One more Linux Magazine
Nov 05, 2018, 19:00
SELinux or Security Enhanced Linux is advanced access control mechanism which was developed by US security agency NSA to prevent malicious intrusions & tempering. It implements MAC (Mandatory Access control) over already present DAC (Discretionary Access Control ) i.e. read, write , execute permissions.
Nimbatus – The Space Drone Constructor is an excellent Early Access game where you snap blocks together to make some truly ridiculous creations. Stray Fawn Studio have now outlined their future plans and it sounds fun.
It’s an addictive game, one where you can easily get lost in how configurable you can make your drones. Do you make them small and sneaky? Do you make them as big as the entire screen? Do you give them some automation with AI to do things for you or go fully manual? So many options, so little time.
To give another example of what you can make with it, I perused the Steam Workshop today and found this amusing little number called “Deus Mecanicus”:
As for their current plans, the Drone Racing sounds awesome. They say it’s going to take a while, but even so it’s hard not to be excited. A game mode which has “drone vs. drone racing for fully autonomous drones and also races against the clock with multiple tracks and leaderboards”, sign me up!
Additionally, they’re going to be adding in wheels, weather effects, ice planets, boss fights, improved single-player campaign progress, sandbox planets and more.
See their roadmap here for their full plans. Find the game on Humble Store and Steam, well worth a look.
Trailer below for those who haven’t seen yet, it’s brilliant:
Manjaro Linux GNOME is an open source Linux operating system, a community-operated edition of Manjaro Linux built around the well know GNOME desktop environment.
It is distributed, like all the other Manjaro derivatives, as Live DVD ISO images that support both 64-bit and 32-bit architectures. In addition, the distribution inherits all the unique features of the original Manjaro operating system.
The boot medium will allow users to try the operating system without installing anything on their computers. It provides two modes, one for users of Intel graphics cards, and another one for owners of Nvidia or AMD video cards. Additionally, the Live CD can be used to start the currently installed operating system, view if your hardware components are correctly recognized or test the system memory for errors.
As mentioned before, the live session is powered by the GNOME desktop environment, which includes some of the main packages from the official GNOME Project. Nothing has been changed to the graphical user interface, providing users with a pure GNOME experience.
Default applications include the VLC Media Player, Mozilla Firefox web browser, Evolution email client, Viewnior image viewer, LibreOffice office suite, Banshee music player, and GIMP image editor.
Many other core GNOME components are installed in this edition of Manjaro Linux, including the GNOME Photos, GNOME Weather, GNOME Clocks, GNOME Chess, GNOME Logs, and many, if not all, GNOME games.
Manjaro Linux GNOME Community Edition is a rolling release operating system, which means that users don’t have to download a new ISO image to upgrade their system each time a new version is available.
You should really consider using this Linux distribution as your main operating system for common day to day tasks, especially because it will offer you an uncluttered GNOME desktop environment and a reliable, rolling-release Arch Linux base.
Recent industry events have underscored the strength of open source in today’s computing landscape. With billions of dollars being spent, the power of open source development, collaboration, and organization seems unstoppable.
Toward that end, we recently provided an array of articles, videos, and other resources to meet you where you are on your open source journey and help you master the basics, improve your skills, or explore the broader ecosystem. Let’s take a look.
To start, we provided some Linux basics in our two-part series exploring Linux links:
Then, we covered some basic tools for open source logging and monitoring:
We also took an in-depth look at the Introduction to Open Source, Git, and Linux training course from The Linux Foundation. This course presents a comprehensive learning path focused on development, Linux systems, and the Git revision control system. The $299 course is self-paced and comes with extensive and easily referenced learning materials. Get a preview of the course curriculum in this four-part series by Sam Dean:
As the default compiler for the Linux kernel, the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) delivers trusted, stable performance along with the additional extensions needed to correctly build the kernel. We took a closer look at this vital tool in this whitepaper:
Security is another vital component of Linux. In this video interview, Linux kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman provides a glimpse into how the kernel community deals with vulnerabilities.
