Tech News - Servers

From the past few months, Facebook and Microsoft together have been working on a new architecture based on the Open Rack standards. Last week, Facebook announced a new initiative that aims to build uniformity around the Rack & Power design. The Rack & Power Project Group is responsible for setting the rack standards designed for data centers, integrating the rack into the data center infrastructure. This project comes under a larger initiative started by Facebook called Open Compute Project. Why a new version of Open Rack is needed? Today, the industry is turning to AI and ML systems to solve several difficult problems. Though these systems are helpful, at the same time, they require increased power density at both the component level and the system level. The ever-increasing bandwidth speed demand for networking systems has also led to similar problems. So, in order to improve the overall system performance, it is important to get memory, processors, and system fabrics as close together as possible. This new architecture of Open Rack will come with greater benefits as compared to the current version, Open Rack V2. “For this next version, we are collaborating to create flexible, interoperable, and scalable solutions for the community through a common OCP architecture. Accomplishing this goal will enable wider adoption of OCP technologies across multiple industries, which will benefit operators, solution providers, original design manufacturers, and configuration managers,” shared Facebook in the blog post. What are the goals of this initiative? This new initiative aims to achieve the following goals A common OCP rack architecture to enable greater sharing between Microsoft and Facebook. Creating a flexible frame and power infrastructure that will support a wide range of solutions across the OCP community Apart from the features need by Facebook, this architecture will come with additional features for the larger community, including physical security for solutions deployed in co-location facilities. New thermal solutions will be introduced such as liquid cooling manifolds, door-based heat exchanges, and defined physical and thermal interfaces. These solutions are currently under development by the Advanced Cooling Solutions sub-project. Introducing new power and battery backup solutions that scale across different rack power levels and also accommodate different power input types. To know more in detail, check out the official announcement on Facebook. Two top executives leave Facebook soon after the pivot to privacy announcement Facebook tweet explains ‘server config change’ for 14-hour outage on all its platforms Facebook under criminal investigations for data sharing deals: NYT report

The Linux Foundation recently launched the Acumos Al Project with an aim to make AI accessible to all. Acumos AI is a platform and an open source framework, to easily build, share and deploy Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Deep learning applications. As a part of the LF Deep Learning Foundation, Acumos strives to make these AI, ML and DL technologies available to developers and data scientists everywhere. It caters to a broad range of business use cases, which include network analytics, customer care, field service and equipment repair, healthcare analytics, network security and advanced video services, and many more. Let’s have a look at what Acumos AI has in store. The Acumos AI Project, Packages tool kits such as TensorFlow and SciKit Learn and models with a common API that allows them to seamlessly connect Allows easy onboarding and training of models and tools Supports a variety of popular software languages, including Java, Python, and R Leverages modern microservices and containers in order to package and export production-ready AI applications as Docker files Includes a federated AI Model Marketplace, which is a catalog of AI models contributed by the community that can be securely shared Benefits of Acumos AI It provides a standardized platform, an easy export, and Docker-file deployment to any environment, including major public clouds, making stand-up and maintenance a breeze It has a simplified toolkit and model onboarding, which helps data scientists focus on building great AI models rather than maintaining infrastructure. The Acumos AI comprises of a Visual design editor, a drag-and-drop application design, and a chaining feature, where applications can be chained to create an array of AI services. These enable end users to deploy complicated AI apps for training and testing within minutes. Read the Acumos AI whitepaper to know more about the Acumos AI Project in detail. Kali Linux 2018.2 released How to implement In-Memory OLTP on SQL Server in Linux What to expect from upcoming Ubuntu 18.04 release

