Red Hat: Security, GCC, Fedora, CentOS and Miscellany

• Red Hat Insights: Your very own security consultant

  When it comes to system maintenance and management, the most critical aspect is to keep all operating systems as safe and secure as possible. This is where Red Hat Insights steps in - it helps users manage security in an easy and convenient way by analyzing system configurations. Since Red Hat Summit 2020, Red Hat Insights has extended capabilities to manage operational efficiency and security risks. Note: Insights is included in all Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) subscriptions.

• Improve your code: Tales from confinement without a debugger

  Now that I have coded for some years, I’ve noticed that I have picked up some bad habits along the way. Over-dependence on the debugger is one of them. I often use it as a high-powered crutch, which frequently leads me waist-deep into stack traces, rarely stopping to think things through. I get lost inside 20 levels of recursion and wonder why an irrelevant variable is being tickled. Granted, there are many good uses for a debugger, but I’m at 40% on the good use scale. My uses usually start benign but then degrade into cancerous abstractions. So, for my 20th GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) hacking anniversary, I decided to give myself the challenge of one month without a debugger. Here is the tale. [...] When I first started hacking GCC, newbies at Red Hat were put on old toolchain support duty. Nine times out of 10, those bugs had already been fixed upstream. I got quite adept at running two parallel gdbs, single-stepping until I found a difference in the codes, and eventually finding the patch that fixed the bug. My technique was effective, but taught me very little about the underlying problem that I was “fixing.” Now, I’m a gray-bearded old fogey, and I can’t count the number of times I have put a breakpoint on the garbage collector to find out who created a chunk of memory, just to save time analyzing the where of a given optimization.

• How Fedora and Outreachy Helped Me Hone My Flexibility With Timelines

  Update: I’m in the seventh week of my Outreachy internship with Fedora! I am working to create a GraphQL API for Bodhi. The following image shows a Gantt chart of the ideal timeline that my mentors and I came up with to get the project up and running...

• Fedora 33 Btrfs by default Test Day 2020-07-08

  A new change proposal has been submitted for the Fedora 33 release cycle which entails usage of btrfs by default for Workstations, Servers and Spins across x86_64 and ARM architectures As a result, QA teams have organized a test day on Wed, July 08, 2020. Refer to the wiki page for links to the test cases and materials you’ll need to participate. Read below for details.

• CentOS Community newsletter, July 2020 (#2007)

  We are pleased to announce the general availability of CentOS Linux 8.2.2004. Effectively immediately, this is the current release for CentOS Linux 8 and is tagged as 2004, derived from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.2 Source Code.

• CentOS Stream Begins Seeing RHEL 8.3 Bits, Real-Time Repository

  Introduced alongside CentOS 8 last year was CentOS Stream as a developer-focused, rolling-release of CentOS/RHEL. With those processes getting squared away and CentOS recently debuting its RHEL 8.2 rebuild, CentOS Stream is beginning to see new and interesting material. In particular, early work from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.3 development is beginning to hit CentOS Stream. There is also an updated installer for CentOS Stream, new modules are coming, and perhaps most significant is the introduction of a real-time/RT repository. These RT packages are optimized for latency-sensitive workloads. The repository can be optionally enabled for those interested in optimizing their software stack for RT workloads.

• Learn CentOS - Managing Storage

  The Learn CentOS series continues with another episode, this time checking out the concept of storage. The /etc/fstab file will be covered, as well as mounting, unmounting, and formatting storage media.

• VR hits a new milestone, Mozilla's growing open source voice library, change in Redis maintainers, and more open source news

  In this week’s edition of our open source news roundup, Mozilla updates its open source voice stack, a tool to tame VR cybersickness, and more open source news.

Kernel: Better Mouse Reporting, GNU Guix Without Linux, New Linux on Ancient PC, Speech Police and Zstd

• Better Mouse Reporting For The Linux Virtual Terminal Is Being Worked On

  The mouse reporting functionality offered by the Linux VT console is rather basic and seemingly seldom used by text-based, mouse-aware programs. However, a series of patches was sent out this week for improving the implementation to provide for more xterm-like mouse reporting.

• GNU Guix Begins Publishing System Images Based On Hurd

  Earlier this year was news of GNU Guix wanting to replace their Linux kernel usage with the Hurd microkernel. For those interested, the project recently began producing system images with indeed Hurd wired up for this software distribution. The plans laid out earlier this year were on switching to Hurd for increasing "security and freedom for their users." A Phoronix reader tipped us off that the Guix project is indeed offering the system images powered by the Hurd micro-kernel.

