Open-source News

Slated for Linux 5.9 is finally mainlining the FSGSBASE patches that have been floating around the kernel mailing list for years. Testing last week showed the tentative x86/fsgsbase patches helping Intel Xeon Linux performance but with AMD also supporting this instruction set extension going back to Bulldozer, how is it looking on the likes of AMD? Here are some benchmarks.

IBM donates AI toolkits to Linux Foundation to 'mitigate bias' in datasets  WRAL Tech Wire

FinOps Foundation is becoming a Linux Foundation effort to increase education and best practices for emerging FinOps discipline; new edX course provides foundation for education and community growth

San Francisco, Calif., June 29, 2020 – The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced the intent to host the FinOps Foundation to advance the discipline of FinOps through best practices, education, and standards.

The FinOps Foundation includes 1,500 individual members across the globe, representing more than 500 companies with more than $1 billion in revenue each. In the same way that DevOps revolutionized development by breaking down silos and increasing agility, FinOps increases the business value of cloud by bringing together technology, business and finance professionals with a new cultural set, knowledge skills and technical processes. Companies represented among membership include Atlassian, Autodesk, Bill.com, HERE Technologies, LiveRamp, Just Eat, Nationwide, Neustar, Nike, and Spotify, among others. To become a member and contribute to this work, please visit: https://www.finops.org/

“Where there is technology disruption, there is opportunity for business transformation. FinOps is exactly this and represents a shift in operations strategy, process, and culture,” said Mike Dolan, vice president and general manager, Linux Foundation Projects. “This type of disruption and transformation is also where community and industry-wide collaboration play critical roles in enabling a whole new market opportunity. We’re pleased to be the place where that work can happen.”

The FinOps community is defining cloud financial management standards and is increasing access to education and certification for this discipline across industries. As part of this effort, the Linux Foundation is announcing a new, free edX course, Introduction to FinOps, to advance education and knowledge in this emerging area and to cultivate a growing community of professionals. This introductory course will cover the basics of FinOps and how it can positively impact an organization by building a culture of accountability around cloud use that helps companies make good, timely, data-backed decisions in the cloud. The course is open for enrollment now, and content will be available to begin on the edX platform July 21.

The FinOps Foundation is offering the FinOps Certified Practitioner Exam (FOCP) through the Linux Foundation, and more training and certification programs are expected later this year. Follow @LF_Training on Twitter or watch https://training.linuxfoundation.org for more information and updates.

“Technology and business leaders are seeking support for understanding how to manage cloud technologies and spending across their enterprises and the FinOps Foundation brings to bear the resources required to enable them to innovate inside their companies,” said J.R. Storment, executive director of the FinOps Foundation. “With the Linux Foundation’s support, especially across its world-class training organization, we can serve this growing community.”

FinOps is the operating model for the cloud, which is resulting in a shift that combines systems, best practices, and culture to increase an organization’s ability to understand cloud costs and make informed business decisions. FinOps ensures that companies get the most value from every dollar spent in the cloud. It pushes accountability for spending to the edge where developers control purchasing decisions, and provides a new set of centralized processes to maximize efficiency of purchases and the ability to allocate spending to teams.

Cloud spending is forecast to exceed $360B by 2022, according to research firm Gartner, but finance teams have very little insight into where that spend is being allocated within their organizations. The result is uncontrolled costs that aren’t properly forecast or documented along with lack of standardized tooling, which can lead to major losses or errors in critical accounting practices. Procurement of IT infrastructure has moved from taking days or weeks to seconds or minutes, which has dramatically accelerated application development but dramatically decreased efficiencies in financial operations.

“As the cloud native movement deepens inside organizations large and small, understanding how to optimize the infrastructure footprint through cultural change and engineering practices is critical,” said Chris Aniszczyk, CTO, Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). “CNCF welcomes the FinOps Foundation to the Linux Foundation and we look forward to collaborating across communities to improve cloud financial management for all.”

Supporting Quotes

Atlassian

“The FinOps Foundation has helped us validate and grow our cloud financial management practices. Having the FinOps Foundation join the Linux Foundation is a great opportunity to see this community continue to develop FinOps practices from which we all benefit,” said Simon Beckett, team lead, Atlassian Cloud FinOps.

 Nationwide

“As enterprises leverage public cloud providers, speed of development is increasing and also a risk of out of control costs.  FinOps provides a framework that brings together IT, Finance and Procurement teams and gives them a common language and processes that helps keep costs under control and keeps the focus on delivering business value. My team and I have connected with peers in the industry to get their insights and perspectives on common problems and to see what is coming next.  In addition there are opportunities for training and certification to take advantage of,” said Joseph Daly, director of cloud optimization, Nationwide.

