Been some time since my last update, so I felt it was time to flex my blog writing muscles again and provide some updates of some of the things we are working on in Fedora in preparation for Fedora Workstation 35. This is not meant to be a comprehensive whats new article about Fedora Workstation 35, more of a listing of some of the things we are doing as part of the Red Hat desktop team.

NVidia support for Wayland
One thing we spent a lot of effort on for a long time now is getting full support for the NVidia binary driver under Wayland. It has been a recurring topic in our bi-weekly calls with the NVidia engineering team ever since we started looking at moving to Wayland. There has been basic binary driver support for some time, meaning you could run a native Wayland session on top of the binary driver, but the critical missing piece was that you could not get support for accelerated graphics when running applications through XWayland, our X.org compatibility layer. Which basically meant that any application requiring 3D support and which wasn’t a native Wayland application yet wouldn’t work. So over the last Months we been having a great collaboration with NVidia around closing this gap, with them working closely with us in fixing issues in their driver while we have been fixing bugs and missing pieces in the rest of the stack. We been reporting and discussing issues back and forth allowing us a very quickly turnaround on issues as we find them which of course all resulted in the NVidia 470.42.01 driver with XWayland support. I am sure we will find new corner cases that needs to be resolved in the coming Months, but I am equally sure we will be able to quickly resolve them due to the close collaboration we have now established with NVidia. And I know some people will wonder why we spent so much time working with NVidia around their binary driver, but the reality is that NVidia is the market leader, especially in the professional Linux workstation space, and there are lot of people who either would end up not using Linux or using Linux with X without it, including a lot of Red Hat customers and Fedora users. And that is what I and my team are here for at the end of the day, to make sure Red Hat customers are able to get their job done using their Linux systems.

Lightweight kiosk mode
One of the wonderful things about open source is the constant flow of code and innovation between all the different parts of the ecosystem. For instance one thing we on the RHEL side have often been asked about over the last few years is a lightweight and simple to use solution for people wanting to run single application setups, like information boards, ATM machines, cash registers, information kiosks and so on. For many use cases people felt that running a full GNOME 3 desktop underneath their application was either to resource hungry and or created a risk that people accidentally end up in the desktop session. At the same time from our viewpoint as a development team we didn’t want a completely separate stack for this use case as that would just increase our maintenance burden as we would end up having to do a lot of things twice. So to solve this problem Ray Strode spent some time writing what we call GNOME Kiosk mode which makes setting up a simple session running single application easy and without running things like the GNOME shell, tracker, evolution etc. This gives you a window manager with full support for the latest technologies such as compositing, libinput and Wayland, but coming in at about 18MB, which is about 71MB less than a minimal GNOME 3 desktop session. You can read more about the new Kiosk mode and how to use it in this great blog post from our savvy Edge Computing Product Manager Ben Breard. The kiosk mode session described in Ben’s article about RHEL will be available with Fedora Workstation 35.

• Node.js circuit breakers for serverless functions | Red Hat Developer

  Using circuit breakers in Node.js applications helps mitigate failures when an application calls external services. For example, if the application calls a service to get a list of movies, and that service is not running, the circuit breaker helps the application fall back and find a different way to satisfy the request—or at least inform the user that the movie list is unavailable.

  In a previous article, I showed how to use circuit breakers with Node.js. Using circuit breakers with Red Hat OpenShift Serverless Functions introduces a new challenge, which we can solve with a slightly different implementation. I'll explain the issue first, then show you how to solve it.

• Dow CIO: Digital transformation demands rethinking talent strategy | The Enterprisers Project

  At Dow, we’ve been on a digital transformation journey for several years now, but over the past 18 months, we’ve had the opportunity to fast-track the use of digital capabilities across all of our business functions. We are well beyond the days when IT was leveraged primarily to drive productivity – we view IT as a core piece of the business and driver of value growth.

  Earlier this year, we announced a $400 million investment to accelerate digital throughout the company.

  We identified the key areas we know will improve the customer and employee experience while delivering the most value.
  Collaborating with our businesses and operational groups, we identified the key areas we know will improve the customer and employee experience while delivering the most value. One area I’m excited about is material science innovation and product commercialization. How we interact with our customers and innovate has completely changed during the pandemic, with the help of digital capabilities. For instance, when big in-person trade shows were put on hold, we began leveraging online forums and hosting virtual events with hundreds of bench scientists at once instead of one-off meetings, enabling customers to watch the events whenever convenient for them.