Along with all these articles, we also recently published videos from some of our October events. Follow the links below to watch complete keynote and technical session presentations from Open Source Summit, Linux Security Summit, and Open FinTech Forum.
Stay tuned for more event coverage and essential open source resources.
While Steam Play is still of beta quality on Linux for running Windows games on Linux using their Wine-based Proton compatibility layer, Steam Play has been fast maturing since it was rolled out to the public in late August. The game list continues growing and with regular updates to Steam Play / Proton / DXVK (Direct3D 10/11 over Vulkan), more games are going online for running on Linux and doing so with decent performance and correct rendering. Given the most recent Steam Play beta update vastly improving the experience in our tests, here are the first of our Steam Play Proton benchmarks with Ubuntu Linux and using sixteen different NVIDIA GeForce / AMD Radeon graphics cards.
The wonderful database at ProtonDb.com is the de facto source for tracking what Windows games are working on Linux. As of writing there are more than 2,800 titles reported to work, though depending upon your Linux distribution and graphics drivers / hardware that number can vary. In terms of the vast majority of games running well, they tend to be older and/or indie games. Among the “platinum” rated games at this point are Tomb Raider: Anniversary, Final Fantasy VII, the original Company of Heroes, Unreal Gold, Far Cry, and also some more interesting games like Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare and The Witcher 3. The selection though of games is improving almost daily thanks to Proton/DXVK advancements being open-source and Valve regularly releasing updates and also the occasional workarounds to the Mesa graphics driver code.
For finding Steam Play games to utilize as benchmarks is still a bit mixed as the games need to be newer to at least stress modern graphics cards to make for an interesting comparison. The games also need to meet our benchmark/test requirements for integration with the Phoronix Test Suite and OpenBenchmarking.org. Since the Steam Play beta update last week improving things, I’ve been running tests using Batman: Arkham Origins and F1 2018. The Batman title is one of the older ones in the franchise but at least working well on Steam Play while F1 2018 is quite interesting considering that it is still a modern Windows game yet working well on Linux thanks to Proton and DXVK for remapping D3D11 to Vulkan.
There are also some other game titles I’m still working on benchmarking like Grand Theft Auto V and Shadow of the Tomb Raider but there are still issues there in my most recent checks. Benchmarks on other games will come as more benchmark-friendly, modern games are brought up to run properly with Steam Play.
For this benchmarking I tested 16 different graphics cards that on the Radeon side included the R9 285, R9 290, RX 560, RX 580, RX Vega 56, and RX Vega 64. All of the Radeon tests were done with the fresh driver stack of Linux 4.19 paired with Mesa 18.3-devel for the newest RADV driver code as of testing. On the NVIDIA side was the GeForce GTX 970, GTX 980, GTX 980 Ti, GTX 1060, GTX 1070, GTX 1070 Ti, GTX 1080, GTX 1080 Ti, RTX 2070, and RTX 2080 Ti. The cards tested on both sides were limited to the newer GPUs I had available for testing. The NVIDIA driver in use was the 410.73 release and all of these benchmarks were run from the same Ubuntu 18.10 system with Intel Core i9 9900K processor.
These benchmarks were run via the Phoronix Test Suite open-source benchmarking framework.
The goal of the OpenMessaging Project is to build out an industry standard, cloud oriented, and vendor neutral open standard for distributed messaging.
Today, the OpenMessaging Project — a collaborative project focused on creating a vendor-neutral open standard for distributed messaging — announced four new members JD.com, China Mobile Cloud, Qing Cloud, and Whale Cloud. Current members include Alibaba, DataPipeline, Di Di, Streamlio, WeBank, and Yahoo!.
The acceleration of microservice-based and cloud-based applications has put a growing focus on how data is connected to services, applications, and users. This focus has led to a number of new innovations and new products that support messaging and queueing needs. It has also contributed to increased demands on messaging and queuing solutions, making performance and scalability critical to success, and the need for an open standardization a must.
