Linux Magazine November 2023

Dear Reader, No one would accuse us of being a business and finance magazine, but we do cover technology, and the tides of tech often follow the tidings of business events. I sometimes wonder if our discussions of business sound as fluffy to business people as a business magazine’s discussion of tech sounds to us. The reference frames are so different, and the truth is usually hidden somewhere in between. The big news this month was the Initial Public Offering (IPO) of chip designer ARM Holdings. ARM is known for its unusual niche in the computer hardware universe. They don’t make chips themselves, but they license their designs to other manufactures, including Qualcomm, Broadcom, Samsung, and many more. ARM is well known for its presence in smartphones and other mobile…

Rocky Linux 9.2 64-bit Rocky Linux is one of the leading community-based drop-in replacements for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). The 9.2 release can be used as an upgrade from earlier 9.x releases, but users of 8.x releases are advised to make a fresh install. Changes in Rocky Linux 9.2 mostly involve improving compatibility with RHEL, including greater reliability on RHEL 9 than on CentOS Stream 9 and changes and additions to container packages, including the images for Microsoft Azure. In addition, 9.2 features enhanced tools for creating installation images; upgrades to packages in the basic tool chain, such as GCC and binutils, and in container tools; and numerous security fixes. Like RHEL, all these changes are geared towards the enterprise, although veterans of all descriptions will find the upgrade…

KSMBD Finally Reaches a Stable State KSMBD (the kernel SMB daemon) is the in-kernel module, developed by Samsung that implements the SMB/CIFS protocol for sharing files and folders over a network. The SMB 3 server could take the place of the traditional Samba software. KSMBD was originally merged for Linux 5.15 but was tagged as experimental. That came about in 2021, and it has taken some time to get KSMBD to a state that was considered stable. That time has come, and KSMBD is planned for Linux kernel 6.6. 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 supports a number of features such as multiple dialects (SMB 2.1, SMB 3.0, SMB 3.1),…

Author The Linux kernel mailing list comprises the core of Linux development activities. Traffic volumes are immense, often reaching 10,000 messages in a week, and keeping up to date with the entire scope of development is a virtually impossible task for one person. One of the few brave souls to take on this task is Zack Brown. Removing the Thorn Sometimes in Linux kernel development, the best thing to come out of a discussion thread is an update to the documentation. David Howells recently reported a problem that had been found by Matt Whitlock. Kernel code using the splice() system call to pipe data from a file into a running process could potentially see some data corruption. The splice() call could return successfully while the data it sent into the…

Accessing ChatGPT from the desktop or the Linux command line ChatGPT [1] is a chatbot developed by OpenAI [2] based on a large language model (LLM). You can have conversations with it, get answers to your questions, or let it write texts or code. With some guidance, the answers are quite useful. However, always keep in mind that ChatGPT lacks understanding: it is purely based on statistical patterns. Therefore, it’s essential to critically evaluate the answers. To begin using ChatGPT on the web, you need to create an OpenAI account. You can sign up by entering your email address and creating a password, or you can log in with a Google, Microsoft, or Apple account. Additionally, you will need to provide your name and mobile phone number, and you will…

Bringing distros together on the same desktop Although several hundred Linux distributions already exist, new technologies and purposes are constantly spurring the creation of more. One of the most ambitious new efforts to emerge recently is blendOS [1], which uses container technology to allow packages from different distributions, as well as Android, to coexist in a single desktop environment (Figure 1). The result is ideal both for developers who package for different distributions and for everyday users who want the latest releases. As I write, blendOS is little more than a year old, with the latest version released in May 2023. Based on Arch Linux, blendOS currently supports Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch Linux, Kali Linux, AlmaLinux, and Rocky Linux, with the potential to support even more distributions. blendOS also features…