Open-source News

Dell releases latest Linux developer laptop with Comet Lake CPU  ZDNet

Dell's dedicated laptop for open-source programmers sees a new release featuring Intel's hot new laptop CPU: Comet Lake.

Live from Open Source Summit this week, we’re thrilled to share that the OpenPOWER Foundation is becoming a project hosted at The Linux Foundation. This includes a technical contribution of the POWER Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) and Source Design Implementations, including a softcore implementation of the POWER ISA.

The OpenPOWER Foundation recognizes how increased collaboration across the open source ecosystem will advance open hardware technology and accelerate opportunity.

Six years ago, IBM setup the OpenPOWER Foundation to widen the reach of their POWER technology. The goal from the start was to support Instruction Set Architecture and contributed Source Design Implementations required for data-driven HPC workloads like modelling and simulation, cloud services and also Artificial Intelligence (AI). 

Today, with 350+ members, OpenPOWER focuses on both hardware and software technologies, providing industry specifications across the open ecosystem, helping members collaborate, as well as providing training and promotion of a POWER architecture. Under The Linux Foundation OpenPOWER’s efforts will increase the  breadth and depth of data-driven architectures for developers across the industry and globe and execute on a standard open governance model. 

So what exactly will this mean for the developers and engineers working within the stacks?  With an open infrastructure from the hardware components to firmware to the operating system and the solutions running on top, developers can now access reviews and improvements to any element in the stack, at any time.  Being able to engage globally with developers, engineers and decision makers will fundamentally shape the future of open hardware technologies and help enterprises see faster applications and cheaper cloud services.

This news is a huge deal. What’s so exciting is that it impacts the entire stack and it mirrors The Linux Foundation’s original mission – to bring open hardware, open standards and open code to developers. With this will come so much innovation from the top all the way down the stack and we’re excited to see how this will revolutionize experiences for customers in hybrid cloud architectures and AI environments. 

Check out more details on the news from today’s keynote and our official release here: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/press-release/2019/08/the-linux-foundation-announces-new-open-hardware-technologies-and-collaboration/

The post Open Source Developer Gain New Collaboration Opportunities on Open Hardware appeared first on The Linux Foundation.

Customizable compute module and eval kit run Linux on i.MX8X  LinuxGizmos.com

CompuLab's rugged “CL-SOM-iMX8X” module runs Linux on a quad -A35 i.MX8X and offers up to 4GB LPDDR4 and 64GB eMMC, up to 2x GbE, and optional ...

In kicking off the Open Source Summit that has returned to San Diego, the Linux Foundation has announced the formation of the Confidential Computing Consortium in collaboration with Intel and other companies...

Purism has published their latest monthly update on the status of their Librem 5 Linux smartphone. They continue bringing up the software stack and tweaking the kernel support, but no word on their finalized hardware design nor if they still plan to ship in Q3'2019 as they continue advertising...

A challenger appears: Taiwanese devs' answer to Gemini PDA wraps a Raspberry Pi in a tablet  The Register

A team of Taiwanese engineers is planning to release an eight-inch tablet based on the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3+. The CutiePi, as it's called, has a MIPI ...

Alibaba, Arm, Baidu, Google Cloud, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Red Hat, Swisscom and Tencent will collaborate on open source technologies and standards that accelerate the adoption of confidential computing

SAN DIEGO, Calif., Open Source Summit, August 21, 2019 – The Linux Foundation today announced the intent to form the Confidential Computing Consortium, a community dedicated to defining and accelerating the adoption of confidential computing. Companies committed to this work include Alibaba, Arm, Baidu, Google Cloud, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Red Hat, Swisscom and Tencent.

Across industries computing is moving to span multiple environments, from on premises to  public cloud to edge. As companies move these workloads to different environments, they need protection controls for sensitive IP and workload data and are increasingly seeking greater assurances and more transparency of these controls. Current approaches in cloud computing address data at rest and in transit but encrypting data in use is considered the third and possibly most challenging step to providing a fully encrypted lifecycle for sensitive data. Confidential computing will enable encrypted data to be processed in memory without exposing it to the rest of the system and reduce exposure for sensitive data and provide greater control and transparency for users.

