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GNU project made version 5.0 of its popular POSIX shell Bash ( Bourne Again Shell) available yesterday. Bash 5.0 explores new improvements and features such as BASH_ARGV0, EPOCHSECONDS, and EPOCHREALTIME among others. Bash was first released in 1989 and was created for the GNU project as a replacement for their Bourne shell. It is capable of performing functions such as interactive command line editing, and job control on architectures that support it. It is a complete implementation of the IEEE POSIX shell and tools specification. Key Updates New features Bash 5.0 comes with a newly added EPOCHSECONDS variable, which is capable of expanding to the time in seconds. There is another newly added EPOCHREALTIME variable which is similar to EPOCHSECONDS in Bash 5.0. EPOCHREALTIME is capable of obtaining the number of seconds since the Unix Epoch, the only difference being that this variable is a floating point with microsecond granularity. BASH_ARGV0 is also a newly added variable in Bash 5.0 that expands to $0 and sets $0 on assignment. There is a newly defined config-top.h in Bash 5.0. This allows the shell to use a static value for $PATH. Bash 5.0 has a new shell option that can enable and disable sending history to syslog at runtime. Other Changes The `globasciiranges' option is now enabled by default in Bash 5.0 and can be set to off by default at configuration time. POSIX mode is now capable of enabling the `shift_verbose' option. The `history' builtin option in Bash 5.0 can now delete ranges of history entries using   `-d start-end'. A change that caused strings containing + backslashes to be flagged as glob patterns has been reverted in Bash 5.0. For complete information on bash 5.0, check out its official release notes. GNU ed 1.15 released! GNU Bison 3.2 got rolled out GNU Guile 2.9.1 beta released JIT native code generation to speed up all Guile programs

Red Hat and SUSE have withdrawn their support for OpenLDAP in their Enterprise Linux offers, which will be replaced by Red Hat’s own 389 Directory Server. The openldap-server packages were deprecated starting from Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7.4, and will not be included in any future major release of RHEL. SUSE, in their release notes, have mentioned that the OpenLDAP server is still available on the Legacy Module for migration purposes, but it will not be maintained for the entire SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLE) 15 lifecycle. What is OpenLDAP? OpenLDAP is an open source implementation of Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) developed by the OpenLDAP Project. It is a collective effort to develop a LDAP suite of applications and development tools, which are robust, commercial-grade, and open source. What is 389 Directory Server? The 389 Directory Server is an LDAP server developed by Red Hat as a part of Red Hat’s community-supported Fedora Project. The name “389” comes from the port number used by LDAP. It supports many operating systems including Fedora, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 and above, Debian, Solaris 8 and above. The 389 Directory Server packages provide the core directory services components for Identity Management (IdM) in Red Hat Enterprise Linux and the Red Hat Directory Server (RHDS). The package is not supported as a stand-alone solution to provide LDAP services. Why Red Hat and SUSE withdrew their support? According to Red Hat, customers prefer Identity Management (IdM) in Red Hat Enterprise Linux solution over OpenLDAP server for enterprise use cases. This is why, they decided to focus on the technologies that Red Hat historically had deep understanding, and expertise in, and have been investing into, for more than a decade. By focusing on Red Hat Directory Server and IdM offerings, Red Hat will be able to better serve their customers of those solutions and increase the value of subscription. To know more on Red Hat and SUSE withdrawing their support for OpenLDAP, check out Red Hat’s announcement and SUSE release notes. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.6 Beta released with focus on security, cloud, and automation Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5 (RHEL 7.5) now generally available Google, IBM, RedHat and others launch Istio 1.0 service mesh for microservices

There has been a lot of noise around serverless computing over the last couple of years. There have been arguments that it’s going to put the container revolution to bed, and while that’s highly unlikely (containers and serverless are simply different solutions that are appropriate in different contexts), it’s significant that a trend like serverless could emerge so quickly to capture the attention of engineers and architects. It says a lot about the rapidly changing nature of software infrastructures and the increased demands for agility, scalability, and power. Azure is a cloud solution that’s only going to help drive serverless adoption further. But we know there’s always some trepidation among tech decision makers when choosing to implement something new or use a new platform. That’s why we’re delighted to be partnering with Microsoft Azure to give the world free access to Azure Serverless Computing Cookbook. Packed with more than 50 Azure serverless tutorials and recipes to help solve common and not so common challenges, this 325-page eBook is both a useful introduction to Azure’s serverless capabilities and a useful resource for anyone already acquainted with it. Simply click here to go to Microsoft Azure to download the eBook for free.