Pearson

“Pearson joined the FinOps Foundation in Feb 2019 as we launched our global team internally. Since then we have leveraged resources from the F2 membership calls, networked within Slack with other practitioners and been able to present back to the share many of our lessons learned along this journey.  Being an education company it’s critical we are always learning. Early 2020, Pearson was able to do a private workshop with the foundation where all 8 of our team members attended the 8 hour workshop and successfully received certification. We immediately leveraged discussions in the workshop and started building our 2020 roadmap. We began mapping our milestones to the F2 principals and using the “crawl, walk, run” approach. The FinOps Foundation has personally helped me connect with many other practitioners that are very mature in Cloud Financial Management process and allowed me to bring best practices and automation ideas back to Pearson to implement, said Ashley Hromatko, senior cloud FinOps manager, Pearson.

 

About the FinOps Foundation

The FinOps Foundation (F2) is a nonprofit trade association made up of FinOps practitioners around the world. Grounded in real world stories, expertise and inspiration for and by FinOps practitioners, the F2 is focused on codifying and promoting cloud financial management best practices and standards to help community members and their teams become better at cloud financial management. For more information or to join, please visit: https://www.finops.org/

 About the Linux Foundation

Founded in 2000, the Linux Foundation is supported by more than 1,500 members and is the world’s leading home for collaboration on open source software, open standards, open data, and open hardware. Linux Foundation’s projects are critical to the world’s infrastructure including Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js, and more.  The Linux Foundation’s methodology focuses on leveraging best practices and addressing the needs of contributors, users and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, please visit us at linuxfoundation.org.

 

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The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see its trademark usage page: www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

Media Contact
Jennifer Cloer
reTHINKit Media
503-867-2304
jennifer@rethinkitmedia.com

The post The Linux Foundation Brings Together IT and Finance Teams to Advance Cloud Financial Management and Education appeared first on The Linux Foundation.

• China Unicom, Fujitsu, Huawei, NTT Communications and Toyota Motor Corporation lead list of participants advancing open source software and standards for data mobility and autonomy
• China Unicom contributes its S3-compatabile object storage YIG project
• Foundation releases Faroe, the 1.0 version of its Open Data Framework software for cloud native and more

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., June 29, 2020 – The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced the SODA Foundation, previously OpenSDS, is expanding to include both open source software and standards to support the increasing need for data autonomy. SODA Foundation hosts an open source, unified and autonomous data management framework for data mobility from edge to core to cloud.

 

Premiere members include China Unicom, Fujitsu, Huawei, NTT Communications and Toyota Motor Corporation. Other members include China Construction Bank Fintech, Click2Cloud, GMO Pepabo, IIJ, MayaData, LinBit, Scality, Sony, Wipro and Yahoo Japan.

 

As part of the expansion, China Unicom is contributing its S3-compatible object storage YIG project to the SODA Foundation. YIG is the first in a line of projects that are joining the Foundation through the SODA Incubator program designed to foster an ecosystem of data and storage projects by supporting their growth through community outreach, collaboration and adoption.

 

The SODA Foundation today is also announcing the release of Faroe, the 1.0 version of its Open Data Framework software for cloud native and more. With support for block, file, and object storage, multi cloud data control, telemetry and resource management across heterogeneous storage, Faroe eliminates data silos, delivers integrated data management and enables seamless data mobility between on-premise and multicloud. Faroe also includes Container Storage Interface (CSI) storage plug-and-play as an experimental feature that simplifies Kubernetes storage management by abstracting CSI storage with SODA.

 

“Providing a neutral forum where both vendors and end users can contribute to building and integrating data management solutions for mobility and autonomy is our goal,” said Steven Tan, chairman, SODA Foundation and VP & CTO of Cloud Solution at Futurewei. “These new investments and our expanding scope will help us support a growing community of open source data professionals who are pushing the envelope on these technologies.”

As data moves between the cloud, on premise and, increasingly, the Edge, data management is becoming more complex. And the increasing number of technologies supporting data management has created even more difficulty, including unintentional silos for data storage. During a time when data mobility and autonomy is more important than ever, it’s critical that we simplify management, unify storage pools and provide a vendor neutral forum and platform that can accelerate innovation for end users. SODA Foundation seeks to reduce silos by integrating efforts across platforms for overall data mobility and autonomy.

“With data privacy and treatment at the top of every company’s priority list, the SODA Foundation serves an important role across industries,” said Mike Dolan, senior vice president and GM of projects at the Linux Foundation. “With new membership commitments, from vendors and end users alike, and an expanded scope to integrate software and standards, we believe this community will have an incredible impact in the coming months and years.”

