Long-time Slashdot reader williamyf writes: In the ongoing battle between Red Hat and other "Enterprise Linux -- RHEL compatible" distros, today the OpenELA (Open Enterprise Linux Association), a body Consisting of CIQ (stewards of Rocky Linux), Oracle and Suse, released source code for a generic "Enterprise Linux Distro" (Sources available for RHEL 8 and RHEL 9). A Steering committee for the foundation was also formed. War between Red Hat and what they call "clones" (mostly Oracle; CentOS, Rocky, Alma and others seem to be collateral damage) has been raging on for years. First, in 2011, Red Hat changed the way they distributed kernel patches. Then, in 2014, Red Hat absorbed CentOS. In 2019 Red Hat transformed CentOS to CentOS stream, and shortened support Timetables for CentOS 8, all out of the blue. Then, in 2023, RedHat severely restricted source code access to non-customers. What will be RedHat's reaction to this development? My bet is that they will stop to release source code of distro modules under BSD, MIT, APACHE and MPL Licenses for RHEL and in certain Windows for CentOS Stream. What is your bet? Let us know in the comments.

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Last week the Linux Foundation announced its Civil Infrastructure Platform project "has expanded its super-long-term stable kernel program with a 6.1-based series. "Just like for the previously started kernel series (4.4-cip, 4.19-cip and 5.10-cip), the project is committed to maintaining the 6.1-cip kernel for a minimum of 10 years after its initial release." The Civil Infrastructure Platform project is establishing an open source base layer of industrial grade Linux to enable the use and implementation of software building blocks for civil infrastructure. The project's kernels are maintained like regular long-term-stable kernels, and developers of the CIP kernel are also involved in long-term-stable kernel review and testing. While regular long-term-stable kernels are moving back to 2 years maintenance, CIP kernels are set up for 10 years. In order to enable this extended lifetime, CIP kernels are scoped-down in actively supported kernel features and target architecture. At the same time, CIP kernels accept non-invasive backports from newer mainline kernels that enable new hardware... "The CIP kernels are developed and reviewed with the same meticulous attention as regular Long-Term-Stable kernels," said Yoshi Kobayashi, Technical Steering Committee Chair at the CIP project. "Our developers actively participate in reviewing and testing long-term-stable kernels, contributing to the overall quality and security of the platform. A key highlight is our work on the IEC 62443 security standard, aimed at fortifying the resilience of critical infrastructure systems." "As 2023 comes to a close, the CIP project has stood as a beacon of stability and innovation, with a commitment to driving collaboration to strengthen this essential initiative," said Urs Gleim, Governing Board Chair at the CIP project... The Civil Infrastructure Platform is driving open source collaboration and innovation around industrial grade software for prodúcts used in industrial automation and for civil infrastructure, such as trains and power grids. To learn more about the CIP project, including how to get involved and contribute, please visit our booth at the Linux Foundation Open Source Summit Japan, December 5 — 6, or visit our website.

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An anonymous reader shared this article from the Linux blog OMG! Ubuntu: The System Monitor app Ubuntu comes with does an okay job of letting you monitor system resources and oversee running processes — but it does look dated... [T]he app's graphs and charts are tiny, compact, and lack the glanceability and granular-detail that similar tools on other systems offer. Thankfully, there are plenty of ace System Monitor alternatives available on Linux, with the Rust-based Resources being the latest tool to the join the club. And it's a real looker... Resources shows real-time graphs showing the utilisation of core system components... You can also see a [sortable and searchable] list of running apps and processes, which are separated in this app. It's also possible to select a refresh interval "from very slow/slow/normal/fast/very fast (though tempting to select, 'very fast' can increase CPU usage)." And selecting an app or process "activates a big red button you can click to 'end' the app/process (a submenu has options to kill, halt, or continue the app/process instead)..." "If you don't like the 'Windows-iness' of Mission Center — which you may have briefly spotted it in my Ubuntu 23.10 release video — then Resources is a solid alternative."

