Open-source News

NVIDIA 530.41.03 Linux Driver Released With IBT Kernel Support, Vulkan Video  Phoronix

Tails 5.11: Secure-surfing 'amnesiac' live distro arrives  The Register

XE Gen 2 Linux Laptop announced by Kubuntu Focus  GamingOnLinux

Thanks to the work of Timur Kristóf on Valve's Linux graphics driver team, the RADV driver in Mesa 23.1 this morning received support for Vulkan mesh and task shaders for Radeon RX 7000 series "RDNA3" graphics processors...

Intel's Linear Address Masking (LAM) functionality to make use of untranslated address bits of 64-bit linear addresses for arbitrary metadata is aiming to be mainlined with the upcoming Linux 6.4 cycle...

Intel LAM Will Try Again For Linux 6.4  Phoronix

Out today is a new version of the Proxmox Virtual Environment as the hyper-converged infrastructure software with hosted hypervisor...

Proxmox VE 7.4 Released With Linux 5.15 LTS + Linux 6.2 Support ...  Phoronix

Google discloses CentOS Linux kernel vulnerabilities following failure to issue timely fixes  Neowin

Atari are acquiring Night Dive Studios | GamingOnLinux  GamingOnLinux

Zhaoxin Beginning Work Bringing Up "Yongfeng" CPU Support For ...  Phoronix

Chinese fabless semiconductor company Zhaoxin, which was started ten years ago as a joint venture between VIA and the Shanghai Municipal Government to create domestic x86 CPUs, is now in the process of working on supporting their newest Yongfeng processors with the Linux kernel...

Proton Experimental fixes up Call of Duty: Black Ops III videos  GamingOnLinux

A new version of MoltenVK has been released, the open-source library that maps the Vulkan API atop Apple's Metal API for making use of this industry standard graphics/compute API on modern iOS and macOS devices...

AWS Releases New Cloud-Optimized Linux Distribution With ...  InfoQ.com

The X.Org Board of Directors has delayed their election process by two weeks in hopes of having more candidates nominated to run for the board as currently they do not have enough candidates to start an election...

Here's how to remove the Bing button in Microsoft Edge  Android Authority

Shell DDoS Malware Attacks Poorly Managed Linux SSH Servers  GBHackers

Enable EPEL and EPEL Next in Almalinux or Rocky Linux 9  H2S Media

3 surprising things Linux sysadmins can do with systemd alansmithee Thu, 03/23/2023 - 03:00

When it first started out, there was a lot of press about systemd and its ability to speed up boot time. That feature had a mostly-universal appeal (it's less important to those who don't reboot), so in many ways, that's the reputation it still has today. And while it's true that systemd is the thing that launches services in parallel during startup, there's a lot more to it than that. Here are three things you may not have realized systemd could do but should be taking advantage. Get more tips from our new downloadable eBook, A pragmatic guide to systemd.

1. Simplify Linux ps

If you've ever used the ps or even just the top command, then you know that your computer is running hundreds of processes at any given moment. Sometimes, that's exactly the kind of information you need in order to understand what your computer, or its users, are up to. Other times, all you really need is a general overview.

The systemd-cgtop command provides a simple view of your computer's load based on the cgroups (control groups) tasks have been arranged into. Control groups are important to modern Linux, and are essentially the support structures underneath containers and Kubernetes (which in turn are why the cloud scales the way it does), but also they're useful constructs on your home PC. For instance, from the output of systemd-cgtop, you can see the load of your user processes as opposed to system processes:

Control Group Proc+ %CPU Memory Input/s Output/s / 183 5.0 1.6G 0B 3.0M user.slice 4 2.8 1.1G 0B 174.7K user.slice/user-1000.slice 4 2.8 968.2M 0B 174.7K system.slice 65 2.2 1.5G 0B 2.8M

You can also view just your userspace processes, or just your userspace processes and kernel threads.

This isn't a replacement for top or ps by any means, but it's an additional view into your system from a different and unique angle. And it can be vital when running containers, because containers use cgroups.

2. Linux cron

Cron is a classic component of Linux. When you want to schedule something to happen on a regular basis, you use cron. It's reliable and pretty well integrated into your system.

The problem is, cron doesn't understand that some computers get shut down. If you have a cronjob scheduled for midnight, but you turn your computer off at 23:59 every day, then your cronjob never runs. There's no facility for cron to detect that there was a missed job overnight.

As an answer to that problem, there's the excellent anacron, but that's not quite as integrated as cron. There's a lot of setup you have to do to get anacron running.

A second alternative is systemd timers. Like cron, it's already built in and ready to go. You have to write a unit file, which is definitely more lines than a one-line crontab entry, but it's also pretty simple. For instance, here's a unit file to run an imaginary backup script 30 minutes after startup, but only once a day. This ensures that my computer gets backed up, and prevents it from trying to backup more than once daily.

[Unit] Description=Backup Requires=myBackup.service [Timer] OnBootSec=30min OnUnitActiveSec=1d [Install] WantedBy=timers.target

You can, of course, intervene and prompt a job to run with . Thanks to the OnUnitActiveSec directive, systemd doesn't attempt to run a job you've manually activated.

Linux Containers What are Linux containers? What is Kubernetes? Free online course: Deploy containerized applications eBook: A guide to Kubernetes for SREs and sysadmins Free online course: Running containers with Red Hat technical overview Podman cheat sheet The latest articles on Linux containers 3. Run Linux containers

Containers make starting up a complex service really easy. You can run a Mattermost or Discourse server in mere minutes. The hard part, in some cases, is managing and monitoring the containers once you have them running. Podman makes it easy to manage them, but what do use to manage Podman? Well, you can use systemd.

Podman has a built-in command to generate unit files so your containers can be managed and monitored by systemd:

$ podman generate systemd --new --files --name example_pod

All you have to do then is start the service:

$ systemctl --user start pod-example_pod.service

As with any other service on your computer, systemd ensures that your pod runs no matter what. It logs problems, which you can view with journalctl along with your other essential logs, and you can monitor its activity within cgroups using systemd-cgtop.

It's no Kubernetes platform, but for one or two containers that you just want to have available on a reliable and predictable basis, Podman and systemd are an amazing pair.

Download the systemd eBook

There's a lot more to systemd, and you can learn the basics, along with lots of useful and pragmatic tips, from author David Both in his new complimentary pragmatic guide to systemd.

It's not just for making your computer boot faster. Download our new systemd eBook for Linux sysadmins for more tips.

Image by:

Internet Archive Book Images. Modified by Opensource.com. CC BY-SA 4.0

Sysadmin Linux Containers What to read next This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International License. Register or Login to post a comment.