The goal of the OpenMessaging Project is to build out an industry standard, cloud oriented, and vendor neutral open standard for distributed messaging. More on this project and how to participate here: http://openmessaging.cloud
New Member Supporting Quotes:
“At China Mobile and CMsoft, we have built a MQ proxy system of Apache RocketMQ to provide a set of producer APIs and consumer APIs. The redundancy of having to hide the differences among the MQs takes so much time and energy out of our team. Given our knowledge in this field, we understand first hand the importance of a messaging communication standard. Having a vendor-neutral and language-independent MQ standard guideline is a big win for many applications. We believe this standard can help and promote the MQ technology that we rely on.” – Henry Hu, Architect at China Mobile and CMsoft.
“As a cloud provider, we offer various messaging services including Apache Kafka, RabbitMQ, and RocketMQ to our customers. More and more people keep asking us what software to use for their messaging requirements as the market is saturated with various open source solutions. This market saturation causes not only a high learning curve, but also a high maintenance cost. An industry open standard, vendor-neutral and language-independent specification for distributed messaging is increasingly important, especially in a cloud era. We look forward to collaborating with the OpenMessaging project to help drive messaging service towards a unified, open standard interface.” – Ray Zhou, Development Director at QingCloud
“At the JD Group, JingDong Message Queue (JMQ) has been widely used. However, despite our efforts to be compatible with all kinds of message protocols, we still can’t meet all the requirements. We are planning to open source JMQ, so it can be implemented for OpenMessaging. We see OpenMessaging as a de-facto international open standard for distributed messaging that aims at satisfying the need of modern cloud-native messaging and streaming applications. We sincerely believe that a unified and widely-accepted messaging standard can benefit MQ technology and applications relied on it.” – DeQiang Lin, Messaging Leader at the JingDong Middleware Department
“Currently, message queuing uses proprietary, closed protocols, restricting the ability for different operating systems or programming languages to interact in a heterogeneous set of environments. At Whale Cloud, in order to make it easy for developers to use messaging and streaming services, we’ve worked to eliminate the differences between the different protocols. Giving us insight and knowledge to know that a vendor-neutral and language-independent open specification is badly needed.” – Zheng Tao, Technical Director of Distributed Messaging and Streaming Data Platform at Whale Cloud
Radxa has posted specs for a $49 and up, community backed “Rock Pi” Raspberry Pi lookalike with a Rockchip RK3399, USB 3.0, M.2, HDMI 2.0, and native GbE, plus optional WiFi, BT, and PoE.
Radxa is prepping a Rockchip RK3399-based Raspberry Pi pseudo clone called the Rock Pi. It joins the RK3399-based NanoPi M4 in closely matching the RPi 3 layout, and it appears it may be the most affordable RK3399 based SBC yet, starting at $49 with 2GB RAM, and possibly lower for the unpriced 1GB model.
Rock Pi, front and back
(click images to enlarge)
Many other RK3399 based SBCs have the same size and 40-pin connector as the Pi, but with different layouts. These include the new
, the
, and several other boards found in our
.
Tom Cubie, who started Cubieboards.org before moving to Radxa, informed me of the upcoming Rock Pi a month ago. However, I first saw the specs today on a revised version of the Single Board Computer Database (“board-DB”), now hosted on Hackerboards. As some of you may recall, LinuxGizmos switched to the Hackerboards.com domain for a year before switching back.
Rick Lehrbaum, who created LinuxDevices and LinuxGizmos, not to mention the PC/104 SBC standard, has been transitioning away from LinuxGizmos in 2018. He decided to revive Hackerboards.com when board.db creator Raffaele Tranquillini asked if he could take over the database for him. Currently, Hackerboards is devoted to a revised version of board-db, which Lehrbaum is in the process of updating.
In his October email, Cubie informed me that Radxa was acquired by a Shenzhen based OEM/ODM called Emdoor Group in 2016. This temporarily put a halt to the Radxa community, which once brought us open-spec boards like the Rockchip RK3188 based Radxa Rock and RK3288 equipped Radxa Rock 2 Square. This year, Cubie signed an agreement with Emdoor, enabling them to revise the Radxa community. “Rock Pi is the beginning of the rebuilding of Radxa,” wrote Cubie.