“The earliest work on technologies that have the ability to transform an industry is often done in collaboration across the industry and with open source technologies,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director at The Linux Foundation. “The Confidential Computing Consortium is a leading indicator of what’s to come for security in computing and will help define and build open technologies to support this trust infrastructure for data in use.”

The Confidential Computing Consortium will bring together hardware vendors, cloud providers, developers, open source experts and academics to accelerate the confidential computing market; influence technical and regulatory standards; and build open source tools that provide the right environment for TEE development. The organization will also anchor industry outreach and education initiatives.

Participants plan to make several open source project contributions to the Confidential Computing Consortium, including:

• Intel® Software Guard Extensions (Intel® SGX) Software Development Kit, designed to help application developers protect select code and data from disclosure or modification at the hardware layer using protected enclaves.
• Microsoft Open Enclave SDK, an open source framework that allows developers to build Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) applications using a single enclaving abstraction. Developers can build applications once that run across multiple TEE architectures.
• Red Hat Enarx, a project providing hardware independence for securing applications using TEEs.

The proposed structure for the Consortium includes a Governing Board, a Technical Advisory Council and separate technical oversight for each technical project. It is intended to host a variety of technical open source projects and open specifications to support confidential computing. Confidential Computing Consortium will be funded through membership dues. For more information and to contribute to the project, please visit: https://confidentialcomputing.io

Supporting Quotes

Alibaba
“Confidential computing provides new capabilities for cloud customers to reduce trusted computing base in cloud environments and protect their data during runtime. Alibaba launched Alibaba Encrypted Computing technology powered by Intel SGX in Sep 2017 and has provided commercial cloud servers with SGX capability to our customers since April 2018. We are very excited to join CCC and work with the community to build a better confidential computing ecosystem,” said Xiaoning Li, chief security architect, Alibaba Cloud.

Arm
“Arm’s vision for the next-generation infrastructure requires complete edge-to-cloud security for protecting and managing the data across a trillion connected devices,” said Richard Grisenthwaite, senior vice president, chief architect and fellow, Architecture and Technology Group, Arm. “Arm is already very involved in helping to develop the Confidential Compute Consortium’s charter, and we see our participation and the new Open Enclave SDK as a critical collaboration with the rest of the industry in making TEE’s easy to deploy.”

Baidu
“The formation of Confidential Computing Consortium under Linux Foundation is an important step towards the future of technologies across cloud computing, blockchain and security. It will help to create the global technical standards of confidential computing and promote its business use at the enterprise level in different industries,” said Fei Song, head of product committee, AI Cloud, Baidu.

Google
“To help users make the best choice for how to protect their workloads, they need to be met with a common language and understanding around confidential computing. As the open source community introduces new projects like Asylo and OpenEnclave SDK, and hardware vendors introduce new CPU features that change how we think about protecting programs, operating systems, and virtual machines, groups like the Confidential Computing Consortium will help companies and users understand its benefits and apply these new security capabilities to their needs,” said Royal Hansen, vice president, Security, Google.

IBM
“IBM was one of the earliest companies to champion open source, and now aligned with Red Hat we are excited for the future. One of the emerging areas of interest to our IBM Cloud and Systems clients is Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs). Combined with new open software projects like Enarx and OpenEnclave SDK, they hold the promise of making future workloads as secure as possible in the next chapter of cloud. IBM has a history of leadership in secure computing, and we are proud to join the Confidential Computing Consortium to help it fulfill its promise of spanning multiple hardware architectures and cloud platforms, to protect tomorrow’s applications and data,” said Todd Moore, vice president, Open Technology and Developer Advocacy, IBM.

Intel
“Software developed through this consortium is critical to accelerating confidential computing practices built with open source technology and Intel SGX,” said Imad Sousou, corporate vice president and general manager, System Software Products at Intel. “Combining the Intel SGX SDK with Microsoft’s Open Enclave SDK will help simplify secure enclave development and drive deployment across operating environments.”