Microsoft announced today that they are releasing Windows 10 Insider build 17682 from the RS5 branch today. The new release includes sets improvements, wireless projection experience, Microsoft Edge improvements, and RSAT along with other updates and fixes. Major improvements and updates Sets Improvements New tab page has been updated which makes it easy to launch apps. On clicking the plus button in a Sets window, apps are visible in the frequent destinations list. The all apps list have been integrated into the new tab page to make it easy to browse apps instead of using the search box. Apps supporting Sets when clicked will launch into a new tab. In case you select News Feed, just select the “Apps” link which is next to “News Feed”, this will help switch to the all apps list. Managing Wireless Projection Experience Earlier, there were disturbances during wireless projection for users when the session was started through file explorer or an app. This has been fixed now with Windows 10 Insider build 17682 as there’ll be a control banner at the top of a screen during a session. The control banner informs you about your connection state, lets you tune the connection as well as helps with quick disconnect or reconnect to the same sink. Tuning is done with the help of settings gear. Screen to screen latency is optimized based on the following scenarios: Game mode makes gaming over a wireless connection possible by minimizing screen to screen latency. Video mode ensures smooth playback of the videos without any glitches on the big screen by increasing screen to screen latency. Productivity mode helps to balance between game mode and video mode. Screen to screen latency is responsive enough so that typing feels natural while ensuring limited glitch in the videos. All connections start off in the productivity mode. Improvements in Microsoft Edge for developers With the latest Windows 10 insider build 17682, there is unprefixed support for the new Web Authentication API (WebAuthN). Web Authentication helps provide a scalable and interoperable solution. It helps with replacing passwords with stronger hardware-bound credentials. Microsoft Edge users can use Windows Hello (via PIN or biometrics). They can also use other external authenticators namely FIDO2 Security Keys or FIDO U2F Security Keys. This helps authenticate the websites securely. RSAT available on demand No need to manually download RSAT on every upgrade. Select the “Manage Optional features” in Settings. Then click on “Add a feature” option which will provide you with all the listed RSAT components. You can pick the components you want, and on next upgrade, Windows will ensure that all those components automatically persist the upgrade. More information about other known issues and improvements is on the Window’s Blog. Microsoft Cloud Services get GDPR Enhancements Microsoft releases Windows 10 SDK Preview Build 17115 with Machine Learning APIs Microsoft introduces SharePoint Spaces, adds virtual reality support to SharePoint

Yesterday, the team at MariaDB announced the release of MariaDB Enterprise Server 10.4, which is code named as “restful nights”. It is a hardened and secured server which is also different from MariaDB’s Community Server. This release is focused on solving enterprise customer needs, offering them greater reliability, stability as well as long-term support in production environments. MariaDB Enterprise Server 10.4 and its backported versions will be available to customers by the end of the month as part of the MariaDB Platform subscription. https://twitter.com/mariadb/status/1138737719553798144 The official blog post reads, “For the past couple of years, we have been collaborating very closely with some of our large enterprise customers. From that collaboration, it has become clear that their needs differ vastly from that of the average community user. Not only do they have different requirements on quality and robustness, they also have different requirements for features to support production environments. That’s why we decided to invest heavily into creating a MariaDB Enterprise Server, to address the needs of our customers with mission critical production workloads.” MariaDB Enterprise Server 10.4 comes with added functionality for enterprises that are running MariaDB at scale in production environments. It also involves new levels of testing and is shipped in by default secure configuration. It also includes the same features of MariaDB Server 10.4, including bitemporal tables, an expanded set of instant schema changes and a number of improvements to authentication and authorization (e.g., password expiration and automatic/manual account locking) Max Mether, VP of Server Product Management, MariaDB Corporation, wrote in an email to us, “The new version of MariaDB Server is a hardened database that transforms open source into enterprise open source.” He further added, “We worked closely with our customers to add the features and quality they need to run in the most demanding production environments out-of-the-box. With MariaDB Enterprise Server, we’re focused on top-notch quality, comprehensive security, fast bug fixes and features that let our customers run at internet-scale performance without downtime.” James Curtis, Senior Analyst, Data Platforms and Analytics, 451 Research, said, “MariaDB has maintained a solid place in the database landscape during the past few years.” He added, “The company is taking steps to build on this foundation and expand its market presence with the introduction of MariaDB Enterprise Server, an open source, enterprise-grade offering targeted at enterprise clients anxious to stand up production-grade MariaDB environments.” Reliability and stability MariaDB Enterprise Server 10.4 offers reliability and stability that is required for production environments. In this server, even bugs are fixed that further help in maintaining reliability. The key enterprise features are backported for the ones running earlier versions of MariaDB Server, and provide long-term support. Security Unsecured databases are most of the times the reason for data breaches. But the MariaDB Enterprise Server 10.4is configured with security settings to support enterprise applications. All non-GA plugins will be disabled by default in order to reduce the risks incurred when using unsupported features. Further, the default configuration is changed to enforce strong security, durability and consistency. Enterprise backup MariaDB Enterprise Server 10.4 offers enterprise backup that brings operational efficiency to customers with large databases and further breaks up the backups into non-blocking stages. So this way, writes and schema changes can occur during backups than waiting for backup to complete. Auditing capabilities This server adds secure, stronger and easier auditing capabilities by logging all changes to the audit configuration. It also logs detailed connection information that gives the customers a comprehensive view of changes made to the database. End-to-end encryption It also offers end-to-end encryption for multi-master clusters where the transaction buffers are encrypted that ensure that the data is secure. https://twitter.com/holgermu/status/1138511727610478594 Learn more about this news on the official web page. MariaDB CEO says big proprietary cloud vendors “strip-mining open-source technologies and companies” MariaDB announces MariaDB Enterprise Server and welcomes Amazon’s Mark Porter as an advisor to the board of directors TiDB open sources its MySQL/MariaDB compatible data migration (DM) tool