Yesterday Martin Best, Senior Technical Product Manager at Unity, briefly announced that the Unity Editor will now officially support Linux. Currently the Editor is available only on ‘preview’ for Ubuntu and CentOS, but Best has stated that it will be fully supported by Unity 2019.3. Another important note is to make sure that before opening projects via the Linux Editor, the 3rd-party tools also support it. Unity has been offering an unofficial, experimental Unity Editor for Linux since 2015. Unity had released the 2019.1 version in April this year, in which it was mentioned that the Unity editor for Linux has moved into preview mode from the experimental status. Now the status has been made official. Best mentions in the blog post, “growing number of developers using the experimental version, combined with the increasing demand of Unity users in the Film and Automotive, Transportation, and Manufacturing (ATM) industries means that we now plan to officially support the Unity Editor for Linux.” The Unity Editor for Linux will be accessible to all Personal (free), Plus, and Pro licenses users, starting with Unity 2019.1. It will be officially supported on the following configurations: Ubuntu 16.04, 18.04 CentOS 7 x86-64 architecture Gnome desktop environment running on top of X11 windowing system Nvidia official proprietary graphics driver and AMD Mesa graphics driver Desktop form factors, running on device/hardware without emulation or compatibility layer Users are quite happy that the Unity Editor will now officially support Linux. A user on Reddit comments, “Better late than never.” Another user added, “Great news! I just used the editor recently. The older versions were quite buggy but the latest release feels totally on par with Windows. Excellent work Unity Linux team!” https://twitter.com/FourthWoods/status/1134196011235237888 https://twitter.com/limatangoalpha/status/1134159970973470720 For the latest builds, check out the Unity Hub. For giving feedback on the Unity Editor for Linux, head over to the Unity Forum page. Obstacle Tower Environment 2.0: Unity announces Round 2 of its ‘Obstacle Tower Challenge’ to test AI game players. Unity has launched the ‘Obstacle Tower Challenge’ to test AI game players Unity updates its TOS, developers can now use any third party service that integrate into Unity

Today, Microsoft unveiled new features of Windows Server 2019. The new features are based on four themes—hybrid, security, application platform, and Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI). General changes Windows Server 2019, being a Long-Term Servicing Channel (LTSC) release, includes Desktop Experience. During setup, there are two options to choose from: Server Core installations or Server with Desktop Experience installations. A new feature called System Insights brings local predictive analytics capabilities to Windows Server 2019. This feature is powered by machine learning and aimed to help users reduce operational expenses associated with managing issues in Windows Server deployments. Hybrid cloud in Windows Server 2019 Another feature called the Server Core App Compatibility feature on demand (FOD) greatly improves the app compatibility in the Windows Server Core installation option. It does so by including a subset of binaries and components from Windows Server with the Desktop Experience included. This is done without adding the Windows Server Desktop Experience graphical environment itself. The purpose is to increase the functionality of Windows server while keeping a small footprint. This feature is optional and is available as a separate ISO to be added to Windows Server Core installation. New measures for security There are new changes made to add a new protection protocol, changes in virtual machines, networking, and web. Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) Now, there is a Windows Defender program called Advanced Threat Protection (ATP). ATP has deep platform sensors and response actions to expose memory and kernel level attacks. ATP can respond via suppressing malicious files and also terminating malicious processes. There is a new set of host-intrusion prevention capabilities called the Windows Defender ATP Exploit Guard. The components of ATP Exploit Guard are designed to lock down and protect a machine against a wide variety of attacks and also block behaviors common in malware attacks. Software Defined Networking (SDN) SDN delivers many security features which increase customer confidence in running workloads, be it on-premises or as a cloud service provider. These enhancements are integrated into the comprehensive SDN platform which was first introduced in Windows Server 2016. Improvements to shielded virtual machines Now, users can run shielded virtual machines on machines which are intermittently connected to the Host Guardian Service. This leverages the fallback HGS and offline mode features. There are troubleshooting improvements to shield virtual machines by enabling support for VMConnect Enhanced Session Mode and PowerShell Direct. Windows Server 2019 now supports