Microsoft
“The Open Enclave SDK is already a popular tool for developers working on Trusted Execution Environments, one of the most promising areas for protecting data in use,” said Mark Russinovich, chief technical officer, Microsoft. “We hope this contribution to the Consortium can put the tools in even more developers’ hands and accelerate the development and adoption of applications that will improve trust and security across cloud and edge computing.”

Red Hat
“Security is consistently top of mind for our customers, and, really, for all of us, as security incidents and data breaches make the headlines. While hardware support for security continues to advance, creating secure computing environments can still be challenging,” said Chris Wright, senior vice president and Chief Technology Officer at Red Hat. “We are developing the Enarx project to help developers deploy applications into computing environments which support higher levels of security and confidentiality and intend to bring it to the Confidential Computing Consortium. We look forward to collaborating with the broader industry and the Confidential Computing Consortium to help make confidential computing the norm.”

Swisscom
“As the leading telecom and ICT provider in Switzerland, we adhere to the highest security standards. Something that is particularly important given the increasing relevance of security for our customers in the wake of new technologies such as 5G and critical IoT or cloud applications. It is a privilege that we, as a Swiss company, are able to join forces with internationally leading technology companies to launch the Confidential Computing Consortium and are thus helping to define standards, frameworks and tools for securing data in the cloud,” said Christoph Aeschlimann, CTO & CIO, Swisscom.

Tencent
“Confidential computing offers CPU-based hardware technology to protect cloud users’ data in use, which we believe will become a basic capability for cloud provider in future,” said Wei Li, vice president of Tencent Security, the head of Cloud Security.

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 projects like Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js and more are considered critical to the development of the world’s most important infrastructure. Its development methodology leverages established best practices and addresses 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 our trademark usage page: https://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 New Cross-Industry Effort to Advance Computational Trust and Security for Next-Generation Cloud and Edge Computing appeared first on The Linux Foundation.

OpenPOWER to become Linux Foundation project to advance development of data-driven architectures required for hybrid cloud environments and increasingly intensive workloads

SAN DIEGO, CA August 21, 2019 – The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced that the OpenPOWER Foundation will become a project hosted at The Linux Foundation. The project includes IBM’s open POWER Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) and contributed Source Design Implementations required to support data-driven hardware for intensive workloads like Artificial Intelligence (AI).

OpenPOWER is the open steward for the Power Architecture and has the support of 350 members, including IBM, Google, Inspur Power Systems, Yadro, Hitachi, Wistron, Mellanox, NVIDIA, and Red Hat.

The governance model within the Linux Foundation gives software developers assurance of compatibility while developing AI and hybrid cloud native applications that take advantage of POWER’s rich feature set and open compute hardware and software ecosystems.

As the demand rises for more and more compute-intensive workloads like AI and in-memory analytics, commodity systems vendors have struggled with the looming predictions of the end of Moore’s Law. Central processing units (CPUs) may no longer handle the rising demands alone, and data-centric systems are built to maximize the flow of data between CPUs and attached devices for specialized workloads. By hosting OpenPOWER at The Linux Foundation, a cross-project, cross-community collaboration, it will accelerate development of hardware and software to support data-centric systems, by making it available to a growing global audience.

“The OpenPOWER community has been doing critical work to support the increasing demands of enterprises that are using big data for AI and machine learning workloads. The move to bring these efforts together with the worldwide ecosystem of open source developers across projects at The Linux Foundation will unleash a new level of innovation by giving developers everywhere more access to the tools and technologies that will define the next generation of POWER architecture,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director at The Linux Foundation.

“IBM believes that open collaboration through groups like Linux Foundation is key to delivering value for our clients,” said IBM’s OpenPOWER General Manager Ken King. “With our recent Red Hat acquisition and today’s announcement, IBM becomes the only commercially-available processor vendor and POWER becomes the only architecture that can boast of a completely open system stack, from the foundation of the hardware through the software stack.”