Earlier this month, Uber open-sourced Pelton, a unified resource scheduler that manages resources across distinct workloads. Pelton, first introduced in November last year, is built on top of Mesos. “By allowing others in the cluster management community to leverage unified schedulers and workload co-location, Peloton will open the door for more efficient resource utilization and management across the community”, states the Uber team. Peloton is designed for web-scale companies such as Uber that consist of millions of containers and tens of thousands of nodes. Peloton comes with advanced resource management capabilities such as elastic resource sharing, hierarchical max-min fairness, resource overcommits, and workload preemption. Peloton uses Mesos to aggregate resources from different hosts and then further launch tasks as Docker containers. Peloton also makes use of hierarchical resource pools to manage elastic and cluster-wide resources more efficiently. Before Peloton was released, each workload at Uber comprised its own cluster which resulted in various inefficiencies. However, with Peloton, mixed workloads can be colocated in shared clusters for better resource utilization. Peloton feature highlights Elastic Resource Sharing: Peloton supports hierarchical resource pools that help elastically share resources among different teams. Resource Overcommit and Task Preemption: Peloton helps with improving cluster utilization by scheduling workloads that use slack resources. Optimized for Big Data Workloads:  Support has been provided for advanced Apache Spark features such as dynamic resource allocation. Optimized for Machine Learning: There is support provided for GPU and Gang scheduling for TensorFlow and Horovod. High Scalability: Users can scale to millions of containers and tens of thousands of nodes. “Open sourcing Peloton will enable greater industry collaboration and open up the software to feedback and contributions from industry engineers, independent developers, and academics across the world”, states the Uber team. Uber and Lyft drivers strike in Los Angeles Uber and GM Cruise are open sourcing their Automation Visualization Systems Uber releases Ludwig, an open source AI toolkit that simplifies training deep learning models for non-experts