Ubuntu, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server inside shielded virtual machines. Changes for faster and safer web Connections are coalesced to deliver uninterrupted and encrypted browsing. For automatic connection failure mitigation and ease of deployment, HTTP/2’s server-side cipher suite negotiation is upgraded. Storage Three storage changes are made in Windows Server 2019. Storage Migration Service It is a new technology that simplifies migrating servers to a newer Windows Server version. It has a graphical tool that lists data on servers and transfers the data and configuration to newer servers. Their users can optionally move the identities of the old servers to the new ones so that apps and users don’t have to make changes. Storage Spaces Direct There are new features in Storage Spaces Direct: Deduplication and compression capabilities for ReFS volumes Persistent memory has native support Nested resiliency for 2 node hyper-converged infrastructure at the edge Two-server clusters which use a USB flash drive as a witness Support for Windows Admin Center Display of performance history Scale up to 4 petabytes per cluster Mirror-accelerated parity is two times faster Drive latency outlier detection Fault tolerance is increased by manually delimiting the allocation of volumes Storage Replica Storage Replica is now also available in Windows Server 2019 standard edition. A new feature called test failover allows mounting of destination storage to validate replication or backup data. Performance improvements are made and Windows Admin Center support is added. Failover clustering New features in failover clustering include: Addition of cluster sets and Azure-aware clusters Cross-domain cluster migration USB witness Cluster infrastructure improvements Cluster Aware Updating supports Storage Spaces Direct File share witness enhancements Cluster hardening Failover Cluster no longer uses NTLM authentication Application platform changes in Windows Server 2019 Users can now run Windows and Linux-based containers on the same container host by using the same docker daemon. Changes are being continually done to improve support for Kubernetes. A number of improvements are made to containers such as changes to identity, compatibility, reduced size, and higher performance. Now, virtual network encryption allows virtual network traffic encryption between virtual machines that communicate within subnets and are marked as Encryption Enabled. There are also some improvements to network performance for virtual workloads, time service, SDN gateways, new deployment UI, and persistent memory support for Hyper-V VMs. For more details, visit the Microsoft website. OpenSSH, now a part of the Windows Server 2019 Microsoft announces Windows DNS Server Heap Overflow Vulnerability, users dissatisfied with patch details Microsoft fixes 62 security flaws on Patch Tuesday and re-releases Windows 10 version 1809 and Windows Server 2019

Last week, the team behind Ubuntu announced the release of Ubuntu 19.04 Disco Dingo Beta, which comes with Linux 5.0 support, GNOME 3.32, and more. Its stable version is expected to release on April 18th, 2019. Following are some of the updates in Ubuntu 19.04 Disco Dingo: Updates in Linux kernel Ubuntu 19.04 is based on Linux 5.0, which was released last month. It comes with support for AMD Radeon RX Vega M graphics processor, complete support for the Raspberry Pi 3B and the 3B+, Qualcomm Snapdragon 845, and much more. Toolchain Upgrades The tools are upgraded to their latest releases. The upgraded toolchain includes glibc 2.29, OpenJDK 11, Boost 1.67, Rustc 1.31, and updated GCC 8.3, Python 3.7.2 as default,  Ruby 2.5.3, PHP 7.2.15, and more. Updates in Ubuntu Desktop This release ships with the latest GNOME 3.32 giving it a refreshed visual design. It also brings a few performance improvements and new features: GNOME Disks now supports VeraCrypt, a utility used for on-the-fly encryption. A panel is added to the Settings menu to help users manage Thunderbolt devices. With this release, more shell components are cached in GPU RAM, which reduces load and increases FPS count. Desktop zoom works much smoother. An option is added to automatically submit error reports to the error reporting dialog window. Other updates include new Yaru icon sets, Mesa 19.0, QEMU 13.1, and libvirt 14.0. This release will be supported for 9 months until January 2020. Users who require Long Term Support are recommended to use Ubuntu 18.04 LTS instead. To read the full list of updates, visit Ubuntu’s official website. Chromium blacklists nouveau graphics device driver for Linux and Ubuntu users Ubuntu releases Mir 1.0.0 Ubuntu free Linux Mint Project, LMDE 3 ‘Cindy’ Cinnamon, released

