Tech News

Linux Kernel 5.13 Released

Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, has made the latest kernel available, after what was one of the smoothest development processes in recent memory. Torvalds wrote in his weekly "State of the Kernel" post: "So we had quite the calm week since rc7, and I see no reason to delay 5.13." Torvalds continued to say, "if the last week was small and calm, 5.13 overall is actually fairly large. In fact, it's one of the bigger 5.x releases, with over 16k commits (over 17k if you count merges), from over 2k developers."

What can you expect in the 5.13 kernel? Some of the features that saw the most commits include Apple M1 support, early support for wireless wide area networks (WWANs), Microsoft's Azure Network Adapter, the Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) spec for laptops, early work for ARM64 Hyper-V guests, RISC-V enhancements, support for Lenovo's ThinkPad X1 Tablet Thin Keyboard, support added for Apple's Magic Mouse 2, new drivers for Amazon's Luna game controller, support for AMD's Navi GPU, and new virtIO drivers for audio devices and Bluetooth controllers.

Although the 5.13 kernel is now available for downloading(https://git.kernel.org/torvalds/t/linux-5.13.tar.gz), you won't find it hitting the repositories for your distributions of choice for some time. For example, Ubuntu most likely won't see the 5.13 kernel appear until the 21.10 daily builds are released.

Linux Foundation Launches New GitOps Training

In conjunction with the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and the Continuous Delivery Foundation, the Linux Foundation is now offering two new classes, focused on GitOps. These two self-paced, online training courses are designed to teach all of the skills necessary for admins to start implementing GitOps into their company's workflow. The two classes offered are as follows:

• Introduction to GitOps (LFS169, https://training.linuxfoundation.org/training/introduction-to-gitops-lfs169) is a free introductory class that provides the foundation for admins to grasp the GitOps principles, tools, and best practices for the implementation of cloud-native applications running on a Kubernetes cluster. This course teaches how to set up and automate continuous delivery pipelines to a Kubernetes cluster, to increase productivity, reliability, and efficiency.
• GitOps: Continuous Delivery on Kubernetes with Flux (LFS269, https://training.linuxfoundation.org/training/gitops-continuous-delivery-on-kubernetes-with-flux-lfs269/) is a course directed at software developers who are interested in learning how to deploy cloud-native applications with GitHub-based workflows. This course will provide a deeper dive into the GitOps practices and offers in-depth training on how to implement those best practices using Flux CD. You can enroll in this course for $299. You should be familiar with Kubernetes pods, ReplicaSets, deployments, services, namespaces, kubectl, and YAML specs at a minimum.

Canonical and Google Team Up for Ubuntu Pro on Google Cloud

Ubuntu Pro on Google Cloud is a new platform that not only offers a 10-year maintenance commitment, but live kernel patching; officially certified components to enable operating environments under compliance regimes such as FedRAMP, HIPAA, PCI, GDPR, and ISO; certified FIPS 140-2 components; security dashboard for Security Command Center and Managed Apps; and all standard optimizations found in the regular Ubuntu releases.

According to Jung Yang, VP and GM Compute at Google Cloud, "The availability of Ubuntu Pro on Google Cloud will offer our enterprise customers the additional security and compliance services needed for their mission-critical workloads."

To make this even more appealing, Ubuntu Pro on Google Cloud will only be 3-4.5 percent of your average computing costs, so the more resources you consume, the smaller percentage will go to Ubuntu Pro. So not only does Ubuntu Pro on Google Cloud offer a much longer range of support, it'll help you save money on deployments at scale.

Images for Ubuntu Pro on Google Cloud can now be purchased directly from Google Cloud by selecting Ubuntu Pro as the operating system (from the Google Cloud Console). For more information on Ubuntu Pro on Google Cloud check out the official documentation (https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/images/os-details#ubuntu_pro) and read the Google announcement (https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/compute/ubuntu-pro-available-on-google-cloud) about the new offering.

Linux Now Set to Always Reserve the First 1MB of RAM

To avoid issues that have plagued some systems, the Linux kernel will now unconditionally reserve the first 1MB of RAM.

Linux developers have always known the first 64K of system memory can be easily corrupted by certain BIOSes. Another issue they've had to deal with was Intel Sandy Bridge graphics chips accessing memory below the 1MB mark. Both of these situations can lead to serious problems with system performance or even booting.

Recently, however, a bug report was filed dealing with unbootable AMD Ryzen systems when the Linux kernel version 5.13 was in use. This happened after developer Linux_Chemist discovered a system with an AMD Ryzen 7 3700x was unable to boot kernel 5.13 and discovered booting worked fine with CONFIG_X86_RESERVE_LOW=640 set.

That bug was set to urgent and had an interesting (and telling) response attached to this git pull (https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/YLx%2FiA8xeRzwhXJn@zn.tnic/T/#u):

"Do away with all the wankery of reserving X amount of memory in the first megabyte to prevent BIOS corrupting it and simply and unconditionally reserve the whole first megabyte."

However, Linus Torvalds had this to say about the comment:

"This seems a bit draconic. How does this work at all under Windows? There must be some windows knowledge about what the BIOS updates that we're not aware of."

In the end, the patch was merged and the Linux kernel will now reserve the first 1MB of RAM to avoid problems in the future.