Yesterday, at Uber Open Summit 2018, the company announced that it is joining the Linux Foundation as a Gold Member with a promise to support the open source community via the Linux Foundation. Jim Zemlin, Executive Director of the Linux Foundation, said, “Uber has been influential in the open source community for years, and we’re very excited to welcome them as a Gold member at the Linux Foundation. Uber truly understands the power of open source and community collaboration, and I am honored to witness that first hand as a part of Uber Open Summit 2018.” By being a member, Uber will support the Linux Foundation’s mission and help the community in building ecosystems that accelerate open source technology development. Uber will also work towards solving complex technical problems and further promote open source adoption globally. Zemlin said, “Their expertise will be instrumental for our projects as we continue to advance open solutions for cloud-native technologies, deep learning, data visualization and other technologies that are critical to businesses today.” Thuan Pham, Uber CTO, said, “The Linux Foundation not only provides homes to many significant open source projects but also creates an open environment for companies like Uber to work together on developing these technologies. We are honored to join the Linux Foundation to foster greater collaboration with the open source community.” To know more about this membership in detail, head over to Uber Engineering. Michelangelo PyML: Introducing Uber’s platform for rapid machine learning development Uber posted a billion dollar loss this quarter. Can Uber Eats revitalize the Uber growth story? Uber announces the 2019 Uber AI Residency

Last week, Jürgen Löb, a Debian user, discovered a bug in the linux-image-4.9.0-8-armmp-lpae package of the Debian system. The version of the system affected is 4.9.144-3. The user states that he updated his Lamobo R1 board with apt update; apt upgrade. However, after the update, uboot was struck at "Starting kernel" with no further output after the same. The same issue was faced by him on Bananapi 1 board. He performed the following steps to recover his system: downgrading to a backup kernel by mounting the boot partition on the sd card. dd if=boot.scr of=boot.script bs=72 skip=1 (extract script) replaced the following command in boot.script: setenv fk_kvers '4.9.0-8-armmp-lpae' with setenv fk_kvers '4.9.0-7-armmp-lpae'  (backup kernel was available on his boot            partition) Then execute: mkimage -C none -A arm -T script -d boot.script boot.scr After performing these steps he was able to boot the system with the old kernel Version and restore the previous version (4.9.130-2) with the following command: dpkg -i linux-image-4.9.0-8-armmp-lpae_4.9.130-2_armhf.deb He cross-checked the issue and said that upgrading to 4.9.144-3 again after these steps results in the above unbootable behavior. Thus concluding, that the upgrade to 4.9.144-3 is causing the said problem. Timo Sigurdsson, another Debian user stated that “I recovered both systems by replacing the contents of the directories /boot/ and /lib/modules/ with those of a recent backup (taken 3 days ago). After logging into the systems again, I downgraded the package linux-image-4.9.0-8-armmp-lpae to 4.9.130-2 and rebooted again in order to make sure no other package upgrade caused the issue. Indeed, with all packages up-to-date except linux-image-4.9.0-8-armmp-lpae, the systems work just fine. So, there must be a serious regression in 4.9.144-3 at least on armmp-lpae”. In response to this thread, multiple users replied with other instances of broken packages, like plain armmp (non-lpae) is broken for Armada385/Caiman and QEMU's. Vagrant Cascadian, another user added to the list that all of the armhf boards running this kernel failed to boot, including: imx6: Cubox-i4pro, Cubox-i4x4, Wandboard Quad exynos5: Odroid-XU4 exynos4: Odroid-U3 rk3328: firefly-rk3288 sunxi A20: Cubietruck The Debian team has not reverted back with any official response. You can head over to the debian bugs page for more information on this news. Google Project Zero discovers a cache invalidation bug in Linux memory management, Ubuntu and Debian remain vulnerable Remote Code Execution Flaw in APT Linux Package Manager allows man-in-the-middle attack Debian 9.7 released with fix for RCE flaw