Earlier this month, Red Hat released RHEL 7.6. Now, Red Hata Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8 beta version is available with more container friendliness than ever. This RHEL release is based on the Red Hat community Linux May 2018 Fedora 28 release. It uses the upstream Linux kernel 4.18 for its foundation. RHEL 8 beta introduces the concept of Application Streams. With this, userspace components can now update more quickly than core operating system packages and without having to wait for the next major version of the operating system. With Application Streams, you can also keep multiple versions of the same package around. RHEL 8 beta features RHEL 8 beta introduces a single and consistent user control panel through the RHEL Web Console. Systems admins of all experience levels can easily manage RHEL servers locally and remotely, including virtual machines. RHEL 8 beta uses IPVLAN to support efficient Linux networking in containers through connecting containers nested in virtual machines (VMs) to networking hosts. RHEL 8 beta also has a new TCP/IP stack with Bandwidth and Round-trip propagation time (BBR) congestion control. This increases performance and minimizes latency for services like streaming video or hosted storage. RHEL 8 is made secure with OpenSSL 1.1.1 and TLS 1.3 support and system-wide Cryptographic Policies. Red Hat’s lightweight, open standards-based container toolkit comes with Buildah (container building), Podman (running containers) and Skopeo (sharing/finding containers). RPM's YUM package manager has also been updated. Yum 4 delivers faster performance, fewer installed dependencies and more choices of package versions to meet specific workload requirements. File Systems in RHEL 8 beta RedHat has deprecated the Btrfs filesystem. This has really confused developers who are surprised why RedHat would opt out of it especially considering that it is also used for ChromeOS's Crostini Linux application container. From hacker news: “I'm still incredibly sad about that, especially as Btrfs has become a really solid filesystem over the last year or so in the upstream kernel.” “Indeed, Btrfs is uniquely capable and important. It has lightweight snapshots of directory trees, and fully supports NFS exports and kernel namespaces, so it can easily solve technical problems that currently can't be easily solved using ZFS or other filesystems.” Stratis is the new volume-managing file system in RHEL 8 beta. Stratis abstracts away the complexities inherent to data management via an API. Also, File System Snapshots provide for a faster way of conducting file-level tasks, like cloning virtual machines, while saving space by consuming new storage only when data changes. Existing customers and subscribers can test Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 beta. You can also view the README file for instructions on how to download and install the software. RedHat shares what to expect from next week’s first-ever DNSSEC root key rollover. Soon, RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) won’t support KDE. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5 (RHEL 7.5) now generally available.

On Tuesday, Google engineer Brendan Higgins announced an experimental set of 31 patches by introducing KUnit as a new Linux kernel unit testing framework to help preserve and improve the quality of the kernel's code. KUnit is a lightweight unit testing and mocking framework designed for the Linux kernel. Unit tests necessarily have finer granularity, they are able to test all code paths easily solving the classic problem of difficulty in exercising error handling code. KUnit is heavily inspired by JUnit, Python's unittest.mock, and Googletest/Googlemock for C++. KUnit provides facilities for defining unit test cases, grouping related test cases into test suites, providing common infrastructure for running tests, mocking, spying, and much more. Brenden writes, "It does not require installing the kernel on a test machine or in a VM and does not require tests to be written in userspace running on a host kernel. Additionally, KUnit is fast: From invocation to completion KUnit can run several dozen tests in under a second. Currently, the entire KUnit test suite for KUnit runs in under a second from the initial invocation (build time excluded)." When asked if KUnit will replace the other testing frameworks for the Linux Kernel, Brenden denied it,  saying, “Most existing tests for the Linux kernel are end-to-end tests, which have their place. A well tested system has lots of unit tests, a reasonable number of integration tests, and some end-to-end tests. KUnit is just trying to address the unit test space which is currently not being addressed.” To know more about KUnit in detail, read Brendan Higgins’ email threads. What role does Linux play in securing Android devices? bpftrace, a DTrace like tool for Linux now open source Linux drops Code of Conflict and adopts new Code of Conduct