We based our spec list below primarily on the Radxa product page but added a few items from the board-db listings such as the extended temperature range. Unlike the product page, the board-db listings also include pricing on all but one model.
The Rock Pi Model A will sell for $49 (2GB) and $65 (4GB). The Model B, which adds PoE and a WiFi-ac/Bluetooth 5.0 wireless module sells for $49 (1GB), $59 (2GB) or $75 (4GB). There’s no price yet for the 1GB Model A, which could end up in the low to mid $40 range, if not $39. The only other differences between the Model A and B, according to board-db, is that the Model B lacks Android support (7.1 or 9.0). Both models support “some Linux distributions,” says Radxa.
Inside the Rock Pi
The ports on the 85 x 54mm Rock Pi are just where a Pi lover would expect them to be. Unlike the RPi 3B or 3B+, the GbE port is native, giving you at least 939Mbps — at least three times the bandwidth. Like the 3B+, it supports Power-over-Ethernet using the same official Raspberry Pi PoE HAT.
Rock Pi (left) and pinout diagram
(click images to enlarge)
Specs are almost identical to those of the $75 (2GB) NanoPi M4. The major difference is that the Rock Pi adds an M.2 storage slot for NVMe SSDs but lacks the M4’s 24-pin GPIO interface, which augments the 40-pin connector found on both boards. The NanoPi M4 also has standard wireless (but no PoE) and has 4x USB 4.0 host ports instead of the 2x 3.0 and 2x 2.0 on the Rock Pi.
If the Rock Pi pricing holds, it looks like the better deal based on specs alone. That means it could be the most affordable RK3399 SBC yet, even besting the smaller, more limited (1GB only) $50 NanoPi Neo4.
The Rock Pi has a microSD slot and an empty eMMC socket in addition to the M.2. You get the same, 4K-ready HDMI 2.0 port, which is one of the main selling points of the RK3399.
The board also provides MIPI-DSI and -CSI interfaces for dual displays and camera attachments, respectively, although they are only 2-lane each. Other features include an audio jack with mic, an RTC, and a USB Type-C port for wide-range power.
Preliminary specifications listed for the Rock Pi include:
Further information
The Rock Pi is looking like it’s heading for pre-order or live orders soon, starting at below $49 if you can get by with only 1GB RAM. More information may be found on Radxa’s Rock Pi product page.
News briefs for November 6, 2018.
VMware has acquired Heptio, which was founded by Joe Beda and Craig
McLuckie, two of the creators of Kubernetes. TechCrunch
reports that the terms of the deal aren’t being disclosed and
that “this is a signal of the big bet that VMware is taking on
Kubernetes, and the belief that it will become an increasing
cornerstone in how enterprises run their businesses.” The post also
notes that this acquisition is “also another endorsement of the ongoing
rise of open source and its role in cloud architectures”.
The energy needed to mine one dollar’s worth of bitcoin is reported to
be more than double the energy required to mine the same amount of
gold, copper or platinum. The
Guardian reports on recent research from the Oak Ridge Institute in
Cincinnati, Ohio, that “one dollar’s worth of bitcoin takes
about 17 megajoules of energy to mine…compared with four, five and
seven megajoules for copper, gold and platinum”.
Happy 15th birthday to Fedora! Fifteen years ago today, November 6,
2003, Fedora Core 1 was released. See Fedora
Magazine’s post for a look back at the Fedora Project’s beginnings.
Microsoft announced the availability of two new Linux distros for
Windows Subsystem for Linux, which will coincide with the Windows 10
1809 release. ZDNet
reports that the Debian-based Linux distribution WLinux is
available from the Microsoft Store for $9.99 currently (normally it’s
$19.99). Also, OpenSUSE 15 and SLES 15 are now available from the
Microsoft Store as well.
ReactOS
0.4.10 was released today. The main new feature is
“ReactOS’ ability to now boot from a BTRFS formatted drive”. See the
official ChangeLog for more
details.
SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 6, 2018 /PRNewswire/ — The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, announces a broad coalition of industry leaders and users have joined forces to create a new open source foundation for the GraphQL project, which will be dedicated to growing and sustaining a neutral GraphQL ecosystem. Hosted under the Linux Foundation, the GraphQL Foundation’s mission will be to enable widespread adoption and help accelerate development of GraphQL and the surrounding ecosystem.
“As one of GraphQL’s co-creators, I’ve been amazed and proud to see it grow in adoption since its open sourcing. Through the formation of the GraphQL Foundation, I hope to see GraphQL become industry standard by encouraging contributions from a broader group and creating a shared investment in vendor-neutral events, documentation, tools, and support,” said Lee Byron, co-creator of GraphQL.
GraphQL is a next-generation API technology developed internally by Facebook in 2012 before being publicly open sourced in 2015. As application development shifts towards microservices architectures with an emphasis on flexibility and speed to market, tools like GraphQL are redefining API design and client-server interaction to improve the developer experience, increasing developer productivity and minimizing amounts of data transferred. GraphQL makes cross-platform and mobile development simpler with availability in multiple programming languages, allowing developers to create seamless user experiences for their customers.
GraphQL is being used in production by a variety of high scale companies such as Airbnb, Atlassian, Audi, CNBC, GitHub, Major League Soccer, Netflix, Shopify, The New York Times, Twitter, Pinterest and Yelp. GraphQL also powers hundreds of billions of API calls a day at Facebook.
“We are thrilled to welcome the GraphQL Foundation into the Linux Foundation. This advancement is important because it allows for long-term support and accelerated growth of this essential and groundbreaking technology that is changing the approach to API design for cloud-connected applications in any language,” said Jim Zemlin, Executive Director, the Linux Foundation.
Unlike REST-based APIs, which take advantage of HTTP and existing protocols, GraphQL APIs provide developers with the flexibility to query the exact data they need from a diverse set of cloud data sources, with less code, greater performance and security, and a faster development cycle. Not only does this enable developers to rapidly build top-quality apps, it also helps them achieve consistency and feature parity across multiple platforms such as web, iOS, Android, and embedded and IoT applications.
The GraphQL Foundation will have an open governance model that encourages participation and technical contribution and will provide a framework for long-term stewardship by an ecosystem invested in GraphQL’s success.
“At Facebook, our mission is to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together. We believe open source projects and the communities built around them help accelerate the pace of innovation and bring many minds to bear to solve large-scale challenges. GraphQL is one such project and community and the GraphQL Foundation will help ensure GraphQL continues to solve the real data fetching challenges that developers will face in building the products of tomorrow,” said Killian Murphy, Director, Facebook Open Source.
“GraphQL has redefined how developers work with APIs and client-server interactions. We look forward to working with the GraphQL community to become an independent foundation, draft their governance and continue to foster the growth and adoption of GraphQL,” said Chris Aniszczyk, Vice President of Developer Relations, the Linux Foundation.
