtime for Docker and uses OCI container images rather than a more traditional KVM (qcow2 or raw) disk image.  I will ask the question... can Kata be used to run system containers and if not, why not?

It is Red Hat Summit time again and this video is from today.  Since I'm a big systemd fan, of course I'd post this video.

I'm sure everyone has already heard this from yesterday... but yes after believing there wouldn't be a new Raspberry Pi release for 2018 because nothing was announced at the end of Feb., the Raspberry Pi foundation pulled a fast one on Pi Day by announcing a new revision of the Raspberry Pi 3B.  They added a + to the end of it: Raspberry Pi 3B+.

What's new?  They improved power regulation and cooling of the CPU enabling a default clockrate 200MHz faster than the previous Pi (1.4GHz).  They totally refreshed the radio components (with a nice RPi logo stamped on the cover of it) bumping the wifi to dual-band 802.11ac and Blutooth 4.2.   They also improved ethernet performance making it "faster ethernet" but just under 1GBit along with 4 new pins for Power-over-Ethernet (PoE) capabilities with an add-on HAT.  Overall it is a cleaner design and the best Raspberry Pi to date.

While some had hoped for a doubling of the RAM (still only 1GB) that just wasn't in the cards as RAM prices have been significantly increasing over the last year and it is very important to the Raspberry Pi Foundation to keep the price point at $35.

Quite a few reviewers got a hold of the new model early and were able to post informative videos on YouTube including some benchmarks.  Retailers don't quite have them in stock yet but will RSN.  I already put in my order with Newark and it should be shipping in about 10 days.  I hope to get FedBerry going on mine for a desktop Fedora system.  I'll post about that when the time comes.  In the meantime, enjoy the following brief video mentioning what's new in the Raspberry Pi 3B+.

Update: My Rpi3B+ arrived on Monday, March 19th.  Wow, that was fast.  I couldn't find the case I had so I haven't had time to play with it yet.  For some reason, it seems smaller than previous models.

This interview is a couple of months old but still good.  Enjoy.