Cockpit has been in development for a few years now and it appears it is going to be default in the upcoming RHEL8 release.  I've recently started using it for managing and accessing KVM virtual machines via the cockpit-machines package.  I made a short screencast showing the basics.  Enjoy.

Red Hat's Dan (Mr. SELinux) Walsh gave a talk about Container Security at the USENIX LISA 2018 conference.

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.