Yesterday a remote code execution bug was found in the APT high-level package manager used by Debian, Ubuntu, and other related Linux distributions. Max Justicz, the security researcher who discovered the bug, says that the bug "allows a network man-in-the-middle (or a malicious package mirror) to execute arbitrary code as root on a machine installing any package.” Justicz’s blog post states that the vulnerable versions of APT don't properly sanitize certain parameters during HTTP redirects. An attacker can take advantage of this and perform a remote man-in-the-middle attack to inject malicious content, thus tricking the system to install certain altered packages. HTTP redirects while using apt-get command help Linux machines to automatically request packages from an appropriate mirror server when other servers are unavailable. If the first server fails, it returns the location of the next server from where the client should request the package. Justicz has also demonstrated this man-in-the-middle attack in a short video: https://justi.cz/assets/aptpoc.mp4 Justicz told The Hacker News that a malicious actor intercepting HTTP traffic between APT utility and a mirror server, or just a malicious mirror, could execute arbitrary code on the targeted system with the highest level of privileges, i.e. root. He further adds, "You can completely replace the requested package, as in my proof of concept. You could substitute a modified package as well if you wanted to”. The APT is also used by major Linux distributions like Debian and Ubuntu, who have also acknowledged and released security patches for this vulnerability. Hacker News also points how this flaw comes around the time when cybersecurity experts are fighting over Twitter, in favor of not using HTTPS and suggesting software developers to rely on signature-based package verification since the APT on Linux also does the same. They further add that the APT exploitation could have been mitigated if the software download manager was strictly using HTTPS to communicate securely. The developers of APT have released version 1.4.9 that fixes the issue. The bug has also been fixed in APT 1.2.29ubuntu0.1, 1.7.0ubuntu0.1, 1.0.1ubuntu2.19, and 1.6.6ubuntu0.1 packages, as well as in APT 1.4.9 for the Debian distribution. You can head over to Max Justicz official blog for more insights on this news. Kali Linux 2018 for testing and maintaining Windows security – Wolf Halton and Bo Weaver [Interview] Black Hat hackers used IPMI cards to launch JungleSec Ransomware, affects most of the Linux servers Homebrew 1.9.0 released with periodic brew cleanup, beta support for Linux, Windows and much more!

Linux is one of the most popular operating systems built around the Linux kernel by Linus Torvalds. Because it is free and open source, it gained a huge audience among developers very fast. Torvalds further welcomed other developers’ contributions to add to the kernel granted that they keep their contributions free. Due to this, thousands of developers have been working to improve Linux over the years, leading to its huge popularity today. Yesterday, Linus, who has been working on the Kernel for almost 30-years caught the Linux community by surprise as he apologized and opened up about going on a break over his ‘hurtful’ behavior that ‘contributed to an unprofessional environment’. In a long email to the Linux Kernel mailing list, Torvalds announced Linux 4.19 release candidate and then talked about his ‘look yourself in the mirror’ moment. “This week people in our community confronted me about my lifetime of not understanding emotions. My flippant attacks in emails have been both unprofessional and uncalled for. Especially at times when I made it personal. In my quest for a better patch, this made sense to me. I know now this was not OK and I am truly sorry” admitted Torvalds. The confession came about after Torvalds confessed to messing up the schedule of the Maintainer's Summit, a meeting of Linux's top 40 or so developers, by planning a family vacation. “Yes, I was somewhat embarrassed about having screwed up my calendar, but honestly, I was mostly hopeful that I wouldn't have to go to the kernel summit that I have gone to every year for just about the last two decades. That whole situation then started a whole different kind of discussion --  I realized that I had completely mis-read some of the people involved,” confessed Torvalds. Torvalds has been notorious for his outspoken nature and outbursts towards others (especially the developers in the Linux Community). Sarah Sharps, Linux maintainer quit the Linux community in 2015 over Torvald’s offensive behavior and called it ‘toxic’. Torvalds exploded at Intel, earlier this year, for spinning Spectre fix as a security feature. Also, Torvalds responded with profanity, last year, about different approaches to security during a discussion about whitelisting the proposed features for Linux version 4.15. “Maybe I can get an email filter in place so that when I send email with curse-words, they just won't go out. I really had been ignoring some fairly deep-seated feelings in the Community...I am not an emotionally empathetic kind of person...I need to change some of my behavior, and I want to apologize to the people that my personal behavior hurt and possibly drove away from kernel development entirely,” writes Torvalds. Torvalds then went ahead to talk about him taking a break from the Linux Community. “This is not some kind of "I'm burnt out, I need to just go away" break. I'm not feeling like I don't want to continue maintaining Linux. I very much want to continue to do this project that I've been working on for almost three decades. I need to take a break to get help on how to behave differently and fix some issues in my tooling and workflow”. A discussion with over 500 comments has started already on Reddit regarding Torvald’s decision.  