“The OpenPOWER Foundation was created in 2013 to promote open standards and specifications of systems designed around the IBM POWER architecture,” said Hugh Blemings, Executive Director, OpenPOWER Foundation. “Since then, hundreds of companies from around the world have contributed to the framework and collaborated with each other to build technology for the benefit of their customers. Collaborating with The Linux Foundation marks the next step in opening up the community further.”

To find more information on the OpenPOWER Foundation or get involved in the project, please visit:  The Linux Foundation Blog, IBM Blog, OpenPOWER blog.

About the Linux Foundation
The Linux Foundation is the organization of choice for the world’s top developers and companies to build ecosystems that accelerate open technology development and industry adoption. Together with the worldwide open source community, it is solving the hardest technology problems by creating the largest shared technology investment in history. Founded in 2000, The Linux Foundation today provides tools, training and events to scale any open source project, which together deliver an economic impact not achievable by any one company. More information can be found at www.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 our trademark usage page: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

Media Contact:
Beth Handoll
reTHINKit Media
415-535-8658
beth@rethinkitmedia.com

The post The Linux Foundation Announces New Open Hardware Technologies and Collaboration appeared first on The Linux Foundation.

Linux Operating System Market Analysis and Revenue Forecast from 2019-2025 | IBM, Ubuntu Linux, Linux Mint  The Tribune Today

This Global Linux Operating System market elaborate report, compiled by Market Research Globe, offers a summary study on regional forecast, business size, ...

Two years after the OpenGL 4.6 specification was announced, Intel's open-source OpenGL Linux driver is now officially advertising the support after today landing the remaining SPIR-V enablement work...

The Linux Foundation Announces New Open Hardware Technologies and Collaboration  DevOps.com

OpenPOWER to become Linux Foundation project to advance development of data-driven architectures required for hybrid cloud environments and ...

Backdoor Found in Utility for Linux, Unix Servers  Threatpost

Backdoor was intentionally planted in 2018 and found during the DEF CON 2019 security conference when researchers stumbled upon malicious code.

Going along with Intel this morning announcing their 10th Gen "Comet Lake" processors, Dell has just announced their new XPS line-up with these new processors and it does include a new Linux-loaded Developer Edition laptop...

Earlier this month Intel announced 11 Icelake CPUs for laptops and 2-in1s under their 10th Gen CPU line-up. Today the company announced the 10th Gen Comet Lake CPUs also for 2-in-1s and laptops...

Debian Buster-based Netrunner 19.08 'Indigo' KDE-focused Linux distro is the perfect Windows replacement  BetaNews

GNOME is undeniably the best desktop environment, but understandably, not everyone likes it. Hey, that's OK. Some folks like Pepsi despite Coke being, like, ...

Dell's Beautiful New Linux Laptop Features Ubuntu, 10th Gen Intel Processors And Super Fast WiFi  Forbes

Coming soon: The 9th generation XPS 13 Developer Edition laptop featuring Intel's latest Comet Lake hexacore CPU and Ubuntu 18.04 SP1 LTS.

IBM joins Linux Foundation AI to promote open source trusted AI workflows  ZDNet

As AI spreads like wildfire through the enterprise, IBM is stepping up efforts to promote open source tools for building fair, robust and explainable AI systems.

Red Hat developer Bastien Nocera has announced Low-Memory-Monitor as a new project he's been tackling to try to help with the Linux desktop use-cases when responsiveness issues due to low RAM / memory pressure problems. Low-Memory-Monitor paired with complementary solutions could help improve the Linux desktop's handling on low-end systems and other desktops/laptops when simply running short on RAM...

Latest Debian GNU/Linux Security Patch Addresses 14 Vulnerabilities, Update Now  Softpedia News

The Debian Project released a new Linux kernel security update for its stable, supported distributions to address several vulnerabilities that may put users' ...

With Xfce 4.14 having finally been released last week following a four year development cycle, prominent Xfce developer Simon Steinbeiß has begun talking about the now-started Xfce 4.16 development cycle...