Yesterday, Slack reported of an outage which started at 7:23 a.m. PDT and was fully resolved at 8:48 a.m. PDT. The Slack status page said that some people had issues in sending messages while others couldn't access their channels at all. Slack said it was fully up and running again about an hour after the issues emerged. https://twitter.com/SlackStatus/status/1155869112406437889 According to Business Insider, more than 2,000 users reported issues with Slack via Downdetector. Employees around the globe, rely on Slack to communicate, organize tasks and share information. Downdetector’s live outage map showed a concentration of reports in the United States and a few of them in Europe and Japan. Slack has not yet shared the reason which caused the disruption on its status page. Last month as well Slack had suffered an outage which was caused due to server unavailability. Users took to Twitter sending funny memes and gifs about how they really depend on Slack all the time to communicate. https://twitter.com/slabodnick/status/1155858811518930946 https://twitter.com/gbhorwood/status/1155864432527867905 https://twitter.com/envyvenus/status/1155857852625555456 https://twitter.com/nhetmalaluan/status/1155863456991436800 While on Hacker News, users were annoyed and said that such issues have become quite common. One user commented, “This is becoming so often it's embarrassing really. The way it's handled in the app is also not ideal to say the least - only indication that something is wrong is that the text you are trying to send is greyed out.” Why did Slack suffer an outage on Friday? How Verizon and a BGP Optimizer caused a major internet outage affecting Amazon, Facebook, CloudFlare among others Google Cloud went offline taking with it YouTube, Snapchat, Gmail, and a number of other web services

Google Cloud launched new Blockchain tools for developers on Monday, as a result of a collaboration with a DLT (distributed ledger technology) startup to help developers easily build apps. Google seems to take inspiration from AWS. Amazon’s cloud company partnered with Hyperledger Fabric earlier this year, introducing Blockchain templates which, allow developers to launch Ethereum apps without needing to write all the code required to create a smart contract. Digital Asset, a Blockchain platform services run by former JPMorgan executive Blythe Masters, will provide a software development kit to developers working on Google cloud. Along with this, Digital Asset Modeling Language (DAML), a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) program will also be made available to developers. The DAML PaaS program is now available through Google Cloud’s Orbitera Application Marketplace. According to Leonard Law, Head of Financial Services Platform at Google Cloud, “DLT has great potential to benefit customers not just in the financial services industry, but across many industries, and we’re excited to bring these developer tools to Google Cloud.” Blythe Masters, CEO of Digital Asset, also mentioned that the company is partnering with Google Cloud to provide a full stack solution to developers “so they can unleash the potential for web-paced innovation in Blockchain”. This, in turn, will help developers and organizations overcome some of the most common technical barriers to DLT application development today. With the arrival of the new Blockchain toolkit, developers will be able to easily manage the distributed systems for financial applications, games, etc. Oracle makes its Blockchain cloud service generally available Blockchain can solve tech’s trust issues – Imran Bashir  

On 23rd January, Debian announced the release of Debian 9.7 which is the seventh update of the stable distribution of Debian 9. This comes right after a remote code execution vulnerability was discovered in the APT high-level package manager used by Debian, Ubuntu, and other related Linux distributions that allows an attacker to perform a man-in-the-middle attack. This Debian includes a security update for the APT vulnerability. The Debian GNU/Linux 9.7 (codename "Stretch") release contains a new version of the APT package manager that's no longer vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks. The team states that there is no need to download new ISO images to update existing installations, however, the Debian Project will release live and install-only ISO images for all supported architectures of the Debian GNU/Linux 9.7 "Stretch". This will be available for download in a few days. Head over to Debian’s official website for more information on this announcement. 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!

