As usual, any new version of MySQL brings lots of improvements, and the current build is also quite large. Users will find that numerous changes have been made and some of them are quite interesting.

“The linked OpenSSL library for the MySQL 5.6 Commercial Server has been updated from version 1.0.1g to version 1.0.1h. Versions of OpenSSL prior to and including 1.0.1g are reported to be vulnerable to CVE-2014-0224. This change does not affect the Oracle-produced MySQL Community build of MySQL Server 5.6, which uses the yaSSL library instead,” notes the changelog.

Software is provided by Red Hat, using a customised version of the Fedora Linux operating system pre-loaded with an ARM Cortex-A57 GNU toolchain, platform device drivers, Apache, MySQL, PHP and both Java 7 and Java 8.

Specifically, GoGrid-sponsored OpenOrchestration.org hopes to advance the open data services ecosystem with a free orchestration service, software library and community. Essentially, the effort aims to do for entire clouds what virtualization did for servers by delivering a range of complex, “full-stack” solutions. Users, in turn, can then easily deploy complex applications in a single cloud, across multiple clouds, on-premises or any combination in between.

I've spent the last couple of months working an internship for The Linux Foundation, doing research on new developments and adoption trends in the open source industry. If you have spent any amount of time reading about open source over the last year, you have probably heard about Docker; a lot of people are talking about it these days and the impact it's going to have on virtualization and DevOps.

With new technologies like this, it can often be challenging to filter out the hype and understand the practical implications. Additionally, complex jargon often makes subjects like Linux containers confusing to the layman and limits discussion to those who are deeply knowledgeable on the subject. With this article, I will step back for a moment from the discussion of what Docker can do to focus on how it is changing the Linux landscape.

Nginx, the lead commercial sponsor behind the open-source Nginx Web server, is out today with a new release of its Nginx Plus server. The Nginx Plus r4 release provides users with new security and load balancing features.

If all goes according to plan the QEMU 2.1 release will happen next week but before that can happen some last-minute testing is encouraged with the new release of QEMU 2.1-rc3.

The final QEMU 2.1 release is expected next Tuesday (29 July) while issued today was 2.1-rc3. A final 2.1-rc4 release candidate is expected in the days to come for fixing one last critical issue with the release.

This article is based on a talk I gave at DockerCon this year. It will discuss Docker container security, where we are currently, and where we are headed.

Docker is making Linux containers a lightweight alternative to hypervisors; network engineers must be prepared. Find out what you need to know about Docker networking.

Every year, the Top 500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers is released. A list filled with machines containing tens of thousands of nodes and capable of cranking out enough petaflops per second to make your head spin.

And, of course, this list is absolutely dominated by machines powered by Linux.

This is awesome. But, really, we all know this. Let's dig a little deeper into these Goliath computers that will, someday, become sentient and rise up against their human creators.

One feature we are spending quite a bit of effort in around the Workstation is container technologies for the desktop. This has been on the wishlist for quite some time and luckily the pieces for it are now coming together. Thanks to strong collaboration between Red Hat and Docker we have a great baseline to start from. One of the core members of the desktop engineering team, Alex Larsson, has been leading the Docker integration effort inside Red Hat and we are now preparing to build onwards on that work, using the desktop container roadmap created by Lennary Poettering.

X.Org Server 1.16 has been delayed. However, it's not been delayed like in some of the more notorious past releases due to outstanding bugs, etc, but over letting in a late feature to this latest revision of the X11 server.

There was a lot of developer interest and pressure to let non-PCI device support get merged for the 1.16 stable release. This non-PCI support is needed for allowing the NVIDIA Tegra (open-source) graphics driver to work properly in an easy manner since it's not exposed as a PCI VGA device. Thierry Reding at NVIDIA along with support from other developers worked out adding this non-PCI graphics support on the X.Org Server side.

Firms that use Linux-based cloud servers are overspending on their cloud capacity by more than £1 billion annually for Infrastructure-as-a-Service (Iaas).

According to cloud provider ElasticHosts, the dominant payment model for IaaS is highly inefficient, and even at its best, companies are overpaying by as much as 50 per cent.

The recommendation is to update your installation to this version. The previous version 1.6.0 had great new features, first and foremost the parallel up- and download of files and a way more performant handling of the local sync journal. That required a lot of code changes. Unfortunately that also brought in some bugs which are now fixed with the 1.6.1 release.

If Ubuntu Linux is to prove truly competitive in the OpenStack cloud and Big Data worlds, it needs to run on more than x86 hardware. And that's what Canonical achieved this month, with the announcement of full support for IBM POWER8 machines on Ubuntu Cloud and Ubuntu Server.

Right now the only operating system that supports this 36 core processors, are the ones based on Linux, though it is not certain which Linux based OS MIT researchers are using.

Facebook engineer Chris Mason is unequivocal about the primacy of Linux in Facebook’s storage infrastructure.

“If it runs on a computer, and it’s storing important data,” he said, “it’s running Linux.”

Mason, speaking at the Linux Enterprise End-User Summit on Monday in New York, joined Facebook just six months ago in order to spearhead the social network’s move to btrfs (usually pronounced “butter eff ess.”), the Linux-based file system that he created in 2008 while working at Oracle.

Also: Linux dominates supercomputers as never before

The cloud-dominated world of modern IT is the perfect breeding ground for the spread of Linux in particular and open-source software in general, according to the man responsible for guiding one of the most important open-source projects.

Jim Whitehurst, CEO of Red Hat believes the wait should be over. In a phone conversation over a two-day period following Red Hat's earnings report last week, Whitehurst assured me his company has a stacked deck in that all-important new frontier known as OpenStack. With the sort of confidence you would expect for someone of Whitehurst's pedigree, he proclaimed "no one knows OpenStack better than us." Investors and analysts have no reason to doubt him.
Whitehurst believes his company has an added advantage -- not only from its long history of open source expertise, but he believes very few players actually understand what OpenStack is. He explained that some make the mistake of confusing OpenStack's relationship to the cloud and server virtualization. In other words, having a cluster of virtualized servers does not qualify as a legitimate cloud platform.
Whitehurst envisions OpenStack as the "default choice for next-generation architecture." He does not see a scenario where "Red Hat does not emerge as the leader." He described this as "his mission."

Atrust unveiled a “t66″ thin client that runs Linux on a quad-core Freescale i.MX6 SoC, and supports Citrix ICA/HDX, RDP, and VMWare Horizon View protocols.

As power consumption grows in priority, the thin client world is increasingly turning to ARM processors. Atrust Computer Corp. offers a number of ARM-based thin clients, and like its x86-based Intel Atom- and Via-based systems, they run a custom Atrust Linux OS. While the company’s previous ARM systems ran on single-core Cortex-A8-based Sitara system-on-chips from Texas Instruments, the Atrust t66 runs on a faster, quad-core, Cortex-A9-based Freescale i.MX6. No clock rate was supplied for the t66, but the i.MX6 typically runs at 1.2GHz, and offers 2D, 3D, and video coprocessors.

While there are competing vendors, chip architectures, core counts and networking fabrics at play in the list of the worlds top 500 supercomputers, when it comes to the operating system of choice, there is no debate. Linux dominates the list with a 97 percent share, being installed on 485 systems on the top 500 list.