Servers and Databases: PASE Versus ILE, Cassandra and More

• PASE Versus ILE: Which Is Best For Open Source?

  Open source has emerged as a driver of innovation in the past 20 years, and has greatly accelerated technological innovation. The proprietary IBM i platform has also benefited from this trend, thanks in large part to the capability to run Linux applications in the PASE runtime. But some members of the IBM i community are concerned that the fruits of the open source innovation have not tasted quite as sweet as they do on other platforms. Linux was the original breakout star in open source software, and so it should be no surprise that the vast majority of software developed with the open source method is designed to run on the Linux operating system and associated open source componentry, including the Apache Web Server, MySQL database, and PHP, the so-called LAMP stack (although you can substitute other pieces, like the Postgres and MariaDB databases and languages like Perl, Python, and Node.js to create other clever acronyms). The IBM i operating system can run Linux applications through PASE, the AIX runtime that IBM brought to OS/400 so many years ago. Getting Linux applications to run on PASE requires that they’re first ported to AIX, which is often not too much work, since Linux is a variant of Unix, just like AIX.

• How Instagram is scaling its infrastructure across the ocean

  To prevent quorum requests from going across the ocean, we're thinking about partitioning our dataset into two parts: Cassandra_EU and Cassandra_US. If European users' data stores are in the Cassandra_EU partition, and U.S. users' data stores are in the Cassandra_US partition, users' requests won't need to travel long distances to fetch data. For example, imagine there are five data centers in the United States and three data centers in the European Union. If we deploy Cassandra in Europe by duplicating the current clusters, the replication factor will be eight and quorum requests must talk to five out of eight replicas. If, however, we can find a way to partition the data into two sets, we will have a Cassandra_US partition with a replication factor of five and a Cassandra_EU partition with a replication factor of three—and each can operate independently without affecting the others. In the meantime, a quorum request for each partition will be able to stay in the same continent, solving the round-trip latency issue.

• Two software companies, fed up with Amazon, Alibaba and other big cloud players, have a controversial new plan to fight back

  Every year, large cloud companies like Amazon rake in billions of dollars— but some of their most popular cloud services comes from repackaging software projects created by other, smaller companies. Amazon is repackaging what's known as "open source" software, which is software that is given away for free, meaning Amazon has every legal right to use it in this way. For instance, since 2013, Amazon had been offering the open-source database Redis as part of a popular cloud service called ElastiCache.

• Running Your Own Database-as-a-Service with the Crunchy PostgreSQL Operator

  One reason why enterprises adopt open source software is to help free themselves from vendor lock-in. Cloud providers can offer open source “as-a-service” solutions that allow organizations to take advantage of open source solutions, but this in turn has can create a new type of trap: infrastructure lock-in. Many organizations have adopted Kubernetes to give themselves flexibility in where they can deploy their services in the cloud, without being locked into one provider. Some people express concerns that this instead creates “Kubernetes lock-in,” but because Kubernetes is open source and has both widespread support and active development, it should be no different than adopting Linux as your operating system.

Latest About GNU/Linux Software on Chromebooks

• Linux Apps Coming To MediaTek-Powered Chromebooks Like The Acer R13

  Google made no mention of Linux apps on Chrome OS at last week’s hardware event in New York. I was a little surprised considering the fact that the Pixel Slate and Chrome OS saw nearly as much stage time as the Pixel phone that brought most of the media to Manhattan. [...] Unfortunately, the Chromebook R13 was quickly overshadowed by new flagships from Samsung and ASUS that featured more powerful processors and various features that made them more appealing to consumers. It was a sad happenstance for the Acer Chromebook because honestly, it is still a great device two years later. Seeing Google bring Linux apps to this device could breath much-needed new life into this model.

• Linux app support coming to MediaTek-based Chromebooks

  Linux apps have arrived in the Chrome OS stable channel, but not all Chromebooks have access to them. The Linux container requires some kernel features that won't be backported to several models, but now Google is bringing the feature to a handful of MediaTek-based Chromebooks. Chrome Unboxed discovered a commit that enables Linux app support for the "oak" platform, which a number of Chromebooks were based on.

• Linux apps on Chrome OS: An easy-to-follow guide

  The software that started out as a strictly web-centric entity — with everything revolving around the Chrome browser and apps that could operate inside it — is now one of modern computing's most versatile operating systems. Contemporary Chromebooks still run all the standard web-based stuff, of course, but they're also capable of connecting to Google's entire Play Store and running almost any Android app imaginable. And if that isn't enough, many models have recently gained the ability to run Linux apps as well.

Latest Lime SDR board builds on Raspberry Pi CM3

The open spec, 125 x 65mm LimeNET Micro is Lime’s first fully embedded SDR board, featuring the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3, MAX 10 FPGA, u-blox GNSS, RF transceiver, Ethernet with PoE, and optional enclosures. UK-based Lime Microsystems has returned to Crowd Supply to launch its first fully autonomous, embedded software defined radio (SDR) platform, and the first to include integrated PoE and GNSS. The successfully funded LimeNET Micro is available through Dec. 6, starting at $269, including the integrated Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3, with shipments due Feb. 25, 2019. Other packages add enclosures and omni-directional antennas.

Kernel: Hwmon and OOMD

• Hwmon Updates Sent To The Kernel Finally Complete AMD Excavator Temperature Readings

  Following this morning's Linux 4.19 release announcement, one of the first pull requests sent in of feature updates for the next 4.20~5.0 feature cycle is the hardware monitoring "hwmon" updates. The hwmon subsystem updates as usual include the various monitoring driver improvements. Most notable though is including the patch we talked about back in September for finally reporting CPU temperatures for all AMD Excavator CPU cores. That patch didn't end up getting sent in as a "fix" during Linux 4.19 development but is now sent in for this next kernel cycle.

• Facebook Developing "OOMD" For Out-of-Memory User-Space Linux Daemon

  While the Linux kernel has its own out-of-memory (OOM) killer when system memory becomes over-committed, Facebook developers have been developing their own user-space based solution for handling this situation. [...] Facebook's Daniel Xu will be talking about OOMD at the Open-Source Summit Europe tomorrow in Edinburgh. But if you can't make it there are the slides (PDF) already available. The OOMD project is hosted on GitHub under the GPLv2 license.