While some people are supporting Torvald by accepting his apology, there are others who feel that the apology was long overdue and will believe him after he puts his words into action. https://twitter.com/TejasKumar_/status/1041527028271312897 https://twitter.com/coreytabaka/status/1041468174397399041 Python founder resigns – Guido van Rossum goes ‘on a permanent vacation from being BDFL’ Facebook and Arm join Yocto Project as platinum members for embedded Linux development NSA researchers present security improvements for Zephyr and Fucshia at Linux Security Summit 201

The Linux Mint Project community announced the release of LMDE 3 Cinnamon, codenamed as ‘Cindy’. LMDE(Linux Mint Debian Edition) is a Linux Mint project where the main goal of Linux Mint team is to see how viable their distribution would be and how much work would be necessary if Ubuntu was ever to disappear. LMDE aims to be similar to Linux Mint, but without the use of Ubuntu. Instead, LMDE package base is provided by Debian. LMDE 3 Cindy includes some bug and security fixes. However, the Debian base package stands unchanged. Mint and desktop components are updated continuously. Once ready, the newly developed features get directly into LMDE. These changes are staged for inclusion in the next upcoming Linux Mint point release, which is not yet disclosed. System requirements for LMDE 3 ‘Cindy’ Cinnamon 1GB RAM (2GB recommended for a comfortable usage) 15GB of disk space (20GB recommended) 1024×768 resolution (on lower resolutions, press ALT to drag windows with the mouse if they don’t fit in the screen) Some known issues resolved Locked root account The root account is now locked by default. To use the recovery console (from the Grub menu) or log in as root, one has to first give a new password to root: sudo passwd root Secure Boot If the computer is using Secure Boot one needs to disable it. Debian Stretch and LMDE 3 does not support it. Virtualbox Guest Additions To add support for shared folders, drag and drop, proper acceleration and display resolution in Virtualbox, click on the "Devices" menu of Virtualbox and choose "Insert Guest Additions CD Image". Choose "download" when asked and follow the instructions. Read Installing the VirtualBox Guest Additions for more details. Sound and microphone issues If there’s any issue with the microphone or the sound output, install ‘pavucontrol’. This will add "PulseAudio Volume Control" to the menu. The ‘pavucontrol’ application has more configuration options than the default volume control. Issues with KDE apps If one’s experiencing issues with KDE apps (Okular, Gwenview, KStars..etc), they can run the following command: apt install kdelibs-bin kdelibs5-data kdelibs5-plugins Read more about this release in detail in LMDE 3 Documentation. Facebook and Arm join Yocto Project as platinum members for embedded Linux development Bodhi Linux 5.0.0 released with updated Ubuntu core 18.04 and a modern look Google becomes a new platinum member of the Linux Foundation  

bpftrace is a DTrace like tool for troubleshooting kernel problems. It was created about a year ago by Alastair Robertson and the GitHub repository was made public recently. It has plenty of features to relate it to DTrace 2.0. bpftrace bpftrace is an open source high level tracing tool which allows analyzing systems. It is now more competent and built for modern extended Berkeley Packet Filter (eBPF). eBPF is a part of the Linux kernel and is popular in systems engineering. Robertson recently developed struct support, and applied it to tracepoints. Struct support was also applied to kprobes. bpftrace uses existing Linux kernel facilities like eBPF, kprobes, uprobes, tracepoints, and perf_events. It also uses bcc libraries. bpftrace uses a lex/yacc parser internally to convert programs into abstract syntax tree (AST). Then llvm intermediate representation actions are done and finally, then BPF is done. Source: GitHub bpftrace and DTrace bpftrace is a higher-level front end for custom ad-hoc tracing. It can play a similar role as DTrace. There are some things eBPF can do and DTrace can't, one of them being the ability to save and retrieve stack traces as variables. Brendan Gregg, one of the contributors of bpftrace states in his blog: “We've been adding bpftrace features as we need them, not just because DTrace had them. I can think of over a dozen things that DTrace can do that bpftrace currently cannot, including custom aggregation printing, shell arguments, translators, sizeof(), speculative tracing, and forced panics.” A one-liner tutorial and reference guide is available on GitHub for learning bpftrace. For more details and trying bpftrace head on to the GitHub repository and Brendan Gregg’s blog. NVTOP: An htop like monitoring tool for NVIDIA GPUs on Linux LLVM 7.0.0 released with improved optimization and new tools for monitoring Xamarin Test Cloud for API Monitoring [Tutorial]

