Open-source News

Benchmarks Of JCC Erratum: A New Intel CPU Bug With Performance Implications On Skylake Through Cascade Lake

Phoronix - Wed, 11/13/2019 - 02:00
Intel is today making public the Jump Conditional Code (JCC) erratum. This is a bug involving the CPU's Decoded ICache where on Skylake and derived CPUs where unpredictable behavior could happen when jump instructions cross cache lines. Unfortunately addressing this error in software comes with a performance penalty but ultimately Intel engineers are working to offset that through a toolchain update. Here are the exclusive benchmarks out today of the JCC erratum performance impact as well as when trying to recover that performance through the updated GNU Assembler.

Mozilla + Intel + Red Hat Form The Bytecode Alliance To Run WebAssembly Everywhere

Phoronix - Wed, 11/13/2019 - 01:00
Mozilla, Fastly, Intel, and Red Hat have announced the Bytecode Alliance as a new initiative built around WebAssembly and focused on providing a secure-by-default bytecode that can run from web browsers to desktops to IoT/embedded platforms...

GitHub report surprises, serverless hotness, and more industry trends

opensource.com - Wed, 11/13/2019 - 01:00

As part of my role as a senior product marketing manager at an enterprise software company with an open source development model, I publish a regular update about open source community, market, and industry trends for product marketers, managers, and other influencers. Here are five of my and their favorite articles from that update.


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The Linux Kernel Mentorship program was a life changing experience

The Linux Foundation - Tue, 11/12/2019 - 22:55

By Bharath Vedartham

Operating systems, computer architectures and compilers have always fascinated me. I like to go in depth to understand the important software components we depend on! My life changed when engineers from IBM LTC (Linux Technology Center) came to my college to teach us the Linux Kernel internals. When I heard about the Linux Kernel Mentorship program, I immediately knew that I wanted to be a part of it to further fuel my passion for Linux.

One of the project in the lists of projects available to work during the Linux Kernel Mentorship program was on “Predictive Memory Reclamation”. I really wanted the opportunity to work on the core kernel, and I began working with my mentor Khalid Aziz immediately during the application period where he gave me a task regarding the identification of anonymous memory regions for a process. I learned a lot in the application period by reading various blogs, textbooks and commit logs.

During my mentorship period, I worked to develop a predictive memory reclamation algorithm in the Linux Kernel. The aim of the project was to reduce the amount of time the Linux kernel spends in reclaiming memory to satisfy processes requests for memory when there is memory pressure, i.e not enough to satisfy the memory allocation of a process. We implemented a predictive algorithm that can forecast memory pressure and proactively reclaim memory to ensure there is enough available for processes.

We achieved a reduction of upto 8% in the amount of time the kernel spends in reclaiming memory! We submitted RFCs on the kernel mailing lists of our work. [1]

I also worked with John Hubbard on his project to track get_user_pages(). I converted a couple of drivers to use the new get_user_pages API as proposed by John. John was a real pleasure to work with!

Throughout my internship, I have learned that the kernel community is very helpful, kind and willing to help new developers. The key was to take the feedback and put in the required effort and work as well as accept constructive feedback and act on it. Working on open source projects was a very liberating experience for me. There are no barriers in open source space. Anyone can work on open source code irrespective of their nationality, creed or company affiliations, which I find very beautiful and liberating. I believe it is a very intellectually stimulating experience for anyone.

I would like to thank my mentor Khalid Aziz and the Linux Kernel community for helping me throughout the mentorship program. I also would like to thank the Linux Foundation for providing this opportunity and especially Shuah Khan for her guidance on how to work with the community.

https://lkml.org/lkml/2019/8/12/1302

The post The Linux Kernel Mentorship program was a life changing experience appeared first on The Linux Foundation.

LinuxBoot Continues Maturing - Now Able To Boot Windows

Phoronix - Tue, 11/12/2019 - 22:05
LinuxBoot is approaching two years of age as the effort led by Facebook and others for replacing some elements of the system firmware with the Linux kernel...

Amazon Web Services, Genesys, Salesforce Form New Open Data Model

The Linux Foundation - Tue, 11/12/2019 - 21:00

To accelerate digital transformation, organizations in every industry are modernizing their on-premises technologies by adopting cloud-native applications. According to the International Data Corporation (IDC), global spend on cloud computing will grow from $147 billion in 2019 to $418 billion by 2024. Almost half of that investment will be tied to technologies that help companies deliver personalized customer experiences.

One major challenge of this shift to cloud computing is that applications are typically created with their own data models, forcing developers to build, test, and manage custom code that’s necessary to map and translate data across different systems. The process is inefficient, delays innovation, and ultimately can result in a broken customer experience.

Announcing the Cloud Information Model

It is in the spirit of removing these barriers to innovation that Amazon Web Services, Genesys, and Salesforce have come together with the Linux Foundation’s Joint Development Foundation (JDF) to form the Cloud Information Model (CIM), an open-source data model that standardizes data interoperability across cloud applications. By easily integrating data in the cloud, developers can build new products that deliver connected and personalized customer experiences.