For more information about the SODA Foundation, please visit: https://sodafoundation.io/

Member Statements

China Construction Bank Fintech
“CCB Fintech is a financial technology subsidiary of China Construction Bank. We are always interested in the open source community contribution and it’s our honor to join SODA. Glad to see its breakthroughs in multi-cloud environments and heterogeneous storage management. We will work with SODA to solve the container storage management challenges in cloud-native scenarios from now on. Hope to see more pioneers of the financial industry join SODA and join us to improve the innovation and development of open source technology in the global financial area,” said CCB Fintech Technology Platform Department General Manager Zhan Shu.

China Unicom
“It’s a great honor for China Unicom Wo Cloud to join the SODA community. We think the openness of the SODA project is great. In fact, we have been very active in this project in the previous year. We contributed the core code of our object storage project named YIG to the community. On Wo Cloud Summit 2019, we have witnessed the launch of SODA in China with many other partners. In the future, we will bring more friends into this community and make more innovations together,” said Zhong Xin, CTO, China Unicom Wo Cloud.

Fujitsu
“FUJITSU LIMITED has been supporting society as an IT company. Over the years, we have been providing comprehensive storage solutions. Now, as we are transforming into a DX company, we are looking to support our customers to transform their business model and to help them to create new businesses by modernizing systems and leveraging cloud native technologies. SODA is a powerful solution for simplifying storage management that has been very complex for many years, and enabling ties to the cloud. FUJITSU believes that SODA will accelerate the accomplishment of its mission and has been contributing to the ecosystem since OpenSDS, the direct predecessor of SODA,” said Shinya Hamano, manager, development department, infrastructure software division, Fujitsu.

IBM
“Managing the data coming from heterogeneous sources and formats is an interesting problem along with the regulatory requirements. SODA foundation attempts to address these challenges in an open manner which would help companies build reliable AI enabled solutions,” said Rakesh Jain, SODA Foundation board member and Researcher & Architect at IBM Corporation.

NTT Communications
“Storage silos in our services make a barrier among customers and the services. The barriers like individual storage software/API have hindered not only us from managing our services, but also customers from utilizing their data across the services. We’re expecting SODA to help service providers and customers overcome the barrier by using an open data management platform,” said Kei Kusunoki, Storage Architect, Innovation Center, NTT Communications.

Scality
“Scality supports SODA Foundation because we share the belief that data proliferation has a huge impact on data management challenges. Organizations are increasingly leveraging the benefits of hybrid cloud, which brings new challenges that demand proven solutions to store, govern and orchestrate massive volumes of data across geographies and clouds. We believe that collaborating with the open source community is vitally important as the velocity of change demands faster, better delivery of solutions,” said Paul Speciale, Chief Product Officer, Scality.

Sony
“As a cold data archive system provider, we are excited about joining the SODA. We have just released the third generation of Optical Disc Archive, and we believe that integrating it into the SODA system will provide more diverse and rich value to this community and its customers. We are looking forward to collaborating with other SODA members to create a full data lifecycle management platform in the aim of solving data/storage management challenges,” said Mikio Kita, VP, Sony Corporation, Senior General Manager of Media Solution Business Div. Sony Imaging Products & Solutions Inc.

Toyota Motor Corporation
“Connected vehicles on a street would generate significant volume of data, and they are widely spread in many locations. Managing those data and data storage is going to be a key challenge for us to get a variety of benefits from those data,” said Kenichi Murata, Project General Manager of Connected Strategy, Toyota Motor Corporation. “We expect that SODA Foundation would be the best place to seek the solution of our future issues, and we would be happy to collaborate in the Foundation with many people who have the same issues.”

Wipro
“Wipro is proud of its association with the SODA foundation. Our passion for latest technology, and access to a diverse ecosystem to deliver value to our customers has been the foundation for Wipro’s EngineeringNXT offerings. Driven by our deep domain expertise in Data management and storage  across industries, Wipro understands and supports the need for open standards in data management for advanced storage solutions. Being part of the SODA foundation will not only enable us to innovate in this space and deliver cloud-and-vendor agnostic solutions for hybrid cloud data management, but also give us a platform to connect and collaborate with like-minded members for thought leadership and industry best practices,” said Supriyo Das, Vice President, Industrial & Engineering Services (I&ES)

Yahoo Japan
“As our services continue to grow, data is getting bigger day by day. We are facing the challenge of managing storage systems more efficiently. We strongly endorse the purpose of SODA to provide a standardized API between multiple storage backends and multiple cloud systems. We believe that SODA can help reduce storage complexity,” said Yusuke Sato, Storage Architect, Yahoo! JAPAN.