Google Cloud Next conference in San Francisco in July 2018 saw some exciting new developments in the field of serverless technology. The company is giving development teams the ability to build apps without worrying about managing servers with their new serverless technology. Bringing the best of both worlds: Serverless and containers, Google announced that Cloud Functions is now generally available and ready for production use. Here is a list of the all-new features that developers can watch out for- #1 Write Cloud Functions using  Node 8, Python 3.7 With support for async/await and a new function signature, you can now write Cloud Functions using Node 8. Dealing with multiple asynchronous operations is now easier thanks to Cloud Functions that provide data and context. You can use the await keyword to await the results of asynchronous operations. Python 3.7 can also be used to write Cloud Functions.  Similar to Node, you get data and context for background functions, and request for HTTP. Python HTTP functions are based on the popular Flask microframework. Flask allows you to get set up really fast. The requests are based on flask.Request and the responses just need to be compatible with flask.make_response. As with Node, you get data (dict) with Python background functions and context (google.cloud.functions.Context). To signal completion, you just need to return from your function or raise an exception and Stackdriver error handling will kick in. And, similarly to Node (package.json), Cloud Functions will automatically do the installation of all of your Python dependencies (requirements.txt) and build in the cloud. You can have a look at the code differences between Node 6 and Node 8 behavior and at a Flask request on the Google Cloud website. #2 Cloud Functions is now out  for Firebase Cloud Functions for Firebase is also generally available. It has full support for Node 8, including ECMAScript 2017 and async/await. The additional granular controls include support  for runtime configuration options, including region, memory, and timeout. Thus allowing you to refine the behavior of your applications. You can find more details from the Firebase documentation. Flexibility for the application stack now stands improved. Firebase events (Analytics, Firestore, Realtime Database, Authentication) are directly available in the Cloud Functions Console on GCP. You can now trigger your functions in response to the Firebase events directly from your GCP project. #3 Run headless Chrome by accessing system libraries Google Cloud functions have also broadened the scope of libraries available by rebasing the underlying Cloud Functions operating system onto Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. Access to system libraries such as ffmpeg and libcairo2 is now available- in addition to imagemagick- as well as everything required to run headless Chrome. For example, you can now process videos and take web page screenshots in Chrome from within Cloud Functions. #4 Set environment variables You can now pass configuration to your functions by specifying key-value pairs that are bound to a function. The catch being, these pairs don’t have to exist in your source code. Environment variables are set at the deploy time using the --set-env-vars argument. These are then injected into the environment during execution time. You can find more details on the Google cloud webpage. #5 Cloud SQL direct connect Now connect Cloud Functions to Cloud SQL instances through a fully managed secure direct connection.  Explore more from the official documentation. What to expect next in Google Cloud Functions? Apart from these, Google also promises a range of features to be released in the future. These include: 1. Scaling controls This will be used to limit the number of instances on a per-function basis thus limiting traffic. Sudden traffic surge scenarios will , therefore,come under control when Cloud Functions rapidly scales up and overloads a database or general prioritization based on the importance of various parts of your system. 2. Serverless scheduling You’ll be able to schedule Cloud Functions down to one-minute intervals invoked via HTTP(S) or Pub/Sub. This allows you to execute Cloud Functions on a repeating schedule. Tasks like daily report generation or regularly processing dead letter queues will now pick up speed! 3. Compute Engine VM Access Now connect to Compute Engine VMs running on a private network using --connected-vpc option. This provides a direct connection to compute resources on an internal IP address range. 4. IAM Security Control The new Cloud Functions Invoker IAM role allows you to add IAM security to this URL. You can control who can invoke the function using the same security controls as used in Cloud Platform 5. Serverless containers With serverless containers, Google provides the same infrastructure that powers Cloud Functions. Users will now be able to simply provide a Docker image as input. This will allow them to deploy arbitrary runtimes and arbitrary system libraries on arbitrary Linux distributions This will be done while still retaining the same serverless characteristics as Cloud Functions. You can find detailed information about the updated services on Google Cloud’s Official page. Google Cloud Next: Fei-Fei Li reveals new AI tools for developers Google Cloud Launches Blockchain Toolkit to help developers build apps easily Zeit releases Serverless Docker in beta