• Take the 2021 Enterprisers Project reader survey

  2021 marks the eighth anniversary of The Enterprisers Project. Each year, we ask our readers to share feedback on the work we’re doing.

  Your responses have shaped the topics we cover, how we deliver articles, and importantly, your feedback has helped us better align our articles to your interests.

• IT talent: 5 mentoring best practices for the hybrid work era

  CIOs who embrace a coaching role say that it’s one of the most rewarding aspects of their jobs. But mentoring IT talent looks different in a hybrid work environment.

  We asked CIOs who recently won the 2021 Capital CIO of the Year ORBIE Awards how they are creating opportunities for IT talent to stand out and rise to the next level - and how that has or hasn’t changed during the pandemic. The awards were presented by the Capital CIO Leadership Association, a professional community that annually recognizes CIOs for their excellence in technology leadership.

  Read on for CIO coaching and mentoring tips you can borrow on your team.

• Red Hat Satellite 6.9 with Puma Web Server

  Until Red Hat Satellite 6.8, the Passenger web/app server was a core component of Red Hat Satellite. Satellite used Passenger to run Ruby applications such as Foreman. Satellite 6.9 is no longer using the Passenger web server. The Foreman application (main UI and API server) was ported to use the Puma project. In this post, we’ll provide an overview of Puma and see how the application server switch affected performance of the Satellite server.

• Using NGINX Ingress Controller on Red Hat OpenShift

  Network engineering for the high availability of application services is nothing new. However, as Kubernetes-based environments become more widespread, companies are beginning to look for innovative deployments across multiple types of infrastructures (on-premise, AWS, Azure, IBM Cloud). They then begin to ask what achieving successful application delivery looks like for those types of deployments.

  In our series on Davie Street Enterprises (DSE), we've used a fictitious company to illustrate how organizations have implemented protective measures against ransomware, transformed applications, and more.

  In this post, we’ll cover how Gloria Fenderson, DSE’s Senior Manager of Network Engineering, plans to use Red Hat OpenShift and the NGINX Ingress Controller to deliver applications on a cluster running across multiple types of underlying infrastructure. Both NGINX and Red Hat solutions are designed to enable the deployment of container-based environments across multiple clouds; we'll see now how easily this is accomplished.

• Sending alerts to Discord and others from syslog-ng using Apprise: blocks and Python templates

  Last year, the CentOS project announced a major shift in strategy. Until recently, CentOS Linux has been a rebuild of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) sources, each RHEL release was quickly followed by a corresponding CentOS Linux release. While CentOS 7 keeps working this way, CentOS 8 will reach its end of life by the end of this year. The CentOS project is focusing on CentOS Stream. It is a continuous stream of bug fixes and new features. Some of the users were not happy about the change, that is how Rocky Linux and AlmaLinux were born.

  As about 80% of syslog-ng Open Source Edition (OSE) installations run on CentOS and RHEL (if we do not count Kindle devices…), support for CentOS Stream and CentOS Linux alternatives is a returning question. From this blog, you can learn about CentOS Stream and CentOS Linux alternatives and how the situation is affecting syslog-ng OSE users.

• The state of CentOS Stream: Innovation in action

  In December 2020, Red Hat announced that we would be focusing our CentOS Project engineering efforts and investments solely on CentOS Stream, an upstream open source development platform where users can develop, test and contribute to a continuously delivered distribution that tracks just ahead of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Since this announcement, we’ve seen significant activity both within and around the CentOS Stream community, including the launch of several derivative operating systems and the introduction of Red Hat Enterprise Linux programs to ease the migration process for users of CentOS Linux.

• Red Hat Innovation Awards - Advice on writing a great submission

  The nomination period for the 2022 Red Hat Innovation Awards has been extended to September 20, 2021 - which means there is still time for you to nominate your organization for innovative uses of Red Hat’s open source technology.

• Learn about containers and Kubernetes with Red Hat Academy

  As the next generation of IT professionals prepares to enter the workforce, Red Hat is taking strides to meet them where they are. A major component of this effort is Red Hat Academy, which offers free training on the Red Hat product portfolio to tens of thousands of students per year at high schools and higher education institutions around the globe.

