Linux Weekly Roundup #35

Hello and welcome to this week's Linux Roundup and what a wonderful week we had! We have plenty of Linux Distro releases and LibreOffice 6.3 RC1. The Linux distros with releases this week are Q4OS 3.8, SparkyLinux 5.8, Mageia 7.1, ArcoLinux 19.07.11, Deepin 15.11, ArchBang 2107-beta, Bluestar 5.2.1, Slackel 7.2 "Openbox" and Endeavour OS 2019.07.15. I looked at most of these Linux Distros, links below, I will look at some of them in the new week and some I will unfortunately not have a look at, for download links and more, please visit distrowatch.com Well, this is this week's Linux Roundup, thank you so much for your time! Have a great week!

Full Circle Magazine: Full Circle Weekly News #140

Christopher Allan Webber: ActivityPub Conf 2019

That's right! We're hosting the first ever ActivityPub Conf. It's immediately following Rebooting Web of Trust in Prague. There's no admission fee to attend. (Relatedly, the conference is kind of being done on the cheap, because it is being funded by organizers who are themselves barely funded.) The venue, however, is quite cool: it's at the DOX Centre for Contemporary Art, which is itself exploring the ways the digital world is affecting our lives. If you plan on attending (and maybe also speaking), you should get in your application soon (see the flier for details). We've never done one of these, and we have no idea what the response will be like, so this is going to be a smaller gathering (about 40 people). In some ways, it will be somewhere between a conference and a gathering of people-who-are-interested-in-activitypub. As said in the flier, by attending, you are agreeing to the code of conduct, so be sure to read that.

Gift ideas for Sysadmin Appreciation Day

Sysadmin Appreciation Day is coming up this Friday, July 26. To help honor sysadmins everywhere, we want you to share your best gift ideas. What would be the best way a team member or customer could show their appreciation for you? As a sysadmin, what was the best gift you've ever received? We asked our writers the same question, and here are their answers: "Whilst working in the Ubuntu community on Edubuntu, I took it upon myself to develop the startup/shutdown sound scheme, which became the default in Ubuntu for, from what I can understand, the next decade. Whilst people had a love-hate relationship with my sound scheme, and rightly so, I had a love-hate relationship with my sound card during the development. At the time I had recorded all my sound samples using one sample rate, but my new sound card, as my motherboard had exploded a few days earlier, did not support it. I had two choices, resample all my samples (which I didn't really want to do) or buy a new sound card.

Red Hat OpenStack Platform with Red Hat Ceph Storage: Radosbench baseline performance evaluation

Red Hat Ceph Storage is popular storage for Red Hat OpenStack Platform. Customers around the world run their hyperscale, production workloads on Red Hat Ceph Storage and Red Hat OpenStack Platform. This is driven by the high level of integration between Ceph storage and OpenStack private cloud platforms. With each release of both platforms, the level of integration has grown and performance and automation has increased. As the customer's storage and compute needs for footprints have grown, we have seen more interest towards running compute and storage as one unit and providing a hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) layer based on OpenStack and Ceph. [...] Continuing the benchmarking series, in the next post you’ll learn performance insights of running multi-instance MySQL database on Red Hat OpenStack Platform and Red Hat Ceph Storage across decoupled and hyperconverged architectures. We’ll also compare results from a near-equal environment backed by all-flash cluster nodes.

The State of Java in Flathub

For maintainers of Java-based applications in Flathub, it's worth noting that even if you consume the Latest OpenJDK extension in your application, users will not be broken by major updates because OpenJDK is bundled into your Flatpak. The implication of this for users is that they won't see updates to their Java version until the application maintainer rebuilds the application in Flathub. If you maintain a Java-based Flatpak application on Flathub, you can consume the latest version of your chosen OpenJDK stream (either LTS or Latest) simply by rebuilding; the latest version of that OpenJDK steam will be pulled in automatically.

Fedora Magazine: Contribute at the Fedora Test Week for kernel 5.2

The kernel team is working on final integration for kernel 5.1. This version was just recently released, and will arrive soon in Fedora. This version has many security fixes included. As a result, the Fedora kernel and QA teams have organized a test week from Monday, Jul 22, 2019 through Monday, Jul 29, 2019. Refer to the wiki page for links to the test images you’ll need to participate. Read below for details.

Bootstrappable Debian BoF

Greetings from DebConf 19 in Curitiba! Just a quick reminder that I will run a Bootstrappable Debian BoF on Tuesday 23rd, at 13.30 Brasilia time (which is 16.30 UTC, if I am not mistaken). If you are curious about bootstrappability in Debian, why do we want it and where we are right now, you are welcome to come in person if you are at DebCon or to follow the streaming.