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It started when Linux blogger Bryan Lunduke complained about how the Linux Foundation was reducing the six-year long-term support (LTS) window for the Linux kernel to two years. Lunduke argued that the Foundation seemed more interested in funding compliance best practices — as well as artificial intelligence and blockchain projects. In an online discussion, Linux kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman had this response: Did anyone think to actually ask the developer who is maintaining the long-term support kernel versions why he made that change (back in February?), i.e. me...? No, I guess that would take too much effort, and wouldn't result in such a click-bait headline. "LTS kernels are no longer supported for 6 years because it turns out no one used them." doesn't have that same fun sound... In a second comment Kroah-Hartman also clarified that in fact "The amount of resources and other stuff that the Linux Foundation provides to the Linux kernel community has increased over the years, including last year. " Just because new people are brought in with new projects (that the LF member companies want to host) does not mean that somehow less is being given to the kernel community at all. It is not a zero-sum game here at all, that's not how the LF works in any way. Again, this would have been easy to verify if someone just asked us. So to repeat, no "abandonment" is happening here at all, the opposite is happening, just like it has for the entirety of the Linux Foundation's existence, support has grown every year. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader whoever57 for sharing the news.

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Liam Proven writes via The Register: Steam OS is the Arch-based distro for a handheld Linux games console, and Valve is aggressively pushing Linux's usability and Windows interoperability for the device. Two unusual companies, Valve Software and Igalia, are working together to improve the Linux-based OS of the Steam Deck handheld games console. The device runs a Linux distro called Steam OS 3.0, but this is a totally different distro from the original Steam OS it announced a decade ago. Steam OS 1 and 2 were based on Debian, but Steam OS 3 is based on Arch Linux, as Igalia developer Alberto Garcia described in a talk entitled How SteamOS is contributing to the Linux ecosystem. He explained that although Steam OS is built from some fairly standard components -- the normal filesystem hierarchy, GNU user space, systemd and dbus -- Steam OS has quite a few unique features. It has two distinct user interfaces: by default, it starts with the Steam games launcher, but users can also choose an option called Switch to Desktop, which results in a regular KDE Plasma desktop, with the ability to install anything: a web browser, normal Linux tools, and non-Steam games. Obviously, though, Steam OS's raison d'etre is to run Steam games, and most of those are Windows games which will never get native Linux versions. Valve's solution is Proton, an open-source tool to run Windows games on Linux. It's formed from a collection of different FOSS packages, notably: [Wine, DXVK, VKD3D-Proton, and GStreamer]. The result is a remarkable degree of compatibility for some of the most demanding Windows apps around [...]. You can view Garcia's 49-page presentation here (PDF).

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An anonymous reader shares a report: The Cloud Native Computing Foundation has returned to Shanghai for the city's first Kubecon since the pandemic. During a keynote that switched languages several times, demonstrating the challenges faced by both AI and human translators in keeping up, Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, threw out several crowd-pleasing statistics while also highlighting some projects likely to make one or two companies squirm a little. On the statistics front, Zemlin joked that the Linux Foundation was likely the largest software company in the world, noting that if one took an average software developer's salary -- he put the worldwide mean as being $40,000 -- and multiplied it by the number of developers contributing to the foundation, the payroll would come to around $26 billion -- more than Microsoft's $24 billion R&D payroll. The statistic was somewhat tongue in cheek as Zemlin pointed out that none of the developers working on Linux Foundation projects actually work for the Linux Foundation. However, the sheer quantity of engineers involved highlighted another issue noted by Zemlin: the "paradox of choice" when selecting the correct open source project for a given purpose when the number on offer reaches the hundreds, thousands, and beyond. Reflecting the increasing maturity of some elements of the open source world, he also emphasized the opportunities for companies to increase revenues and profits through the use of open source. WeChat, Alibaba, and Huawei all received nods -- unsurprising considering the location -- as Zemlin noted a virtuous circle whereby improvements go back into projects, meaning better profits, meaning more improvements, and so on. It all sounded very utopian, although darkening clouds were signaled by the addition of OpenTofu to the list of projects Zemlin was keen to boast about, including open source efforts around large language models.