  Among other courses, the curriculum includes offerings on Red Hat OpenShift including Introduction to OpenShift Applications (DO101) and Red Hat OpenShift I: Containers & Kubernetes (DO180). These courses introduce students to building and managing containers for deployment on a Kubernetes cluster.

  Introduction to OpenShift Applications is a developer-focused introduction to OpenShift application building. The course walks you through production scenarios such as scaling and troubleshooting your applications. This course can also help future administrators who might be working with code as infrastructure or with automation take the next step into development.

  Students who are interested in learning more about the underlying OpenShift infrastructure and have strong Red Hat Certified System Administrator (RHCSA)-level skills should start with Red Hat OpenShift I: Containers & Kubernetes (DO180).

• Let’s talk about industry scoring systems

  When it comes to electronics, sustainability rating systems measure a company’s or product’s performance against established benchmarks in categories such as environmental impact, production, ethics, working conditions, use and disposal of devices and procurement. They usually examine specific topics like repairability, sustainability, environmental footprint or social impact programs. In fact, we are sometimes consulted by such rating organisations to help shape what is assessed.

  These rating systems are useful for both businesses and consumers. The focus areas defined by such systems are relevant points of guidance for any company trying to move in a more sustainable direction, and ratings help consumers make informed decisions.

• Surprise! It's IBM i Technology Refresh Time [Ed: 'News' sites about IBM, sponsored by IBM]

  IBM surprised the midrange world last week by announcing Technology Refreshes (TRs) for IBM i 7.3 and 7.4, which became generally available on Friday. The fall TRs, which typically are announced in October, brought support for the new Power10-based Power E1080 server in addition to a slew of enhancements to the operating system and surrounding IBM i products.

  The big piece of news with the new TRs – IBM i TR 7.3 TR11 and 7.4 TR5 – is support for servers based on IBM’s speedy new Power10 processor, which is the first Power chip based on its 7 nanometer process. Companies that want to use one of the new Power10 servers – starting with the high-end Power E1080, which is slated to ship later this month – will have to run 7.3 TR11 or 7.4 TR5. Midrange and entry-level Power10 models, which are expected to be announced later this year and into 2021, will also need one of these two operating systems.

  But IBM packed a lot more goodies into these TRs (its fourth TR refresh during the COVID pandemic) that will interest the bulk of IBM i shops (that is, the 99.9 percent of us who aren’t immediately adopting the big new enterprise-class machine). We’ll give you a general overview of these goodies in this story, to be followed with more detailed stories on specific items.

• Some things to reduce background bandwidth usage on a Fedora machine

  Suppose, not entirely hypothetically, that you have a Fedora laptop and you want it to use minimal bandwidth for things that you don't specifically do. Unfortunately there are only a few things that I know of to do, and I'm not sure they're comprehensive. Most of my information comes from this old r/Fedora post.

• First POWER10 Machine Announced

  IBM turns up the volume to 10 (and their server numbers to four digits) with the Power E1080 server, the launch system for POWER10. POWER10 is a 7nm chip fabbed by Samsung with up to 15 SMT-8 cores (a 16th core is disabled for yield) for up to 120 threads per chip. IBM bills POWER10 as having 2.5 times more performance per core than Intel Xeon Platinum (based on an HPE Superdome system running Xeon Platinum 8380H parts), 2.5 times the AES crypto performance per core of POWER9 (no doubt due to quadruple the crypto engines present), five times "AI inferencing per socket" (whatever that means) over Power E980 via the POWER10's matrix math and AI accelerators, and 33% less power usage than the E980 for the same workload. AIX, Linux and IBM i are all supported.

• Russ Allbery: Pod::Thread 3.00

  This Perl module converts POD documents to thread, the macro language I use for my static site builder (about which, more in another software release coming up shortly). This release fixes a whole ton of long-standing problems.

• Fscrypt broken in user spot

  It turns out that there is a fundamental problem in EasyOS. If a person entered a password at the very first bootup, Easy creates encrypted folders in the ext4 working-partition. So, if anyone steals your usb-stick or hard drive, they won't be able to access the files in those folders.

  The encryption mechanism works on a per-folder basis, and the init script in the initrd will unlock those folders when the correct password is entered at bootup. It works great, however, falls apart if login as a non-root user...

  I have a utility, 'keyctl', from the 'keyutils' package. I have today compiled that in OE and added it to the package list, so it will be in future releases of EasyOS. It is for managing the kernel keys. I know hardly anything about this topic, but let's explore...