About the Linux Foundation
Founded in 2000, the Linux Foundation is supported by more than 1,000 members and is the world’s leading home for collaboration on open source software, open standards, open data, and open hardware. Linux Foundation’s projects are critical to the world’s infrastructure including Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js, and more.  The Linux Foundation’s methodology focuses on leveraging best practices and addressing the needs of contributors, users and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, please visit us at 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.

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Media Contact
Jennifer Cloer
jennifer@rethinkitmedia.com
503-867-2304

The post SODA Foundation Gains New Investments, Expands Charter to Address Increasing Need for Data Autonomy appeared first on The Linux Foundation.

Last month, the Joint Development Foundation (JDF), which became part of the Linux Foundation family in 2019, was recognized as an ISO/IEC JTC 1 PAS (“Publicly Available Specification”) submitter. With that recognition, Linux Foundation can put forward specifications to JTC 1 for national body approval and international recognition. Once JTC 1 approves a PAS submission, it becomes an international standard. Also in May, the JDF announced that The OpenChain Specification was the first specification submitted for JTC 1 review for recognition as an international standard.

The Linux Foundation today announced that the latest SPDX release (version 2.2) is the second specification to be submitted through the JDF to ISO/IEC JTC 1 for approval. In brief, the Software Package Data Exchange (SPDX) is an open standard for communicating software bill of material information, including components, licenses, copyrights, and security references. SPDX reduces redundant work by providing a common format for companies and communities to share important data, thereby streamlining and improving compliance. The first version of the SPDX specification was 10 years ago, and it has continued to improve and evolve to support the automation of more software bill of materials information over the years.

SPDX serves to verify the accuracy software bill of materials information metadata which is important both from a security and compliance standpoint. Consider that there are millions of open source software projects (34m open repositories are on GitHub alone) making it hard to know which are most critical, who created them and what are their security vulnerabilities? SPDX plays an important role in building more trust and transparency in how software is created, distributed and consumed. While many consider SPDX a defacto standard already, JTC1 certification will encourage accelerated adoption and acceptance on a global scale.

“The SPDX specification has played a vital role over the last 10 years in enabling open source adoption and establishing a foundation for  automating compliance,” said Jim Zemlin. “Through the submission to the ISO/IEC JTC 1 by JDF, we are hopeful that it can become a accepted international standard that addresses how open source metadata  information is shared, while reducing the risks and costs of compliance for organizations.”

The post SPDX Specification Becomes the Second ISO/IEC JTC 1 Submission From JDF appeared first on The Linux Foundation.

The Linux Foundation Brings Together IT and Finance Teams to Advance Cloud Financial Management and Education  Monterey County Weekly

The Linux Foundation Brings Together IT and Finance Teams to Advance Cloud Financial Management and Education  StreetInsider.com

500 Inspiring Individuals Around the World Receive IT Training & Certification Scholarships from The Linux Foundation  Yahoo Finance

500 Inspiring Individuals Around the World Receive IT Training & Certification Scholarships from The Linux Foundation  PRNewswire

500 Inspiring Individuals Around the World Receive IT Training & Certification Scholarships from The Linux Foundation  thepress.net

500 Inspiring Individuals Around the World Receive IT Training & Certification Scholarships from The Linux Foundation  Monterey County Weekly

Over the weekend I began running some benchmarks of the Linux 5.8 development kernel on the Lenovo Flex 5 laptop with Ryzen 5 4500U. One of the standouts so far for from this Linux 5.8 testing compared to the stable 5.6/5.7 kernel series is better Radeon graphics performance with the Renoir laptop...

Linux 5.8 Bringing Some Performance Boosts For AMD Renoir Graphics  Phoronix

MontaVista adds continuous integration support  LinuxGizmos.com

MontaVista adds continuous integration support  LinuxGizmos.com

Introduction

In an earlier post back in May, the Linux Foundation and Joint Development Foundation (JDF) announced its ability to propose international standards by being recognized as an ISO/IEC JTC1 PAS submitter and that it had submitted its first standard, OpenChain, for international review. We also discussed why Open Standards were essential to the Linux Foundation’s efforts, just as Open Source projects are.

Today, we’re announcing a new way for communities to create Open Standards. We call it the Community Specification, and it allows communities to develop standards and specifications using the tools and approaches that are inspired and proven by open source developers. It’s standards development explicitly designed for Git-based workflows. The Community Specification brings the frictionless approach of open source collaborations to standards development.