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An anonymous reader shared this report from Phoronix: One of the new features merged for the Linux 6.6 kernel was multi-grained timestamps for the VFS layer and wiring it up for the EXT4, Btrfs, XFS, and Tmpfs file-systems. This alternative though to coarse-grained timestamps ended up exposing some problems and this week ahead of Linux 6.6-rc3, the feature has been stripped entirely from the kernel. Multi-grain timestamps were intended for addressing cases where the current coarse-grained timestamps can be ineffective for updating creation/modification times with a lot of I/O potentially happening within the once per jiffy timestamp... Multi-grained timestamps though were only to be selectively enabled to avoid the performance overhead. Christian Brauner of Microsoft who originally submitted the feature for Linux 6.6 went ahead and submitted the pull request, which has already been honored, for dropping the short-lived kernel feature... "As there are multiple solutions discussed the honest thing to do here is not to fix this up or disable it but to cleanly revert. The general infrastructure will probably come back but there is no reason to keep this code in mainline."

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At the Open Source Summit Europe in Bilbao, Spain, the Linux Foundation this week announced the launch of the Unified Acceleration (UXL) Foundation. The group's mission is to deliver "an open standard accelerator programming model that simplifies development of performant, cross-platform applications." From a report: The foundation's founding members include the likes of Arm, Fujitsu, Google Cloud, Imagination Technologies, Intel, Qualcomm and Samsung. The company most conspicuously missing from this list is Nvidia, which offers its own CUDA programming model for working with its GPUs. At its core, this new foundation is an evolution of the oneAPI initiative, which is also aimed to create a new programming model to make it easier for developers to support a wide range of accelerators, no matter whether they are GPUs, FPGAs or other specialized accelerators. Like with the oneAPI spec, the aim of the new foundation is to ensure that developers can make use of these technologies without having to delve deep into the specifics of the underlying accelerators and the infrastructure they run on.

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Steven Vaughan-Nichols writes via ZDNet: BILBAO, Spain: At the Open Source Summit Europe, Jonathan Corbet, Linux kernel developer and executive editor of Linux Weekly News, caught everyone up with what's new in the Linux kernel and where it's going from here. Here's one major change coming down the road: Long-term support (LTS) for Linux kernels is being reduced from six to two years. Currently, there are six LTS Linux kernels -- 6.1, 5.15, 5.10, 5.4, 4.19, and 4.14. Under the process to date, 4.14 would roll off in January 2024, and another kernel would be added. Going forward, though, when the 4.14 kernel and the next two drop off, they won't be replaced. Why? Simple, Corbet explained: "There's really no point to maintaining it for that long because people are not using them." I agree. While I'm sure someone out there is still running 4.14 in a production Linux system, there can't be many of them. Another reason, and a far bigger problem than simply maintaining LTS, according to Corbet, is that Linux code maintainers are burning out. It's not that developers are a problem. The last few Linux releases have involved an average of more than 2,000 programmers -- including about 200 new developers coming on board -- working on each release. However, the maintainers -- the people who check the code to see if it fits and works properly -- are another matter.

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Slashdot reader Leading Edge Boomer wants to help "a retired friend whose personal computing has always been with Windows." But recently, they were gifted a laptop that's running "some version of Linux..." Probably he's not even aware that there are different distributions for different purposes. He seems open to learning about this different world. What recommendations might Slashdot readers have to bring him up to speed as a competent Linux user? I really don't want to hold his hand, and he's smart enough to learn on his own. "Mint is the answer," argues long-time Slashdot reader denisbergeron. "First make him use Mint, because it's easy and there a lot of documentation and the community is very strong." But long-time Slashdot reader spaceman375 thinks they can solve the problem with just three letters. "Show him the man command. When he feels confident, or breaks it pretty hard, then I'd agree — install mint and go from there. But start with man." Is that it? Is it as simple as that? Share your own thoughts and opinions in the comments — along with your learning tools for beginners. What's the best Linux resource for a retired Windows user?