Linus Torvalds announced on 4th November that Kernel 4.20-rc1 is tagged and pushed out, and the merge window is closed.  Linux 4.20 brings a lot of prominent changes from AMD Vega 20 support getting squared away, AMD Picasso APU support, Intel 2.5G Ethernet support, the removal of Speck, peer-to-peer PCI memory support, and other new hardware support additions and software features. Here are some of the features of 4.20-rc 1r: 70% of the patch is driver updates including changes in the gpu drivers Arch updates in x86, arm64, arm, powerpc, and the new C-SKY architecture), Updates in the  header files, networking, core mm and kernel, and tooling 4. Tooling has been upgraded as well. The Kernel will have more than 350 thousand lines of new code! The AMD Vega 20 7nm workstation GPU support is now largely squared away for when this graphics card will be released in the months ahead. GPUVM performance improvements for the AMDGPU kernel driver. The Intel DRM driver now has full PPGTT support for Haswell/Ivy/Valley View hardware. Support for the Hygon Dhyana CPUs -the new Chinese data center processors based on AMD Zen. Scheduler improvements that should benefit asymmetric CPU systems like ARM big.LITTLE processors.  Faster context switching on IBM POWER9.  Several Btrfs performance improvements.  Intel 2.5G Ethernet support was added via the new "IGC" driver. Xbox One S controller rumble support along with Logitech high-resolution scrolling and the new Apple Trackpad 2 driver are among the input hardware improvements.  The Linux kernel is now VLA-free for variable length arrays to improve code portability and better performance and security. Speck crypto code was removed due to this crypto algorithm being quite controversial with its roots inside the NSA. The highly anticipated WireGuard secure VPN tunnel is held off until the next cycle. The FreeSync / Adaptive-Sync / HDMI VRR bits are also being held off for DRM until the next cycle. As the merge window closes, there will be some delay in the pull request which will be taken care of in the second week of the merge window. The duration of the merge window is two weeks. Linus is considering making an explicit rule that he will stop taking new pull requests some time during the second week unless users have a good reason for why it was delayed. He also hopes that by the time the next merge window rolls around, there will be a new automation for it, so that everybody just automatically gets notified when their pull request hit mainline. You can head over to Phoronix.com for a detailed list of all the new improvements added to 4.2 0 rc 1. You can also read the change log for further details. Soon, RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) won’t support KDE Microsoft releases ProcDump for Linux, a Linux version of the ProcDump Sysinternals tool Facebook open sources a set of Linux kernel products including BPF, Btrfs, Cgroup2, and others to address production issues

Yesterday, Facebook open sourced a suite of Linux kernel components and tools. This suite includes products that can be used for resource control and utilization, workload isolation, load balancing, measuring, monitoring, and much more. Facebook has already started using these products on a massive scale throughout its infrastructure and many other organizations are also adopting them. The following are some of the products that they have open sourced: Berkeley Packet Filter (BPF) BPF is a highly-flexible Linux kernel code execution engine. It enables safe and easy modifications of kernel behaviors with custom code by allowing bytecode to run at various hook points. Currently, it is being widely used for networking, tracing and security in a number of Linux kernel subsystems. What can you do with it? You can extend the Linux kernel behavior for a variety of purposes such as load balancing, container networking, kernel tracing, monitoring, and security. You can solve those production issues where user-space solutions alone aren’t enough by executing the user-space code in the kernel. Btrfs Btrfs is a copy-on-write (CoW) filesystem, which means that instead of overwriting in one place, all the updates to metadata or file data are written to a new location on the disk. Btrfs mainly focuses on fault tolerance, repair, and easy administration. It supports features such as snapshots, online defragmentation, pooling, and integrated multiple device support. It is the only filesystem implementation that works with resource isolation. What can you do with it? You can address and manage large storage subsystems by leveraging features like snapshots, load balancing, online defragmentation, pooling, and integrated multiple device support. You can manage, detect, and repair errors with data and metadata checksums, mirroring, and file self-healing. Netconsd (Netconsole daemon) Netconsd is a UDP-based daemon that provides lightweight transport for Linux netconsole messages. It receives and processes log data from the Linux kernel and serves it up as a structured data. Simply put, it is a kernel module that sends all kernel log messages over the network to another computer, without involving user space. What can you do with it? Detect, reorder, or request retransmission of missing messages with the provided metadata. Extract meaningful signal from the data logged by netconsd to rapidly identify and diagnose misbehaving services. Cgroup2 Cgroup2 is a Linux kernel feature that allows you to group and structure workloads and also control the amount of system resources assigned to each group. It consists of controllers for memory, I/O, central processing unit, and more. Using cgroup2, you can isolate workloads, prioritize, and configure the distribution of resources. What can you do with it? You can create isolated groups of processes and then control and measure the distribution of memory, IO, CPU and other resources for each group. You can detect resource shortages using PSI pressure metrics for memory, IO, and CPU with cgroup2. With cgroup2, production engineers will be able to deal with increasing resource pressure more proactively and prevent conflicts between workloads. Along with these products, they have open-sourced Pressure Stall Information (PSI), oomd, and many others. You can find the complete list of these products at Facebook Open Source website and also check out the official announcement. Facebook open sources QNNPACK, a library for optimized mobile deep learning Facebook introduces two new AI-powered video calling devices “built with Privacy + Security in mind” Facebook’s Glow, a machine learning compiler, to be supported by Intel, Qualcomm and others