On the 4th of November, Linux 4.20 rc-1 was released with a host of notable changes right from AMD Vega 20 support getting squared away, AMD Picasso APU support, Intel 2.5G Ethernet support, the removal of Speck, and other new hardware support additions and software features. The release that was supposed to upgrade the kernel’s performance, did not succeed in doing so. On the contrary, the kernel is much slower as compared to previous Linux kernel stable releases. In a blog released by Phoronix, Michael Larabel,e lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org, discussed the results of some tests conducted on the kernel. He bisected the 4.20 kernel merge window to explore the reasons for the significant slowdowns in the kernel for many real-world workloads. The article attributes this degrade in performance to the Spectre Flaws in the processor. In order to mitigate against the Spectre flaw, an intentional kernel change was made.The change is termed as  "STIBP" for cross-hyperthread Spectre mitigation on Intel processors. Single Thread Indirect Branch Predictors (STIBP) prevents cross-hyperthread control of decisions that are made by indirect branch predictors. The STIBP addition in Linux 4.20 will affect systems that have up-to-date/available microcode with this support and where a user’s CPU has Hyper-Threading enabled/present. Performance issues in Linux 4.20 Michael has done a detailed analysis of the kernel performance and here are some of his findings. Many synthetic and real-world tests showed that the Intel Core i9 performance was not upto the mark. The Rodinia scientific OpenMP tests took 30% longer, Java-based DaCapo tests taking up to ~50% more time to complete, the code compilation tests also extended in length. There was lower PostgreSQL database server performance and longer Blender3D rendering times. All this was noticed in Core i9 7960X and Core i9 7980XE test systems while the AMD Threadripper 2990WX performance was unaffected by the Linux 4.20 upgrade. The latest Linux kernel Git benchmarks also saw a significant pullback in performance from the early days of the Linux 4.20 merge window up through the very latest kernel code as of today. Those affected systems included a low-end Core i3 7100 as well as a Xeon E5 v3 and Core i7 systems. The tests conducted found the  Smallpt renderer to slow down significantly PHP performance took a major dive, HMMer also faced a major setback compared to the current Linux 4.19 stable series. What is surprising is that there are mitigations against Spectre, Meltdown, Foreshadow, etc in Linux 4.19 as well. But 4.20 shows an additional performance drop on top of all the previously outlined performance hits this year. In the entire testing phase, the AMD systems didn’t appear to be impacted. This would mean if a user disables Spectre V2 mitigations to account for better performance- the system’s security could be compromised. You can head over to Phoronix for a complete analysis of the test outputs and more information on this news. Soon, RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) won’t support KDE Red Hat releases Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 beta; deprecates Btrfs filesystem The Ceph Foundation has been launched by the Linux Foundation to support the open source storage project

Microsoft developer, David Fowler revealed ‘ProcDump for Linux’, a Linux version of the ProcDump Sysinternals tool, over the weekend on November 3. ProcDump is a Linux reimagining of the classic ProcDump tool from the Sysinternals suite of tools for Windows. It provides a convenient way for Linux developers to create core dumps of their application based on performance triggers. Requirements for ProcDump The tool currently supports Red Hat Enterprise Linux / CentOS 7, Fedora 26, Mageia 6 and Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, with other versions being tested. It also supports gdb >= 7.6.1 and zlib (build-time only). Limitations of ProcDump Runs on Linux Kernels version 3.5+ Does not have full feature parity with Windows version of ProcDump, specifically, stay alive functionality, and custom performance counters Installing ProcDump ProcDump can be installed using two methods, first, Package Manager, which is a preferred method. The other one is via.deb package. To know more about ProcDump in detail visit its GitHub page. Microsoft Azure reportedly chooses Xilinx chips over Intel Altera for AI co-processors, says Bloomberg report ‘We are not going to withdraw from the future’ says Microsoft’s Brad Smith on the ongoing JEDI bid, Amazon concurs Microsoft bring an open-source model of Component Firmware Update (CFU) for peripheral developers