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When Linus Torvalds announced Linux kernel 6.6's first release candidate, it included a newly-stable version of KSMBD, which is Samsung's in-kernel server for the SMB protocol (for sharing files/folders/printers over a network). An announcement in 2021 had said that "For many cases the current userspace server choices were suboptimal either due to memory footprint, performance or difficulty integrating well with advanced Linux features." LWN noted at the time that Linux has been using "the user-space Samba solution since shortly after the beginning." In a sense, ksmbd is not meant to compete with Samba; indeed, it has been developed in cooperation with the Samba project. It is, however, meant to be a more performant and focused solution than Samba is; at this point, Samba includes a great deal of functionality beyond simple file serving. Ksmbd claims significant performance improvements on a wide range of benchmarks...One other reason — which tends to be spoken rather more quietly — is that a new implementation can be licensed under GPLv2, while Samba is GPLv3. The Register notes that when Samba switched to GPL 3, "one result was that Apple dropped Samba from Mac OS X and replaced it with its own, in-house server called SMBX." And they also remember that a month after its debut in 2021, "Linux sysadmins got to enjoy KSMBD's first security exploit." What's changed now is that it has faced considerable security testing and as a result it is no longer marked as experimental. It's been developed with the assistance of the Samba team, which itself documents how to use it. It's compatible with existing Samba configuration files. As the team says, "It is not meant to replace the existing Samba fileserver 'smbd', but rather be an extension and will integrate with Samba in the future...." KSMBD is also important in that placing such core server functionality right inside the kernel represents a significant potential attack surface for crackers... The new bcachefs file system will not be going into kernel 6.6, and its developer is not happy. "It's taken some time to get KSMBD to a state that was considered stable," points out Linux magazine. That time has come, and KSMBD is planned for Linux kernel 6.6.: But why is KSMBD important? First off, it promises considerable performance gains and better support for modern features such as Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA)... KSMBD also adds enhanced security, considerably better performance for both single and multi-thread read/write, better stability, and higher compatibility. In the end, hopefully, this KSMBD will also mean easier share setups in Linux without having to jump through the same hoops one must with the traditional Samba setup.

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The (Arch Linux-powered) Steam Deck was released in February of 2022 — and Phoronix reports that's helping Linux's market share on Steam. "While July was at 1.96% for Linux, the August numbers [from SteamPowered.com] show a 0.14% dip to 1.82%. Interestingly, macOS dipped by 0.27% to 1.57% while Windows rose by 0.4% to 96.61%. For those wondering why the Steam Linux numbers dropped while the Steam Deck continues to be very popular, it's possibly again another month impacted by large swings in Chinese traffic... SteamOS Holo that powers the Steam Deck gained another 2% marketshare to now commanding around 44% of the reported Linux gamers. Among Linux gamers, AMD CPUs power around 71% of the systems. In part due to the Steam Deck being powered by an AMD APU. Meanwhile Steam on Windows has the AMD CPU marketshare at around 33%.

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An anonymous reader shared this report from 9to5Linux: Just a couple of days after celebrating its 32nd anniversary , Linus Torvalds announced today the final release of the Linux 6.5 kernel series as a major update that introduces several new features, updated and new drivers for better hardware support, and other changes. After seven weeks of RCs, Linux kernel 6.5 is here with new features like MIDI 2.0 support in ALSA, ACPI support for the RISC-V architecture, Landlock support for UML (User-Mode Linux), better support for AMD "Zen" systems, as well as user-space support for the ARMv8.8 memcpy/memset instructions. Also new in Linux 6.5 is Intel TPMI (Topology Aware Register and PM Capsule Interface) support for the power capping subsystem and a TPMI interface driver for Intel RAPL, and the "runnable boosting" feature in the EAS balancer to improve CPU utilization for specific workloads. This release also improves SMP scheduling's load balancer to recognize SMT cores with more than one busy sibling and allows lower-priority CPUs to pull tasks to avoid superfluous migrations, and improves EXT4 file system's journalling, block allocator subsystems, and performance for parallel DIO overwrites.