Supporting Quotes
“Airbnb is making a massive investment in GraphQL, putting it at the center of our API strategy across both our product and internal tools. We are excited to see the Foundation play a key role in cultivating the community around GraphQL and continue to evolve GraphQL as a technology, paving the way for continued innovation of Airbnb’s API.” – Adam Neary, Tech Lead, Airbnb
“Given GraphQL’s centrality in the modern app development stack, the foundation we’re announcing today is not just necessary, but overdue. As the creators of Apollo, the most widely used implementation of GraphQL, we’re looking forward to working together with the Linux Foundation to define appropriate governance processes for this critical Internet standard.” – Geoff Schmidt, co-founder and CEO of Apollo GraphQL
“GraphQL, and the strong ecosystem behind it, is leading to a fundamental change in how we build products, and it helps bring together teams and organizations of every size. At Coursera, GraphQL assists us in understanding the massive breadth of our APIs and helps us create transformative educational experiences for everyone, everywhere. We’re excited to see the impact of the GraphQL Foundation in making both the technology and the community stronger.” – Jon Wong, Staff Software Engineer, Coursera
“GraphQL has come a long way since its creation in 2012. It’s been an honor seeing the technology grow from a prototype, to powering Facebook’s core applications, to an open source technology on the way to becoming a ubiquitous standard across the entire industry. The GraphQL Foundation is an exciting step forward. This new governance model is a major milestone in that maturation process that will ensure a neutral venue and structure for the entire community to drive the technology forward.” – Nick Schrock, Founder, Elementl, GraphQL Co-Creator
“We created GraphQL at Facebook six years ago to help us build high-performance mobile experiences, so to see it grow and gain broad industry adoption has been amazing. Since Facebook open-sourced GraphQL in 2015, the community has grown to include developers around the world, newly-founded startups, and well-established companies. The creation of the GraphQL Foundation is a new chapter that will create a governance structure we believe will empower the community and provide GraphQL long-term technical success. I’m excited to see its continued growth under the Foundation’s guidance.” – Dan Schafer, Facebook Software Engineer, GraphQL Co-Creator
“GraphQL has proven to be a valuable, extensible tool for GitHub, our customers, and our integrators over the past two years. The GraphQL Foundation embodies openness, transparency, and community — all of which we believe in at GitHub.” – Kyle Daigle, Director, Ecosystem Engineering, GitHub
“This is a very welcome announcement, and we believe that this is a necessary step. The GraphQL community has grown rapidly over the last few years, and has reached the point where transparent, neutral governance policies are necessary for future growth. At Hasura, we look forward to helping the Foundation in its work.” – Tanmai Gopal, CEO, Hasura
“GraphQL has become one of the most important technologies in the modern application development stack and sees rapid adoption by developers and companies across all industries. At Prisma, we’re very excited to support the GraphQL Foundation to enable a healthy community and sustain the continuous development of GraphQL.” – Johannes Schickling, Founder and CEO, Prisma
“At Shopify, GraphQL powers our core APIs and all our mobile and web clients. We strongly believe in open development and look to the Foundation to help expand the community and nurture its evolution.” – Jean-Michel Lemieux, SVP Engineering, Shopify
“GraphQL is gaining tremendous adoption as one of the best protocols for remote retrieval of large object graphs. At Twitter, we are looking forward to what’s to come in the GraphQL ecosystem and are very excited to support the GraphQL Foundation.” – Anna Sulkina Sr. Engineering Manager, Core Services Group, Twitter
About the Linux Foundation
The Linux Foundation is the organization of choice for the world’s top developers and companies to build ecosystems that accelerate open technology development and industry adoption. Together with the worldwide open source community, it is solving the hardest technology problems by creating the largest shared technology investment in history. Founded in 2000, The Linux Foundation today provides tools, training and events to scale any open source project, which together deliver an economic impact not achievable by any one company. More information can be found at www.linuxfoundation.org.
The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see our trademark usage page: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.
Media Contact:
Emily Olin
The Linux Foundation
eolin@linuxfoundation.org
View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/the-linux-foundation-announces-intent-to-form-new-foundation-to-support-graphql-300744847.html
SOURCE The Linux Foundation
Posted On: Nov 5, 2018
The built-in algorithms that come with Amazon SageMaker now support Pipe Mode for datasets in CSV format. This accelerates the speed at which data can be streamed from Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) into SageMaker by up to 40%, while training machine learning (ML) models. With this new enhancement, the performance benefits of Pipe Mode are extended to training datasets in CSV format in addition to the protobuf recordIO format that we released earlier this year.
Amazon SageMaker supports two methods of transferring training data: File Mode and Pipe Mode. With File Mode, the training data is downloaded first to an encrypted EBS volume attached to the training instance before training the model. With Pipe Mode, the data is streamed directly to the training algorithm while it is running. This results in faster training jobs and lesser disk space, reducing overall costs to train ML models on Amazon SageMaker.
Support for CSV format with Pipe Mode is available in all AWS regions where Amazon SageMaker is available today. You can read additional details in this blog post.