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nVidia Fixes Linux Bug
Nvidia has fixed an ancient problem in Ubuntu systems which turned the screen into 40 shades of black.
The problem has been around for years and is common for anyone using Nvidia gear on Ubuntu systems.
When opening the window of a new application, the screen would go black or become transparent. As it turns out, this is actually an old problem and there are bug reports dating back from Ubuntu 12.10 times.
However to be fair it was not Nvidia’s fault. The problem was caused by Compiz, which had some leftover code from a port. Nvidia found it and proposed a fix.
“Our interpretation of the specification is that creating two GLX pixmaps pointing at the same drawable is not allowed, because it can lead to poorly defined behavior if the properties of both GLX drawables don’t match. Our driver prevents this, but Compiz appears to try to do this,” wrote NVIDIA’s Arthur Huillet.
Soon after that, a patch has been issued for Compiz and it’s been approved. The patch would be pushed in Ubuntu 15.04 and is likely to be backported to Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.
RHEL Finally Available On IBM’s Power8
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IBM has made the Power8 version of the latest Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) beta available through its Power Development Platform (PDP) as the firm continues to build support for its Power systems.
IBM and Red Hat announced in December that RHEL 7.1 was adding support for the Power8 processor in little endian instruction format, as the beta release was made available for testers to download.
This version is available for developers and testers to download from today through the IBM PDP and at IBM Innovation Centres and Client Centres worldwide, IBM announced on its Smarter Computing blog.
“IBM and Red Hat’s collaboration to produce open source innovation demonstrates our commitment to developing solutions that efficiently solve IT challenges while empowering our clients to make their data centres as simple as possible so they can focus on core business functions and future opportunities,” said Doug Balog, general manager for Power Systems at IBM’s Systems & Technology Group.
The little endian support is significant because IBM’s Power architecture processors are capable of supporting little endian and big endian instruction formats. These simply reflect the order in which bytes are stored in memory.
The Power platform has long had Linux distributions and applications that operate in big endian mode, but the much larger Linux ecosystem for x86 systems uses little endian mode, and supporting this in Red Hat makes it much easier to port applications from x86 to Power.
Suse Linux Enterprise Server 12 launched last year with little endian support for the Power8 processor, as did Canonical’s Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.
However, Red Hat and Suse are understood to be continuing to support their existing big endian releases on Power for their full product lifecycles.
IBM sold off its x86 server business to Lenovo last year, and has focused instead on the higher value Power Systems and z Systems mainframes.
In particular, the firm has touted the Power Systems as more suitable for mission critical workloads in scale-out environments like the cloud than x86 servers, and has been forging partnerships with firms such as Red Hat through its OpenPower Foundation.
Is China Spying?
Security experts claim that a Chinese manufacturer has been installing malware in its hand-held scanners that steals supply chain data.
TrapX says infected scanners made by an unnamed Chinese manufacturer located in Shandong province have been sold to eight unnamed firms including a large robotics company. The manufacturer denied knowledge that its scanners and website-hosted software were infected.
Sixteen of the 48 scanners deployed at one firm were infected, TrapX found. They all successfully sought out and compromised host names containing the word finance and siphoning off the logistical and financial data. The report Anatomy of the Attack: Zombie Zero said:
“Exfiltration of all financial data and ERP data was achieved, providing the attacker complete situational awareness and visibility into the logistic/shipping company’s worldwide operations,”.
TrapX suspected the attacks dubbed Zombie Zero were backed by the Chinese government and were a bid to gain intelligence on either logistics firms or their customers.
Is RedHat Being Open?
Red Hat has responded to claims that its implementation of Openstack isn’t as open as it should be.
A report at the Wall Street Journal this week suggested that Red Hat was blocking customers from using alternatives to the bespoke version of Openstack that it offers.
Red Hat provides Openstack with extended support by the company, however in spirit of open source, users should be entitled to use another vendor’s Openstack software, the generic Openstack, or create their own fork.
In reality though, the Wall Street Journal report suggests that Red Hat customers have been advised that Red Hat will not support mixed vendor software, that it has claimed it would cost the company too much to support multiple Openstack distributions and that Red Hat Linux and Red Hat Openstack are too closely intertwined to be separated.
Openstack’s open character is part of what makes it what it is, it’s embedded in the name, and Red Hat has been quick to distance itself from the report, though it does hedge a bit.
In a blog post, Paul Cormier, president of the company’s Products and Technologies division said, “Red Hat believes the entire cloud should be open with no lock-in to proprietary code. Period. No exceptions. Lock-in is the antithesis of open source, and it goes against everything Red Hat stands for.”
However, he went on to warn, “[Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform] requires tight feature and fix alignment between the kernel, the hypervisor, and Openstack services. We have run into this in actual customer support situations many times.”
In other words, its advice to customers is seemingly ‘of course you can do it, but you’d have to be a bit daft’.
He went on to explain, “Enterprise-class open source requires quality assurance. It requires standards. It requires security. Openstack is no different. To cavalierly ‘compile and ship’ untested Openstack offerings would be reckless. It would not deliver open source products that are ready for mission critical operations and we would never put our customers in that position or at risk.”
Which suggests that Red Hat will let you use your own version, unless it’s not happy with it, in which case it won’t.
In a swipe at HP, Cormier concluded by attacking its rival, saying, “We would celebrate and welcome competitors like HP showing commitment to true open source by open sourcing their entire software portfolio.”
HP, which recently launched its HP Helion brand for Openstack, would probably argue that it has already done this, so the war of words might just be beginning.
Dell RedHat Join Forces
The Dell Red Hat Cloud solution, a co-engineered, enterprise grade private cloud, was unveiled at the Red Hat Summit on Thursday.
The Openstack-based service also includes an extension of the Red Hat partnership into the Dell Openshift Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Linux Container products.
Dell and Redhat said their cloud partnership is intended to “address enterprise customer demand for more flexible, elastic and dynamic IT services to support and host non-business critical applications”.
The integration of Openshift with Redhat Linux is a move towards container enhancements from Redhat’s Docker platform, which the companies said will enable a write-once culture, making programs portable across public, private and hybrid cloud environments.
Paul Cormier, president of Products and Technologies at Red Hat said, “Cloud innovation is happening first in open source, and what we’re seeing from global customers is growing demand for open hybrid cloud solutions that meet a wide variety of requirements.”
Sam Greenblatt, VP of Enterprise Solutions Group Technology Strategy at Dell, added, “Dell is a long-time supporter of Openstack and this important extension of our commitment to the community now will include work for Openshift and Docker. We are building on our long history with open source and will apply that expertise to our new cloud solutions and co-engineering work with Red Hat.”
Dell Red Hat Cloud Solutions are available from today, with support for platform architects available from Dell Cloud Services.
Earlier this week, Red Hat announced Atomic Host, a new fork of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) specifically tailored for containers. Last year, the company broke bad with its Fedora Linux distribution, codenamed Heisenbug.
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