Ubuntu 18.04 official release is scheduled on April 26th 2018. Ubuntu 17.10 was released in October 2017 and within a span of 6 months, they are releasing their next big update in 18.04. The version numbers of Ubuntu have an interesting trait, where-in 18.04 will be released in the 4th month of 2018, similar to 17.10, which was released in 10th month of 2017. Ubuntu 18.04 comes with some exciting new feature releases: Extending support to color emojis All the previous versions of Ubuntu supported monochrome black and white emojis, which definitely lacked aesthetic appeal. This update might not be at the top of wishlist for anyone using Ubuntu, but emojis form an integral part of modern communication, and also comparing it to other distros like Fedora, which gained color emoji support long back. With 18.04 release, you can add and view color emojis, anytime, anywhere. The release uses Noto Color emoji font, which can be downloaded from the GitHub page. Shipping with Linux Kernel 4.15 Ubuntu 18.04 now ships with the slowest Linux kernel ever since 2011 i.e Kernel 4.15. This brings in much-needed Spectre and Meltdown patch fixes for Ubuntu 18.04. Furthermore, it has also added native-support for Raspberry Pi touchscreen, and has a significant performance boost for AMD GPUs. GNOME 3.28 Unity desktop environment is no longer the default environment anymore, since the release of customized GNOME in Ubuntu 17.10 release. They are planning to continue with it and plotting the latest version of GNOME (3.28) along with 18.04. Xorg display server Wayland was introduced as the default display server for Ubuntu along with the 17.10 release. But it has turned out to be an issue as a decent amount of applications were not supported on Wayland. Hence, in the new release Ubuntu is switching back to Xorg display server as the default option and wayland will be provided as an option to the users. Increase in boot speed Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, has claimed that Ubuntu 18.04 will have a better boot speed as the systemd’s features will help identifying the bottleneck and solve them as quickly as possible. New installer for the server edition Ubuntu was using their debian text-based installer for their server edition but with the 18.04 release, server edition will be using the all new subiquity installer. Checkout the GitHub page for more about subiquity installer. For minor bug fixes, features and enhancements, refer to the FOSSBYTES blog.