It’s flexible, enabling small and large standards collaborations. And it’s built for growth. When or if the time is right, Community Specification projects can move to the Joint Development Foundation or another standards body. From there, the Joint Development Foundation can provide a path to international standardization.

Standards play a role in everyone’s life. Think about the things you touch every day, as simple as a power plug, the USB connector on your phone or laptop, or the WiFi that you use in your business and your home to connect your mobile devices wirelessly. All of these devices need to be able to interoperate with each other. 

Open Standards are best defined as specifications made available to the public, developed, and maintained via an inclusive, collaborative, transparent, and consensus-driven process. Open standards facilitate interoperability and data exchange among different products or services and are intended for widespread adoption.

Setting up a well-formed standards project is important. Items like due process, balance, inclusiveness, and intellectual property clarity are vital to developing technology that meets the needs of the broader community that can be implemented without intellectual property surprises.

The Community Specification builds on these best practices and brings them to the Git repository development environments that developers are already using. And it makes it easy to get started. You can start using the Community Specification by bringing its terms into your repository and getting to work — just like starting an open source project. 

Lowering the costs and reducing the level of effort of creating specifications

Starting a new standards effort is traditionally a time consuming and expensive project. It takes time, money, and effort — from negotiating multi-party agreements to dealing with the legal and corporate formalities to obtaining professional support.

The Joint Development Foundation created a much-streamlined alternative to setting up a traditional standards-setting activity. We created a standardized set of formation documents and procedures that allow the collaborators to choose from a predefined set of licensing terms. 

JDF took this expensive multi-month process and replaced it with a “check-the-box” approach that has already enabled over 13 communities like Open Manufacturing Platform, GraphQL, and Trust Over IP to get up and running quickly, and allowing these communities to create technologies with worldwide impact.

For these projects, the JDF shortened the process of creating a new standards project from many months to as quickly as a few days and removed much of the ongoing legal overhead of creating a new non-profit company to host the project.  

And while JDF has streamlined the creation of new standards organizations by providing a “standards organization in a box,” sometimes an even lighter-weight approach is desired. Today, the JDF is pleased to announce its latest innovation, the Community Specification.  

The Community Specification is the next step in reducing the friction of standards development.  By incorporating the Community Specification materials into a Git-based repository, communities can now start a standards development effort as quickly as an open source project, using proven standards-based best practices for governance and intellectual property. And it’s free. The Community Specification provides a “standards-organization-in-a-repo.” All you have to do is clone or copy the Community Specifications repository, fill in a few details, and get started.

JDF takes its inspiration from the developer community. We know the ultimate consumer of a specification is the implementer, and implementers are by and large developers. So it is no accident that the Community Specification relies on Git-based repositories like GitHub and GitLab as its platform for creating new standards. 

The tools that are natively available for managing contributions in a Git-based repository via an open and inclusive process are based on best practices from standards and open source development models. To make this process attractive to developers, we have adopted a single set of agreements for technical contributions, source code, governance, code of conduct, patents, and copyright. 

The Community Specification will allow communities to employ a fast and easy way to start a specification development process using software development-style tools and workflows that they already know. 

Conclusion

The new Community Specification process allows contributors to start a specification collaboration with a simple set of licenses and procedures at no cost. The Community specification is efficient and runs using tools and approaches that lower the administrative burden on the organizers and ensures contribution integrity. The project can run as a repository-based collaboration or as a legal entity under JDF, depending on the project’s needs. 

From this starting point, the collaborative can move seamlessly into a more structured JDF project that allows the project to scale up the support services to allow for broader member participation, collections of membership dues, test events, and marketing services. As part of the Joint Development ecosystem, the projects may also enjoy the benefits of being part of the world’s largest developer ecosystem at the Linux Foundation.  

In the ultimate expression of a standard’s success, the project may apply to submit the specification to JTC1/ISO/IEC through the JDF PAS submitter program, which allows the specification to reach national standards bodies worldwide.  

The Community Specification can dramatically reduce the time developers spend on building and meeting spec requirements and ensure important work is not lost and time is not wasted. By democratizing the specification build process, developers have more time to innovate and build the technologies that differentiate their work from others. 

We invite interested projects and people with great ideas to benefit from an organized collaboration platform to reach out to the Joint Development Foundation. 

Access Community Specifications

The post Accelerating Open Standards development with Community Specifications appeared first on The Linux Foundation.

Ramping up security options with new NIST 800-53 Mappings  WIND

Ubuntu 20.04-based Linux Mint 20 "Ulyana" now available  Notebookcheck.net

A decidedly non-Linux distro walkthrough: Haiku R1/beta2  Ars Technica

This Chinese malware is affecting Windows, Linux devices: Here's how  India TV News