• Redditor Boots Linux Kernel 5.8 On 30-Year-Old Intel Processor via Floppy Disk

  Do you remember your first PC on which you booted Linux from floppy? Well, Floppy disk is almost dead. The majority of people now use USB sticks or DVDs to install Linux distros on their PCs. However, retro enthusiasts love to revive their old hardware and relive the flashback. Recently, a Redditor who goes by the name ‘FozzTexx’ demonstrated the latest stable Linux Kernel 5.8.0-rc2+ running from his floppy disk. He successfully booted a tiny kernel on a 30-year-old 32-bit Intel 80486 (i486 or 486) CPU.

• Linux kernel developers: This new BLM coding style avoids words like blacklist

  Key Linux kernel maintainers have largely welcomed a new proposal by Intel engineer and fellow kernel maintainer Dan Williams to introduce inclusive terminology in the kernel's official coding-style document. The first to sign off on Williams' proposal were Chris Mason and Greg Kroah-Hartman. But other maintainers have approved the proposal too, which requires kernel developers to avoid using the words 'slave', for development trees and branches, and 'blacklist'.

• Zstd'ing The Kernel Might See Mainline With Linux 5.9 For Faster Boot Times

  It looks like the long ongoing work for compressing the Linux kernel image with Zstd might finally soon be mainlined, potentially for next month's Linux 5.9 cycle kicking off as the "v6" patches sent out this week were done as a Git pull request. Nick Terrell of Facebook has been the one herding these Zstd patches for the Linux kernel and trying to get them upstream. Facebook is already using them in production on their many web servers. Facebook found that using a Zstd compressed kernel image shrunk their x86_64 decompression time from 12 seconds to 3 seconds with formerly using XZ compression. The actual boot time dropped by about two seconds using Zstd over XZ. When testing the Zstd-compressed kernel on their AArch64 servers, Facebook found the decompression time shrunk from 27 seconds to 8 seconds.

Huawei’s ARM-based desktop PC could leave you scratching your head

Part of the problem is Huawei’s replacement for Windows, a Linux-based Unity OS (not to be confused with Ubuntu’s Unity). While the OS itself performed smoothly, the apps running on it didn’t. The YouTuber even had to pay 800 RMB ($115) to get access to the UOS app store which had a very limited selection of software. Any Linux user would expect popular proprietary software like Microsoft Office and Adobe’s Creative apps to be absent but the store also strangely didn’t support running 32-bit programs either.

Games: Hammer Dongers, Destination Sol, Basement, and Railway Empire

• Floor-destroying party game 'Hammer Dongers' adds rockets and new maps

  Hammer Dongers is a great idea for a party game, pitting up to four people against each other in small levels with the ability to destroy the very ground beneath your feet. Currently free while it's in development, not only does it have a good idea but it's also a huge amount of fun because the gameplay is nicely streamlined. You each start with a big Hammer, which you can use to smash the ground and have it fall away to hopefully take down an opponent. With the latest update, they've overhauled the maps with a Castle theme to include new traps and contraptions. There's also a Rocket Launcher because why the heck not.

• Free and open source space RPG 'Destination Sol' has a big 2.0 release

  Destination Sol might not be a name known to all but it's a sweet little space exploration RPG that's free and open source, plus it's getting big updates. The 2.0 release of Destination Sol was released on July 5, bringing with it much easier and expanded modding support. So easy in fact, you should be able to download extra Modules and drop them into the Modules folder to have them work. This release also adds in more ships, more guns and more of everything else.

• Make nefarious goods in Basement, now up on GOG

  Basement, a game about building up a business making some questionable goods to fund development of a video game is now available DRM-free on GOG. You need to deal with other gangs, cops, crazy junkies, a mysterious investor and even ghosts from the past. After being in Early Access for quite some time and in development for 5 years, towards the end of last year it fully released on Steam and now you can also pick it up from GOG.

• Railway Empire is getting a Complete Collection on August 7

  Publisher Kalypso Media and their in-house developer Gaming Minds Studios have announced that Railway Empire - Complete Collection is coming on August 7. After over two years of updates some of which overhauled and improved major parts of the game like re-workings of competitor AI, the addition of a gigantic complete North American map, almost 20 free updates, an all-new Challenge Mode, new buildings and countless other quality of life improvements and bug fixes it seems they're finally done with it. This full edition will bring together all of the eight expansions under one roof, giving new players the easy option of getting it all together.