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Why aren't more people using Linux on the desktop? Slashdot reader technology_dude shares one solution: Jack Wallen at ZDNet says establishing an "official" version of Linux may (or may not) help Linux on the desktop increase the number of users, mostly as someplace to point new users. It makes sense to me. What does Slashdot think and what would be the challenges, other than acceptance of a particular flavor? Wallen argues this would also create a standard for hardware and software vendors to target, which "could equate to even more software and hardware being made available to Linux." (And an "official" Linux might also be more appealing to business users.) Wallen suggests it be "maintained and controlled by a collective of people from users, developers, and corporations (such as Intel and AMD) with a vested interest in the success of this project... There would also be corporate backing for things like marketing (such as TV commercials)." He also suggests basing it on Debian, and supporting both Snap and Flatpak... In comments on the original submission, long-time Slashdot reader bobbomo points instead to kernel.org, arguing "There already is an official version of Linux called mainline. Everything else is backports." And jd (Slashdot user #1,658) believes that the official Linux is the Linux Standard Base. "All distributions, more-or-less, conform to the LSB, which gives you a pseudo 'official' Linux. About the one variable is the package manager. And there are ways to work around that." Unfortunately, according to Wikipedia... The LSB standard stopped being updated in 2015 and current Linux distributions do not adhere to or offer it; however, the lsb_release command is sometimes still available.[citation needed] On February 7, 2023, a former maintainer of the LSB wrote, "The LSB project is essentially abandoned." That post (on the lsb-discuss mailing list) argues the LSB approach was "partially superseded" by Snaps and Flatpaks (for application portability and stability). And of course, long-time Slashdot user menkhaura shares the obligatory XKCD comic... It's not exactly the same thing, but days after ZDNet's article, CIQ, Oracle, and SUSE announced the Open Enterprise Linux Association, a new collaborative trade association to foster "the development of distributions compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux." So where does that leave us? Share your own thoughts in the comments. And should there be an "official" version of Linux?

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The Steam Survey results for July 2023 were just published and it points to a large and unexpected jump in the Linux gaming marketshare. Phoronix reports; According to these new numbers from Valve, the Linux customer base is up to 1.96%, or a 0.52% jump over June! That's a huge jump with normally just moving 0.1% or so in either direction most months... It's also near an all-time high on a percentage basis going back to the early days of Steam on Linux when it had around a 2% marketshare but at that time the Steam customer size in absolute numbers was much smaller a decade ago than it is now. So if the percentage numbers are accurate, this is likely the largest in absolute terms that the Linux gaming marketshare has ever been. When looking at the Steam Linux breakdown, the SteamOS Holo that powers the Steam Deck is now accounting for around 42% of all Linux gamers on Steam. Meanwhile, AMD CPU marketshare among Linux gamers has reached 69%. The Steam Survey results for July show Windows 10 64-bit losing 1.56% marketshare and Linux gaining the healthy 0.52% of that. This is also the first time the Linux gaming marketshare outpasses Apple macOS on Steam!