Candy Tsai: Outreachy Week 6 – Week 7: Getting Code Merge

You can’t overhear what others are doing or learn something about your colleagues through gossip over lunch break when working remotely. So after being stuck for quite a bit, terceiro suggested that we try pair programming. After our first remote pair programming session, I think there should be no difference in pair programming in person. We shared the same terminal, looked at the same code and discussed just like people standing side by side. Through our pair programming session, I found out that I had a bad habit. I didn’t run tests on my code that often, so when I had failing tests that didn’t fail before, I spent more time debugging than I should have. Pair programming gave insight to how others work and I think little improvements go a long way.

about your wiki page on I/O schedulers and BFQ

Hi,
this is basically to report outdated statements in your wiki page on
I/O schedulers [1].

The main problematic statement is that BFQ "...  is not ideal for
devices with slow CPUs or high throughput I/O devices" because too
heavy.  BFQ is definitely more sophisticated than any of the other I/O
schedulers.  We have designed it that way to provide an incomparably
better service quality, at a very low overhead.  As reported in [2],
the execution time of BFQ on an old laptop CPU is 0.6 us per I/O
event, against 0.2 us for mq-deadline (which is the lightest Linux I/O
scheduler).

To put these figures into context, BFQ proved to be so good for
"devices with slow CPUs" that, e.g., Chromium OS migrated to BFQ a few
months ago.  In particular, Google crew got convinced by a demo [3] I
made for them, on one of the cheapest and slowest Chromebook on the
market.  In the demo, a fast download is performed.  Without BFQ, the
download makes the device completely unresponsive.  With BFQ, the
device remains as responsive as if it was totally idle.

As for the other part of the statement, "...  not ideal for ...  high
throughput I/O devices", a few days ago I ran benchmarks (on Ubuntu)
also with one of the fastest consumer-grade NVMe SSDs: a Samsung SSD
970 PRO.  Results [4] can be summarized as follows.  Throughput with
BFQ is about the same as with the other I/O schedulers (it couldn't be
higher, because this kind of drives just wants the scheduler to stay
as aside as possible, when it comes to throughput).  But, in the
presence of writes as background workload, start-up times with BFQ are
at least 16 times as low as with the other I/O schedulers.  In
absolute terms, gnome-terminal starts in ~1.8 seconds with BFQ, while
it takes at least 28.7 (!) seconds with the other I/O schedulers.
Finally, only with BFQ, no frame gets lost in video-playing
benchmarks.

BFQ then provides other important benefits, such as from 5x to 10X
throughput boost in multi-client server workloads [5].

So, is there any chance that the outdated/wrong information on your
wiki page [1] gets updated somehow?  If I may, I'd be glad to update
it myself, after providing you with all the results you may ask.

In addition, why doesn't Ubuntu too consider switching to BFQ as
default I/O scheduler, for all drives that BFQ supports (namely all
drives with a maximum speed not above ~500 KIOPS)?

Looking forward to your feedback,
Paolo

Should Ubuntu Use The BFQ I/O Scheduler?

The BFQ I/O scheduler is working out fairly well these days as shown in our benchmarks. The Budget Fair Queueing scheduler supports both throughput and low-latency modes while working particularly well for consumer-grade hardware. Should the Ubuntu desktop be using BFQ by default? [...] But in addition to wanting to correct that Wiki information, Paolo pops the question of why doesn't Ubuntu switch to BFQ as the default I/O scheduler for supported drives. Though as of yet, no Ubuntu kernel developers have yet commented on the prospect of switching to BFQ.

Quest Releases KACE SDA & SMA Updates

The update to 7.0 for KACE Systems Deployment Appliance is primarily about bringing a scope of endpoint management capabilities with new support for Linux devices to the table.

Rugged, Kaby Lake transport computer has a 10-port LAN switch with PoE

Axiomtek’s Linux-ready “tBOX400-510-FL” transportation system has a 7th Gen Intel CPU and a 10-port managed switch with 8x M12-style 10/100Mbps PoE and 2x GbE ports. The rugged system also has 3x mini-PCIe slots and dual swappable SATA drives. Axiomtek has launched a fanless, Kaby Lake-U based transportation computer with a choice of power supplies designed for in-vehicle, marine, or railway applications. The rugged tBOX400-510-FL features a Qualcomm-driven, Layer 2 managed PoE switch with support for IP surveillance and video management applications. “Customers can connect IP cameras directly without installing an extra PoE switch, minimizing overall deployment costs and installation space onboard,” stated Axiomtek product manager Sharon Huang.