Lately, the relationship between SUSE and openSUSE community has been under discussion. Different options are being considered, among which the possibility of setting up openSUSE into an entirely independent foundation is gaining momentum. This will enable openSUSE to have greater autonomy and control over its own future and operations. Though openSUSE board chair Richard Brown and SUSE leadership have publicly reiterated that SUSE remains committed to openSUSE. There has been a lot of concern over the ability of openSUSE to be able to operate in a sustainable way, without being entirely beholden to SUSE. The idea of an independent openSUSE foundation has popped up many times in the past. Former openSUSE board member Peter Linnell says, “Every time, SUSE has changed ownership, this kind of discussion pops up with some mild paranoia IMO, about SUSE dropping or weakening support for openSUSE”. He also adds, “Moreover, I know SUSE's leadership cares a lot about having a healthy independent openSUSE community. They see it as important strategically and the benefits go both ways.” On the contrary, openSUSE Board member Simon Lees says, “it is almost certain that at some point in the future SUSE will be sold again or publicly listed, and given the current good working relationship between SUSE and openSUSE it is likely easier to have such discussions now vs in the future should someone buy SUSE and install new management that doesn't value openSUSE in the same way the current management does.” In an interview with LWN, Brown described the conversation between SUSE and the broader community, about the possibility of an independent foundation, as being frank, ongoing, and healthy. He also mentioned that everything from a full independent openSUSE foundation to a tweaking of the current relationship that provides more legal autonomy for openSUSE can be considered. Also, there is a possibility for some form of organization to be run under the auspices of the Linux Foundation. Issues faced by openSUSE Brown has said, “openSUSE has multiple stakeholders, but it currently doesn't have a separate legal entity of its own, which makes some of the practicalities of having multiple sponsors rather complicated”. Under the current arrangement, it is difficult for OpenSUSE to directly handle financial contributions. Sponsorship and the ability to raise funding have become a prerequisite for the survival of openSUSE. Brown comments, “openSUSE is in continual need of investment in terms of both hardware and manpower to 'keep the lights on' with its current infrastructure”. Another concern has been the tricky collaboration between the community and the company across all SUSE products. In particular, Brown has stated issues with the openSUSE Kubic and SUSE Container-as-a-Service Platform. With a more distinctly separate openSUSE, the implication and the hope is that openSUSE projects will have increased autonomy over its governance and interaction with the wider community. According to LWN, if openSUSE becomes completely independent, it will have increased autonomy over its governance and interaction with the wider community. Though different models for openSUSE's governance are under consideration, Brown has said, “The current relationship between SUSE and openSUSE is unique and special, and I see these discussions as enhancing that, and not necessarily following anyone else's direction”. There has also been no declaration of any hard deadline in place. For more details, head over to LWN article. SUSE is now an independent company after being acquired by EQT for $2.5 billion 389 Directory Server set to replace OpenLDAP as Red Hat and SUSE withdraw support for OpenLDAP in their Enterprise Linux offerings Salesforce open sources ‘Lightning Web Components framework’

Earlier this month, the Windows 10 October update had problems with files being deleted off users’ computers. After which Microsoft had to pause the mass rollout of Windows 10 update for October. After the issue was reported, Microsoft took steps, did testing with the Windows Insider community for finding the reasons and fixing this bug. But now there is another bug which can cause you to lose your files. Many people having installed the Windows 10 October update have reported an issue where ZIP operations are not working as intended. Windows fails to notify as to which files should be overwritten. On unzipping files to a folder, if other copies of those files already exist in that folder, Windows 10 usually asks whether those existing copies should be overwritten. This does not happen anymore after the update and Windows just overwrites the files. The user is not even informed that the files are overwritten. Accidental overwrites are highly likely if the user doesn’t get any prompt or information. There can be situations where a modified file, for example, is overwritten with something original from the ZIP file. However, this happens only with the built-in Windows file manager. On using a third party tool to work with compressed files, however, this bug does not happen. Wazhai, a Reddit user sums up the issue nicely: “The issue is that in 1809, overwriting files by extracting from an archive using File Explorer doesn’t result in an overwrite prompt dialogue and also doesn’t replace any files at all; it just fails silently. There are also some reports that it did overwrite items, but did so silently without asking.” There is also another scenario but not widely reported where the file extraction seems to happen, but no files are updated. This bug was discussed on Reddit over the weekend and can be read on a Reddit thread, visit their website. Microsoft pulls Windows 10 October update after it deletes user files Microsoft fixing and testing the Windows 10 October update after file deletion bug Microsoft Your Phone: Mirror your Android phone apps on Windows