“Bringing the Cloud Information Model under JDF will offer a neutral home for the open-source community,” Jim Zemlin, Executive Director at The Linux Foundation. “This allows for anyone across the community to collaborate and provide contributions under a central governance model. It paves the way for full community-wide engagement in data interoperability efforts and standards development, while rapidly increasing adoption rate of the community.”

How the Cloud Information Model Works

The CIM reduces the complexities of integrating data across cloud applications by providing standardized data interoperability guidelines to connect point-of-sale systems, digital marketing platforms, contact centers, CRM systems and more. Developers no longer need to spend months creating custom code. Instead, they can adopt and extend the CIM within days so that they can create data lakes, generate analytics, train machine learning models, build a single view of the customer and more.

CIM Compatible Applications

The founding members already offer products and technologies for companies to use with the CIM.  AWS Lake Formation helps customers move, store, catalog and clean data from different sources to quickly set up a secure data lake. Amazon Redshift powers mission critical data warehouses for business intelligence, predictive analytics and real-time streaming analytics. Customers can leverage the JSON or SQL scripts to create CIM-compatible schemas for their AWS data lakes and data warehouses.

Salesforce’s Customer 360 is a set of platform services powered by CIM. Customer 360 provides customers with a single source of truth by providing instant access to consistent, reconciled customer data across Salesforce apps. MuleSoft, the provider of the leading integration and API platform, now natively supports CIM to enable the discovery of CIM data types, allowing users to easily create CIM-compatible APIs and integrations. CIM is available today in MuleSoft’s Anypoint Exchange.

Using Genesys Cloud and Genesys AI, businesses can seamlessly interact with their customers across all channels, including voice, chat, email, text and social. By combining engagement data from Genesys with data from CIM-compatible sources, businesses gain an even more complete perspective of their customers and employees in real-time, resulting in deeper levels of personalization.

How to Contribute to CIM

Anyone is invited to contribute to the CIM–including developers, technology vendors and brands. To learn more and get started, visit www.cloudinformationmodel.org. If you would like information on joining the project, please reach out to membership@cloudinformationmodel.org.

 

 

The post Amazon Web Services, Genesys, Salesforce Form New Open Data Model appeared first on The Linux Foundation.

Librsvg Continues Rust Conquest, Pulls In CSS Parsing Code From Mozilla Servo

Phoronix - Tue, 11/12/2019 - 20:49
For about three years now GNOME's SVG rendering library has been transitioning to Rust. This library, librsvg, now makes further use of Rust around its CSS parsing code and Mozilla's Servo is doing some of that heavy lifting...

Coreboot Support Is Being Worked On For Fwupd/LVFS

Phoronix - Tue, 11/12/2019 - 20:23
In making it more easy to update Coreboot system firmware, the ability to update Coreboot via the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) with Fwupd is finally being worked out...

Qualcomm's Adreno 640 GPU Is Working Easily With The Freedreno OpenGL/Vulkan Drivers

Phoronix - Tue, 11/12/2019 - 20:10
The Adreno 640 GPU that is used by Qualcomm's Snapdragon 855/855+ SoCs is now working with the open-source Freedreno Gallium3D OpenGL and "TURNIP" Vulkan drivers with the newest Mesa 20.0 development code...

Getting started with PostgreSQL

opensource.com - Tue, 11/12/2019 - 16:03

Everyone has things that would be useful to collect in a database. Even if you're obsessive about keeping paperwork or electronic files, they can become cumbersome. Paper documents can be lost or completely disorganized, and information you need to access in electronic files may be buried in depths of paragraphs and pages of information.


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5 open source plugins for Flutter apps

opensource.com - Tue, 11/12/2019 - 16:02

Flutter is the newest addition to Google's programming cadre. Following the success of Android, Kotlin, and Golang, Flutter was created as a cross-platform application development language. It is primarily based on the Dart programming construct and is considered to be the next big programming paradigm because its code can run as a mobile app, a web app, and even a desktop app without any major changes.


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8 great podcasts for open source enthusiasts

opensource.com - Tue, 11/12/2019 - 16:01

Where I live, almost everything is a 20- or 30-minute drive from my home, and I'm always looking for ways to use my car time productively. One way is by listening to podcasts on topics that interest me, so as an open source enthusiast, I subscribe to a variety of open source-related podcasts.

Here are eight Linux and open source podcasts that I Iook forward to every week.


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What open communities teach us about empowering customers

opensource.com - Tue, 11/12/2019 - 16:00

When it comes to digital transformation, businesses seem to be on the right track improving their customers' experiences through the use of technologies. Today, so much digital transformation literature describes the benefits of "delivering new value to customers" or "delivering value to customers in new ways."

But "bringing new value to customers" is just the beginning. An even more powerful effect of digital transformation efforts is empowering customers.


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