Red Hat and Fedora Leftovers
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This is the second in what I hope to make a monthly series summarizing the past month on the Community Blog. Please leave a comment below to let me know what you think. Stats In July, we published 20 posts. The site had 6,463 visits from 4,128 unique viewers.
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We’re excited to announce that Red Hat Virtualization 4.4, the latest update to our mature and trusted virtualization solution for traditional virtual machine (VM)-based workloads, will be generally available this week. As the established virtualization landscape shifts towards cloud-native technologies, Red Hat Virtualization has continued to provide the ability for businesses to deploy, configure and manage traditional workloads. With this latest release, Red Hat Virtualization is now rebased to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.2 and offers a more seamless integration with Red Hat OpenShift, providing a solution that can launch the next-generation of cloud-native applications while providing a foundation for VMs today.
From traditional to cloud-native, virtualization here and now
Red Hat is uniquely positioned to provide virtualization solutions for both traditional and containerized applications. With Red Hat Virtualization, we remain committed to providing customers robust and stable datacenter virtualization based upon KVM.
Based on RHEL 8.2, Red Hat Virtualization 4.4 inherits all of the stability, performance and security improvements that you trust for your most business critical workloads while adding new capabilities that make it even easier to manage a large virtual environment. We’ve also improved observability with new dashboards for the Data Warehouse (DWH) showing performance and capacity of all your critical inventory. This leads to actionable results with unique analysis and trends of which workloads need attention, and when you need to add more hardware. Other improvements for virtualization admin include easier network configuration with NetworkManager.
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At Keyva, we see clients in all phases of their automation journey. Some organizations are just starting out and automating domain lifecycle tasks, such as provisioning firewall rules or automating server builds, while others may be well down the path of creating self-service IT capabilities. In most cases, regardless of where a team is on its journey, they eventually want to arrive at the point where they can provide self-service IT capabilities to the teams and users that want to consume them.
At a basic level, self-service IT requests require two primary pieces of functionality: a request portal and automated request fulfillment. Let’s briefly look at both components.
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Enterprises across the globe are looking to transform their operations and services to better align with current conditions. To succeed, they also need to adopt the latest technologies. Even the most traditional businesses - such as banks and financial institutions - need to use innovative approaches to deliver leading-edge solutions to their clients and partners.
As our customers begin to evaluate their digital transformation options, they are looking for a trusted partner to work with and a proven infrastructure platform to innovate upon. These are often the key factors for success. Take Royal Bank of Canada (RBC), for instance. RBC is in the top 10 of global banks with over 86,000 employees and a complex IT environment. As a leader in technology and innovation, RBC has been at the forefront of digital transformation. The bank has been recognized with multiple industry awards and honors, and continues to innovate to better serve their customers.
| Is the Python Community Becoming Toxic?
The Python community is amazing. I started learning Python over 15 years ago and the community was almost always very supportive in helping me figure things out. However, the past few years there seems to have been a shift. I’m not sure if it’s just because Python has grown so much in popularity or if it’s something more basic, such as people becoming more sensitive about things. Whatever it is, the community seems to be heading away from what it once was.
I first started thinking about this during Brett Cannon’s PyCon keynote about his experiences in the open-source community and how we need to be nice to each other. Too many people think they can be rude when requesting features or bug fixes. But he also mentioned that maintainers also need to have a good attitude and not drive away potential new contributors.
A couple months after this keynote was when Guido Van Rossum, creator of the Python language, suddenly retired as the head of Python. At the time, the reason given was that there was so much acrimony and fighting over PEP 572 that he stepped down early.
This year we saw multiple members of the PyTest team drop out of the project.
While Reddit and StackOverflow remain very popular, in my experience I have found them to be difficult to break into. The Reddit Python community, while very large and diverse, is full of trolls and the moderators don’t seem to follow Reddit’s own rules. I personally have had problems simply posting articles on there while others I know have been harassed because their project wasn’t deemed to be “Pythonic” enough. The PySimpleGUI project has been demonized repeatedly there, for example.
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Linux 5.9: close_range(), Keem Bay, and FSGSBASE
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The close_range() system call is intended to allow efficiently closing a range of file descriptors (or all file descriptors) of the calling task. This system call was devised in cooperation with FreeBSD developers.
FreeBSD developers merged their compatible close_range system call all the way back in April 2019 while now for Linux 5.9 in August 2020 this system call is deemed ready for inclusion.
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There are many ARM changes coming to Linux 5.9, including support for Intel's Keem Bay.
Keem Bay is the Intel SoC by way of their Movidius acquisition that is built for edge AI computing. Keem Bay is a SoC built with Arm Cortex A53 processors and an Intel Movidius VPU. Intel acquired Movidius in 2016 and has continued advancing their low-power, computer vision hardware. Intel published a DRM driver for Keem Bay and other driver changes while the pull request being talked about today is the actual ARM platform enablement.
Along with Keem Bay, new Arm SoC families being supported by the mainline Linux 5.9 kernel are Microchip SparX5 and Mediatek Infinity3 / Mercury5.
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The Linux kernel work for making use of the x86_64 FSGSBASE instruction since Intel Ivy Bridge and since then AMD CPUs also is set to finally land with the in-development Linux 5.9 kernel. The FSGSBASE support has the possibility of helping Intel/AMD CPU performance especially in areas like context switching that had been hurt badly by Spectre/Meltdown and other CPU vulnerability mitigations largely on the Intel side.
Intel developers started the FSGSBASE Linux support around five years ago but never got through in getting it mainlined. Microsoft's Linux kernel engineer then a few months back decided to take up the work to try to get it mainlined as even Microsoft found value in the performance benefits.
| Today in Techrights
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