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This week the Slackware Linux project is celebrating its 30th anniversary. It is the oldest Linux distribution that is still in active maintenance and development. The Register reports: Version 1.0 of Slackware was announced on the July 16, 1993, and project lead Patrick Volkerding, who still maintains the distribution today, celebrated with a modest announcement: "Hey folks! It's time to acknowledge another one of those milestones... 30 (!) years since I made the post linked below announcing Slackware's first stable release after months of beta testing. Thanks to all of our dedicated contributors, loyal users, and those who have helped us to keep the lights on here. It's really been a remarkable journey that I couldn't have anticipated starting out back in 1993. Cheers! :-)"

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According to Statcounter, the Linux share on the desktop has passed 3% for the first time. GamingOnLinux reports: While it has been close a couple of times, the trend according to their stats is pretty clear that Linux use has been slowly rising over the last few years. This does not include ChromeOS, even though it's based on Linux, as they track that separately so this is just plain desktop Linux. Across this year their stats show for Linux: January - 2.91% February - 2.94% March - 2.85% April - 2.83% May - 2.7% June - 3.07%

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Last week Linus Torvalds personally cleaned up the x86 memory copy code for Linux 6.4, Phoronix reports — and this week "he's merged more of his own code as he took issue with some of the code merged by Intel engineers as part of their Linear Address Masking enabling." Back during the Linux 6.2 days at the end of last year, Linus rejected the Intel LAM code at the time for various technical issues. Intel then reworked it for Linux 6.4. This time around Linus merged Intel LAM into Linux 6.4 as this new CPU feature for letting user-space store metadata within some bits of pointers without masking it out before use. Intel LAM — like Arm TBI — can be of use to virtual machines, profiling / sanitizers / tagging, and other applications. But this time around there were some less than ideal code that he personally took to sprucing up... Torvalds reworked around one hundred lines of code for cleaning it up. It's fun to read Torvalds' commit messages (included in both Phoronix articles). Torvalds begins by writing that the LAM updates "made me unhappy about how 'access_ok()' was done, and it actually turned out to have a couple of small bugs in it too..."

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Linux Magazine argues that System76's Pop!_OS offers "something rare: a commercial distribution that was integrated into the hardware, with utilities designed specifically for System76 computers and keyboards." The only other example of an integrated commercial distro of which I am aware is Purism, a company in the same niche... With hardware and software coming from the same source — what business calls vertical integration — distributions like System76/Pop!_OS offer Linux users their first experiences with what Windows and macOS users have always enjoyed — to say nothing of the closest they can currently get to open hardware. Could Linux be finally becoming mainstream at last? They interviewed System76 CEO Carl Richell (along with a marketing director and media relations manager), who remembered how System76 was actually founded in Carl's basement around 2005: He wanted to show the world how far Linux and open source software had come by delivering it preinstalled on high-quality computers backed by caring, knowledgeable customer support. Carl felt that making Linux computers that highlight the work of the community would be a great way to introduce the broader public to open source technology and its potential... LM: What other hardware might System76 offer in the future? S76: We are in the research and development process of designing our own in-house laptop. We'll eventually refresh our Meerkat mini desktop with a new Thelio-style aesthetic. That project will start sometime after our first in-house laptops start shipping. [In addition,] Launch keyboards and the System76 Keyboard Configurator work on macOS and Windows! We've also prepared ISO layouts for most Launch models but don't have a time frame for release. LM: What are you willing to say at this point about the company's future directions? S76: We're developing COSMIC DE — a desktop environment written in Rust — as well as a prototype for an open hardware laptop manufactured in-house. Finally, Nebula, a line of computer cases based on Thelio desktops will be arriving in the coming months. My favorite line from the interview? "Seeing a flat sheet of aluminum transformed into a beautiful desktop is strikingly rewarding."

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Further adding to the excitement of the upcoming Linux 6.4 merge window is the mainline kernel seeing the Device Tree (DT) additions for Apple's current M2 devices including the MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and Mac Mini systems. From a report: The upstream kernel still has more work to go around the M1/M2 support compared to the downstream state with Asahi Linux, but at least now with this DT support will provide some basic level of upstream kernel support for the Apple M2. Asahi Linux lead developer Hector Martin today sent in the Apple SoC DT updates targeting the Linux 6.4 cycle for queuing into the SoC tree ahead of the merge window opening around the end of the month. The main addition with this pull request is adding the Apple M2 Device Tree series.

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